Rancho Santa Fe News, March 29, 2019

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The

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Check out our Home & Garden Magazine inserted in today’s paper VOL. 15, N0. 7

SERVING NORTH COUNTY SINCE 1987

MARCH 29, 2019

Admissions scandal hits North County

Edison: ‘We could have done a better job’

2 residents indicted in FBI college sting

By Jordan P. Ingram

By Steve Puterski

REGION — Two San Diego County residents have been indicted in the massive FBI investigation into parents securing their children admission to some of the best universities in the nation. Named “Operation Varsity Blues,” the scandal has implicated at least 50 people including Elisabeth Kimmel, 54, of La Jolla (who also owns a home in Las Vegas) and Toby MacFarlane, 56, of Del Mar. Early headlines described how actresses Lori Laughlin (“Full House”) and Felicity Huffman (“Desperate Housewives”) were also charged in the scheme. Kimmel owned KMFB News8 in San Diego before selling the station in 2018. She was arrested March 12 at her La Jolla home and is accused of a conspiracy to get her daughter into Georgetown and son into the USC. According to reports, Kimmel’s daughter’s application said she was a tennis recruit, although no there is no record of her daughter’s participation with the U.S. Tennis Association. Her daughter never played at Georgetown and graduated in 2017, according to NBC 7 in San Diego. Kimmel allegedly bribed officials at both schools through a fixer, William Rick Singer, who operated the Key WorldTURN TO SCANDAL ON 7

REGION — Nearly eight months after a “nearmiss” canister incident delayed storage operations at San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, the message from Southern California Edison’s management team was clear: The company is committed to regaining the public’s trust. Edison officials spoke directly to several local reporters about the company’s new safety and oversight program during a March 18 walking tour of the facility. “Quite frankly, we didn’t do our job here,” said Ron Pontes, Edison’s environmental decommissioning manager. “Believe me, we’ve taken a lot of heat, not only from the community, but from senior executives in this company, that are not happy with what happened here. We could have done a better job.” Dry storage efforts were interrupted on Aug. 3 after a stainless steel canister containing 50 tons of JIM PEATTIE, General Manager of Decommissioning Oversight at SCE, describes how the spent nuclear fuel rods becask transporter loads canisters into long-term storage. Photo by Jordan P. Ingram came wedged on a shield

ring as it was being lowered into an 18-foot concrete cask. The canister hung precariously and went unnoticed for roughly 45 minutes before employees realized what happened. After walking through the incident step-by-step, Edison identified five areas of improvement including better training programs and re-training crews, installation of new load-monitoring cameras and alarms, more detailed procedures and specific oversight of operations. “We took away a big lesson from that (canister) event,” Pontes said. “The lesson is we need to be more intrusive and we will be more intrusive going forward with all of our contractors.” Jim Peattie, General Manager of Decommissioning Oversight, was brought in to help revamp and improve the current system. Since December, Peattie has implemented a TURN TO SAN ONOFRE ON 3

Bestselling author Winslow talks trilogy at RSF Library By Christina Macone-Greene

RANCHO SANTA FE — It was a sold-out event for The Rancho Santa Fe Library Guild’s March Author Talk with New York Times bestselling author Don Winslow. The March 11 function held at the Rancho Santa Fe Library highlighted Winslow’s final chapter to his trilogy with his last work titled “The Border.” Before diving into his DON WINSLOW reads from “The Border,” the last installment of his trilogy about the drug war in Mexico, at the RSF Library crime fiction work, he talkGuild’s March Author Talk. Photo by Christina Macone-Greene ed about his penchant for

libraries. His deep-rooted fondness for libraries stems from his mother who was a librarian. “The other day, I was thinking how libraries were a revolutionary concept and how essential libraries were to the creation of democracy,” he said, adding how people had access to all the world’s available knowledge. And this was centuries before the internet. Winslow doesn’t think the rise of Western democ-

racies around the creation of free lending libraries was coincidental. With libraries, people had access to information, news, and different opinions, he shared. He also noted that libraries welcome all despite their economic status, class, or gender. “I’m always happy when I’m asked to speak at libraries, so it’s very nice to be here today,” he said. TURN TO AUTHOR ON 5


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