Category: History

By Donna Frye

It’s no wonder the public doesn’t have a lot of trust when it comes to big development projects in the City of San Diego. Too often, what we are told is not accurate.

On Monday November 9, the San Diego City Council is scheduled to hear the Midway Rising development project.

Items 600, 601 and 602. see link inside

From the beginning, the project has been promoted as a massive affordable housing project.

The proposed project is on 48.5 acres of public land and includes an entertainment center, 2,000 affordable housing units, 2,250 market rate housing units, between 123,500 and 130,000 square feet of retail space, 8.2 acres of parks, and 6.42 acres of public spaces.

One of the many documents the council will be voting on is the Disposition and Development Agreement (DDA).

The DDA is over 600 pages long and is a complex and complicated document to read, let alone understand.  It includes such things as the leases for the property and determines the order in which the development will occur.

The DDA was first made public one week before the City Council Land Use and Housing Committee meeting on October 16. The public has had very limited time to review all the documents and provide comments.

The Rag’s own Kate Callen had a letter to the editor published in today’s San Diego Union-Tribune. We publish it below.

Wealthy zoo deciding to charge for parking is wrong

Re “Zoo makes parking fees permanent for nonresidents” (Oct 31):

The San Diego Zoo insists it needs $3 million from parking revenue for park upgrades. Let’s look at its financials. According to ProPublica, the zoo’s 2024 total assets were $1.05 billion, its revenue was $438 million, and its expenses were $391 million. President/CEO Paul Baribault was paid $1.99 million; COO Shawn Dixon earned $820,184; CFO David Franco made $757,377.

by Ernie McCray

I look at the election
that took place yesterday
and I can’t help but say
that “We the People”
kicked some serious ass,
making it so
that some folks
who have come close
to ending our democracy
will, in the near future,
be spoken of in the past.

By Michael Hernandez

The midterm elections have come and gone, leaving in their wake a renewed sense of change and hope for the future. While it may be a while before we feel the complete effect of Tuesday’s victories, in the meantime we can examine some changes that could take place real soon at the local level, with the next round of properties going up for sale in Ocean Beach and Point Loma:

4222-4224 Voltaire Street

The first property we will be looking at is the 4222-24 Voltaire Street Through-Lot. According to an offering memorandum for the property, this 5,135 square foot commercial through-lot runs from Voltaire Street to Whittier Street, and is also known as 4217 Whittier Street. The lot features a storefront with residential improvements in the back. The storefront along Voltaire is currently home to Bubba’s Barber Shop, a popular neighborhood barbershop established in 2018.

By Kate Callen

There are two schools of thought about how Michigan’s Haley Stevens should spend her final weeks as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Enraged Democrats reacted to her 11th-hour endorsement of Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers by wanting her stripped of office. She was booted from the Michigan Democratic Party. Long-time friends and mentors disavowed her.

Democrats with cooler heads preferred another outcome.

Forcing Stevens out of her job, if that were even possible, would make her an ideological martyr. Letting her stay would make her a pariah. If she shows up in the halls of Congress after this, she will be shunned like a skunk – publicly ostracized every minute of every painful remaining day.

Revenge is a dish best served cold. For maximum effect, it should be brought to the table slowly. Which is why a new campaign to recall Mayor Todd Gloria is a bad idea.

On October 29, a group of activists led by attorney Genevieve Jones-Wright filed a notice of intent to gather signatures for a recall petition. If all goes smoothly, the petition can begin circulating before Thanksgiving. If signatures from 15 percent of registered voters are collected within 120 days, the City Council must call a special election.

That election would cost money the city doesn’t have. It would bring Gloria’s YIMBY and labor minions out of the burrows where they’ve been hiding. It would overshadow the 2028 race for mayor and hinder the candidates already gearing up to succeed him.

And to what end? Gloria can’t inflict much more damage on San Diego. His “strong mayor” power has run out. He squandered it by racking up enough failures and transgressions to power a website.

>Nov. 3rd:– the Day Americans Take Back Our Country

8:40 pm Democrats take the Senate

Democrats Clinch Senate as Voters Deliver Blistering Rebuke to Trump; Democratic candidates won races in Republican strongholds, flipping Senate seats in

• Kansas,
• Ohio,
• North Carolina,
• South Carolina and even
• Texas. On a night shaping up as a Democratic rout, President Trump told The New York Times that he would accept the election results.

8:14 pm Crosby and Abraham take early leads in San Diego City Council races 2 and 4 with 689,666 ballots counted overall county-wide

Nicole Crosby at this stage has a 9 point lead over Richard Bailey in District 2, 54.5% to 45.5%.

Martha Abraham is in a much tighter race with incumbent Henry Foster III with a 3.3 point lead, 51.7% to 48.3%.

8:05 pm Xavier Becerra is first Mexican-American elected as governor of California

Xavier Becerra, a Democrat and former Biden administration official, began the race for California governor with poll numbers so low that his own party chairman urged him to drop out. Now, Mr. Becerra will become the next governor of the nation’s most populous state, The Associated Press said on Tuesday, a rise that was considered improbable a year ago. Mr. Becerra, 68, is the first Latino elected as governor of California, a milestone that punctuates a decades-long demographic shift in the state.

By Lindsay Whitehurst / PBS – Associated Press / Nov. 2, 2026

Trump administration appeals to Supreme Court to sideline 20,000 disputed California mail ballots

See Below — Analysis: More than 40% of names on DOJ list of alleged noncitizens not on California’s voter rolls

President Donald Trump’s administration appealed to the Supreme Court on Monday — today, Nov. 2 — in its push to sideline thousands of disputed California mail ballots the day before the pivotal midterm elections.

The emergency appeal came after a divided appeals court rejected the request to set aside ballots from some 20,000 people the federal government suspects may not be citizens. It also came just hours before another federal judge ruled against the administration’s efforts to make last-minute changes in California’s election.

The federal government says those ballots should not be counted until the voters’ status can be verified. California officials say the list is highly unreliable and likely includes many people who are U.S. citizens.

The Republican Trump administration has prioritized identifying noncitizen voters this year, despite them being rare.

A district court judge had previously denied the Justice Department’s request and warned that the demand could disenfranchise citizens in Tuesday’s midterm elections to determine control of Congress.

Impeachment and court reform stand out as the most powerful accountability tools Dems will have

By Bill Blum / Common Dreams – Truthdig / Nov 01, 2026 Truthdig

It’s not enough for the Democrats to win the midterms. Whether they take back one or both chambers of Congress, their overriding objective must be to cripple the remainder of Donald Trump’s presidency and dismantle the MAGA movement he leads. Holding Trump and his key enablers to account for their lawlessness and corruption will be the standard for success. Without accountability, there will be no justice and no end to the growing threat of fascism in America.

Of all the accountability tools that will be available should the Democrats prevail on November 3, impeachment and court reform stand out as the most powerful. Both are implicitly on the midterm ballot, and while neither is a magic bullet for checking Trumpism, they can and must be deployed far more aggressively and urgently than in the past.

The road ahead won’t be easy, but the party may never get another opportunity.

Impeachment
The Supreme Court’s 2024 decision on presidential immunity (Trump v. United States), penned by Chief Justice John Roberts, has made it all but impossible to hold Trump accountable through ordinary criminal prosecutions. As legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin has noted, Roberts’ opinion contains language that “suggests the president cannot even be investigated for his official actions,” much less indicted.

Elections are always split in their results; Tuesday’s could be the same

By Bill Eddy / Substack /  Nov 01, 2026

Over the past few weeks, we have seen a flurry of rallies by President Trump around the country, including this weekend, in desperate support of his troubled Republican candidates. It’s tempting to see this effort as futile for him since his approval ratings have now sunk to 30% according to some polls. However, I believe quite the opposite: by making urgent intense emotional attacks on Democrats he will claw back some of his reluctant followers to turn out the vote and dampen any Democratic wave. Remember that his power is based on right brain emotions rather than left-brain logic. (See last week’s blog: Right Brain Politics II.)

How Splitting Works

In 2012, a psychologist friend, Don Saposnek, and I wrote a little book titled: Splitting America: How Politicians, Super PACs and the News Media Mirror High Conflict Divorce. I was working as a family lawyer at the time and we were struck by the similarities of people with high-conflict personalities in high-conflict divorces to some politicians who were entering politics. People with high-conflict personalities tend to have four key characteristics: blaming others, all-or-nothing thinking, unmanaged emotions, and extreme behaviors. “Splitting” is a psychological term for seeing some people as all-good and others as all-bad, which is common for people with high-conflict personalities. As we wrote then:

Last week we ran Debbie Sklar’s post about Devil’s Pot in the Sunset Cliffs area. At that point, no one was certain where it used to be as it no longer exists, what due to the tremendous erosion the cliffs suffer every year.

Then “Larry OB” or Larry O’Brien responded to the post with this:

“In all fairness to Dave Bunnnell, [ed.:who performed a study of sections of cliffs cited by Debbie] back in 2008 he probably wasn’t aware of this (attached) photo of the early development of Sunset Cliffs.  I think Devil’s Pot was filled and buried out in front of the mansion at Osprey Street.”

The San Francisco-based court also said federal officials must stop demanding that ballots from selected voters be segregated.

Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney / rsn – POLITICO / November 2, 2026

A federal judge on Friday ordered the Justice Department to stop threatening state and local election officials with criminal prosecution over their handling of disputes about voter qualifications.

U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson also ordered the Trump administration to cease demanding that election workers remove voters from statewide rolls, refuse to issue ballots to specific voters or segregate ballots cast in the midterms based on the administration’s claims that some voters are ineligible.

By Staff

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

The full City Council is adjourned this week for elections.

Thursday, November 5:

Economic Development and Intergovernmental Relations Committee, 9:00 a.m.

Agenda:

Item 2: Proposed Revisions to Council Policies 900-20 Naming of City Assets and 000-40 Marketing Partnerships

Why it matters: The proposed revisions appear to strengthen transparency and oversight while maximizing potential revenue. But in a cash-poor city that continues to squander public trust, this issue will always need close scrutiny.