Author: Frank Gormlie

Residents in Point Loma are fed up with street lights that don’t work. Entire neighborhoods have lacked working street lights for years – many of them are placed in the middle of streets – and residents have filed numerous Get It Done complaints with the city. Still, years later, many remain off.

The city says the situation in Point Loma is complex due to multiple points of damage and a lack of replacement parts. In the meantime, the city has installed some solar lights in the area, but repairs needed for a more permanent solution are currently unfunded.

Other neighborhoods, like in North Pacific Beach and South Park, have similar issues with the non-functioning street lights. In North Pacific Beach, entire blocks have been without functioning street lights for years.

At the beginning of November, the City of San Diego gave notice of an application for a possible construction of a seawall and rip rap revetment at the very end of Bermuda Avenue in south Ocean Beach.

Applicant Bob Trenttin has applied for an emergency coastal development permit and other permits “for the abatement of a retreating coastal bluff landward of a failed existing seawall” which would be “the construction of a reinforced shotcrete coastal bluff seawall with drilled tieback anchors and a rip rap revetment consisting of two-to-four ton stones along the shelf below the proposed shotcrete wall.”

The notice also states, “The 0.10-acre site is located on City-owned public right-of-way at the western terminus of Bermuda Avenue, west of 4848 Bermuda ….”

Neighbors upset. They seemed to be finding out about a developer’s plans in their neighborhood — but the City of San Diego wasn’t helping them.

Sound familiar?

It’s a story that’s resounding across San Diego communities these days – and this time it’s in Emerald Hills and the Chollas area. And this time, it involves a low-income community that is mainly African-American and Latino.

Two tall radio towers sit on the highest point of Emerald Hills which is a huge empty green lot behind wire fencing. Yet, it’s private land and two years ago, the city announced that a housing project would be constructed there.

Neighbors had wanted a  park there, something akin to Kate Sessions in Pacific Beach with maybe a youth or senior center. But now these neighbors are finding out about a developer’s plans to build more than 120 units on the empty lot. Yet, the zoning map showed that only about 70 houses would be allowed on the parcel.

A fifth of the American people just voted in what I’m calling “democratic fascism.”

At last count, Trump had a little over 71 million votes. It will nudge up slightly. And there’s 337.4 million people living in the U.S. right now according to the Census Bureau.

So, doing a little math, roughly 20 to 21% of the people, a little over half of the electorate, voted in democratic fascism.

Democratic fascism is a fascism that is democratically voted in. And then it’s fascism for those who didn’t vote for it — and it would also be fascism for many of those that did vote for it.

Mayors Race

8:38pm From CNN: PT It’s 11:30 p.m. ET, and polls have closed in most of the US. Here are the latest updates on voting

Polls have closed in most of the United States while voting continues in some Western states, as tens of millions of American voters went to the polls Tuesday to choose the country’s next leaders.

Here’s the latest on the voting front:

Resistance among Point Loma residents to a planned 4-story, 56-unit apartment complex coming to Rosecrans and Talbot is growing dramatically.

This resistance was evidenced Tuesday night, October 29, when 300 residents packed a town hall meeting on the project at the S.E.S. Portuguese Hall in Roseville. Organized by members of the Peninsula Community Planning Board, a panel of speakers updated the crowd on the project and efforts to obtain more information about the building.

No representatives of city or of the developer were present. In fact, neither the city nor the developer have released pertinent documents on the project and had ignored its obligations to the local volunteer planning board.

Ever since news of the project was broken by the Rag on October 21, anger within the community has grown at the delaying tactics undertaken by the city. The project had come up at the Oct. 17 meeting of the Peninsula Community Planning Board — which is what Rag writer Geoff Page was reporting on — and more and more residents became infuriated with the city and the complex.

In these modern times, there are many reasons that will delay the announcement of who won the presidential election come next Tuesday, November 5th. From slow ballot-counting to logistical challenges, we know ahead of time that by midnight next Tuesday, the victor may not be known.

Many of those reasons are reasonable and America will have another safe and secure election.

But we also know Trump. And we know in this temporary vacuum that Trump will declare himself the victor and set in accelerated motion his efforts to stage a coup. Reportedly, he already has “an army” of local election officials who are ready to do his dirty work and attempt to gum up the works of democracy.

So, we need to prepare ourselves for this eventuality and get ready for his deadly shenanigans. He will attempt something akin to the January 6th attack on the Capitol — but it will be much worse.

But if we are ready, then his success will be extremely limited and will fail.

It was 1965 and I remember very well staring at the cover of Life magazine. It had a young woman, a local Point Loman, on the cover doing a handstand on a skateboard. It was an amazing picture and even more of an amazing stunt. The young blond on the cover was Patti McGee.

Skateboards were brand new back in the mid-sixties and most kids who had them had made them themselves. Take the metal skates available and attach them to a wood board covered by a piece of carpeting. Voila! A skateboard.

Patti McGee has just passed; she was 79. She broke so many records, it’s difficult now to imagine a world without her. Fortunately for us, U-T writer Maura Fox has just laid out McGee’s history and significance, and to let the rest of us know that a nonprofit named Exposure Skate will hold a ceremony for McGee at its annual skate event for women and nonbinary skaters in Encinitas this Saturday, November 2 at 5 p.m.

As many know, one of the most contentious contests in this election cycle is between incumbent County Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer and former Republican mayor Kevin Faulconer. They’re both running in District 3, which includes much of the coast and has much of a liberal bent.

Faulconer knows this, so he’s currently appealing to those liberal voters, touting his old climate policies when he was mayor.

However, many see this contradiction. His “old climate polices” don’t match his current policies. The Voice of San Diego shows this attempt at being a liberal is really just a campaign lie. The Voice:

When Kevin Faulconer was mayor of San Diego, he signed a Climate Action Plan requiring the city build densely in urban areas to reduce driving and planet-warming emissions. The county recently passed its own Climate Action Plan modeled after former Mayor Faulconer’s. But as a supervisor, he’s proposing to open the county to development anywhere which defies a major component of climate policies: Concentrate development so people drive less.

There’s another community in San Diego that feels like they’ve been victimized by a huge apartment complex coming in without any neighborhood input. This time it’s the community of Golden Hill where residents are feeling very agitated by a “stealth” 8-story, 180-unit complex planned for the 2900 block of A Street. And the residents feel abandoned by the City of San Diego.

Three adjacent lots on that block have been recently sold and are all now behind wire fences. And neighbors feel like the city has forgotten about the families who live around there and now favors big developers.

Prompted by a resident’s concerns, local TV station CBS8 looked into it and searched the City’s website. There’s a proposed development in the preliminary stage of the process at 2935 A Street, they reported.

You know what I’d really like to do right now? Escape into video games. I’m too depressed to really want to do anything else.

I don’t want to think about this election — the national one — much less write about it. Who wants to think about all the horrible things Trump will do if he wins? I don’t. I’d rather log onto my favorite computer game and get lost in that. Why grow gray hairs worrying about something I don’t have any control over?

Being an editor of a news and opinion blog right now is not very enjoyable. Especially one that is progressive and grassrootie like the Rag. I mean, we’re supposed to be able to give voice and expression to our “progressive” values and perspectives on all that’s relevant locally. One of the strengths of the Rag is its focus on local, local news and events and people and restaurants — our readers really appreciate that.

To Rag readers

I wanted to share with our many Rag readers the latest writing assignment I’ve given our writers and reporters.

This may be the most unusual writing assignment you’ve ever been given, but here it is —

It’s 2 weeks before election day. It appears that due to slow counts and other election day headaches, it’s likely we won’t know officially who won the Presidential election on the 5th of November.

But we do know that Trump will declare himself the victor and set in motion collaboration from state election boards, state reps and other highly-placed acolytes that will sow disinformation, confusion and outright sabotage to our election machinery.