In Training

Northern Exposure

FIT TO SPRINT: The much-maligned Sprinter is finally up and running, offering light-rail service between Oceanside and Escondido. The 22-mile route was first approved in 1990 at an estimated cost of $60 million, with completion targeted for 1999. The long delay, triggered in part by an unsuccessful lawsuit filed by the city of Vista over traffic and noise, caused the cost to mushroom to $477 million——and earned the train the derision of The San Diego Union-Tribune’s Logan Jenkins, who took frequent swipes at the project in his North County column. His latest jab was at the Sprinter stations——for not offering restrooms.

SOME SPRINTER: The Sprinter caused a massive traffic jam before it even opened for business. During a practice run several weeks ago, the train pulled into the station just west of College Avenue and south of Mesa Drive in Oceanside. As it approached, the railroad crossing gates went down——and stayed down the entire time the train was in the station. After 10 minutes, cars lined up on College in both directions began honking; several SUVs and pickups jumped the curb and went back the way they had come. Traffic was backed up nearly a mile in each direction when the gates finally opened——and after several Oceanside Police cars had arrived on the scene to maintain order.

POSTAGE DUE: A Carlsbad resident is behind one of the U.S. Postal Service’s new stamps for 2008. That would be art director Carl T. Herman, who worked with New York artist Michael Deas to create a portrait of novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (best remembered for the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Yearling). Herman is no stranger to stamp design, with such classics as 2006’s “Love: True Blue” and 2003’s “Snowy Egret” to his credit.

BUTT OUT: Carlsbad’s boardwalk has a new anti-litter tool: little boxes marked “butts only,” placed right next to the dog-doo bag dispensers that have lined the mile-long stretch of sidewalk north of Tamarack Avenue for years. The march of progress.

FULL BLOOM: Carlsbad’s famed Flower Fields are set to open this month for another 10-week season of ranuncula viewing. New this year: Santa’s Play Area, with several play houses and giant mushrooms that once were part of Santa’s Village, the Christmas theme park in Lake Arrowhead that closed in January 1998 after 43 seasons. “We have the Guard Shack, Doll House and Crooked Treehouse,” says Fred Clarke, general manager of the Flower Fields.

THE POOP ON PONTO: Carlsbad civic leaders have high hopes of turning the rundown area just east of Ponto Beach, in the southwestern part of the city, into a shiny southern resort gateway to their town. But now the city of Encinitas is suing its northern neighbor over its share of the cost of improving La Costa Avenue, which would absorb most of the traffic resulting from construction of the 50-acre resort. The resort, according to the lawsuit, would generate 70 percent of future traffic, and yet Carlsbad is only asking developers to pay 27 percent of the cost of improving La Costa Avenue’s intersections with Coast Highway and Vulcan Avenue, a block east. A Carlsbad spokesperson says the city attorney will review the suit and then brief the city council on what response, if any, the city will make.

GOOD GENES: Carlsbad’s Invitrogen Corporation was among the country’s big biotech winners in 2007, with a 63 percent gain in its stock price. Invitrogen makes kits used by researchers for gene cloning. Overall, the biotech sector closed the year with more modest gains; the American Stock Exchange’s biotech index rose 5 percent, while NASDAQ’s biotech index finished the year up 5.6 percent.

O HOLY NIGHT: Oceanside is doing everything it can to clean up its image, but stories like this, widely circulated through the Associated Press, don’t help: Two men celebrated Christmas by breaking into an Oceanside sex shop called Sinsations and stealing $700 worth of adult videos and magazines.

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