By Brandon HENSLEY

During the Aug. 20 Crescenta Valley Town Council meeting, which was held online via Zoom, ongoing concerns over the property at Foothill Boulevard and Briggs Avenue were addressed by Land Use Committee co-chair Ines Chessum.

Both Town Council and Land Use members have said that they would like more time and research put into understanding what the new owners would like to do with the property that is currently a long-standing and beloved motel. Public opinion feels lopsided, as Chessum has said many feel the proposed affordable housing would not meet the Community Design Standards.

“Everyone knows the community is opposed to it,” Chessum said during the meeting. “We’re going to try to approach it from better quality development, but it might come to community outreach and we don’t know what the owners will do.”

Community member Sharon Raghavachary was online during the meeting and said the owner still has to do a sewage flow test so it doesn’t impact the CV Water District system.

“If it doesn’t pass, it’s an extremely large cost to him, which would severely impact his bottom line,” she said.

Eric Menjivar, PIO from Caltrans, updated council on Caltrans’ slurry seal project on the 210 Freeway from Lowell Avenue to Arroyo/Windsor. County is putting slurry seal on 30 on- and off-ramps. According to the Public Works website, a slurry seal is “an application of a mixture of water, asphalt emulsion, aggregate … and additives to the existing asphalt pavement surface.”

“We’re digging out destressed asphalt pavement and we’re going to preserve coating. Down the road, we’ll do an actual repaving of those ramps,” Menjivar said.

Menjivar said county is working on five auxiliary lanes, and joked that the only good thing about the recent heat wave was that the temperatures allows the material to dry faster.

Closures are from 7 p.m. to 6 a.m. Menjivar said completion should be in late fall or early winter.

“It’s a pretty straightforward project,” he said.

For more information, visit quickmap.dot.ca.gov.

Southern California Edison PIO David Ford joined the meeting to address the extreme heat conditions and challenges of managing power grids.

Ford said the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) has been regulating the grid with power and, since 2001, it’s had rotating outages to prevent system-wide blackouts. Edison can sometimes operate its own shutoff, called a Public Safety Power Shutoff, which is rare.

Ford informed the group of a three-stage procedure when operating reserves fall below 1.5%. Stage 1 is when Edison sends out basic alerts about common sense power usage, such as turning off lights and setting the thermostat to 78 degrees. Stage 2 is when blocks of energy are reduced, which means high usage customers may have their power reduces for periods of time.

Stage 3 is when larger numbers of users are without power.

“Generally, it’s about [20,000] to 30,000 when [we] are approximately reducing 100,000 megawatts of power. These power interruptions usually last for an hour,” Ford said.

“It’s important people do as much as they can to reduce the cost to the state,” Ford said about the ongoing heat wave.

He said people can download the CAISO app on their smartphone. This allows people to see how much energy is being used during the day, as well as what Edison’s capacity is for that kind of usage.

In the early part of the meeting, Mike Baldwin from the CV Chamber said due to safety concerns surrounding COVID-19, the 9/11 memorial motorcade will look different this year.

“We’ve expanded into [Glendale] Adventist Hospital and over into Tujunga because we don’t have to go to schools; it cut our trip down quite a bit,” Baldwin said.

The next town council meeting is scheduled for Sept. 17 at 7 p.m., and is expected to be held via Zoom.

  Brandon Hensley