OB Rag

From the Trenches

By JW August –– Special to the OB Rag

When President Donald Trump’s calliope of confusion is at its noisiest, we’ve learned a game is afoot in numerous places.  This particular game comes with a warning from a source who has a highly placed position in a large federal agency.

The source is named “S” and says an end-of-March announcement about moving the U.S. Forest Service out of Washington, D.C. is a foreshadowing of a massive reorganization effort of the federal government. The suggested agency suspected of being the next ordered to move will be the Bureau of Land Management, according to my source.

The overall goal, made in the name of efficiency, is to punish the cities and states that vote Democratic and reward Trump loyalists with jobs and money, says our source. By creating these new offices, away from D.C., there will be far less oversight, and far more access.

The source says that “as long as it’s a Republican town, they’re going to get an infusion of cash and jobs because their plan is to go out to isolated areas of the country so that they can do whatever they want.”

The building at 4833 Santa Monica Avenue — known as the OB Post Office — is for sale! LoopNet advertises it. For $4,995.000.

It’s been there for decades — back to the 1950s. Yet now it’s on the chopping block. For nearly $5 million. Prime location. The ad above says “Trophy Coastal … Property.”

Many questions abound.

Are there plans to open another post office in Ocean Beach?

Postal Service Would Mail Ballots Only to Those on Official Voters List

By Jane C. Timm and Ryan J. Reilly / NBC News / March 31, 2026

President Donald Trump is again trying to exert control over American elections, signing an executive order Tuesday that aims to create federal lists of citizens and ask the U.S. Postal Service to transmit mail ballots to only those people.

The executive order, his second related to elections since he retook office last year, is sure to be quickly challenged in court. The U.S. Constitution gives states the power to set voting rules and administer their own elections, though Congress has the ability to set some regulations, too.

“That’s a big deal,” Trump said as he signed the order in the Oval Office, adding that he didn’t believe the courts could overturn it. “I think this will help a lot with elections. We’d like to have voter ID. We’d like to have proof of citizenship, and that’ll be another subject for another time. We’re working on that. You would think it’d be easy.”

by Ernie McCray

I’m nearing 88 years
and along with that
there are, of course,
a few fears,
anxieties rising
just from seeing
all my meds
set in front of me
on the coffee table
where I used to place a few knick-knacks,
and there are the
aches and pains
suddenly appearing like hoodlums
crashing a party,
and the loss of the ability to do
things I once
did very well
like getting up
and sitting down
without making a sound,
and I am constantly using my cane

Tribe Never Consulted During Planning for Hidden Valley Ranch Housing Project

by Katie Futterman / inewsource / March 29, 2026

Tribal leaders have found human remains and evidence of a burial site – first in October and twice this March – at the construction site of a housing development first approved in Poway over 20 years ago.

The San Pasqual Band of Mission Indians is calling on the city and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to stop work on a portion of a 420-acre site on the east side of Old Coach Road immediately.

In October, Johnny Bear Contreras, the chair of the cultural committee for the San Pasqual Band of Mission Indians, got a call from fellow cultural monitors telling him to come take a look at the Hidden Valley Ranch project.

When he arrived at the site of what’s slated to be 41 single-family homes, he found just what the tribe had expected: human remains.

by JW August / Times of San Diego / April 2, 2026

A San Diego council member suggested at a recent committee meeting that the city look into ways to take revenue from golf division leases to help fund all parks and recreation needs.

The Golf Enterprise Fund provides for the care and maintenance of the city’s three public courses. At the end of last year it held an impressive $55 million.

With a city facing a $120 million budget shortfall in the coming fiscal year, this tempting target is fodder for those tasked with filling the gap. Councilman Sean Elo-Rivera, at a Land Use and Housing Committee meeting last month, asked that city staff study the possibility of shifting more money away from the golf fund to cover other expenses.

In 2025, the gross revenue for San Diego’s municipal courses was $41.4 million, 9.9% of which was paid to the general fund.

by Tessa Balc / Times of San Diego / March 31, 2026

The next chapter in San Diego’s pursuit of Midway Rising will play out in Sacramento.

State Senator Akilah Weber Pierson introduced a bill last week to exempt the project from review under the state’s landmark environmental law and make way for the plan to redevelop the roughly 50-acre area around Pechanga Arena into an urban district with 4,000 homes, acres of parks, and a new arena.

[Please see original for any and all links.]

Weber Pierson’s proposal follows a California Supreme Court decision not to review a previous court ruling that threw out a 2022 voter-approved initiative to raise the height limit in the Midway area. The lower court ruled that the city failed to consider the environmental impacts of allowing taller buildings there.

Midway Rising’s developers quickly said the court’s ruling would not halt their project, because other state housing laws allowed them to exceed the height limit regardless.

The Home Team Act has been introduced in the U.S. Senate which would if pass keep the Padres in San Diego — at least for another year.

Here’s Phillip Molnar at the San Diego U-T:

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders is behind a bill that would prevent the Padres from leaving in the future — and would have kept the Chargers in San Diego. Some say the government has no place in dictating where private businesses operate.

Sanders, I-Vermont, and U.S. Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, recently introduced the Home Team Act, which would require team ownership to provide one year of notice before moving a team to a new location if the team would move across state lines or to a new metropolitan area.

During that year prior to the proposed relocation, the franchise in question would be available for other prospective owners to purchase “at a fair and reasonable price.”

San Diego is especially sensitive about teams leaving after the Chargers went to Los Angeles in 2017. Recently, the Padres have entertained several offers to sell, igniting fears someone may take the baseball club somewhere else.

Editordude: The following is an unsolicited response to a recent Rag post entitled, “Open Letter to the Demonstrators at the Corner of Sunset Cliffs & West Point Loma,” which has garnered quite a bit of attention but not a lot of actual dialog, which was our intent in publishing it. Until this … from Code Pink activists. 

Dear Clandestina Urbanista,

We appreciate you taking the time to write. We also want to be straightforward in response.

We are members of the San Diego chapter of CODEPINK, and we speak for our chapter only. Together with members of Veterans For Peace, Jewish Voice For Peace, and several other organizations throughout San Diego, we gather each week because what is happening in Gaza is not an abstract “complexity” – it is mass killing, carried out with the full support and funding of the United States government. As U.S. taxpayers, we refuse to be silent in the face of it.

We reject the framing that asking the public to hold “all sides” equally, in this moment, is a neutral act. It risks obscuring the scale, power, and ongoing nature of the violence being inflicted on Palestinians, as well as Iranians and Lebanese.

By David Garrick / San Diego Union-Tribune / April 1, 2026

San Diego’s efforts to cement its long-term control over Liberty Station have hit a snag that could force the city to sell the leafy complex of public parks, artist studios, restaurants and shops just east of Point Loma.

The city must get several local school districts, community college districts and health districts to agree to payouts as part of a complicated process required to retain control of former redevelopment agency properties.

Eight of those 14 agencies have recently agreed to Liberty Station payout offers from the city — but the San Diego Unified School District board is raising questions and voted unanimously last Tuesday to delay any decision indefinitely.

That vote came after the board was lobbied by the private company that manages much of Liberty Station to reject the city’s $1.4 million payout offer, contending the payout should be closer to $10 million.

City officials say the management company, Seligman Properties, is disingenuously trying to scuttle the deals so the city will be forced to sell it Liberty Station at a substantially deflated purchase price.

Because Seligman already controls 330 acres of Liberty Station’s commercial areas under no-rent leases that run through 2070, city officials contend it wouldn’t make sense for any other company to bid against Seligman — limiting how much the city can get.

By Dave Myers / Op-Ed San Diego U-T / April 2, 2026

California voters deserve to understand exactly what is happening.

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a Republican now running for governor, has launched an unprecedented law enforcement investigation into the November 2025 special election and seized roughly 650,000 ballots. The stated basis is alleged voter fraud — claims that have not been supported by verified data. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, citing Bianco’s own sworn statements, has argued the sheriff failed to establish probable cause to justify this action. Although a California court recently denied Bonta’s request to halt the ballot review, the underlying legal and constitutional concerns remain unresolved.

This should concern every voter, regardless of party.

A sheriff sworn to uphold the law has stepped into the election process, pursuing claims that do not withstand basic scrutiny. More troubling is the use of law enforcement authority to reach into the handling of ballots themselves. That is not routine policing. It is a direct intrusion into a system designed to be insulated from political pressure and protected by strict legal safeguards.

Ballots are not criminal evidence to be collected at will.

The City of San Diego has begun the process of replacing the 44-year old Mission Beach lifeguard station. On March 14, the city began fencing off the existing lifeguard tower from the public and started installing a temporary lifeguard tower and trailer just north of the current dilapidated station.

“These temporary facilities will allow lifeguards to operate safely and efficiently while plans are developed to upgrade the existing station,” the city of San Diego said in a released statement at the time work began.

This is all well and good — a lifeguard station that old deserves to be replaced. And the surrounding community deserves it also.

Yet — what about the Ocean Beach lifeguard station? It’s even older than the Mission Beach one. It was built in 1980-1981. (See comments to that post.)

Sure, the city can argue that the Mission Beach station serves a larger community and there’s more beachgoers there than in Ocean Beach. Okay, replace them both.

This also fits a pattern all too familiar with observant OBceans who’ve seen city resources go to other communities over the years — no, over the decades. South Mission Beach got a new lifeguard station; Pacific Beach got a new station; La Jolla got a new one.

But not OB.

Perhaps due to the marginal size of the neighborhood — not that many voters or property owners — Ocean Beach has been repeatedly passed over on infrastructure projects that have been needed.