Author: Anna Daniels

Community Power Affecting Budget Decisions that Impact Our Neighborhoods

by Anna Daniels / San Diego Free Press

It is highly unusual for a group of strangers to smile broadly at each other and enthusiastically confess that the workshop they had just attended on how to read the City’s Capital Improvement Budget had been really interesting and very worthwhile.
That is exactly what happened a few weeks ago when I got into the elevator with a group of people with whom I had just attended the Community Budget Alliance‘s hands on budget workshop held in City Heights. It’s budget season…
(Come inside for insight into the City’s Budget.)

Thoughts on defensible spaces and private places

By Anna Daniels / San Diego Free Press

…Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out, …
Robert Frost, Mending Wall

A few days ago I realized that every single piece of residential property on my City Heights block, save one, has a fence and or a gate between the residence and the street. The business at the end of the block is also completely fenced.

I only became conscious of this fact after spending a number of hours last month walking along the side streets north of University Avenue a few blocks east and west of 30th Street in North Park. This area looks in many ways like the City Heights side streets off of University Avenue, farther to the east, where I now live.

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze distance. On Mere Being, Wallace Stevens

Street trees in urban areas are important. They provide a human scale to our surroundings and soften the mind numbing linearity of vast expanses of concrete. They clean the air we breathe and provide much appreciated shade. On an often unconscious level they impact our feelings about a street or neighborhood’s economic status and safety, which is to say its desirability as a place to walk or live.

A specific iconic tree can define where we live on a particular street or in the city of San Diego itself. For many residents of Ocean Beach, that iconic image is of a Torrey Pine. I can remember a spectacular late afternoon descent over the downtown cityscape which had been turned into a massive violet bouquet of blossoming jacaranda. And of course, there are the eucalyptus in Balboa Park and lining Park Boulevard.

This was a wonderful year for Christmas lights in my City Heights neighborhood. They cheerfully, often exuberantly, illuminated the night from the day after Thanksgiving until the day after New Year’s. It is sad to see them extinguished, put away, for yet another year, although ours stay up in the house year round. You can never have enough illumination in the darkness…

But that is not to say the seasonal celebrations are over- far from it. Sunday January 6th is the Three Kings Day celebration in Mexico and other Spanish speaking cultures; it is also Orthodox Christmas Eve for those religious traditions based upon the Julian calendar, as opposed to our Gregorian calendar. What that boils down to is that I have to order my rosca de reyes so that I can take it to our Orthodox Christmas Eve dinner.

Here are some frequently asked questions about election day voting in San Diego County. The source for all of the information below is provided by the League of Women Voters at smartvoter.org unless otherwise specified. Information in Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese and Filipino here.

When are the polls open?

“Sanders said another savings in the works will come from using managed competition to lower the cost of city employees performing jobs that private companies can do for less. One such job is residential trash services. San Diego city employees are paid to collect trash. Most other California cities contract with a private company and residents pay for their own trash services.

“We don’t have to have government employees mow the laws in our parks. We don’t have to have government employees pick up trash,” Sanders said. Mayor Jerry Sanders reviews his legacy at La Jolla luncheon La Jolla Light 9/11/12

Three months to go in the last term of our first strong mayor — Jerry Sanders, and the legacy polishing tour has begun.

Originally posted at San Diego Free Press

San Diego seems to be in love with dogs. We have dog parks for big dogs and dog parks for small dogs. Dog owners, complete strangers to each other, stand on street corners in North Park with their pets and discuss the details of life with a shar pei or bichon frise while said animals enthusiastically explore each others nether portions.

City Heights has got religion. A distinctive characteristic of my community is not only the sheer number of religious establishments located here, but the diverse forms that religious expression takes. There are the storefront Evangelical and Pentecostal Christian churches that have sprung up along University and El Cajon Boulevard, with names like La Esposa del Cordero, the Shepherd’s Wife, and signs with the exhortation Pare de Sufrir, to stop suffering.

There are Buddhist temples, botánicas, a mosque, a tiny Russian Orthodox church, and familiar Catholic and Baptist churches as well. Religious services are conducted in Spanish, Creole, Russian, Chinese and Vietnamese, to name just a few of the languages routinely spoken besides English. I do not know if other languages besides Arabic are used at the mosque located adjacent to the Somali neighborhood known as Little Mogadishu. There are also shamans and babaloas living quietly among us.

Originally published at San Diego Free Press

“The process of public engagement [in developing the County of San Diego General Plan] had hundreds of hearings over 10 years…So the implication is that anything that is coming forward now would be inconsistent. It would be amazing if there is going to now be wholesale General Plan amendments.”

San Diego County Planning Commissioner Michael Beck, Nov. 9, 2011 interview with KPBS

Last Wednesday, June 20th, the County Board of Supervisors held a hearing for 137 private property requests that would require amending the County’s new General Plan, …

What happens when you combine strong mayor Jerry Sanders with a Canadian firm’s desire to build an 800 MW gas-fired power plant in San Diego? You get a secret plan that is being fast tracked through the City Council with the intent of a November ballot measure to enable passage. You also get “business as usual” at City Hall. Hear more about the proposal and what you can do on Monday, June 25, 6pm at the University Community Planning Group meeting, Forum Hall, UTC Mall (above Wells Fargo Bank).

From San Diego Free Press

It probably should come as no surprise that the diverse community of City Heights delivers up equally diverse coffee drinking experiences. The one unifying quality to the coffee here is a certain “robustness–” this IS City Heights after all.

From San Diego Free Press

If it feels like open game season has been declared on women, your feelings are absolutely correct. Our putatively job creation obsessed Congress has been singularly incapable of delivering the goods. They seem instead to have settled for the deeply gratifying right wing pursuit of scuttling Obama’s and the Dem’s attempts to actually do something about jobs, tuition relief for students, tax fairness and infrastructure investments.