Category: Economy

Hot Sunday, September 20th: Not everyone went to the beach or got ready for the Chargers game. 75 of our fellow San Diegans instead rallied against state cuts to health care and education. They rallied and then marched down Park Blvd to City College. And they rallied and marched for the rest of us. They really wanted to march on Sacramento, but had to settle for downtown San Diego.

It was high noon in front of the Navy Hospital near Balboa Park. …

by GrokSurf

In Sunday’s Union-Tribune (9/13/09), Mike Lee wrote that “water districts might have to keep boosting prices” because consumers reduced their water consumption due to the shortage. The article generated plenty of interest (169 comments, many angry, when I last checked).

As far as the San Diego Water Department is concerned, …

Restrooms near Dog Beach need to be demolished and it will take 18 months to replace – meanwhile 10 portable toilets set up. The city is leasing them for $1,341 per month.
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OCEAN BEACH — For the second time in 18 months, San Diego’s history of putting off maintenance to save money has caught up with it, resulting in the sudden closure of a public building due to safety concerns.

OCEAN BEACH, CA. It turns out that despite all the whining about and dissing of tourists, beach residents are actually tolerant of them and even welcome them.

The OB Rag ran a poll recently on this very subject, and the results are somewhat surprising. From September 4th through the 14th (I know, it’s more than a week – sorry!) our poll asked:

Do you think the tourists that visit Ocean Beach are a positive or negative influence on the community?

The police raids on numerous San Diego County medical marijuana dispensaries that took place throughout the afternoon are the culmination of a five-month investigation, CityBeat has learned. A law enforcement source close to the operation and familiar with the details told CityBeat the investigation revealed that many of the marijuana collectives and co-ops were functioning as for-profit businesses, and thus lost the protection granted to them by voters under Proposition 215 in 1996.

by Lane Tobias

Anyone who works in human services knows that these are lean times. Budgets have been cut, while the services we provide are in higher demand.

This goes across the board, from government agencies to non-profits, and while the services provided to the community may not be lessened in terms of effectiveness, there is certainly an emotional effect on both those seeking services and the providers themselves.

There are more people seeking help, and just as many people to help them as before…

A breakfast forum last Thursday on the subject of homelessness included Rob Hutsel, executive director of the San Diego River Park Foundation.

Hutsel, who’s headed the nonprofit for eight years, has become an unlikely expert on the people who call the river banks home: The organization’s twice-monthly trash pick-ups and bi-annual “river blitz” clean-ups have somewhat become field studies of the living conditions of river-bank dwellers.

by Frank Gormlie

By 6:00 pm, there was a long line that stretched from the gym’s doors almost all the way to the main road, lining the school’s parking lot as it crept up the small hill. Doug and I were at Rancho Buena Vista High School for Congressman Darrell Issa’s Town Hall meeting on health care. We had driven to southern Vista – a land of new suburbs, condos and malls – from the southern reaches of the county. Everything in sight seemed to have been built in the last ten to twenty years or so.

It had been a long drive from San Diego, and so we had a while to muse about was in store for us … in conservativeland.

Originally posted August 21, 2009

by Frank Gormlie

No other corner in all of Ocean Beach has had as much attention and been the point of so much contention and conflict within the community as has the corner of Voltaire Street and Sunset Cliffs Boulevard. The northwest corner to be exact.

Local Congressman Darrel Issa appears to be trying to capture the right-wing momentum sputtering here and there at town hall meetings across the nation. He all of a sudden announced that he, too, is holding a health care reform town hall meeting – this one is tonight in Vista.

A line wrapped down the block and around another one in Hillcrest Tuesday morning. If you didn’t know, you would think they were handing out free money not free nectarines and bread.

One after another, young and old collected plastic bags filled with fresh produce — bread, cantalope, nectarines, bananas and potatoes — from volunteers.

by George Mitrovich

At the tribute to Senator Ted Kennedy Friday night at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut, Mr. Kennedy’s closest friend in the Senate, told a story of how he recently underwent prostate cancer surgery and when he came out of recovery his first phone call was from Mr. Kennedy, who said, “Given the choice between prostate cancer surgery and going to town hall meetings, you made the right choice.”