Latest news with #MeasureQ
Los Angeles Times
a day ago
- General
- Los Angeles Times
Huntington Beach's Sowers Middle School celebrates new gymnasium, other upgrades
Ravi Sohoni has been a physical education teacher at Isaac L. Sowers Middle School in Huntington Beach for more than 30 years. During those three-plus decades, the school has never had its own gymnasium. He saw the basketball teams practicing at the district's other middle school, Dwyer, or on the blacktop court at neighboring Moffett Elementary or the Edison Community Center. Sohoni, who will retire from the Huntington Beach City School District in a couple of years, knows that good things can come to those who wait. Sowers Middle School celebrated the completion of phase two of its reconstruction with a ribbon-cutting ceremony Wednesday. 'We've been waiting for this gym for 32 years,' Sohoni said with a laugh on Wednesday afternoon inside Sowers' new state-of-the-art gymnasium. 'But yeah, it's amazing. The whole school is going to be amazing.' The district's operations director, Mark Manstof, said that in addition to the new gym, there's a new locker room building and hard court area featuring ball walls and basketball and volleyball courts. Outdoor nodes between the 'Viking Union' and the gym were expanded. The parking facilities were also improved with a two-lane drop off system. 'The new pickup and drop off is a really big feature for us, because there's a lot of congestion on Indianapolis [Avenue] with pickup and drop off,' Manstof said. 'It was like that with the old honeycomb building, it was like that during construction. We worked pretty diligently on a design that would try to move traffic off the ancillary streets around us and onto the campus, working with Huntington Beach city as well.' Phase one of the Sowers reconstruction project concluded in February 2024. The first phase included five American Modular System GEN7 prefabricated buildings for 27 new classrooms, as well as a new science, technology, engineering and mathematics building. District Supt. Leisa Winston said the phase two completion will round out the entire student experience at Sowers. 'Yes, the academic environment is very important to us, but having this space for students to be able to engage in physical activity, having an indoor space during inclement weather — as infrequent as it is, it's nice to have that space,' Winston said. 'It's a similar model to what we have at Dwyer, so now our two middle schools have an equitable experience.' Sowers Principal Jeff Smith and District Board President Diana Marks also addressed those attending the ceremony. Marks, a former teacher at Sowers herself, was moved to tears as she highlighted retired longtime Sowers teacher Bill Bates, who came in from Washington for the ceremony. Marks said that the new STEM building will be named after Bates and his wife Rebbie, another longtime Sowers teacher. Officials said the total Sowers reconstruction project estimated cost was $72 million. It was funded by Measure Q, sale of the former Gisler Middle School property and additional facilities funding.
Yahoo
17-04-2025
- Yahoo
New police station will be coming to Manteca
( — A roughly 8-acre lot at 682 Main Street in Manteca sits empty now, but it is set to be a brand-new police station in the next few years. The announcement came from city officials this week. 'We pushed hard to put a tax measure in place, which is measure Q, three-quarter cent and one of the promises we made out of that tax measure was that if it passes, we are going to look at trying to get a new police station,' said Manteca city mayor Gary Singh. Officials say the decades old police station on Center St was long overdue for expansion, especially as they seek to increase staffing in the near future. Singh says the police department currently has 80 sworn officers. CHP assists with emergency aircraft landing in Plumas County 'We actually have run out of room in our current station,' Singh said. 'Not just even in personnel, but we also don't even have room for our vehicles' Mayor Singh says half the lot would be used for the new station, and the other half for a possible community resource. He said the new building may also feature a real-time crime center incorporated into a dispatch center, community rooms where the public can meet, upgrades in technology, and a larger workplace overall to accommodate officers on the job. Juan Mejia, a 20-year-resident, said he is in support of a bigger new station. After experiencing a car accident on Wednesday morning, he says he hopes a bigger station will mean more officers will be patrolling nearby to make the streets safer. 'For sure, it will make people feel more safe,' Mejia said. 'Better control for the city and a lot less crime.' The city's early estimates are that this new project could cost anywhere between $60 million to $80 million. 'Because we have Measure Q for the next 20 years, we'll actually work on getting bonding against that tax measure to pay for this building and get it done now,' Singh said. Officials say they could start breaking ground next year, and their goal is to have the new station up and running by 2028. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Los Angeles Times
12-04-2025
- Business
- Los Angeles Times
Costa Mesa earmarked a slice of cannabis tax revenue for the arts. Where is it going?
When Costa Mesa officials drafted the city's retail cannabis ordinance, they agreed to dedicate one-half cent of the 7-cent-per-dollar tax toward the implementation of an Arts & Culture Master Plan. But until recently, it's been unclear where the money's going. Adopted in 2021, the same year as the cannabis law was crafted following the passage of Measure Q, the arts master plan took years to create as public input was sought on how citywide art and cultural events, programs, policies and staffing might be developed over a five-year period. The document comprised existing events — like a utility box art program and the annual ARTventure — and also called for new commitments, such as establishment of the seven-member Arts Commission and creation of a full-time arts specialist, hired in 2022 at an annual salary of $120,000. Some saw the tax earmark as a shot in the arm for local arts, including Costa Mesa Mayor John Stephens, who helped draft the recommendation as part of a council-appointed cannabis ad hoc committee. 'Everybody, I think, realized it was a good thing to put money behind — here's a fund to hopefully spur and inspire some investment into public art,' Stephens said Thursday. 'My view was we'd see some great public art.' Now, with more than $3.3 million in total revenue having so far been generated from the legal sale of marijuana, the application of the arts funding is not so visible. Parks & Community Services Director Brian Gruner explained during an April 3 Arts Commission meeting the cannabis tax funds were not being accumulated for a special purpose, but were going into the city's general fund, from which arts programs and initiatives have historically been covered. Gruner told commissioners while city leaders initially projected the cannabis tax revenue would be sufficient to fund the total implementation of the master plan's programs — around $8 million annually — actual income has been less robust, possibly due to a cap placed last year on the number of dispensaries allowed to do business. 'Currenlty, the tax revenue coming in is not sufficient to basically fund the arts master plan, so the council has been supplementing additional funds from the general fund to help offset that,' he said. 'The council has been very, very supportive of the arts, and they certainly make that a priority to continue the funding, at least for the next fiscal year.' Total implementation of the five-year plan — which began July 2021 and ends in June 2026 — is estimated to cost $1,941,700, including a projected cost for next fiscal year of $457,300, according to figures provided by Gruner at last week's commission meeting. But given the arts master plan funding constitutes 1/14 of the total cannabis tax taken in, the city would have to earn $27,183,800 in revenue from dispensaries for arts and culture programs to be fully funded. By contrast, figures provided in the 2024-25 adopted budget show only $420,967 in arts-related cannabis taxes will have been collected by June 30. That the earmark is being returned to the city's general fund came as a surprise to resident Jim Fitzpatrick, a former planning commissioner-turned-cannabis-consultant who makes frequent appearances at public meetings to decry what he sees as waste and misspending at City Hall. 'Measure Q came after the Arts & Culture Master Plan. [The arts tax] was never intended to fund it,' Fitzpatrick said during the Arts Commission meeting. 'It was always intended to be incremental, over and above, to do more for the City of the Arts. Now [staff] is saying they're having to supplement it with the general fund. They've got it backwards.' City Finance Director Carol Molina, in the throes of preparing next fiscal year's budget, deferred questions about the cannabis tax to Costa Mesa spokesman Tony Dodero, who clarified that the city's intention was that the revenue would be the sole funding source for programs identified in the document. 'Ultimately, the money from Measure Q is supposed to totally fund the master plan, but at this point it's not. And, because of that, for the last three years the city's been taking money out of the general fund to fund the master plan,' Dodero said Wednesday. Stephens said while that's not exactly what he envisioned when the council approved the tax set-aside, he doesn't think of using the general fund to pay for arts programming as a 'subsidy.' 'My vision was that it would be tangible, that people would be able to see a tangible art piece and trace it back to the cannabis art funds,' the mayor said Thursday. 'But it's still obviously an additional source of funds we didn't have before. If that allows us to get [an arts specialist], that wasn't what I was thinking — but I don't disagree with that.'
