La Jolla Money vs Nature

La Jolla Cove is a scenic treasure, downtown, with a nice park. People go there to shop in the trendy stores, eat trendy food in the trendy restaurants, cruise around for hours looking for a parking place… If they succeed in the latter, they sit in the park with bottles of Cabernet and Pinot Noir and watch the sun go down, unless the marine layer hides that event, which it usually does.

You may get the idea I’m not a big fan of La Jolla, which has partly to do with its average income which rivals the national debt.

La Jollans are presently outraged by an invasion of seals, which are defecating on the rocks at La Jolla Cove. They are doing so in great quantity, and it may not surprise you to know that seal shit stinks. Badly. La Jollans are not happy about the stink, and they want the city government to do something about it. This is serious stuff. Who wants to eat trendy dinners, watch a sunset or stare at the marine layer in an area that smells like an overflowing sewage treatment plant?

The La Jolla Cove Business Association, I believe it was, hired a company to pressure wash the poop off of the rocks, but that didn’t turn out to be very effective. In order for it to work they had to use detergent, but the Coastal Commission vetoed that due to the pollution it caused, and blasting it with plain sea water didn’t remove it. All it did was piss off the seals, which is illegal.

Then they proposed hiring an animal behaviorist to train the seals to do their business somewhere else. I thought that was a joke when I read of it, and was trying to envision the size of the litter box that would be required, but it turned out they were actually getting bids from supposedly legitimate companies. Very high bids, as it turned out, so that idea was dropped.

Then they simply sued the city to force it to do a cleanup, not specifying how the cleanup was supposed to be done or what measures were to be taken to prevent the mess from recurring. The judge apparently noted the flaws in their filings, and ruled that cleaning seal shit from rocks was not a municipal responsibility in any case.

So that’s where it stands. La Jolla Cove still stinks, proving that no matter how much money you have, nature still rules.