Month: May 2025

By Jim Peugh and Nan Renner / Op-Ed San Diego U-T / May 20, 2025

City leaders face difficult tradeoffs as they navigate budget decisions. City tax revenue must cover essential services and infrastructure needs. At the same time, city government aims to fulfill legal obligations and environmental responsibilities, all while respecting the will of voters.

Increasing Mission Bay’s vanishing wetlands uniquely meets all these criteria and constraints, using funds already earmarked by voters specifically for this purpose.

San Diego voters passed Proposition C (2008) and Measure J (2016) creating a clear roadmap for Mission Bay Park Improvement Funds. Binding priorities in the City Charter Section 55.2 direct taxpayer investments first toward navigable waterways, then environmental restoration and protection, and last to deferred maintenance projects. These dedicated funds cannot be diverted to address any other citywide needs, no matter how pressing.

This year, Mission Bay Park Improvement Funds to be spent in Mission Bay Park amount to $18.8 million. At present, the city budget allocates not one dollar of this restricted fund to wetland restoration, the top remaining priority set by San Diego voters.

By Geoff Page

The only way to access the site of the “cottages” is by turning west off Catalina Blvd. onto Lomaland Drive and driving onto the Nazarene University campus. Just past the intersection of Lomaland Drive and Lomaland Drive – yes there is such an intersection – is a dirt road to the west that is easy to miss.

The four units are on the west side of the dirt road, facing Sunset Cliffs Park below. At the end of the short road are Units #4 and #3.

Unit #4 is a very small building, only 400 square feet according the to the tenants in Unit #3. Unit #3 is a small one-bedroom place next to it. Unit #2 has been empty for 18 years and it looks like it. Unit #1 is referred to as the Corbin House. Unlike the other three, Unit #1 is a substantial house, inhabited, but also in a state of disrepair. This is the house proponents are pushing for historical designation.

The retired couple renting Unit #3 were home and happy to talk about what was happening. Joe and Debbie Corr’s house is small, a one-bedroom. The living room has a spectacular wide view – what some might call a million-dollar view – of the Pacific Ocean below. There is a small deck outside the living room window. The house is mostly wood and concrete block, clearly old.

Here are the details for the Historic Resources Board meeting on the Point Loma cottages.

Today, Thursday, May 22, 2025, at 12:00 P.M.

Location: Public Utilities Department Metropolitan Operations Complex II (MOC2) Auditorium
9192 Topaz Way San Diego, CA 92123

See this for HRB Agenda

At noon there is an awards program, the business agenda will likely not begin until 1pm.

ITEM-1 Continued from March 27, 2025:  ROSE VOLLMER/ RICHARD LAREAU RENTAL HOUSE Applicant/Owner: City of San Diego represented by Heritage Architecture & Planning

Staff: Suzanne Segur — Consider the designation of the property located at 4101 Lomaland Drive, 92107, Peninsula Community, Council District 2, as a historical resource. Report Number: HRB-25-011

PROPOSED ACTION

Designate or not designate the property as a historical resource under adopted designation criteria.

By Francine Maxwell / May 20, 2025

I am a San Diego resident, a taxpayer, and somebody who still believes this city belongs to the people. This is my request to the City Council as it tries to navigate our financial crisis.

Let’s be clear: the Mayor has done his job. He proposed a draft budget to close a $258-million deficit. If you don’t like it — and I don’t — your job is to propose something better. The people of San Diego didn’t elect nine Councilmembers to rubber-stamp bad ideas. They elected you to lead.

This budget is a moral document. And what it says right now is: The City values bureaucracy over neighborhoods. It protects middle management and redundant executive positions while gutting services our communities rely on. Five-day library service? Parks losing a third of their programming hours? And residents paying for it through $47 trash fees, water rate hikes, $2.50-an-hour parking meters, and who knows what next?

By Paul Krueger / May 21, 2025

I listened politely, and with compassion, as speaker after speaker at the San Diego City Council’s May 19 Public Budget Forum pleaded, begged, and demanded that the Mayor and the Council protect our libraries, parks and rec centers.

I totally agreed with all the advocates. But it was Francine Maxwell’s comments that best expressed my position on how to balance the city’s budget. And that’s why I used my one-minute public comment to urge the Council to follow her sage advice.

Francine’s powerful presentation is posted here. I will summarize it in a few words: “Cut positions, not programs.”

By Paul Coogan / San Diego Urban Wildfire / May 21, 2025

As Los Angeles reels from the devastating loss of 16,251 structures and 29 lives in the Palisades and Eaton fires, city, county, and state are studying the ashen landscape to learn how we can better survive the next urban wildfire. Those lessons will be essential in crafting new policies for land use, building codes, infrastructure enhancements, and technological advancements.

San Diego has a golden opportunity to leverage this information and craft new policy without undergoing our own tragic devastation. But will our civic leadership heed the science?

We are bound to live with increasing wildfire risk as climate change makes for hotter, drier, and windier fire seasons. We must mitigate that risk by taking a hard look at our current state of affairs and applying strategic planning and policy implementation.

By Steve Rivera / May 20, 2025

Political mailers clog mailboxes and recycle bins every campaign cycle.

Why?

Because they work. Sort of.

They are crude, broad-based attempts by campaigns to influence voters. In a news and political environment with declining coverage and increased partisanship, mailers are often the only connection a voter will have to a campaign.

As the general public becomes algorithmically fractionalized, it becomes easier to “micro-target” voters. Rare campaign funds are put toward niche social media strategies rather than broad outreach.

Broad efforts such as field campaigns (yard signs, volunteers, doorhangers, transportation, food, water, etc.) and phone banks (calling voters) are still used. But after COVID, their importance can be questioned as fewer people answer the door let alone talk to strangers on the phone.

Texting can work, but its appeal is limited. And in this era of virtual private networks, social media buys are like throwing darts blindfolded; You’ll hit the dartboard only if you’re lucky.

By Dan Walters / Calmatters / May 20, 2025

One of Gavin Newsom’s political ploys is to depict political rivals as bullies and himself as someone who stands up to them.

Last September, for example, he devoted an entire segment of his podcast, “Politickin’,” to denouncing Donald Trump, saying he is “a bully. But here’s the thing about bullies — they’re weak.”

That was before Trump was elected and before Newsom had to play nice in hopes of securing billions of dollars in federal relief aid for fire-damaged Los Angeles County. After initially saying he would provide such aid during a visit to L.A., Trump began hinting on imposing conditions on California, such as tightening up voting requirements and loosening up on water deliveries to farmers.

Newsom then reverted to his previous role as a leader of resistance to Trump.

Yes, Trump does use bullying tactics to get his way. He uses aggressive policies — such as tariffs on imports — as a negotiating tactic. So does Newsom.

By Marty Graham / May 19, 2025

Remember that Measure B campaign for fairness and free bins?

In the last two weeks, about 47,000 San Diego households received letters kicking them off free city trash service they’d been receiving and leaving them to scramble to find private haulers. Nearly all are in buildings with more than four homes, both apartments and condos. (Existing service for a two cubic yard dumpster for trash only – not including recycling – at a North Park condo building currently runs about $300 a month, or about $38 per unit each month.

Coincidentally, the City Auditor released a report that concludes those private haulers are NOT paying their fair share of landfill costs. While the report said the loss belongs to the city, it’s obvious that taxpayers have been subsidizing trash costs for anyone using a private hauler – and for the more than 47,000 households who got kicked off free service.

By Concerned Point Loman

While San Diego officials double down on messaging around affordable housing and equitable access in every neighborhood, an unsettling contradiction is quietly unfolding on city-owned land in Point Loma, right adjacent to Point Loma Nazarene University.

Just up the hill from the surf, in an area that embodies the classic history of the area, the City of San Diego is preparing to evict 11 low-income tenants from a cluster of historic cottages it owns literally less than a stone’s throw from the university — at 4101 Lomaland #1 — #4.

These modest cottages, some over 100 years old, are still home to seniors, families with young children, and multigenerational residents—whom pay affordable rent, maintain their homes themselves, and cover full property taxes, despite the City owning the land since 1992. This is not a failing community. It’s a thriving, affordable one that represents precisely the kind of housing San Diego claims to need more of.

What’s replacing them? Storm drain improvements and landscaping, part of the Sunset Cliffs Natural Park Drainage Improvements Project.

The city is choosing to demolish existing affordable housing in a walkable, transit-accessible coastal community, the exact kind of neighborhood city leaders say should welcome more low- and middle-income residents.

Here’s a short video of the OB Kite Festival 2025 by Charles Landon.

By Jim Varnadore / May 17, 2025

You’re in the short rows with the FY-26 budget, and it still isn’t balanced.  There are some things you can do to help the budget without harming your constituents.

You should remove bike lanes from the FY-26 budget.  Bike lanes are miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles – a genuine waste of money. In the most recent 3,000+ miles I’ve driven around San Diego from San Pasqual to San Ysidro, no bicycle was present in any bike lane anywhere in the city.