OB Rag

By Sue Taylor

Jack McGrory was City Manager during some of the early pension decisions, including the 1996 agreement often cited as a starting point in the City’s pension problems, but he was not City Manager when the financial and disclosure issues later came to light.

Those problems involved many players over a number of years, including elected officials, the pension board, labor and City leadership. After that crisis, San Diego put major safeguards in place, including the independent Audit Committee, a stronger independent City Auditor, tighter budget, reserve and debt policies, stronger pension oversight, more rigorous financial disclosure rules, and greater transparency and public reporting.

So, the City operates today with far more financial oversight, audits, checks and reporting requirements than existed during that era.

I think those safeguards would make a City Manager form of government even stronger today than it was in the past because

OB Rag Staff Report

San Diego’s 22-year experiment with a “strong mayor” has been hobbled by a string of financial crises.

Is it time to consider restoring the position of City Manager?

Jack McGrory, a former city manager for San Diego, will share his thoughts at a town hall forum on “Why We Need a City Manager and Other Insights” on Saturday, June 20, from 12:30 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. at the Mission Valley Library, 2123 Fenton Parkway.

Sponsored by the San Diego Community Coalition (SDCC) and Neighbors for a Better San Diego (NFABSD), the forum is the fifth in a series of question-and-answer sessions on important civic issues.

These events are free and open to the public, but seating is limited.

An’s Gelato Named No.2 in America; Free Scoops Offered on July 1 at Ocean Beach Shop

San Diego’s An’s Gelato company has been named the No. 2 independently owned ice cream shop in America in USA Today’s 10Best Reader’s Choice Awards, which were announced Wednesday. It’s the fourth year the local company has been ranked in the USA Today contest. An’s ranked No. 1 in 2025 and 2024, and No. 2 in 2023.

An’s operates four shops in San Diego County, including Ocean Beach where in 2025, they opened An’s Electronic Repair in a former phone repair shop. A fifth is set to open soon in Oceanside’s iconic Top Gun House. The judges praised An’s for its scratch-made gelato and unique flavors, like brown butter, brookies (brownies and cookies), watermelon and mint sorbet. The judges also noted An’s  generous sampling policy, where employees encourage visitors to taste all seven flavors of the day before they buy.

To celebrate the latest 10Best honor, An’s scoop shops in OB, Normal Heights, and Del Mar will give away one free small gelato cup or cone per customer from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. July 1, while supplies last. Then the shops will close for the rest of that day to give employees the evening off.

by Debbie L. Sklar / Times of San Diego / June 18, 2026

Sand dunes, mussel beds, picnics.

Ocean Beach’s shoreline has been described in different ways over time, long before it became the coastal community known today.

Ocean Beach today is probably best known for its surf culture, its long concrete pier [that is permanently closed], and a tightly-knit neighborhood identity. But its earlier history is rooted less in formal place names and more in how people described the landscape: a broad stretch of sand shaped by wind, shifting dunes, and the former course of the San Diego River as it reached the Pacific.

Eric DuVall, president of the Ocean Beach Historical Society, said the earliest widely used reference for the area was likely Los Médanos, Spanish for “the dunes,” reflecting the dominant natural feature of the coastline before development.

“There was a lot of sand, hence the dunes, hence the name Los Médanos,” DuVall said.

He said the area had no widely established formal name before the late 1800s, instead being identified in simple geographic terms tied to the dunes and open shoreline.

That began to change in 1887, when developers William “Billy” Carlson and Frank Higgins subdivided the land and began marketing it as a seaside residential community under the name Ocean Beach.

An unidentified body washed ashore Thursday afternoon, June 18, near the Ocean Beach Pier.

Police were called to the area around 3 p.m. after someone had discovered the body.

by Ernie McCray

Juneteenth is a celebration
that causes me to wonder
what enslaved men and women
felt when they got the news
of their emancipation
approximately 900 days late.

So many of them, surely,
must have stood gasping and crying, in disbelief,
feeling joy from such an outrageously delayed freedom
while, simultaneously,
grieving from the realization
of all the hardships
that came from the years stolen from them,

By John McNab

We rarely talk context of why the public coast is disappearing and high rises are sprouting up everywhere.  The below is a perspective on going from freeing animals to caging humans – San Diego’s shift in priorities

A black-and-white movie on TV in the early 60’s was about a boy who went to the zoo with his grandfather. Upon seeing the animals in cages, he broke down. Likely because he loved to spend time under the warm sun playing in the canyons with the lizard and birds. Seeing the zoo animals poorly treated broke his heart.

Upon getting home, he was still in tears. It was recommended he did something. So he started protesting at the zoo. The editor at the local paper thought the story was cute and ran a piece on the boy and his protest. It struck a nerve and suddenly citizens were up in arms. So the embarrassed zoo changed. The last scene, in Technicolor, was the front of the San Diego zoo.

Yet what could be a sequel to the story?

A mother had many errands to run so she dropped off her son with his grandfather. The son, full of energy, got on the grandfather’s nerves. “Why don’t you go outside and play?” The boy answered in tears, “there’s nowhere outside to play”.

By Debbie L. Sklar

Little Italy today is one of San Diego’s most visible dining and residential districts, but much of what people see now sits on top of a far more industrial and working-class
waterfront history. The neighborhood’s transformation didn’t happen all at once, and many layers of its earlier identity are still embedded in the streets, buildings, and public spaces that remain.

Here are five things you might not know.

1. It was once a major tuna processing hub

Before restaurants and redevelopment, this area was closely tied to San Diego’s tuna industry. Italian immigrant families were central to fishing, canning, and dockside work along the waterfront. The neighborhood functioned as part of a larger working harbor economy, where industrial labor defined daily life far more than residential or
commercial activity.

San Diego Gas & Electric has just formally requested an 8.6% rate increase with the California Public Utilities Commission. SDG&E wants it to begin in 2028.

The utility seeks approximately $3.8 billion for 2028, including about $2.9 billion for electric operations and $900 million for natural gas service. If the CPUC approves their request, “SDG&E estimates the increase would add roughly $14.03 per month to the average residential electric bill and $8.45 per month to the average residential gas bill compared to 2027 rates,” reports CBS8. That’s a combined $22.48 to the average monthly bill, reports the OB Rag.

The filing by San Diego’s for-profit utility, launches “what is expected to be an 18-month review process before state regulators determine whether to approve, modify or reject the proposal,” says CBS8/

Meanwhile, the San Diego City Council on Tuesday, June 16th, voted to endorse 10 bills in the state legislature aimed at lowering electricity rates and making investor-owned utilities more accountable to ratepayers, reports KPBS.

The U-T this morning announced that the City of San Diego has “quietly” pushed back its decision on Midway Rising, the massive 50-acre redevelopment project slated for the Sports Arena area until “an unknown date later in the year.”

As UT reporter Jenifer van Grove mused, the project has been “promised for May and then June,” and now pushed back even more. She wrote:

The City Council’s Land Use & Housing Committee is not slated to hear the item before the council’s summer legislative recess, Councilmember Kent Lee, who chairs the committee, told the Union-Tribune.

Last week, we posted an article about anti-short term rentals stickers being plastered around north OB.

Now, we find residents of Clairemont have done one better against the ADUs that have clobbered their community over the last couple of years. (See above)

Go here to see the photos of the small professionally made and anonymous signs that have popped up in the Clairemont Mesa area.:

Election denialists have been installed in key positions and are using series of measures to change voting rules

By Peter Stone / The Guardian – U.S. / June 17, 2026

The Trump administration is waging war on voting rights using justice department lawsuits, FBI investigations and an executive order to limit voting by mail, moves mirroring the US president’s false claims he lost the 2020 election due to voting fraud, say election experts and ex-officials.

Since Donald Trump began his second term, numerous 2020 election denialists have been installed in key agencies such as the Department of Justice, the FBI and elsewhere to pursue widely discredited claims of fraud, which can intimidate election workers and voters in swing states that Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020.

The justice department has also filed lawsuits seeking sensitive voter data from 30 states – even though, by law, states control elections – and the FBI has launched investigations into debunked allegations of voting fraud in Georgia, Wisconsin and a few other swing states that Trump lost in 2020.

Trump in late March this year issued an executive order sharply tightening mail-in voting rules, which Trump has long claimed without evidence contribute to fraud. The order gives the United States Postal Service unprecedented powers to issue new rules making voting by mail harder.

The administration’s multi-pronged push to change voting rules is under way despite laws that empower states and Congress to set election rules, sparking lawsuits from states and non-partisan voting rights groups.

It’s Been Nearly 2 Years Since Rag Contest — Here’s an Update on Clairemont Area ADUs

By Michael A Hernandez 

It’s been almost two years since the Rag held a contest ranking “The Worst ADUs in San Diego”. Launched in an effort to better understand the severity of the issue of rampant ADU (Accessory Dwelling Unit) development in America’s Finest City, the contest received dozens of resident submissions from at least 20 different localities.

Submissions were evaluated by a panel of judges consisting of reporters and experts on the subject who scored the projects based on their physical size or number of units, aesthetic, and their impact on the neighborhood, like affected street parking.

The issue has been a hot topic ever since the introduction of the City of San Diego’s Bonus ADU Program, which enabled homeowners to build additional ADUs on a property even after the maximum number allowed by right had been reached, so long as they agreed to rent the affordable housing unit to low or moderate-income households for the next 10-15 years.