Bilbray Speech Slurs Alcohol Battle Plans

A major part of an ambitious campaign to revive the run-down neighborhoods of San Diego has been to get residents active in zoning and licensing decisions involving the sale of alcohol.

Activists say nothing can sour a struggling neighborhood like another bar or liquor store or more sales of 75-cent wine. “The nice neighborhoods get the big supermarkets, and we get the liquor stores,” says one minister in Southeast San Diego.

Given the concern of the Southeast Clergy Alcohol Awareness Team and others, you might have expected easy approval for a plan to seek a $25,000 state grant to teach neighborhood groups in San Diego how to speak out when a liquor-license application is filed. Instead, the grant application hit a buzz saw: Supervisor Brian Bilbray.

“This reeks of social engineering right from the beginning,” Bilbray told his supervisorial colleagues. “And I don’t mean to sound overkill, but I mean this has got Margaret Mead written all over it. And God bless her, but the fact is that we’re (not) going to make a community perfect by having perfect planning, and those days are over with.”

Margaret Mead? “Coming of Age in Samoa”? Bare-breasted native girls discussing their sex lives?

Before he could be quizzed on his knowledge of anthropology, Bilbray explained that he didn’t want to hear a lot of sob-sister stuff showing a correlation between neighborhood crime and the number of liquor stores and bars, or that poor neighborhoods bear an unusually heavy load of liquor licenses.

“Doggone it,” Bilbray said, “let’s not sit there and interpret statistics the way we want to hear it. The fact that there is a lot of demand in those neighborhoods is the reason (the bars and stores) are there. The demand isn’t there because the businesses are there.”

Translation: Poor people just drink more than the rest of us. The fact that they may lack the political clout to keep bars and liquor stores out of neighborhoods has nothing to do with it.

The supervisors, who have authority over health-related grants, voted 4 to 0 to kill the application. County staff members offered no defense, and Supervisor Leon Williams, whose district includes Southeast San Diego, was absent.

The move was met with anger at City Hall and elsewhere. Mayor Maureen O’Connor called Bilbray’s comments “shocking.” The Rev. Leola A. Arnold, associate pastor at 47th Street Church of God, said alcohol “is killing our youth and poisoning our community.”

“We need help, not speeches,” Arnold said.

Keep It Clean

Call it the B. S. Factor. That’s B for bird.

With $160 million or more at stake, the designers and overseers of San Diego’s waterfront convention center are trying to think of everything. Take the huge tent-like coverings on the roof that will allow for open-air receptions, flower displays, trade shows, banquets, etc.

At a cost of $6 million, the translucent coverings will require as much material as covering 32 tennis courts. They will also be vulnerable to the elements.

Hence a clause in the contract requiring the tent maker to “guarantee in writing no more than a 10% reduction in the structural capacity of the fabric material as a result of the chemical impact of sea gull droppings.”

Gene Stephens, operations manager of the Convention Center Corp., hopes that even the 10% sag will never be hit. A squad of maintenance workers will be assigned to keep the coverings clean once the center opens in November.

Where’s the Party?

Posters appeared this week around UC San Diego inviting students to a party Friday at the home of Chancellor Richard Atkinson. Sounds like quite a bash: free beer, no I. D. needed, a chance to meet Atkinson. The posters included a map to Atkinson’s home.

However, there are problems: There is no party, no beer and the chancellor is not amused at the hoax. The student newspaper will try to straighten things out in Thursday’s edition.