The paseo bridge over Copper Hill adjacent West Creek Academy in Valencia has been under construction since SCVTalk reported in late May.
Newhall Land’s continued investment in paseos in Valencia decades after the master plan is in itself a fitting tribute to paseo designer Thomas Sutton.
The bridge will be completed next week; in case you haven’t seen a paseo bridge in pieces, it looks like this:
The City of Santa Clarita should be commended for its disciplined approach to fiscal management. Despite continued pressure on tax revenues, the City has assembled a balanced budget that has no notable cuts to City services while aligning expenses accordingly. The budget also accounts for a vigorous schedule of capital improvements to our great City.
Some observations after perusing the 2010 – 2011 Budget for the City of Santa Clarita:
For all the criticism we’ve lodged toward the City as of late, it’s worth pausing for a moment, looking around at our neighboring cities, and giving Santa Clarita City staff credit for their fiscal discipline.
Meat and potatoes on improvements to bike lanes, trails and the MRTC:
Not long after the Bristol Farms closure came news that a different sort of market would be coming to Valencia, perhaps better attuned to our choosy-yet-housepoor community. SCVtalk has been following the story all year, and we weren’t alone.
Today, Sprouts Farmers Markets opened in Valencia and I braved the opening day crowds, but not the (fifteen-deep) opening day lines.
While it shares some of the quirkiness (and off-brands) as Trader Joe’s and has its share of Whole Foods-inspired piety, much of the store’s offerings are comparable to what you would find in a conventional grocery store.
For example, just about everything is available in the produce section, regardless of season, and organics are restricted to a space in the corner. That said, fruits and vegetables that are in the height of their season are displayed in abundance. The produce section just might be the largest, as a share of the total space, in the SCV. There are some additional nice touches, like bulk salad greens, but much of this will look familiar to a Ralph’s shopper.
The cheese-deli-meat operation was an interesting mishmash. The cheese selection and quality seemed south of Whole Foods and Bristol Farms, but a notch above Trader Joe’s. The butcher counter is mostly a fish counter, save for the litany of house-made sausage. The rest of the meat selection was impressive. Nearly all beef is USDA Choice or higher and it’s priced well. From what I could see, there is also a fair amount of organic beef and poultry. Like Trader Joe’s, there are very few larger cuts or roasts. I noticed a couple of people manning deli slicers, but I couldn’t figure out how to order sliced meat or cheese.
Most unusual, to my eyes, were the aisles of various bulk grains, dried fruit, nuts, granola, and who knows what else. There is a full barrel of dried cranberries (strange, right?). Next time, I’ll inspect further, but as a home cook, I expect that this will be an invaluable resource.
I confess to being disappointed with the coffee selection, which is limited to a few pre-ground brands and a couple dozen varieties of the house brand, much of it flavored and/or decaf and/or roasted to a crisp. Oh well.
This sounds like a lot of hemming and hawing, but my early guess is that they’ve found a sweet spot for this community. There’s a happy medium of price and quality, plus the selection is wide enough to make it your only stop. The location is less than ideal, especially since just about everyone in this valley will pass another market on their way, but I think there is enough here to keep me, and others, returning.
When the crowds thin out a little, I’ll even buy something.
Suburbs of Copenhagen, Denmark. Click picture for original link
No Daily Brief today
In the Daily Brief yesterday I stated, quite provocatively, that the righteousness quotient had risen in the SCV as Master’s College students returned to the SCV. One reader took offfense:
So Jeff….you have “witnessed” TMC students all over town? How do you know they are from TMC? Are they all carrying Bibles, wearing signs and singing hymns? Are you stereotyping? I thought flaming lib types didn’t stereotype.
First of all, I’m honored you’d think of me as a “flaming lib.” I’ve worked hard to earn that title and it’s nice to see my work hasn’t been all for naught. I would have accepted “bleeding heart” or “commie pinko” as well, but I’ll settle for “flaming lib.”
Secondly: yes, it is just that obvious, literally. Let me give you an anecdote.
My wife and I (moreso my wife) are foodies. We love and appreciate good food. And as such, we appreciate Fish Tail, a Copperhill/Newhall Ranch Road Asian Fusion restaurant that specializes in great seafood entrees at a decent price.
One night we had a Fish Tail craving, but it was getting late. At 8:50 I rang the restaurant and begged them to take our order as we skedaddled north in our flaming liberal Subaru Outback, the official car of SCVTalk. They graciously said they’d stay open past 9 pm, as long as we ordered our food to go.
And when we arrived, they were true to their word, handing us a bag of delicious fishy entrees wrapped in styrofoam containers and bidding us adieu.
Naturally, we wanted to eat on site, but the restaurant was closed. So we snuck into the outdoor Chipotle dining patio, hoping our brown bags of food would fool the ever-present and helpful Chipotle employees. We had the entire patio to ourselves, and I looked forward to a great meal with the best of company, my lovely wife.
But then it happened. One by one, clean shaven, clean-looking college youth poured out of Chipotle. They said “Excuse me,” as they bumped my chair. They politely asked if we were using all our chairs. One of them did in fact carry a gold-leafed Bible. They didn’t cuss or swear and they wore crosses around their neck. Some of them had Southern accents, not unlike the ones I imagine Fred to have.
Soon, five of them grew to ten. Then 15. Then 25. We were surrounded by cleanly shaven, well-behaved college students. It was a Master’s College confab right there in the Chipotle patio. Naturally I blurted out, “Hey, are you Master’s College students and is this welcome week?”
“Yes” a few of them stated, grinning ear to hear, “How could you tell?”
So dear reader, to uninformed SCVers like you, maybe it’s not very obvious which college a 20-something youth in the SCV attends, but it is to me. When I worked as a bag boy at Lucky’s Grocer, I could totally tell the Master’s students apart from the CalArts student. The COC student, in contrast, looked like a high school student (I plead guilty), but Master’s students and CalArts student dressed the part and were easily identifiable by their behavior, dress, and mannerisms. Not that CalArts students weren’t well-behaved.
I think it’s really great that SCV has one of the most conservative Christian colleges in the USA (one or two steps left of Bob Jones U) and one of the most renowned, liberal art colleges in the USA too. It all adds to the spice of SCV life and makes me look forward to the fall season.
If you were to ask me what a “food truck” was a year ago, I’d probably tell you stories about my time working in the Valencia Industrial Center and hearing the call over the PA system that a “roach coach” had arrived. Or maybe I’d think about the Mexican produce trucks that cruise slowly down the streets of Newhall, their cavernous interiors open at the rear with fruits and vegetables dangling just feet above the street.
But if you ask me now, there’s only one thing that comes to mind when someone mentions “food trucks.” Twitter-connected foodies, rushing to meet and get in line for hip food trucks that dish out amazing food late at night.
Indeed, the mobile gourmet food truck “scene” has grown so popular and hot in Los Angeles in the last year that its long, tasty tentacles have reached all the way up to square Santa Clarita, a place that pines for Cheesecake Factory above all else. As the Signal and KHTS have both reported, we now have four food trucks that visit the SCV regularly. And hundreds of Twitter connected SCVers line up for them, spending thousands of dollars each week to gorge themselves on food I never heard of growing up.
And that leaves me not only hungry, but concerned.
You see, just last week, the City of Santa Clarita solved a problem few knew existed: rogue auto dealers were setting up shop, selling cars to presumably willing buyers, and pissing off Creekside and the City. There were no media reports about this, no stories of victims getting hoodwinked or the taxpayers getting ripped off. Nothing.
What was the problem exactly? According to the item, the dealers were appearing in places they shouldn’t have been, and they were competing with businesses the City felt it had to protect:
The Vehicle Services Overlay Zone does not, however, regulate the location of automobile retail uses. There has been a recent proliferation of retail automobile and light trucks sales businesses throughout the City, including areas outside the Vehicle Services Overlay Zone. City staff is concerned about the negative impacts that these businesses are having and may have on local businesses and the community in general and feel that the current regulatory scheme is inadequate.
The solution to this problem no one knew existed was drastic: an “urgency ordinance” was adopted by council that forbid any car dealers from opening in the city for the next 45 days. Yes, we actually issued a moratorium on a certain type of business. And it wasn’t massage parlors.
You may have thought Santa Clarita was well-regarded as a business friendly city. What you and I missed, however, was that you have to be the right kind of business, a connected business, a made business even, if you want the City’s protections and benefits.
Call it a hunch, but I bet if you polled our out-of-touch City Council, they’d say that food trucks take money (steal?) out of the pockets of local restauranteers and chains alike, that they take in thousands of dollars and then jet down to LA with their money. Oh sure, they’d couch it in more friendly terms, (“We need to protect the City’s commercial retail trade and look out for food safety”) but it’s not that much of a stretch, is it? That’s what the rogue car dealer item was all about, after all.
Think I’m crazy? Well this battle is going on down in LA right now. KCRW’s Good Food radio show talked to a writer who has been looking into how restaurants are distressed and upset over the food truck scene. Listen in at about the 12:30 minute mark below:
Currently, selling “prepared foods” in a truck is legal in Santa Clarita. But these food trucks aren’t selling prepared foods, they’re cooking meals. The 2008 ordinance (Chapter 11.37) that forbid certain peddling and solicitation activities (again, in the interests of protecting local businesses, though they claimed food safety was an issue too) doesn’t seem to address these types of gourmet food trucks, which come into town, park for a few hours, cook and sell food, then split.
In other words the situation is ripe for the City to issue another “urgency ordinance” for the protection of local businesses, just like they did with the auto dealers.
In the interests of SCV food literacy and diversity, you have my word I’ll keep an eye out for this. And raise holy hell if it happens.
COC Facebooks parking advice to their 20,000+ students as Fall 2010 starts:
I beg to differ. If you hate parking at COC (and who doesn’t?!?) why not try out Santa Clarita Transit, which has no less than two routes that drop off passengers right at COC’s front door? It’s cheap, you don’t have to worry about driving (or parking) and it couldn’t be easier. Really now, why waste gas?
Or, if you’re selfish like me, why not ride your bike there and beat all the suckers parking altogether? You know one of the few things the City has done right in recent years is painting Class II bike lanes along Rockwell, Tournament and Wiley, and there’s a path on Valencia as well that leads directly to the school. Parking challenges and frustrations are for suckers who drive their car; cycling to college is fun, cool, hip, environmentally-friendly and leads to good looking bodies that attract the opposite (or same, I’m not judging) sex.
As I always say, one of the worst thing about driving is having to park; one of the best things about cycling is not having to park.
So think about it COC students. Be a rebel. Be hip. Be cool. Be different than the herd of single drivers. Take the bus or ride your bike to COC and let all those other suckers shell out the cash and get stressed while they hunt for a primo parking space.
After much searching, geologists announced Monday that they had found Marsha McLean's "forming cracks," deep in the heart of Soledad Canyon. McLean said that if left to its own devices, the forming cracks would not just harm the libraries, but threatened "to swallow us all."
Yelp Reviews in SCV