Author: Source

<Originally posted Feb. 26, 2021
By Savvy Sammy

I love fried chicken and when I heard OB was going to get a fried chicken place right on Newport, my jaw dropped and my mouth watered at the same time. Oh my god!

OB hasn’t had good fried chicken on the avenue since Zeke’s closed – and that was a long time ago (where Bravos is now at the corner of Newport and Bacon). Zeke’s had a take-out window right there on Bacon. …

Maybe it’s about to change. Martin Robles and Bruno Elias are opening – or already have opened – ChickenHeadz – a fried chicken place right where Livingston’s used to be, 5026 Newport. Both used to work at Hodad’s (Elias for 17 years, Robles 10), so they know Newport, OB and restaurants well.

By Geoff Page

The campaign to recall District 2 council member Jennifer Campbell is in full swing. Signature gathering to call for the special election to remove Campbell kicks off Saturday, February 27, at Ski Beach in Mission Bay. This is at the intersection of Ingraham Street and Vacation Road, the island on Mission Bay that Ingraham crosses.

The event kicks off at 10:00 a.m. and runs to 2:00. There will be some short speeches but the reason for the gathering is to get started. Organizers are asking folks to bring, masks, gloves, sanitizer, and sunscreen.

“Agenda: 1. Gather 2. Rally with speakers 3. Go get some signatures!”

By Joni Halpern / Special to the OB Rag / Feb. 25, 2021

CEQA: The Last Guardian of the Communtiy

Two visions of the future have collided in a lawsuit set for trial April 9, 2021, challenging the Morena Corridor Specific Plan (MCSP). [The Morena area is just east of I-5 and just north of I-8 at the mouth of Mission Valley.]

Morena United, an informal association of residents and business owners in areas that will be affected by the MCSP, believe city officials have ignored their concerns about the harm the plan will cause.

They believe the City has aligned itself with development interests looking only to maximize profits through sales and rents to high-income residents, while producing only a minimal amount of affordable housing. Even that amount of affordable housing, they say, will be to exclude lower-income households, while at the same time failing to provide for those with middle income.

The MCSP map looks like a gerrymandered voting district, taking in chunks of land that were once part of two other community plans.

One section, for example, bordered roughly by I-5 on the west, Friars Road on the south, Tecolote Road on the north, and a strip along Morena Boulevard on the east, once was covered solely by the Linda Vista Community Plan, which called for additional housing in the center of Linda Vista, not on the periphery, as specified in the MCSP. That Linda Vista Community Plan envisioned growth, but with thousands fewer dwellings than proposed in the MCSP, which now overrides the Linda Vista plan.

Here are two Op-Ed pieces that ran in the San Diego Union-Tribune on Tuesday, Feb. 23, on the subject of recalling Jen Campbell.

Campbell Puts Special Interests Before Voters

By Wendy D. Gelernter

City Council President Jennifer Campbell has lost the trust of her constituents by ignoring their input, breaking campaign promises and siding with powerful special interests and corporations against the needs of her voters. This is why a diverse coalition of San Diegans this month announced a movement to recall Campbell from office.

As a small business owner and 34-year resident of Pacific Beach, I donated to and campaigned for Campbell when she ran for council. But I soon grew alarmed at her lack of responsiveness to community voices.

After nearly a year of campus closures and at-home learning due to the coronavirus pandemic, the San Diego Unified School District on Tuesday announced its target date to reopen its campuses.

San Diego Unified school board member Richard Barrera told NBC 7 that staff members are slated to return to campuses the week of April 5, with students at all grade levels returning the following week, dependent upon whether the county had returned to the red tier and vaccines being fully available to staffers.

The county will begin making COVID-19 vaccines available to school employees March 1.

Your input can help craft the OB Library’s future! Click the link below to take the survey, and let the San Diego Public Library Commission know:

1. What do you need from the Library?
2. How can the Library better serve OBceans?
3. What services, technologies, and programs would help you?

From the PCPB / Feb. 23, 2021

As with all other officially recognized community planning groups throughout the City of San Diego, the COVID-19 pandemic prevented the Peninsula Community Planning Board (PCPB) from holding its annual election in March 2020.

But, under guidelines recently promulgated by the City of San Diego and procedures approved by the Peninsula Community Planning Board (PCPB) at its meeting on February 18, 2021, PCPB will be holding an election this March to fill a total of eleven vacancies.

These eleven Board positions to be filled comprise over two-thirds of the Board’s fifteen positions. Board terms are typically three (3) years in length. Because the 2020 election was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, however, the 2021 election will include several positions with shorter terms. Of the eleven PCPB positions to be filled, five will be for three-year terms, five will be for two-year terms and one will fill a current vacancy for the balance of a one-year term.

By Lisa Halverstadt / Voice of San Diego / Feb. 22, 2021

As City Council President Jen Campbell and stakeholders on both sides of the vacation rental saga prepare to debate yet another regulation proposal, they’re grappling with an inconvenient truth: No one knows exactly how many vacation rentals there are in the city. Campbell has predicted her plan could slash the number of whole-home rentals in the city by at least two-thirds.

But new data obtained separately by Voice of San Diego and the city’s Office of the Independent Budget Analyst suggests Campbell’s proposal may not reduce the number of whole-home vacation rentals as much as she predicts.

By Kevin Hastings

Tomorrow, Tuesday, Feb 23rd, councilmember Jen Campbell will seek to legalize all the Short Term Vacation Rentals (STVRs) in your neighborhood, and leave room for even more. Her proposal has been endorsed by Airbnb and VRBO, but none of the neighborhood community groups.

Campbell’s policy was developed behind closed doors by VRBO and a hotel worker’s union and successfully dodged public input and scrutiny. It would create a 4-tier licensing system covering everything to full-time STVRs without host on site (Tier 3 & 4), to the uncontroversial part-time rentals and room shares (Tier 1 & 2).

It would limit licenses for the full-time whole-home STRs to approximately 6,500 city-wide. Campbell has peddled this as a “78% reduction in STRs” that will “return 7,000 units to long term housing”. She does this despite providing no analysis of the existing number and types of STRs. A cursory study of the existing STR situation, and a previous study commissioned by the city both show her claims to be false.

By Colleen O’Connor

Unable to travel? Unhappy about sheltering in place? Depressed about our blue planet’s future; aging; or just in a funk about the enormity of change and loss.

Fret not. There is a remedy close at hand. In fact, two of them; both contenders for big acting awards; directing awards; foreign film and storytelling awards.

Think about it. A dreadful 2020 year producing two marvelous films (both based on books) with two great, older actresses.

The stories confront generational and cultural sufferings without sentimentality and hardly any make-up.

The first, The Life Ahead, starring 86-year-old, Sophia Loren, (where she plays the lead as Madame Rosa) has already won the San Diego Film Critics Society “Best International Film” award, and the Capri Hollywood International Film Festival nod for Best Actress.

Oscar nominations and award decisions are still pending; delayed due to the pandemic.

At age 86, Sophia Loren has already collected five Golden Globes, 10 Donatellos, one BAFTA, one Grammy, two Oscars, not to mention multiple lifetime achievement awards.

By Bill McKibben / Reader Supported News – The New Yorker / February 18, 2021

Sometimes, all you need is a map. In the wake of this week’s power failures in Texas, which have left millions without heat in subfreezing conditions, right-wing politicians and news networks decided that the emergency was down to “frozen wind turbines,” a phrase that has now been repeated ad infinitum on all the various ganglia that make up the conservative “information” network.

The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, which has managed to be wrong about energy and climate for more than four decades, put it like this:

“Gas and power prices have spiked across the central U.S. while Texas regulators ordered rolling blackouts Monday as an Arctic blast has frozen wind turbines.”

Governor Greg Abbott took time out from failing to deal with the emergency that had imperiled many in his state to tell Fox News that “this shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America.”

Not to be outdone, on Tuesday afternoon, Representative Dan Crenshaw, a Republican who represents Texas’s second congressional district, including parts of Houston, tweeted that “this is what happens when you force the grid to rely in part on wind as a power source.”

By Don Bauder / Times of San Diego / Feb. 18, 2021

A mob incited by then-President Trump invaded the Capitol. Everybody knows about that mob.

But what about the other mob that has been nurtured, cuddled, stroked by Trump? By whatever name — Mafia, organized crime, gangsters — this mob has gotten very little media attention, particularly in the 2016 and 2020 elections.

Let’s call the first Mob 1 and the second Mob 2.

As noted last September, I have followed Trump’s Mob 2 since the 1980s. But in this essay, I will rely on works of three great investigative journalists: David Cay Johnston, an expert on Trump’s fraudulent finances; the late Wayne Barrett, who for decades reported on Trump and other New York crooks, and Dan E. Moldea, the reporter who exposed the cozy relationship between professional sports team owners and organized crime.