Brewer stands by mailers, message Newport Beach...

Brewer stands by mailers, message

Newport Beach Republican Congressional candidate Marilyn Brewer on

Thursday dismissed as meaningless a censure dealt to her by the

Orange County Republican Party early in the week.

After a complaint by opponent state Sen. John Campbell, the

party’s ethics committee decided Brewer’s campaign mailers made false

claims about Campbell.

Campbell and Brewer will face off with 15 other candidates Tuesday

in a special primary for the 48th Congressional District seat.

Brewer said the party isn’t an objective critic because it already

endorsed Campbell, and she stood by her mailers as accurate.

“They’re not going to support me, so they’re doing anything they

can to make it more difficult,” she said of the party’s Wednesday

decision.

Dredging will continue without grounded boat

A major dredging project in the Santa Ana River will continue

upstream of Coast Highway, but the dredging boat that ran aground

twice early in the year won’t be back, Army Corps of Engineers

project manager Ken Morris said Thursday.

Eland, a dredging boat that’s more than 160 feet long, ran aground

once in February and once in March while working on the $5-million

project, which began in November. The Corps is dredging 400,000 cubic

yards of silt from the river to improve flood control.

Enough dredging has been done at the river mouth, so the boat

won’t return.

Workers still are digging silt out between Coast Highway and Adams

Avenue, and they will grade the sand that was deposited on an island

habitat for least terns, Morris said. The flood control project

should be finished in mid-November.

Horse play is getting a bit nicer at fairgrounds

A dispute between management and tenants at the Orange County

Fairgrounds Equestrian Center has been smoothed over, and one fair

board member now wants to look at the center and all other

fairgrounds operations to see if they’re the best use of the

property.

At a fair board meeting in August, several riders and trainers who

board horses at the equestrian center complained that Rick Hanson and

his family, who manage the center, haven’t kept its facilities clean

and safe and that they have raised rents without notice.

Hanson said he did address complaints when they were brought to

him, and the problems weren’t as severe as the riders said.

Since then, the management and tenants have started talking out

their differences and “are headed in a really good direction,” said

Kathy Hobstetter, a trainer who runs her business from the center.

Conditions at the center haven’t changed much, she said, but there’s

hope for improvement.

Hanson said he won’t evict two tenants who were served notice

earlier.

“I think we decided that in order to avoid lawsuits and heaven

knows what, we better start talking, or we’re going to end up on a

dead-end road,” Hanson said.

After hearing more about the equestrian center at a meeting

Thursday, fair board member Dale Dykema asked for a report on the

various uses of fairgrounds property and how they interact. Fair

chief executive Becky Bailey-Findley said the report likely will be

presented to a buildings and grounds committee in October.

-- Compiled by Alicia Robinson