David Mays Blog

Friday, November 13, 2020

Stumpy’s Hatchet House to offer cutting edge entertainment in Huntington Beach

Swinging axes and swigging beers: What could possibly go wrong?

Well, the name of the place – Stumpy’s Hatchet House – suggests at least one potential snafu.

Huntington Beach is soon to boast this cutting-edge style of entertainment, which may well be the hottest trend you’ve never heard of.

Eric and Adriana LaShelle and their son, Nikko La Shelle, near their home in Huntington Beach, CA, on Friday, November 13, 2020. The Huntington Beach Planning Commission recently gave a stamp of approval to the LaShelles new hatchet throwing house – a franchise they are bringing to Huntington Beach. Eric LaShelle likens it to a bowling alley with axes. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)
Eric and Adriana LaShelle and their son, Nikko La Shelle, near their home in Huntington Beach, CA, on Friday, November 13, 2020. The Huntington Beach Planning Commission recently gave a stamp of approval to the LaShelles new hatchet throwing house – a franchise they are bringing to Huntington Beach. Eric LaShelle likens it to a bowling alley with axes. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)
Eric and Adriana LaShelle and their son, Nikko La Shelle, near their home in Huntington Beach, CA, on Friday, November 13, 2020. The Huntington Beach Planning Commission recently gave a stamp of approval to the LaShelles new hatchet throwing house – a franchise they are bringing to Huntington Beach. Eric LaShelle likens it to a bowling alley with axes. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)
Eric and Adriana LaShelle and their son, Nikko La Shelle, near their home in Huntington Beach, CA, on Friday, November 13, 2020. The Huntington Beach Planning Commission recently gave a stamp of approval to the LaShelles new hatchet throwing house – a franchise they are bringing to Huntington Beach. Eric LaShelle likens it to a bowling alley with axes. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)
Eric and Adriana LaShelle and their son, Nikko La Shelle, near their home in Huntington Beach, CA, on Friday, November 13, 2020. The Huntington Beach Planning Commission recently gave a stamp of approval to the LaShelles new hatchet throwing house – a franchise they are bringing to Huntington Beach. Eric LaShelle likens it to a bowling alley with axes. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)
Eric and Adriana LaShelle and their son, Nikko La Shelle, near their home in Huntington Beach, CA, on Friday, November 13, 2020. The Huntington Beach Planning Commission recently gave a stamp of approval to the LaShelles new hatchet throwing house – a franchise they are bringing to Huntington Beach. Eric LaShelle likens it to a bowling alley with axes. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)
Eric and Adriana LaShelle and their son, Nikko La Shelle, near their home in Huntington Beach, CA, on Friday, November 13, 2020. The Huntington Beach Planning Commission recently gave a stamp of approval to the LaShelles new hatchet throwing house – a franchise they are bringing to Huntington Beach. Eric LaShelle likens it to a bowling alley with axes. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)
Stumpy’s Hatchet House, coming to Huntington Beach, features axe-throwing, beer and snacks.

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In the four years since the original debuted in New Jersey, 25 Stumpy’s Hatchet Houses have popped up around the country. Huntington Beach’s will be the first on the West Coast.

As for risks to life and limb, the chain’s founders compare hatchet throwing to bowling – a sport that involves 16-pound cannon balls and, often, the likes of Jack Daniels and Jose Cuervo.

On Nov. 11, the Huntington Beach Planning Commission voted 5-2 to approve a Stumpy’s on Edinger Avenue near Golden West College. It is expected to at least partially open this spring, depending on coronavirus numbers.

Local couple Eric and Adriana LaShelle became enamored with Stumpy’s last year when they visited the flagship location in Eatontown, New Jersey.

“We’d been going down the road of buying a traditional franchise,” said Eric LaShelle, 42, who works in video animation. “We decided, ‘Let’s do the crazy idea, instead!’”

Hatchet-tossing venues dot Southern California, including in Los Angeles, San Bernardino and San Diego Counties. However, Stumpy’s will be the only hatchet-pitching enterprise in Orange County legally authorized for beer and wine consumption.

An attempted start-up in Costa Mesa wound up missing the mark. AXT opened September of 2018, inviting customers to bring their own spirits. But it was shut down by a few months later, when the city said the owners had not received permission to sell alcoholic beverages.

The AXT website still reads: “Temporarily closed on account of having a little too much fun!”

Huntington Beach Planning Commissioner John Scandura voiced his own concerns about mixing booze and sharp objects, arguing for a two-drink limit. But the majority felt Stumpy’s will be a good fit for Surf City.

“It’s no less safe than throwing darts at a bar,” Vice Chairman Dan Kalmick said, adding that “Huntington Beach is all about personal responsibility.”

Scandura later said that the hatchet-throwing craze was news to him.

“My son threw hatchets in Boy Scouts,” he said. “It’s a lot of fun. But alcohol introduces a whole new element. It’s easy to make mistakes when you’re drinking. People could get careless and grab the wrong end. Or what happens if the hatchet slips out of your hand?”

Stumpy’s co-founder Kelly Josberger said stringent protocols are in place. “We have our safety measures nailed down,” she said. “It’s a very controlled environment.”

Customers must undergo training prior to handling hatchets. Groups of friends are confined to their own “pits” – separate enclosures with wooden targets. Coaches oversee each pit.

And the price tag – about $25 per person per hour – deters impulsive mischief makers.

Josberger was an elementary school principal when she, her husband Stuart, and another 50-something couple, Mark and Trish Oliphant, hit upon the notion.

“We were looking to do something fun after retiring at some point from our day jobs,” Josberger said. “During a backyard barbecue, the men started throwing a hatchet at a stump. Trish and I were like, ‘Boys will be boys.’ But then we started playing, too. It was addictive.”

The foursome found themselves contemplating the possibilities. Already, they would learn, the drinking game was all the rage in Canada.

“We liked that it’s social, noncompetitive, and doesn’t involve technology,” Josberger said. “When we started investigating properties to rent, it was a bit of a challenge. Landlords found the concept interesting but didn’t totally get it.”

Proprietors weren’t the only ones. “Our families thought we were totally crazy,” Josberger said.

The partners landed on the humorous name “by design,” Josberger admitted. “We like that it sounds edgy,” she said with a laugh. “But the main reason we chose ‘Stumpy’s’ is that the whole thing started with a tree stump.”

Arriving in April of 2016, Stumpy’s immediately hit the bull’s eye.

“Our initial plan was to open a couple more in the area,” Josberger said. “We had no intention of franchising. But then people from out of state would say, ‘I want to start one of these in my town.’”

Enter the LaShelles.

“Huntington Beach is the perfect place for this kind of business,” said Adriana LaShelle, 39, who owns a marketing firm. “You have serious business people, you have surfers, and then you have the rowdy folks who just want to be entertained.”

And next, enter COVID.

“We literally had just signed our lease when everything started shutting down (in March),” Eric LaShelle said.

But they also count their blessings. “Although it was scary, we almost felt that the fact we hadn’t opened yet was fortunate,” Adriana LaShelle said. “I feel terrible for new businesses that were trying to get off the ground.”

Stumpy’s patrons must be at least 21 years of age, but many franchisees offer an occasional alcohol-free family day. The LaShelles, who have an 11-year-old son, hope to do so, as well.

Although he expressed reservations, Planning Commissioner Scandura hailed Stumpy’s as an innovative business for Huntington Beach.

“It’s certainly an exciting concept,” he said. “I wish them the best of luck.”

Stumpy’s Hatchet House to offer cutting edge entertainment in Huntington Beach posted first on https://anaheimsignsorangecounty.blogspot.com

OC jail phone vendor again records confidential calls between inmates and their attorneys

The telephone vendor for the Orange County jail system — already embattled for inadvertently recording nearly 34,000 confidential attorney-client phone calls before repairing the system in 2018 — is again breaching protected calls, according to court papers.

In the latest lapse, phone vendor GTL in 2019 recorded six calls from jail inmates to the Orange County Public Defender’s branch office in Westminster, said a motion filed Friday by Assistant Public Defender Scott Sanders. The recordings were made from April to December 2019, even though the Westminster phone number had been added to a “do not record” list kept by GTL, of Reston, Virginia.

One of the recordings was of Sanders’ client, Ryan Franks, who pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing for car theft. Franks is hoping to take back his plea and have the charges dismissed under the premise that GTL violated his constitutional rights.

Franks has subpoenaed more documents from GTL, while prosecutors are fighting to quash the motion. The Public Defender’s Office was notified of the new recordings by a special master, who was assigned by a judge in 2018 to take custody of all the recorded calls and notify defense attorneys.

Sanders said the number of recorded calls to the Westminster office could be in the thousands.

“It is illogical that (only) six calls were recorded,” Sanders said, explaining that either the computer would record all the calls to that number or none of them. “It is unfortunate that over the years, GTL failed to deliver truth or transparency to these issues.”

Sanders noted that in the early days of the controversy, GTL kept delivering different numbers for the volume of recorded calls.

Authorities first learned in June 2018 that, for the previous three years, the phone system had been recording calls between inmates and their attorneys because of “human error.” In all, 4,356 such conversations were recorded because the lawyers’ phone numbers were mistakenly left off a “do-not-record” list. GTL assured the Sheriff’s Department in 2018 that the problem had been resolved.

Another 29,456 unanswered calls were also recorded, said GTL spokesman James Lee, in an earlier interview. Lee had no comment on Friday. Carrie Braun, a spokeswoman for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, said the agency was unaware of any new attorney-client recordings.

Defense attorneys were fearful that the recorded conversations were turned over to prosecutors, who could then eavesdrop on planning sessions between defendants and their attorneys.

However, a May 2019 Orange County grand jury report found no wrongdoing on the part of the Orange County District Attorney’s Office or Sheriff’s Department in the handling of the recorded calls, which violated the most sacred of legal tenets. Grand jurors found no cases affected by the breach. The panel, however, concluded the Sheriff’s Department was insufficiently trained to oversee the phone system.

It wasn’t the first time GTL had recorded attorney-client calls. The telephone carrier had done it twice before in Florida. Calls between inmates and their attorneys were mistakenly recorded in Pinellas and Charlotte counties.

OC jail phone vendor again records confidential calls between inmates and their attorneys posted first on https://anaheimsignsorangecounty.blogspot.com

How did your neighborhood vote? Ballot data for Orange County reveals curious shifts, splits

Over the past month, more people turned out to vote in Orange County than in any election in more than a half century.

With old trends upended by the coronavirus pandemic and political rhetoric, more voters submitted their ballots via drop box than by any other voting method.

And while reliably blue neighborhoods in Santa Ana and Irvine strongly favored President-elect Joe Biden, President Donald Trump flipped Little Saigon this year, which in 2016 gravitated toward Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

These are a few of the electoral facts emerging as the Orange County Registrar of Voters counts the last of the ballots from the 2020 general election.

While final numbers are expected to be certified in December, a precinct-level analysis of the preliminary totals offers insight into how local voting patterns have changed, where some residents left ballots blank and when they did something increasingly rare in American politics — split their tickets.

The vote for president

Across the county, 54% of voters chose for Biden while 44% picked Trump. Another 2% voted for third-party candidates.

This election, the county was diced into 1,795 precincts, many with hundreds or thousands of registered voters and others with as few as zero.

While many neighborhoods showed a presidential preference that mirrored the overall county numbers, most were at least somewhat lopsided. In all, some four in ten of all active precincts showed a difference of 10 percentage points or less between Biden and Trump, while more than half (55%) showed a bigger gap.

If you pull away the tiniest precincts, where just a few votes were cast, Biden is most popular in the neighborhoods around UC Irvine, which include student and faculty housing. In those, Biden won around 9 out of 10 votes out of about 2,300 ballots cast for president.

Trump’s support in Orange County was more scattered.

While the outgoing president got 100% of the vote in a small horse country precinct in Orange Park Acres, where all 14 voters chose him, and 11 out of 12 votes cast in a precinct that touches Newport Beach’s Back Bay, the most Trump-friendly standard precincts weren’t quite as supportive. For example, in the voting zone that includes Fashion Island, where 2,232 ballots were cast for president, Trump took about 65% of the vote.

The data also showed this: In some parts of Orange County, voters changed their minds about Trump.

Four years ago, Clinton led strongly over Trump in many neighborhoods of Santa Ana and Little Saigon. This election, while many Santa Ana precincts still favored Biden, the share of votes that went to Trump grew. And in much of Little Saigon, centered in Westminster, voters that once liked Clinton outright favored Trump this time around.

Conversely, voters in some parts of Mission Viejo and other South County areas who in ’16 liked went to Biden this year.

Looking at total votes by city, Villa Park, Yorba Linda and Newport Beach, the first, second and third most Republican cities by party registration, were, in that order, Trump’s strongest supporters.

However, the same wasn’t true for Biden. Voter registration shows that Santa Ana, Stanton and Anaheim are the county’s top three Democrat cities, but Biden drew his biggest vote shares in Santa Ana, Irvine and Laguna Beach.

How we cast ballots

The March primary was the first time a ballot was mailed to ever registered voter, and the first time the county opened multi-day vote centers and placed drop boxes around the county to collect mail ballots.

Though Orange County Registrar of Voters Neal Kelley couldn’t have anticipated the coronavirus when he began pushing to update the county’s voting system in 2017, the changes that started in March came in handy during the general election, allowing anyone who chose to cast a ballot from home.

Kelley said it’s hard to tell how much the pandemic influenced voters’ behavior because the high turnout for the Nov. 3 election included some younger voters who may simply have been energized to vote early. But he said, “We did hear from a lot of voters that they were thankful that they did have the opportunity to vote through the mail because of COVID.”

Another sign of things to come: the term “vote by mail” ballots might not be 100% accurate anymore. More people ultimately returned their Nov. 3 ballots via county drop boxes (about 583,000) than sent them by the postal service (about 512,000), while another group (about 195,000) brought completed mail ballots to vote centers during the last five days they were open.

The last week before Election Day, the registrar’s data shows a clear drop-off in voters using USPS and a spike in use of drop boxes. This came despite some confusion over unofficial drop boxes placed by the California Republican Party, and online chatter about whether drop boxes were secure. Kelley said there were no broad problems related to any voting method.

Changes in how voters cast their ballots also appears to have changed how results were reported, upending conventional wisdom from prior election cycles.

In previous Orange County elections, ballots counted on election night included votes cast early in the mail-in period and in person — a voting block that typically leaned Republican. But ballots counted and reported after Election Day tended to favor Democrats.

This year, for reasons ranging from fears of the postal service being slow to spread of coronavirus, the voting patterns seemed to shift. Democrats mailed their ballots in early and Republicans voted on Election Day. That meant the first vote counts announced favored Democrats, while the next round of vote counts shifted to Republicans. And as later mail-in votes and provisional ballots have been counted, the Democrat tilt hasn’t been pronounced, with many Republican candidates making gains as final ballots are tallied.

Kelley said he expects use of mail ballots to continue to grow, though many voters may opt not to return them through the post office. The 1,000-pound metal ballot drop boxes were permanently installed and will remain in place for future elections.

Historic voter turnout

Orange County posted high voter turnout in this election, shattering the notable 2016 number and on track to tie with turnout last seen in 1968.

As of Friday, Nov. 13, county turnout was 86.6%, with 1.53 million ballots cast from a pool of 1.77 million registered voters.

That’s significantly higher than statewide turnout, which as of Friday was at 75.3%. Both figures will inch up even as late mail-in and provisional ballots are tallied, with more than 1 million ballots still being processed across the state as of Thursday night.

In the 2016 election, voter turnout was at 80.7% in Orange County, with 1.2 million ballots cast from 1.5 million registered voters. That marked the county’s highest election participation rate in four decades — O.C. turnout was 67.3% in 2012, 72.6% in 2008 and 73.2% in 2004.

The county’s all-time turnout record is 90%, hit in 1960 and again in 1964.

Heading into this election, Kelley had predicted perhaps an 80% turnout given the enthusiasm on both sides of the aisle. His office doubled its scanning and automation capacity over the past six months so they’d be ready, with O.C. counting ballots at a significantly faster rate than neighboring counties.

Ballots partially complete

Most people who vote regularly have at one time or another “undervoted,” meaning they’ve left some races or measures blank, whether by mistake, as a protest against the available choices, or because they didn’t know enough about the candidates or measures to decide.

Some Orange County voters failed to vote in certain contests, but on top-of-the-ticket choices most people had their minds made up. The presidential race appeared to have the lowest rate of undervoting of anything on the ballot, with fewer than 1% of voters not picking a candidate, according to the registrar’s data.

That’s a change from four years ago, said Michael Alvarez, a Caltech political science professor who studies elections and voting. His research found that in the 2016 general election there was a national jump in voters who passed on casting a vote for president, with Republicans often unwilling to pull the lever for Trump or Clinton.

This year, most county voters also made their wishes known in congressional and state assembly races, and on statewide initiatives and a few local measures only about 5% of ballots cast left those options blank.

“Most likely, when you see an undervote, it’s because people don’t know the choices,” Alvarez said.

Because California ballots are often quite long, he added, there’s an increasing tendency to “roll off,” or quit filling in boxes, the farther down a voter gets.

Voters split tickets

There’s also evidence that some Orange County voters split their tickets, casting votes for Democrats and Republicans on the same ballots.

Though split-ticket voting was common as recently as the late 1970s, it’s become rare as politics have become more polarized.

It’s tough to definitively identify ticket splitting without seeing actual ballots, since other factors can come into play. But in a majority of O.C. congressional districts there were thousands more ballots cast for Biden than for Trump, while tighter margins — or even reversed partisan results — were seen in House contests, with little evidence of ballot drop-off between those races.

The biggest discrepancy was in the local portion of the 39th House District, which Includes northern Orange County cities from Buena Park to Anaheim Hills. There, Biden had 51% of the vote Friday while Democratic incumbent Rep. Gil Cisneros had 47%. Meanwhile, in the same area, Trump had 45% of the vote while Republican congressional contender Young Kim had 51%.

Even after accounting for third-party presidential candidates and other factors, the results indicate thousands of people voted Biden for president and Kim for Congress.

The only congressional district where it appears voters may have split their tickets the other way was the 46th District, which includes Anaheim, Santa Ana and parts of Orange. There, Democratic incumbent Rep. Lou Correa earned a higher percentage of votes than Biden, while Correa’s Republican competitor received a lower slice of the vote than Trump. That suggests several thousand CA-46 residents — who in the March primary backed Democrat Bernie Sanders for president — voted for Correa and Trump.

Kevin Wallsten, political science professor at Cal State Long Beach, said most people still vote the party line. “It is also obvious, however, that there is an anti-Trump/never-Trump/save-democracy constituency in the Republican Party that probably voted for Biden as a protest to Trump but wanted to check the Democratic Party more broadly by voting for conservative candidates down ballot.”

Wallsten doesn’t expect such ticket splitting to be a trend, however.

“Once Trump is off the ballot,” he said, “many Republicans will probably ‘return home.’”

How did your neighborhood vote? Ballot data for Orange County reveals curious shifts, splits posted first on https://anaheimsignsorangecounty.blogspot.com

Del Mar horse racing consensus picks for Saturday, Nov. 14

The consensus box of picks comes from handicappers Bob Mieszerski, Art Wilson, Terry Turrell and Eddie Wilson. Here are the picks for Saturday, Nov. 14 for horse racing at Del Mar.

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Del Mar horse racing consensus picks for Saturday, Nov. 14 posted first on https://anaheimsignsorangecounty.blogspot.com

Mountain High to open Saturday, Nov. 14, for pass holders, followed by Snow Valley Monday

After a short delay this week following four employees who tested positive for coronavirus, Mountain High announced it will open on Saturday, Nov. 14, for season pass holders.

The Wrightwood resort will sell tickets to the general public on Sunday, Nov. 15, according to the website. Tickets must be purchased 24 hours in advance.

Amenities will be limited on opening weekend, including no lessons or rentals and limited food and beverage, though people can bring their own snacks onto the mountain.

“It’s going to be a beautiful weekend so come enjoy your lunch on the sun deck. Indoor access will be limited,” the announcement said. “Guests should be prepared to enjoy an outdoor experience this winter, no matter the conditions. Lodges will be available for restrooms and retail purchases only.”

Snow Valley in the San Bernardino Mountains announced Friday its season start date will be Nov. 16. The six-person chairlift will accommodate a whole family and groups that arrive together, or two singles spaced out on the lift chair. Snow Valley’s 300-foot moving carpet lift in the Children’s Learning Center also lends itself to healthy social distancing, resort officials said.

Snow Summit opens for pass holders on Nov. 18 and 19, and will open to the public on Nov. 20, resort officials announced.

Bear Mountain will also open on Nov. 20, but will only be open Fridays through Sundays, until further notice. Lift tickets, rentals and parking will be available for purchase starting on Nov. 16. Tickets will be sold in advance and only online.

Resorts are eager to open up after a recent storm brought nearly two feet of snow, creating a winter wonderland at local mountains. Like many businesses, local resorts had to shut down in March due to the coronavirus pandemic and were only allowed to reopen if certain guidelines were met.

Mountain High had hoped to open mid-week, but after learning of one employee testing positive, others were tested and quarantined while the mountain operators followed contact tracing protocols.

The resort, as many others are, is limiting attendance and put in new technologies such as touchless check-in kiosks. Visitors to the mountain will be required to wear face coverings.

Mountain High to open Saturday, Nov. 14, for pass holders, followed by Snow Valley Monday posted first on https://anaheimsignsorangecounty.blogspot.com

Hostage reported at Ubisoft offices in Montreal

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Biden would add 306 electoral votes

Biden would add 306 electoral votes posted first on https://anaheimsignsorangecounty.blogspot.com