Category: Economy

By Steve Anderson / Beach & Bay Press – Times of San Diego / April 30, 2026

Recently, Mayor Todd Gloria proposed major cuts to San Diego’s arts and culture funding. As the city faces an $118 million deficit, the proposed arts cuts alone would save $11.8 million. Like much of Gloria’s decisions as mayor, this was met with backlash, especially among the local arts community.

On top of that, it seems like the cuts will affect other beloved aspects of our community — street fairs and parades are also under threat of losing major funding. Within Point Loma and OB that would be annual events, like the OB Street Fair and Chili Cook Off.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the OB Street Fair will cease to exist, but it might raise attendance fees and the organizations that support the events may experience layoffs.

by Linda Caballero Sotelo / Voice of San Diego / May 5, 2026

Over a recent phone conversation, a friend conveyed her sense of disillusionment with how cities are being managed. The expression “tone-deaf” came up, and that warnings are all around us. Across the United States, cities are making budget decisions that reveal far more than their fiscal priorities. They reveal their values, their imagination, and their sense of responsibility to future generations.

In San Diego, the mayor’s proposed budget would virtually eliminate nearly the entire $12 million arts and culture budget, effectively dismantling the cultural ecosystem of educational organizations filling the gaps for student art education-based programming, artist support to produce works that attracts visitors and creates a livable and forward city to enjoy, visit and invest in. An ecosystem that extends across borders and has taken decades to build.

This is not simply a budget cut. It is a cultural alarm, a canary in the coal mine warning us about the direction of our civic life.

This Thursday, May 7th, the City Council is holding a “Special Meeting” to vote on an ordinance implementing Senate Bill 79, the new state law that allows 5+ story apartments within one-half mile of trolley stops and certain major bus routes.

And a Call to Action has been announced for residents to help limit the impact of SB 79 by attending or by using the city’s online comment system.
It’s Agenda Item 600.

Here’s more on the situation from Neighbors For A Better San Diego (NFABSD):

To use the protections allowed under the law, San Diego must adopt an implementing ordinance before SB 79 takes effect on July 1.

 While Neighbors For A Better San Diego (NFABSD) opposed the bill in Sacramento, the Planning Department’s phased approach is the best available path under a bad law and deserves support. It limits immediate exposure in high-fire-hazard zones, low-resource areas, historic sites, and sea-level-rise areas, and it applies the state’s optional one-mile walking-distance cap to reduce the most unreasonable overreach.

The picture snapped in Hillcrest yesterday

by Debbie L. Sklar / Times of San Diego / May 4, 2026

Mission Bay didn’t start as a destination. It started as water that refused to sit still.

Just inland from the oceanfront homes and boardwalk of Mission Beach, the waters of the bay stretch across what was once a wide, shifting tidal wetland. Before it became a center of recreation, the bay was part of a dynamic coastal system of marshes, mudflats and seasonal channels— land that helped shape the surrounding beach communities as they developed.

Early waters and wetlands
For centuries, the San Diego River spread across a wide tidal basin here, carving through a shifting wetland of mudflats, marsh channels, and seasonal flood zones. Long before development, this was part of a larger coastal ecosystem used by the Kumeyaay, whose presence in the region predates Spanish settlement by thousands of years.

By the mid-20th century, that landscape was already being redesigned.

On April 27, the mayor sent a memo to the City Council laying out three options for cutting costs at libraries:

Option 1 focuses on preserving hours in Districts 4, 8, and 9 (historically underserved communities), while cutting hours at 14 other branches. Six of these branches would eliminate a full day of service. Eight branches would be reduced to a half-day on Saturdays.

Option 2 would result in more uniform cuts across the city for branches open Monday-Saturday. Most locations would lose Saturday hours, and four locations (Carmel Valley, North Park, University Heights, and Allied Gardens) would lose Monday hours entirely.

By Marc Snelling

The distance between the Trump regime and the American people continues to grow, as the United States and Canada are set to renegotiate their trade pact. Trump’s fellow Epstein Island visitor Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick recently offered his insightful analysis of the deep ties between the countries saying of Canada “they suck.” Lutnick is following Trump’s lead who earlier stated “We don’t need anything from Canada.”

Headlines in Canada are being made with foreign support being uncovered in Alberta’s proposed referendum over separation. Many have likened the Trump regime support for Alberta separatism with the disinformation campaign from the Putin regime in Ukraine’s Donbas region leading up to the Ukraine-Russian War. Trump minion, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent speaking of Alberta said “they want sovereignty, they want what the US has got.”

While regime officials run their mouths the American people, particularly in the States that border Canada, have been singing an entirely different tune. The Trump Slump continues unabated with Canadian’s boycott of American tourism and products growing. The boycott is not easily reversed by government action on either side of the border as it is a grassroots effort.

The San Diego Community Coalition publishes this email bulletin to keep our members and the general San Diego public informed about important Council and Planning Commission hearings and other city public meetings.

Budget Review May 4 — May 8

The Council will spend all five days this week (May 4–May 8) in one continuous meeting to review the proposed FY2027 budget. Here’s the link to the week-long agenda of city department budget presentations

A quick review shows that Mayor Gloria is making good on his threat that the defeat of the 2024 Measure E sales tax increase would result in cuts to community services.

The “Community Services Branch Expenditures Summary” lists a reduction of 38 positions or 8.8% ($3.4M) out of 434 in the Library Department; 94 positions or 8% ($8.8M) out of 1,168 in Parks and Recreation; and 33 positions or 4.3% ($2.8M) out of 760 in Engineering and Capital Projects.

JW August reports:

No ICE! No War! “Hands Off Our Vote” was one of the themes running through Friday’s ‘May Day Strong’ event at Chicano Park.  Billionaires were not welcome, nor were Democrats or Republicans. The park, long a gathering place for protests, was again a staging area for emotional speeches and pleas followed by a march to City College.

The speeches echoed the language and themes on the organizers and their website

It was all about pocketbook issues and the creation of the ‘Real Affordability Agenda’.  “A promise of a good life for everyone back in reach” said one speaker, “if workers will unite”. Supporting a goal of “making billionaires and corporations pay what they owe” says the website, repeated by the protest speakers as well as multiple signs and tee shirts with an anti-capitalist theme.

One of the dozen events happening in San Diego County today, May Day, is in Chicano Park.

Our on-the-spot photog JW August took these.

From Coastal Caretakers

Senate Bill 79 (SB 79), also known as the Abundant and Affordable Homes Near Transit Act, is a landmark piece of California legislation signed into law in October, 2025. San Diego Mayor and Council members were among the first cities in the State to embrace the bill and create new laws supporting the State mandate.  Look out folks, ‘they’ have just begun.

We can expect the City of San Diego Council to have future meetings about SB 79 legislation.  With San Diego approving tiny, tiny apartments ministerially into high-rises, declaring they are proponents of equity and affordable housing, Neighbors for a Better San Diego saw otherwise: “SB 79 (Wiener) remains one of the most disruptive state housing bills in recent memory.”