Author: Staff

By Geoff Page

I did not watch Todd Gloria’s State of the City speech. I heard afterward that Gloria announced he had signed some kind of “executive order.” I had no idea the mayor had the power to issue executive orders. I decided to check this out.

After 20 years of working on complex construction claims and lawsuits, the most important thing I learned was the paramount importance of substantiation, good substantiation, specific substantiation. The first thing to look at was the mayor’s order. Here is what the order said:

A notice is attached to the Ocean Beach Pier gate from the City of San Diego’s Development Services Department – and it appears to end the “argument” over the future of the iconic structure — it’s a notice of the “historic designation, demolition and replacement of the Ocean Beach Pier ….”

The date of the notice is February 6, 2024.

Here is a close-up of the text:

The City of San Diego has started its search for the Police Department’s next chief of police. And the city has devised an an online survey to gain feedback and has organized public forums on the search for each council district.

The District 2 forum will be Friday, Jan. 12, from 5-7 p.m. at the Point Loma Library located at 3701 Voltaire St. (San Diego, CA 92107). Councilwoman Jen Campbell will be co-hosting the event.

Community members are also asked to complete the survey — www.surveymonkey.com/r/T2M9X73 — to share their opinions about the qualities and characteristics they’d like to see in the next chief of police.

This awe inspiring video of Sunset Cliffs by Charles Landon is a must see.

As virulence rises, medical providers across the nation have gradually begun to tighten their procedures, cutting back on visitation of hospitalized patients and increasingly requiring masks, according to a recent report from the Associated Press.

More U.S. hospitals are requiring masks and limiting visitors as health officials face an expected but still nasty post-holiday spike in flu, COVID-19 and other illnesses.

Due to a request from the San Diego Police Department, the City has closed a dirt parking lot next to Robb Field in Ocean Beach.

The parking lot in question is west of the western-most baseball diamond at Robb Field. The usual entrance to this lot is a driveway off of West Pt Loma Blvd., right next to the old pump station west of Bacon St. That entrance is gated with temporary fencing. There are numerous paper signs posted around the lot indicating indefinite closure.

Here is some sad news in Ocean Beach.

Somebody cut down the two young Torrey Pines that were planted a couple years back close to where the 90 year old Torreys were taken down in front of 4630 Saratoga Avenue. This had to happen Wednesday afternoon, January 3, in broad daylight.

One is still standing but not for long. It will suffer a slow death since the cut nearly completely girdles the tree — cutting off its vascular system along with its transport of water and nutrients.

The City of San Diego has doubled down on using “H-Barracks” as a site for a homeless shelter of some kind. A recent article in the U-T by Blake Nelson recounts why that appears to be so.

Apart from Mayor Gloria’s director of community engagement, Kohta Zaiser, making public pronouncements about the positive attributes of the idea, work crews are clearing asbestos and lead from H-Barracks’ eight two-story buildings, shaped like giant “H’s.” When finished with the planned demolition, only a concrete slab will remain.

The prime real estate property has been promised to San Diego’s multibillion-dollar Pure Water recycling system, but which doesn’t need it for another five years, leaving the city with around seven empty acres.

ON Monday, December 18, the city published the “notice of preparation” for the sports arena area redevelopment — inviting the public and others to help craft what’s studied in the environmental analysis of the proposed development.

As we all know, the Midway Rising re-development team was selected in 2022 by the city council to remake the property in the Midway District. And as we all must know by now, the re-development team was headed up at the time by Brad Termini, head of housing developer Zephyr, who – along with his spouse – were the biggest contributors to Mayor Gloria’s campaign for mayor.

The mayor was the biggest fan of Midway Rising and convinced the city council to select it for one of the most massive redevelopment projects in modern San Diego history.

In the end at Tuesday’s City Council hearing on Mayor Gloria’s Housing Package, it was 7 to 1 “yay” to one “nay”. The long, contentious debate over the controversies of the plan that’s lasted weeks if not months came to a conclusion – the last time the council voted on the package, it was 5 to 3 against – but with one “hold-out” this time around – who had her own reasons for denying Gloria a full, unanimous endorsement.

The most important controversy being Gloria’s proposal to allow affordable housing developers to build the units “off-site” — that is not on the property where all the other units are being built, units allowed under the city’s current law. And that was the controversy the last time this package appeared, only to be closely voted down. The Rag called it a “give-away to developers.”

What’s happened in the interim is