Month: September 2024

By Melody Petersen / San Diego Union-Tribune TNS / Sept. 24, 2024

When Roy Richards spotted workers cutting down and shredding Joshua trees for a sprawling solar energy project near his Mojave Desert home last week, he started taking photos.

“Once the trees go through the shredders, they vanish,” he said, showing a reporter an image of a small pile of brown dust left by the crews. The developer of the Aratina Solar Center has government approval to fell all of the thousands of trees on the site.

By Colleen O’Connor

Tired of the juvenile nature of Presidential politics that passes for dialogue? Same snarky insults? Same quick-fix ideas that solve nothing? The drumbeat of “retribution,” chaos, endless photo ops, and vague promises?

Ready to escape to something more enlightening? More spectacular, indeed “stunning” in beauty, history and optimism?

Here is the answer.

By Lori Weisberg / The San Diego Union-Tribune / September 19, 2024

A little more than a year after suing SeaWorld for $12 million in back rent and fees dating back to the pandemic, the city seems no closer to recouping its money despite multiple efforts to settle the litigation.

In a legal brief filed last week seeking more time to meet a number of pre-trial deadlines, the San Diego City Attorney’s Office indicated that efforts to settle the case have so far not been successful. On top of that, lawyers for the city said that it has had trouble getting adequate responses from SeaWorld for documents it had requested as part of the discovery process.

Morris Cerullo was indeed a deeply-flawed televangelist, but in 2017, the San Diego City Council approved his Legacy International Center’s main campus for Mission Valley. It had a $160 million price tag. Construction began in 2018, and was completed in 2020, but Morris Cerullo died that same year.

Now, the massive, sprawling Hotel Circle property that was once envisioned by Morris Cerullo as a luxurious center for his global ministry and teachings has gone up for sale — after just four years.

Council District 9 Candidate Forum
Wednesday, September 25th, 2024
6:30 PM – 7:30 PM
Hoover High School Theater
4474 El Cajon Boulevard, San Diego, CA 92115

Local TV station CBS8 sent a couple of reporters out to Convoy Street in Kearny Mesa to check on the new bike lanes the city just installed a couple of weeks ago.

What the station found was not pretty. The crew was there for 2 hours and witnessed a total of 5 bike riders in the bike lanes, including one on an ebike and another who jumped onto a sidewalk to ride.

They also found that the plastic barriers used were ineffectual – several already damaged — and that because the barriers prevented street sweepers able to clean the gutters, the bike lanes had trash, rubble and shopping carts clogging them.

By Paige Turner

For those of us living in Point Loma and other communities near San Diego International Airport, the constant roar of planes is something we’ve come to expect—day and night. But recently, the noise has been worse than usual. Due to bad weather, planes are landing in the middle of the night, creating a disturbance that’s hard to ignore, especially for residents trying to sleep or focus on their daily routines.

While San Diego International Airport imposes fines on airlines for violating curfew restrictions on takeoffs, the reality is that these measures do little to comfort those of us living with constant noise pollution. Shouldn’t the residents most impacted by this disruption be compensated for the toll it takes on our quality of life?

A lot of OBceans know Matt Beatty. He was the librarian at the OB Library for years. Now Matt is in the news.

Matt is a resident of Mission Beach and goes for daily swims in the ocean off his home beach. But on Friday, September 20, he was attacked by a sea lion while swimming — and injured and had to be taken to a hospital for his wounds.

And he wasn’t the only person attacked by a sea lion. Jessica Linares was snorkeling with a friend earlier in the day, around noon on that same Friday when she too was attacked and had to go to the hospital.

Matt, 61, told ABC10News that he was halfway done with his daily ocean swim near the lifeguard station Friday night at Mision Beach when he felt more than just a tug on his leg.

By David Helvarg / Los Angeles Times Op-Ed / Sept. 20, 2024

Just up the road from Oakland and Berkeley, the city of Richmond is a minority and low-income community of 115,500 people — mainly Latino, Black and Asian American — with a major Chevron refinery whose pollution has been an ongoing source of conflict (the city just reached a $550-million settlement with Chevron to mitigate health and lifestyle effects of the refinery). It’s also home to an active port and soon — finally — a world-class park.

By Esmeralda Perez / CBS8 / September 20, 2024

San Diego is known as America’s Finest City with its beaches, weather and attractions. It’s also a city driving investors to purchase homes.

In the second quarter of 2024, 23.7% of homes sold in San Diego were purchased by investors according to a Redfin Analysis. That is second in the U.S. Metro areas only to Miami where investors bought 28.5% of homes that sold.