Category: Civil Rights

County Planning Staff and Planning Commission both recommend denial of the project

Following a nearly seven year process, including members of the public signing thousands of opposition petitions, expressing concerns at dozens of public meetings, and sending hundreds of letters detailing the many significant safety, environmental, and community impacts, the controversial Cottonwood Sand Mine proposal is scheduled to be heard by the San Diego County Board of Supervisors this Wednesday, September 10, 2025, at 9 a.m.

Following the July vote to deny the project by the County Planning Commission, the applicant filed an appeal with the Board of Supervisors.

The County’s Department of Planning & Development Services (PDS) is also recommending the project application be denied, noting that the legal findings required for a Major Use Permit cannot be made.

Both PDS and the Planning Commission cited their concerns that the project will have a harmful impact on the desired community character and the site is not suitable for a large-scale industrial sand mine. These are the same concerns Stop Cottonwood Sand Mine has raised since 2018.

By Calista Stocker / Mission Times Courier – Times of San Diego / Sept. 8, 2025

San Diego City Council’s accessory dwelling unit reforms went into effect on Aug. 22, but many residents of the College Area feel that the efforts are too little, too late.

The set of 25 reforms, which passed 5-4 on June 18, set new requirements and new maximums for the city’s Bonus ADU Program. Previously, the program was mostly unlimited, with the general requirement that half of the units built must be affordable. [Editordude: this is not true.]

Now, single-family homes are only permitted to add one converted ADU, one detached ADU and one junior ADU, or JADU. Other maximums include four units for lots smaller than 8,000 square feet, five units for lots between 8,001 and 10,000 square feet and six units for lots bigger than 10,000 square feet.

[Go to original for links]

Other key changes include structure distance minimums for fire safety, sidewalk requirements for Sustainable Development Areas and the allowance of ADUs to be sold separately as condominiums.

Not mentioned in the list of reforms, residents say, are their concerns about community betterment and equivalent infrastructure developments.

Activists in the greater Golden Hill area mobilized on Sunday, Sept. 7, to bring attention to the horrendous threats of huge development projects alive in their community. There’s at least six projects in the process of construction right now, sitting in the middle of quiet residential and small business neighborhoods, telegraphing their disruption of those areas.  [Richard Santini wrote a great piece about the threats to the soul of Golden Hill on behalf of Preserve Greater Golden Hill just recently here at the Rag.]

Roughly 50 residents and supporters gathered at the children’s park at 28th and Cedar — and most of them took off for a “walk and roll” through that neighborhood of South Park with banners, signs and chants.

by Jim Newton / Cal-Matters / September 4, 2025

At least two things are true about SB 79, a bill by state Sen. Scott Wiener that would clear the way for construction of apartment buildings near transit stops in California, most pointedly including Los Angeles: It’s a bad idea, and Los Angeles has only itself to blame for it.

The fact that Wiener’s approach is both wrongheaded and entirely understandable has led to some strange reactions in California’s largest city, where unusual bedfellows have found themselves together either supporting or opposing it. A bare majority of a city council normally divided between liberals and democratic socialists came together to formally oppose the bill, the eight no votes drawing from both political camps. Supporters similarly crossed ideological lines.

Mayor Karen Bass also opposed Wiener’s bill, positing a brief statement. “While I support the intent to accelerate housing development statewide,” she said, “as written, this bill risks unintended consequences for LA.”

She was joined by her once and possibly future opponent, developer Rick Caruso, who echoed Bass’ ambivalence as well as her conclusion.

“The state is right to encourage more housing,” he said, “but it must be done with the full engagement and support of local officials and residents.”

By Kate Callen 

Why do San Diego’s political leaders keep pushing transit-oriented development in a city with a hopelessly inadequate transit system?

That question was at the heart of my August 29 post about commuting by bus and trolley around San Diego. Our YIMBY government claims that more people will use transit if they live closer to it. Judging by the responses to my post, proximity won’t make a bit of difference.

Simply put, the Metropolitan Transit System (MTS) does not get people where they need to go when they need to be there. The Blue, Orange and Green trolley lines are efficient, but they are linear routes with narrow reach. Most of the city must depend on a sprawl of 97 bus lines that are neither timely nor user-friendly.

For a full picture of the hardships of transit commuting, and using the excellent online MTS Trip Planner, let’s map out how the residents of two “Complete Communities” housing projects would take buses and trolleys to regional employment centers for jobs that start at 8:30 a.m.

In Point Loma, a four-story, 56-unit apartment building is planned at the busy intersection of Rosecrans and Talbot Streets. In Lomita, 37 ADU units are slated for construction at 819 Jacumba Street. Neither project will have on-site parking for residents. Both are in congested neighborhoods where street parking is already scarce.

We’ll start by commuting from Rosecrans and Talbot to Qualcomm in Sorrento Valley. You would leave at 7:00, walk to Rosecrans and Canon to catch the #28 bus to the Old Town Transit Center, take the Coaster to the Sorrento Valley station, then take the 472 Coaster connection bus to Qualcomm Building Q.

State Assembly: COMPLETE FORM HERE

State Senate: COMPLETE FORM HERE

WATCH HERE for Statewide rallies recap

To:  San Diego City Council Members and Mayor

From:  Coastal Caretakers /Lynne Miller

Item 331: Coastal Resilience Master Plan and Programmatic Environmental Impact Report.  (SEPT 9, 2025)

This Agenda has been on your calendar and cancelled several times.  Now it is the last item on the agenda.  People who live in the Ocean Beach, Sunset Cliffs, and Point Loma area have tried unsuccessfully to communicate with the ‘board’ and designers of this plan.  Requests to set up a new meeting to answer local concerns have been denied.  This behavior is consistent with unbridled building that is justified by the high-density affordable housing philosophy and new laws.

We are asking City Council Members and Staff, and the Mayor, to listen to and respond to the concerns of local neighborhoods and San Diego residents.  San Diego citizens have voiced their concerns about mandated changes through meetings, emails, letters, slideshow presentations, bound documents, appeals, and protests. Private organizations around the city are combining forces to challenge the city’s power structure, which has stripped local San Diegans of their rights. The ministerial law is clearly the government’s strategy to exclude people from making decisions about their immediate community.  Years of city planning have been systematically destroyed.  New laws provide developers with a permitting process that streamlines building and ensures a profit.

by Geoffrey Hueter / Times of San Diego / Sept. 6, 2025

Despite recent revisions, Senate Bill 79 should not be approved without further meaningful changes.

SB 79 is a solution in search of a problem. Its goal is supposedly to enable transit-oriented development, but most California cities — especially those with significant transit investments — have already zoned for this.

In addition to adding housing capacity through general plan and community plan updates, regional transportation planning agencies and municipalities, including SANDAG and cities throughout the San Diego region, have maximized their transit investments by creating and funding specific plans for transit-oriented development — by increasing densities, eliminating parking, and streamlining permitting.

That these cities have housing plans that have been certified by the California Department of Housing and Community Development is proof that cities have already “made it legal to build housing near transit” as proponents of the bill are fond of saying.

SB 79 is too expansive to be transit-oriented. The bill’s one-half and one-quarter mile tiers should be defined by walking distance, not straight line (“as the crow flies”) distance,

By David Garrick / San Diego Union-Tribune / September 7, 2025

A new growth blueprint for Clairemont — the oldest and largest of San Diego’s suburban neighborhoods — calls for 17,000 new homes, mostly in new mixed-use villages or along a trolley line.

The blueprint, which is slated for City Council approval before the end of the year, aims mostly to preserve Clairemont’s suburban character by concentrating the new housing in existing commercial areas.

Clairemont’s sprawling shopping plazas would be transformed into densely built mixed-use villages with high-rise housing above the shops. The area’s neighborhoods of single-family homes would remain mostly untouched.

One of the most important networks of San Diego residents to emerge over the last 6 months is holding its general public monthly meeting tomorrow, Saturday, September 6. It’s the San Diego Community Coalition – a network of over two dozen communities and their leaders and activists.

As they state on their facebook page:

A network of San Diego community activists and leaders from 25 neighborhoods riled up about over-development and its consequences plus the disrespect shown to residents by City Hall.

The Coalition is having its meeting in Clairemont, at the Northminister Presbyterian Church at 4324 Clairemont Mesa Blvd (92117) and it starts at 10am and runs to noon.

Cutting its teeth on pushing the City Council to enact reforms to the disastrous so-called Bonus ADU program, the Coalition works to share knowledge, give support to and help to coordinate all the myriad different neighborhood groups that have formed recently explicitly to push back on City Hall’s housing policies.

There is so much going on right now across the city’s neighborhoods, that one needs a program to keep track of everything.

For example, check all these out:

Here’s the very latest from Washington, DC, the nation’s capital — your capital. There’s a brand new lawsuit from DC officials that challenges Trump’s use of the National Guard as a “military occupation.” A Federal Judge in D.C. said U.S. Atty. Jeanine Pirro’s office have tarnished its reputation with how they are handling the deluge of hundreds of cases. And leaders in the House and Senate are not planning to hold votes to extend President Donald Trump’s temporary control of D.C. police before it expires next week. Here’s details ….

DC lawsuit challenges Trump’s National Guard deployment as a forced ‘military occupation’

The District of Columbia on Thursday [Sept.4] challenged President Donald Trump’s use of the National Guard in Washington, asking a federal court to intervene even as he plans to send troops to other cities in the name of driving down crime. Brian Schwalb, the district’s elected attorney general, said in a lawsuit that the deployment, which now involves more than 1,000 troops, is an illegal use of the military for domestic law enforcement.

“No American jurisdiction should be involuntarily subjected to military occupation,” Schwalb wrote.

The White House said deploying the Guard to protect federal assets and assist law enforcement is within Trump’s authority as president. “This lawsuit is nothing more than another attempt — at the detriment of D.C. residents and visitors — to undermine the President’s highly successful operations to stop violent crime in D.C.,” spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said.