Oceanside Council Mulls Permit For Concrete Plant

By Alison St John / Reporter, KPBS Public Broadcasting

Published March 19, 2008 at 1:19 PM PDT

This story was published more than 16 years ago.

Oceanside city council expects a full house at city hall tonight. The matter of permitting a concrete plant on Oceanside Boulevard, less than two miles from the coast, has proved controversial. KPBS r

Oceanside city council expects a full house at city hall tonight. The matter of permitting a concrete plant on Oceanside Boulevard, less than two miles from the coast, has proved controversial. KPBS reporter Alison St John has more.

Supporters of the concrete plant say new development requires concrete, and it has to be manufactured somewhere. The company has already been refused permits in San Marcos and Vista.

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Nadine Scott served on a community group that spent a year planning a future vision for Oceanside Boulevard. She says grass roots opposition to the concrete plant is similar to the effort by residents of Barrio Logan to get chrome plating stores out of their neighborhood.

Scott : We had hundreds of citizens participating from all over the city and that's what we put in the visioning plan -- phase out incompatible businesses.

Scott says the concrete plant will bring 400 heavy-duty trucks a day rumbling through an area on the new Sprinter line that aims to eventually become mixed residential and retail.

Those in favor of the plant say it will bring in $200,000 a year in taxes to the city.

Alison St John, KPBS News.

Alison St John

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Alison St John currently serves as a general assignment reporter and occasionally co-hosts KPBS Midday Edition. She fell in love with KPBS Radio when she arrived in San Diego in 1985 and first heard NPR. She has been a voice on KPBS Radio since 1989, and has served as a news reporter for radio, TV and the web, as well as anchoring, hosting, producing and editing. Alison has reported on stories about North County and was based in the KPBS' North County Bureau. Alison covered the metro beat during the critical period of the San Diego City pension crisis, and the education beat while Alan Bersin was the controversial Superintendent of San Diego City School District. She covered health when the industry was converting to managed care and told welfare reform stories in the late 1990s when Clinton was “ending welfare as we know it.” She has covered land use issues extensively, looking at the challenges of meeting a growing population while preserving community character, and developing a better transportation system to meet environmental concerns. She has done many stories on the military in San Diego, and the series she edited on the challenges veterans face returning from active duty to civilian life won “Best of Show” from the San Diego Society of Professional Journalists. She occasionally hosts the KPBS Roundtable and KPBS Midday Edition. Alison has won awards from the San Diego Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press TV and Radio Association, and the California Golden Mike Awards. Alison was born in Tanzania, brought up in Scotland, and earned her degree in psychology and sociology from Durham University in England. Her postgraduate diploma is in student counseling. She worked in England, Nigeria, Switzerland, Belgium, India, and Japan before moving to the United States in 1981. She now lives in Oceanside and enjoys how her community is growing and changing.