Category: Environment

Contact Governor Newsom Immediately to Veto SB 344 -the Midway Rising Gut-and-Amend Bill

By Donna Frye

[Here’s Part 1]

If you’ve been following the Midway Rising development project for the past many years, you know how complicated it has become. The project being proposed includes a new sports arena and housing development in the Midway area that “was once part of the river bottom and alluvial flood plain area of the San Diego River.”

Most recently, state legislation (SB 344) was introduced at the very last minute and passed via a shameful gut-and-amend political maneuver by the state legislators.

It’s been difficult to watch this process play out and not feel disconnected from the elected officials who are supposed to represent us. But it’s no wonder especially when our representatives work so hard to shut us out of the process.

That being said, we still have to do something to try and stop SB 344 from being signed into law.

By Nicole Crosby, Candidate for San Diego City Council District 2

It’s no secret that many of us feel left behind by City Hall. It’s a sentiment I hear from and share with my neighbors every day. With costs on the rise, our infrastructure crumbling, and City leaders pushing half-baked solutions to complex issues, it’s easy to see why.

These were the issues on my mind when I decided to launch my campaign for City Council District 2, which covers the neighborhoods of Ocean Beach, Mission Beach, Point Loma, Clairemont, Midway, Old Town, and North Bay. These are the neighborhoods where I started my family, served as the President of the PTA and Clairemont Town Council, and am proud to be raising my daughter.

And as a working mom, I know this race isn’t about abstract ideas or numbers on a spreadsheet; it’s about real problems that impact real people’s lives. I have served the City Attorney’s office for over a decade, where I’ve stood up for victims of elder abuse, hate crimes, and gun crimes. Every day, I work to help ordinary people secure justice and dignity against those who try to exploit them. Now, I’m running to take that fight to City Hall on behalf of our neighborhoods and stand up against the corporate special interests that want us to stay quiet.

While serving in the community, I have seen firsthand the ways that the system is rigged against working San Diegans: whether it’s corporate short term vacation rentals turning affordable homes in our communities into unregulated hotels, a recreational airfield spreading pollution directly into our backyards, or a stunning lack of investment in basic infrastructure and services. What would fixing these issues and making City Hall actually work for us mean in our everyday lives?

Reporter Interviews Editordude and Cites His Study, “Death and Distress at Sunset Cliffs”

By Andrew J. Campa / The Los Angeles Times / September 8, 2026

SAN DIEGO — As dusk approached San Diego’s seaside enclave of Ocean Beach, its Sunset Cliffs bustled on a recent Friday evening. Two engaged couples posed for wedding photos in between joggers, dog walkers and sightseers who clamored around Osprey Street to enjoy the day’s majestic sunset.

It was a deceptively idyllic setting for what authorities say is continued lawbreaking and peril, which authorities just can’t seem to quash.

The lawbreakers were gathered this day on a cliff and a nearby arch, a crowd of around 50 young people — 14- to 20-year-olds, mostly males. Buoyed by a youthful sense of invincibility, they dared one another to leap, waiting for another to move, like emperor penguin chicks before a first arctic plunge. After a few minutes, there was a dive off the arch, followed by a cannonball from the next person, a backflip from a third and then other more spectacular and daring stunts from the flock. The cliff divers, drawn to the thrills of the illicit jumps amplified by social media, reveled in dozens of leaps.

No one was injured that day, but that hasn’t always been the case.

By Mat Wahlstrom

Consider what can be accomplished in four years. High school, college, military service, medical residency, a term in political office, a vehicle lease, can all be encompassed in that time. So it is fitting to reflect that four years ago today was the kickoff of the Midway Rising scheme, when the San Diego City Council’s Land Use and Housing Committee voted unanimously to send it to the full council as their “recommendation” of the three proposals winnowed by Todd  Gloria’s staff.

Here is the link to the original write-up of that meeting by Jennifer Van Grove in the San Diego Union-Tribune. (Full disclosure: one of the public comments she reported was by yours truly, so judge for yourself how well this project has aged.)

It was already clear that the fix was in for Midway Rising. La Prensa revealed a week before the committee’s vote that the couple behind its development team had been the largest individual contributors to Todd Gloria’s 2020 political campaign.

By Kate Callen

When my sister and I were children, we loved making Christmas wish lists: pedal-powered mini-cars, two-story dollhouses. But we understood that Santa had to provide for a world full of kids and we wouldn’t get everything we wanted.

Rational people faced with limited resources set realistic expectations. So why do Balboa Park planners keep inviting San Diegans to envision upgrades this cash-strapped city can’t afford? Why ask the public to sit through two years of presentations and workshops that will only raise false hopes? Why not revisit the original 1989 Balboa Park Master Plan to learn about valuable ideas that were never implemented?

These issues surfaced when the latest Balboa Park Master Plan Update kicked off at the September 3 meeting of the Balboa Park Committee. In a 45-minute presentation, San Diego Planning Director Heidi Von Blum and her team slow-walked the Balboa Park Club’s capacity audience through a 35-page slideshow.

People new to park planning might have been bewildered by the mash-up of abstractions: from “vision and guiding principles” to “conceptual framework” to “priorities and phases.” For those of us who have participated in Balboa Park presentations, studies, surveys, and workshops over decades of steady park decline, the slideshow resurrected ghosts of failures past.

From 10News – CNS / September

Homes in Ocean Beach and Loma Portal Eligible

The Federal Aviation Administration Tuesday, September 1, awarded the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority $15.3 million for its Quieter Home Program to provide sound insulation for around 400 homes in the airport’s flight path.

The funding comes from the FAA’s Airport Improvement Program centered on infrastructure projects.

“We are grateful to receive this funding for our Quieter Home Program,” said Atif Saeed, president and CEO of the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority. “We appreciate the unwavering support from Senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff, Congressman Scott Peters, and the entire San Diego congressional delegation. This funding will help us work with our neighboring communities and provide sound insulation treatment to reduce noise inside eligible homes located around the airport.”

By Debbie L. Sklar / Special to the OB Rag

In 1925, a trip through Point Loma could include a stop at the Point Loma Service Station on Rosecrans Street, where motorists could get their automobiles serviced while traveling on one of the peninsula’s main roads.

A photograph from that year, preserved by the San Diego History Center, shows two men working on an automobile outside the station. Their names aren’t recorded, but the image captures a time when the automobile was changing the way San Diegans traveled — and creating an entirely new type of neighborhood business.

Service stations were becoming familiar sights during the 1920s as automobile ownership expanded. Gasoline, repairs, and maintenance were no longer occasional needs for a small number of motorists. They were becoming part of everyday life.

Point Loma was well positioned for that transition. Rosecrans Street connected the peninsula with the rest of San Diego, making it an important route for motorists heading toward Point Loma and the military reservation at its western end.

The Point Loma Service Station became part of that automobile landscape.

by Karen Pearlman  / Times of San Diego / Aug. 31, 2026

The California Coastal Commission in mid-August voted unanimously to approve the city of San Diego’s De Anza Natural plan — but with some important changes required to what was passed by the San Diego City Council in May 2024 as the De Anza Natural Amendment to the Mission Bay Park Master Plan.

The plan to “re-wild” DeAnza Cove, a plan discussed by environmentalists and the city as far back as 2015, will eventually convert Campland on the Bay and much of the current Mission Bay RV Resort into wetlands. It will expand habitat in the area from about 70 acres to a little over 260 acres, and relocate some camping spots further inland.

“This is one of the last opportunities the city is ever going to have to really recreate the wetlands that were so characteristic of the Mission Bay area, and frankly the entire coastline,” said San Diego City Council President Joe LaCava.

By Paul Krueger

Barnes Tennis Center executives are willing to renegotiate a lease agreement that pays the city just $50 per month on yearly revenues of more than $7 million.

The controversial lease for city-owned property in Point Loma was signed in 1994. The lease expires in June, 2029, and does not include any periodic increases in the $600 annual payment over the life of the agreement.

Committee member Vivian Moreno said she is “extremely angry” that the city has for decades received such a minuscule share of the Tennis Center’s $7.2 million in revenue. “Any San Diegan would love to have their rent frozen at 1994 levels,” Moreno said.

Committee member Henry Foster was also critical of the agreement.  “If we are writing contracts that aren’t beneficial to the city, shame on us,” Foster said during Wednesday’s meeting. “Quite honestly, this is a mess, and it’s a pattern. And (city) leadership needs to get this problem resolved.”

Details about the lease came to light last week with the release of the City Auditor’s investigation, which was prompted by an call to the city’s fraud hotline.

HMCS Yukon Was Bought by San Diego to Eventually Scuttle for an Artificial Reef

By Team Global / The Economic Times / August 31, 2026

In 2000, the City of San Diego, working with the San Diego Oceans Foundation, acquired and refurbished HMCS Yukon, a decommissioned 366 foot Canadian warship, to scuttle it as an artificial reef about 1.85 miles off Mission Beach. However, there were some issues with the actual sinking of the ship. On July 14, 2000, the ship unexpectedly began to capsize and sank before divers could position it properly, settling on the seafloor at depths ranging from about 60 to 105 feet.

A 366-foot warship sinks prematurely off Mission Beach

After the Yukon was sunk, one pressing concern that arose for researchers was whether an artificial reef such as this one truly contributed to the production of marine life or merely drew fish populations that were already living elsewhere into the vicinity of the reef.

“It’s not a wave you can surf” or see but it will register on tidal instruments

By Anthony Edwards / Yahoo News – San Francisco Chronicle / September 2, 2026 

Sea levels along the California coast are expected to rise by a foot as soon as late September, as El Niño-warmed tropical water pushes a slow-moving wave up the coast of North America.

The swell isn’t something seen crashing at a beach but a planetary-scale process known as a Kelvin wave that is triggered by changes in wind at the equator.

“It’s not a wave you can surf,” said Dillon Amaya, an assistant professor of marine science at North Carolina State University. “You’re not gonna be able to see it from your boat, but our instruments will see it as it passes by, like tide gages.”

The coastally-trapped Kelvin wave, as it’s called, originated along the equator and hit the South America coast before turning north at about 6 mph. It raised water levels about nine to 14 inches (relative to 1993-2025 averages) along the coast of Central America in late August. That surge will hit Cabo in late September and eventually reach San Francisco the first or second week of October.