Serving OB, the Peninsula and San Diego Beaches
The largest Earth Day celebration in San Diego will return this weekend to Balboa Park with more than 100 vendors, a full day of live entertainment and presentations and other activities focused on keeping our planet healthy and green.
By Tanja Kropf / Explore Clairemont / April 22, 2026
This is the second in a two-part series of interviews with candidates for the San Diego City Council’s District 2 seat, currently occupied by Jennifer Campbell. District 2 includes Clairemont, Midway, Mission Beach, Mission Bay, Old Town, Ocean Beach, and Point Loma.
Part Two of this series includes candidate interview summaries of Mandy Havlik, Josh Coyne, Jacob Mitchell, and Paul Suppa.
Explore Clairemont interviewed all the candidates. All the questions asked of the candidates were submitted by Explore Clairemont’s audience, ensuring the candidates answered only the questions their future constituents wanted to hear.
Last week’s interviews included Richard Bailey, Nicole Crosby, and Mike Rickey.
The election will be held on June 2, 2026.
By Van Whiting / Times of San Diego / April 21, 2026
In 2020, the city of San Diego budget authorized 11,820 full-time-equivalent positions. The budget for fiscal year 2026 carries 13,062. That is roughly 1,200 added positions in six years, while city population held flat.
The mayor’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2027 eliminates nearly $12 million of the city’s $13.8 million arts and culture budget — a cut of roughly 85% — along with reductions to libraries and recreation. But it trims only about 290 of the 1,200 positions added since 2020.
This is neither logical nor good governance. Start with the math.
City employees do not cost only their salaries. Fringe benefits — pensions, health care, related costs — add roughly 50%-60% on top of pay. A manager at $200,000 costs the city about $320,000 fully loaded. That figure is illustrative of the marginal, higher-compensation positions driving growth in internal functions, not the average employee.
By JW August / Times of San Diego / April20, 2026
After a 12-year journey, “The Black Family” statue will soon resume its place in one of San Diego’s oldest parks — and in the city’s arts world.
A new version of the statue will replace the 52-year-old original that was removed due to years of decay, at its old home at the front of Neal Petties Mountain View Community Park, formerly known as Mountain View Community Park. It will be unveiled on June 13 as part of the annual Juneteenth celebration.
The stainless steel statue, like the original made from painted redwood, will continue to honor late artist Rossie Wade’s image of Black values and community pride, as it did when it was dedicated in the southeastern San Diego park in 1974.
Wade’s concept was inspired by an abstract painting he created in the 1950s of a Black family of four. The new statue is intended to reflect the earlier work’s message of hope, depicting a Black family of four including a father, mother, son and daughter reaching for the sky.
By Kristina Houck / Patch San Diego / April 17, 2026
Eighty-three hospitals in California are among 446 across 44 states and Washington, D.C., facing a heightened risk of closing, cutting services or laying off workers due to federal medicaid funding cuts, according to a new report. Three from San Diego County are numbered among those at risk.
The cuts to Medicaid were included in the “One Big Beautiful Bill” signed by President Donald Trump on July 4, 2025.
The report by Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization, says the law will cut $911 billion in federal spending on Medicaid and CHIP over 10 years, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office.
by Crystal Niebla / inewsource / April 9, 2026
Beside a 10-foot-tall pile of construction debris, dozens of people sat at folding tables and brainstormed how to reclaim a piece of land in National City used as a dumping ground.
The 7-acre site at Division Street and Palm Avenue, situated underneath Interstate 805 and near on-ramps, is the product of how freeway construction divided communities decades ago. Locals are now making their mark on the barren land with hand-painted signs, new plants and public art.
They say they want to see it turned into more.
Why this matters
The federal government’s construction of the interstate highway system decades ago including intentionally building through Black and brown communities and resulted in taking homes via eminent domain, exposing residents to higher levels of air pollution and unsafe pedestrian routes. Scholars — and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg — have described the practice as racist.
Friday’s outdoor session kicked off the first of seven workshops across San Diego County assessing how to correct harmful infrastructure to historically underserved communities. The workshops will inform a study by the San Diego Association of Governments in partnership with Caltrans meant to explore projects related to transportation, housing, green spaces, and more “that support community reconnection.”
Organizers are calling the land Maat Mataa Yum — loosely translated from Kumeyaay to “where the people come together on the land,” said community organizer Janice Luna Reynoso.
Today, Monday, marks marijuana culture’s high holiday, 4/20, when cannabis fans gather in clouds of smoke at music festivals, celebrate with all-you-can-deals on chicken wings and other munchies, and take advantage of pot-shop discounts in legal weed states.
This year’s edition provides an occasion for activists to reflect on how far their movement has come, with recreational pot now allowed in 21 states and the nation’s capital, as well as a national political climate that hasn’t moved as quickly on legalization as many expected.
Here’s a look at the holiday’s history.
Why 4/20
The origins of the date, and the term “420” generally, were long murky. Some claimed it referred to a police code for marijuana possession or that it arose from Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women No. 12 & 35,” with its refrain of “Everybody must get stoned” — 420 being the product of 12 times 35.
But a consensus has emerged that it started with a group of bell-bottomed buddies from San Rafael High School in California, who called themselves “the Waldos.” A friend’s brother was afraid of getting busted for a patch of cannabis he was growing in the woods at Point Reyes, so he drew a map and gave the teens permission to harvest the crop, the story goes.
During fall 1971, at 4:20 p.m., just after classes and football practice, the group would meet up at the school’s statue of chemist Louis Pasteur, smoke a joint and head out to search for the weed patch. They never did find it, but their private lexicon — “420 Louie” and later just “420? — would take on a life of its own.
From Adams Ave Association
On April 25, 2026, Adams Avenue will host the free musical walkabout, Adams Avenue Unplugged. This event features 90 live musical performances at 26 locations hosted by restaurants, bars and coffee houses lining a two-mile stretch of Adams Avenue.
by Debbie L. Sklar / Times of San Diego / April 8, 2026
At the foot of Mt. Woodson in Ramona stands a remarkable stone-and-adobe residence that locals affectionately call the Ramona Castle. Despite the nickname, there were no princesses or royalty here. The home was conceived and built as the private vision of Irene Amy Strong, a San Diego dress designer and entrepreneur who wanted a residence that combined craftsmanship, artistry, and harmony with nature.
A Home Born of Craft and Personal Vision
In 1909, Strong, a successful designer catering to San Diego’s social elite and known for sourcing fabrics from Europe, acquired the Woodson Ranch property. She commissioned architects Emmor Brooke Weaver and John Terrell Vawter to design a home reflecting the American Craftsman Movement, which emphasized handcrafted detail, natural materials, and integration with the environment.
Construction began around 1916 and concluded in 1921 at a reported cost of $50,000 — a significant investment for the era. The resulting structure spanned roughly 12,000 square feet, with 27 rooms over multiple levels. Thick stone walls, flagstone floors, and a great room with a 16-foot ceiling highlighted the home’s grandeur. Materials were sourced largely from the property itself, including eucalyptus, oak, and redwood, complemented by rock, adobe, brick, plaster, concrete, and stucco.
Forecasters are sounding the alarm that the return of El Niño this year could be one of the worst in California’s history if it develops as many meteorologists have recently predicted — and the phenomenon already appears to be in motion.
This week, a cluster of tropical cyclones were recorded on both sides of the equator in the western Pacific Ocean, generating a westerly wind burst that is pushing warm water eastward, and accelerating “real potential for the strongest El Niño event in 140 years,” Paul Roundy, an atmospheric scientist at the University at Albany told the San Francisco Chronicle.
The rare cluster of tropical cyclones, which are fueling the westerly wind burst, points to signs El Niño could be emerging and may set records. The strong westerly wind bursts have been documented in the Pacific Ocean all year, pushing unusually warm water, following the end to the La Niña pattern.
Roundy estimated the setup could cause El Niño to arrive quickly, within one to two months. Last month, one of the leading weather forecast models calculated a 62 percent chance that a strong El Niño could develop in the summer.
Over the past two decades, the name El Niño has become synonymous with extreme weather. El Niño occurs when there is a change in the Pacific Ocean’s typical pattern of water movement, temperatures and air flow, which happens about every two to seven years. The southern jet stream strengthens, especially in the eastern Pacific Ocean, bringing more moisture into the southwest and storm activity in the southern part of the country.
After years of lawsuits, delays, and archeological surprises, Oceanside’s Ocean Kamp surf lagoon is finally under construction near real ocean waves.By Dashel Pierson / SURFER / Apr 7, 2026
Key Points
The San Diego, CA project has been in the works for years, in fact, but there’s been a number of setbacks that have left the manmade surf park – located near the coast, and one of the Golden State’s popular, although sleepy, surf towns – in something like limbo.
But now, it appears the $45 million project is moving finally moving forward.
Previously, some four years ago, the Ocean Kamp project had been announced and everything seemed to be moving forward. But then, it stalled. The project got embroiled in a number of hurdles – including lawsuits, city approvals, and the discovery of Native American artifacts on the site. And so, the bureaucratic hoops, as they say, were set.
Construction on the project is currently underway, and according to the video above, the narrator describes: “A massive surf lagoon is coming to Oceanside, San Diego, and they’re targeting to have it finished by the [Los Angeles] 2028 Olympics…the centerpiece of this project is a $45 million surf lagoon. It’s going to have a 3.5-acre wave pool, which produces perfect, customizable waves all year round.”
Firefighters Live in a Trailerby Mariana Martínez Barba / Voice of San Diego / April 16, 2026
In 2015, construction workers plowed through an abandoned gas station in southeastern San Diego to make way for a new, temporary fire station.
The site, which would house a fire engine and an ambulance, was opening to improve emergency response times in the area after our reporting revealed people died of gunshot wounds and overdoses because emergency responders came too late.
Then-Mayor Kevin Faulconer applauded the city’s efforts at a press conference outside the soon-to-be station in 2015. He made a bold promise: “In two to three years, we will begin building a permanent fire station right here on this very spot.”
That never happened. Instead, Fire Station 51 is still a temporary fire station. The fire truck sits under a large tent and firefighters’ living quarters are a mobile trailer.
George Duardo, president of the San Diego City Firefighters IAFF Local 145, has worked more than 100 shifts as a firefighter at Fire Station 51. He said it does not meet the standards of a “modern fire station.”
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