By Pat Orr
Apple Valley Review
Four-hundred new building permits are in the works for a section at Sun City/Jess Ranch. They won’t be built all at once, but new rules, regulations and higher fees are being enacted soon that make getting the permits through the system now rather than later less costly.
The ultimate point is that senior living communities are still a hot development prospect because of brisk sales.
Will Jerry cave?
Despite the fact that studies are now clear that pre-school education has little bearing on future success in school, Democrats use “Universal Pre-School” as a political tool.
Gov. Sunspot has continued to refuse to add budget dollars for tax-paid pre-school and the Legislature isn’t happy. Brown wants to save some budget surplus for a “rainy day fund.” How about Mom, Dad or whichever one you can find socializing the kiddos and getting them ready for school — LOL. Should we pay for it? Choose the expletive of your choice before the word NO.
I was wrong!
That’s a phrase I don’t use much — just ask my wife — but I messed up in a column a few weeks back and I need to correct that error.
I got a call from Apple Valley Mayor Art Bishop to tell me that about a dozen readers of my column emailed to alert him that I wrote Tim Donnelly hadn’t endorsed anyone for the Assembly seat Donnelly is vacating. In the nicest possible way, Art queried if I had my cranium ensconced in my elementary canal last November when Donnelly did in fact endorse him (Bishop) in the 33rd Assembly race.
I guess I was so focused on Turkey last November I totally missed the announcement. Oops.
“One toke over the line ...”
That song lyric, from a famous late-’60s anthem about smoking pot (or so I’m told) is about to be re-written in California this fall to “take as many tokes as you want” when state voters legalize marijuana.
There will be at least one legalization initiative on the November ballot and those who vote “no” have been aged out of the picture. According to recent polling, 68 percent of millennials — voters born after 1980 — support legalization.
We old farts are outnumbered, to put it bluntly.
Some estimate that the California marijuana crop could be worth as much as $13 billion. That should give our tax hungry Legislature a shot at $1 billion a year in new taxes if they can find a way to control the black market and back-woods producers. This is perfect timing with the news that Obamacare is now being pitched as a way to give folks a chance to stop working or work less and keeptheir insurance.
What a great place. Somebody pays your insurance premiums if you’d rather get stoned than work full time.
Golden State indeed.
No home, no voice
Spring Valley Lake residents apparently woke up to the fact that a bridge is being built through their community. Gosh, they must have missed the five years of talk, news stories, meetings and website posts, huh? SVL folks have always resisted annexation by Victorville or Apple Valley. If you have no local political “home,” you have no voice. The nearby Wal-Mart and the Yucca Loma Bridge projects could be the final alarms to prompt someone to posit, “Gosh, what if we had our own council person representing our views?”
— Pat Orr is a local business owner, community volunteer and political junkie.