Serving OB, the Peninsula and San Diego Beaches
The first District 2 candidate forum organized by the League of Women Voters San Diego is tonight, Thursday, March 5 – 5:30-7:30 PM at the Cathy Hopper Clairemont Friendship Center, located at 4425 Bannock Ave, San Diego 92117 This Forum is also hosted by the Clairemont Town Council.
Seven candidates have confirmed their attendance, and several more may come.
Planning Group Elections This Week in San Diego
San Diego’s Community Planning Groups (CPGs) hold annual elections every March. Here are dates, times, and locations for in-person voting at some of this week’s elections. Be sure to bring your driver’s license or another form of ID showing your home address.
Normal Heights will accept ballots from 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. at the Normal Heights Community Center at 4649 Hawley Boulevard.
https://normalheightscpg.org/notice-of-election/
Ocean Beach requires voters to download and print a registration form and ballot (available on website below). In-person voting takes place between 5:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. at the Ocean Beach Recreation Center at 4726 Santa Monica Avenue.
Community Coalition Bulletin: This Week at City Hall, March 2 — 6
The San Diego Community Coalition publishes this email bulletin to keep our members and San Diego residents informed about important Council and Planning Commission hearings and other city public meetings.
Item 330: Performance Audit of the City’s Key Performance Indicators
Why it matters: The City Auditor states that “key performance indicators (KPIs) are critical tools to … evaluate the City’s programs and services and deliver improved outcomes for residents.” But the Auditor has found that “the City underutilizes KPIs [and] lacks a cohesive approach to KPIs.” Recommendations include publishing an annual City KPI performance report and creating a publicly accessible dashboard with historical performance data. We can only hope.
Item S501: Consideration of an Empty Homes Tax Ballot Measure
Why it matters: Sean Elo-Rivera’s proposal for a yearly $8,000 tax on more than 5,000 mostly unoccupied homes faces a steep uphill battle.
by Roberto Camacho / Times of San Diego • Palabra / March 1, 2026
In a typically cool spring morning in San Diego, muralist Daniel Angeles took a phone call that chilled his soul: His first piece of public art in the city’s Latino-centric Barrio Logan, a large mural called “Birth of the Hummingbird,” was being erased. He clicked on a live video and was horrified that his masterwork was being painted over — the vibrant colors of his mural gradually covered by mundane, muddy browns.
Angeles called the property’s owner, who, years before, had allowed him to paint the building’s street-facing wall and fence. Angeles thought of invoking the California Art Preservation Act and the federal Visual Artist Rights Act of 1990, written to help artists preserve public works. Damaging or modifying works without an artist’s consent can be unlawful. Property owners are supposed to send notice three months before demolition or repainting, giving artists time to remove, document or relocate their murals.
“I was shocked. I couldn’t do anything since I was at a music performance for my oldest daughter,” Angeles said. “She was performing when this youngster FaceTimed me as he was running toward the wall to show me a couple of guys were going over the art with rollers and dark paint. I couldn’t believe that it was going away.”
Angeles, who paints under the name Dentlok, is a celebrated muralist, tattoo artist and long-time resident of the neighborhood. He said he received no warning before his prized mural was erased.
By Alana Coons / SOHO March-April 2026
At the City of San Diego Historical Resources Board meeting on February 26, 2026, the Newman Building project in North Park was on the consent agenda. In thanking the applicant, board member Rammy Cortez repeated a familiar refrain—that historic resources require applicants to “jump through hoops,” and that preservation reform in Package B of the preservation and progress Initiative would streamline projects like this one.
However, as this case demonstrates, the record does not support that narrative.
When Newman Building developer Nate Cadieux responded during this public meeting, he made something very clear: The historic review process was not the problem. In Cadieux’s words, the historic component to obtain a building permit was “streamlined, not scary, not complicated.” He described working with the HRB Design Assistance Subcommittee as collaborative and constructive. He credited Heritage Architecture, and preservation advocates, noting Bruce Coons of SOHO, for providing helpful, clear guidance.
From UC San Diego Today Now / March 5, 2026
The growth form of giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) is composed of shoots known as stipes instead of branches. From one parent holding fast to the hard bottom might come as many as 150 stipes.
Typically the tips of the biggest kelp bob at the ocean surface and calm the waters, appearing as patches of gold visible from land — a sign of the good health of the ecosystem that it anchors.
But the kelp as San Diego knows it is in trouble.
In January, a team led by UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography released an unmatched history of kelp forests off La Jolla and Point Loma. Together spanning nearly 19 square kilometers (7.3 square miles), they are the largest on the United States West Coast. Amassed over more than 40 years, their story reveals a progression of steady decline that transcends typical cycles of crash and recovery.
Now, say the researchers, competing organisms usually cast in shadow by the kelp are emerging as winners. The giant kelp are losing, but so might be myriad other organisms – fishes and humans included – as another natural order is disrupted by climate change and other new circumstances.
The downsides range from a decrease in the catch available to recreational fishers in San Diego to the loss of the nurseries that sea stars and open ocean fishes use to protect their larvae. Even the beach wrack – the large piles of decaying kelp that wash up after storms – is diminishing. Though the absence of the pungent kelp will be a relief to some beachgoers, those piles attract the kelp flies that are an important source of food for seabirds.
By Tanja Kropf / Clairemont Explore / March 4, 2026
Questions about trust in City Hall, including whether residents believe their leaders are listening, dominated a March 2 Linda Vista town hall with San Diego City Council Member Raul Campillo, who represents District 7.
Campillo recently held a series of town halls in his district, in the neighborhoods of Linda Vista, Serra Mesa, Navajo, and Tierrasanta.
From the failed one-cent sales tax measure to trash fees, parking fees, bonus ADUs, fire safety laws, and e-bikes, the evening revealed a consistent theme. Residents are skeptical of San Diego’s government, a concern Campillo says he doesn’t take lightly.
Voters Rejected Sales Tax Increase
Campillo began the evening by reflecting on the failed one-cent sales tax ballot measure, which he had supported.
“As many of you know, in 2024, I was pushing hard for the one-cent sales tax on the ballot,” started Campillo. That measure failed.
“What that told me was San Diego voters are not ready to trust the city with more money, and so we need to listen accordingly,” he said. Campillo said that view was not widely shared by his fellow council members or by Mayor Todd Gloria.
Attorney Represents Point Loma Residents Increasingly Alarmed at Coming Gridlock
By Jennifer van Grove / San Diego Union-Tribune / March 3, 2026
A letter sent last week to San Diego leaders asserts that the environmental analysis for the Midway Rising project is legally flawed, and will, if approved, not only lead to additional gridlock in the area but force taxpayers to bear the brunt of infrastructure needs because of the limited scope of study.
The legal letter, addressed to Mayor Todd Gloria and San Diego City Council members, identifies six areas where the project’s state-mandated environmental impact report is described as substantially deficient. The most severe omission is said to be the report’s failure to evaluate the cumulative impacts of the anticipated redevelopment of the Navy’s nearby NAVWAR property.
The letter comes in the weeks leading up to the report’s presumed certification by the council members, which would pave the way for the city’s sports arena real estate in the Midway District to be remade with thousands of apartments and a new entertainment venue.
The letter was written by Kathryn Pettit, an attorney with Chatten-Brown Law Group, on behalf of her clients, J. Keith Behner and Catherine Stiefel of Point Loma. The couple hired the law firm, as well as a traffic engineer, during the environmental review process to study the documents as they became increasingly alarmed about the project’s long-term implications for congestion, Behner told the Union-Tribune.
By Lori Weisberg / San Diego Union-Tribune / March 4, 2026
In a near-unanimous decision, the San Diego City Council agreed Tuesday to let voters decide whether a hefty tax should be imposed on thousands of second homes that are sitting empty most of the year.
The proposal, which will appear on the June ballot, is a divisive one and drew scores of people on both sides of the issue eager to voice their feelings on a tax that council members believe will be a key step forward in expanding the supply of rental and for-sale housing in San Diego.
The “empty homes tax,” as it is being called, would impose an initial annual tax of $8,000 on more than 5,000 homes unoccupied for more than half a year — plus a $4,000 surcharge for corporate-owned dwellings. In subsequent years, the tax would rise to $10,000, with the surcharge increasing to $5,000.
It is the brainchild of Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera, who just a month ago failed to win support from his colleagues for a far broader measure that would have also taxed whole-home short-term rentals.
From SOHO / March-April 2026 Newsletter
San Diego’s historic districts and individually designated resources are not abstract planning concepts. They are neighborhoods, cultural landscapes, and places that tell the story of our region and its people. Once protections are weakened or removed, the impacts are often permanent. That is why careful environmental review and adherence to adopted community plans are essential.
On February 24, 2026, the San Diego City Council voted to approve the so-called “Preservation and Progress Package A,” following extensive public testimony in opposition, and repeated warnings regarding the measure’s violations of law. Environmental review and preservation safeguards exist to prevent irreversible harm to historic neighborhoods. The Council chose to ignore those safeguards.
Many San Diegans left City Hall that day disheartened, not because preservation lost a political fight, but because the Council chose to advance destructive changes to our historic preservation ordinance without the environmental review and public accountability the law requires.
Citywide opposition was overwhelming. Since the City released the Preservation and Progress initiative, over 600 written comments were submitted, with roughly 12 to 1 opposed. Twenty-eight community planning groups voted no, along with 12 city wide historic organizations. The City’s own Historical Resources Board rejected it twice, in two separate votes. Preservation organizations representing thousands of residents across San Diego urged caution, transparency, and lawful process.
Yet Package A passed. Council President Joe LaCava acknowledged the breadth of public concern and voted against the measure. The remaining members present, who numbered only 5, as a third of the council was missing in action, voted in favor.
No one still knows why these 4 American servicemembers had to die. Trump doesn’t know. Hegsleth doesn’t know. Rubio doesn’t know.
They were killed in an Iranian drone strike on Sunday, March 1.
Yet, here they are – as the Pentagon has identified them of the six US service members who have died. The multiple reasons that Trump and gang have given for attacking Iran since it all began have varied with the time of day and night. From “regime change” to wiping out missiles they don’t have, or to making the first strike before they did ….Trump still hasn’t addressed the nation on the widening war.
The soldiers are Capt. Cody Khork, 35; Sgt. 1st Class Noah Tietjens, 42; Sgt. 1st Class Nicole Amor, 39; and Sgt. Declan Coady, 20. All four were assigned to the 103rd Sustainment Command, an Army Reserve sustainment unit out of Iowa.
The two other soldiers who were killed in the strike on Sunday have not yet been identified.
CNN first reported that the suspected drone strike hit a temporary tactical operations center at the port of Shuaiba in Kuwait on Sunday. At the time of their deaths the soldiers were serving with 1st Theater Sustainment Command.
A source familiar with the situation described the operation center as a triple-wide trailer with office space inside; the building was surrounded by concrete barriers that are typically used to protect military structures overseas from things like car bombs and improvised explosive devices. However, there was nothing overhead that could shield the building from drones or missiles.
Historic District at Risk, Seawall Debate, and a Call for a “Seat at the Table”By Jillian Butler
March 3rd, 2026–The Ocean Beach Planning Board met Tuesday night, March 3, at the Ocean Beach Recreation Center on Santa Monica Avenue. Only seven residents attended in person, with a handful more joining via Zoom — a modest turnout for discussions that could significantly impact OB’s historic character and coastline.
Notably absent were representatives from City Council District 2, State Senator Akila Weber, Assemblymember Tasha Boerner Horvath, and County Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer. In a meeting centered on preservation, development, and public safety, their absence did not go unnoticed.
Mayor’s Rep Catches Flak Over “Package A” Passage
Randy Reyes, representing Mayor Todd Gloria’s office, informed the board that City Council had passed Preservation Package A. The new policy could affect OB’s Emerging Cottage Historic District — potentially making it harder for the district to qualify for historic protection.
Congress must assert its constitutional authority over matters of war and peace against an out-of-control, rogue president and executive branch, and vote in favor of the Iran War Powers Resolutions.By Kevin Martin / Common Dreams / March 2, 2026
Once again, the United States and Israel are illegally attacking Iran, as they did last June. It is already a regional war, which will take a horrible toll on ordinary people in many countries, with reports a girls’ school was bombed, killing at least 85 people.
Unlike the limited strikes in last June’s 12-day war, this is aimed not just at Iran’s nuclear or military facilities, but at regime change in Iran, as President Donald Trump declared, and government targets in Tehran have been hit, with Israel claiming Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed. Predictably, Iran is firing back at Israel and at US military bases in the region.
Late last week, the Foreign Minister of Oman, who had been mediating negotiations between the US and Iran, stated prospects were good for a possible agreement. However, according to an Israeli official, the talks were apparently a treacherous ruse, as the US and Israel had planned coordinated attacks on Iran for months.
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