Category: Reader Rant

OB Staff Report / September 29, 2025

Campaigning for San Diego’s June 2 primary election is already underway. Given the City’s deplorable state of affairs (101 Ash, predatory development, bait-and-switch trash fees, paid Balboa Park parking), voter interest in the four Council races on the 2026 ballot will be unusually intense.

To help voters make informed choices, the Rag will provide investigative coverage of the most important 2026 races. We will scout campaign finance reports and document where candidates get their support. We will study the fine print on campaign mailers and tell you which powerbrokers and special interest groups funded them.

The best indicators of a politician’s real agenda aren’t their promises or their platforms. It’s the money. When you know who is backing a candidate, you can pretty much predict what that person will do in office.

Let’s say we publish a list of the top 20 donors to Candidate X, and we identify many of them as players who have been close to Mayor Todd Gloria. Their support for X means they believe X will follow in Gloria’s political footsteps.

If you think Gloria has been a great mayor, you might want to give X your vote and even your money. If you think Gloria has been a disaster, you might want to back one of X’s opponents.

By Brae Canlen / June 11, 2025

That awful pasta salad your sister-in-law brings to the 4th of July barbecue? Expect it to appear again this year. Your supervisor, the one who was promoted over you because he sucks up to the right people? He is a bona fide psycho who should be reported to HR, for all the good that will do.

These are all true events. But they didn’t happen to me. They happened to people I have never met and probably never will meet. I know about them because I happened to be in the right place at the right time – sitting on my living room couch reading a book or working on my computer.

The victims were walking their dogs past my house or maybe just getting some exercise. They decided to call someone. Or someone decided to call them. Either way, they pressed a button and pulled me into their conversations, their dramas, their lives.

By Frank Laughton / June 3, 2025

First, a true confession, I am not a financial wizard, and I have never run for or held a public office. I’m just a lowly taxpayer, and recent decisions from our political leaders make me feel even more lowly.

I was a firm supporter of the strong mayor concept in 2004, when the passage of Proposition F eliminated the city manager form of government on a trial basis, and again in 2010, when the passage of Proposition D made the new arrangement permanent. I believed at the time that the Mayor needed to have the flexibility to carry out his or her agenda.

But the past several years have delivered a strong wake-up call. Everywhere I look, I see hard evidence that the Mayor and the City Council do not have the competence to run the affairs of the city.

Let’s start with fiscal mismanagement. I’m a former long-distance biker who is all for safety. But how can the City justify spending $90 million on 26 miles of bike lanes that are hardly used? There was no cost-benefit analysis done (that I know of). When the Mayor was asked for a justification of the large expenditure, his answer was “safety.” Where was the data to support that position?

By Orville

You guys need to let the city manager thing go.

San Diego was able to generate plenty of scandals under that system too, and you all know full well they’d just hire a lackey anyway – one we couldn’t vote out every four years.

Pining for a model used by mid-size cities is waste of everyone’s time. 1.4 million people live here. It’s not getting on the ballot. The ship has sailed.

Reader Rant by Rick Dower

On Wednesday afternoon, Feb. 1st, I almost became the victim of an attempted scam which I will call the ‘old Armani leather jacket con’.

I was walking my dog across Pt. Loma Ave at Guizot St. just an hour before I wrote this up as a warning for OB Rag readers, and a guy in a nice white Jeep Grand Cherokee stops in the middle of the street, hails me in a heavy Italian accent. Needs directions to the airport.

He pulled onto Guizot, I gave “Antonio” directions, he profusely thanks me. In heavily accented English, he then tells me he is a designer for Giorgio Armani in Milan, was in San Diego for a big fashion show and is leaving in 2 hours for London for another show.

What-a size are you?” He is so grateful for my help he offers to give –give!– me 3 nice-looking “Armani” leather jackets he designed and brought to town for the show.

By Local One

I attended the Peninsula Community Planning Board meeting last night (Thursday, July 21) and listened intently to the presentations made by Mayor Faulconer’s representative and the head of the Developmental Services Department.

Boy oh boy, what a bunch of packaged lies we were fed last night. The people can see with their own eyes that the community is being snookered with regard to the lack of enforcement, and continuing DSD approval, of numerous violations of the existing MC defined 30 foot coastal height limit.

Speaker after speaker last night quoted directly from the Municipal Code in which the law is absolutely clear with regard to measuring the 30? height, but City representatives from the Mayor’s office and DSD kept insisting that the City Attorney’s office interprets the voter approved Proposition D very differently than any common sense reading of the law.

Further, the Mayor and DSD shut down the Emerson Street project based on a violation of the FAR standards, NOT the obvious violation of the 30 foot coastal height limit.

By Geoff Page

If you are going to the polls today and are thinking of voting for Kevin Faulconer because he has “repaired” 300 miles of roads, as he is telling everyone, he has been successful in fooling you.

This doesn’t mean you are not smart, it just means that paving is not something you know much about and you think this is true because of all the new black streets and new stripes. I’ve been in the construction business for 43 years. I know paving and the mayor is not being honest.

The vast majority of what has been done is called slurry seal. This is not a “repair,” slurry seal is a maintenance operation designed to prolong the life of good asphalt. It is something the city should have been doing all along.
.

OB Commuters on Bike Path Will Have to Take Lengthy Detour

By Tom Roebuck

Bike to Work Day is Friday, May 20th and has been heavily promoted by SANDAG.

But OB cyclists attempting to commute to work on Friday via the Ocean Beach bike path will encounter a chain-link fence just east of the W. Mission Bay Drive bridge.

With no public notice or input, SDG&E has completely closed the OB bike path between W. Mission Bay Drive and Pacific Highway until at least May 27.

The runway-flat stretch of blacktop on the south side of the San Diego River provides easy access from OB to Old Town, downtown San Diego and Mission Valley, and the closure will force cyclists, joggers, walkers and other users of the path onto busy surface streets for a lengthy detour.

2 Multi-Story Residences on Border Between OB and Point Loma Approved by City Without OB Planning Board Input, While Peninsula Board Votes to Oppose Project

By Tom and Judy Parry

“Sorry, Ocean Beach, your opinion doesn’t count.”

That’s essentially what the city has told residents of a quiet Ocean Beach street where two multistory residences would be squeezed onto a tiny parcel and tower over the single-family homes on the block, if a developer prevails, . The ultra-modern architecture would blend in with Southern California Spanish style homes and graceful bungalows as well as a fisherman’s wading boots at a black tie dinner.

That’s the situation where we live, on Froude Street between Voltaire and Greene Street. The applicant wants two twin residences on two tiny lots, each just 25 feet wide. There’s an imaginary line that runs down Froude Street – our side is under Peninsula Community Planning Board jurisdiction. The other side, though less than 50 feet away, belongs in the Ocean Beach Planning Board district.

By Jeff Stone

Why is the mainstream media only in hysterics over ISIS and the “terrorist threats” from Muslims? Could it be that they are being manipulated, or even directed by our government agencies?

Before you accuse this writer of paranoia realize that there are only six corporations that collectively control U.S. media today: Time Warner, Walt Disney, Viacom, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., CBS Corporation and NBC Universal. Together, the “big six” absolutely dominate news and entertainment in the United States.

A

A Reader’s Rant

By Joe Flynn / San Diego Free Press

Editor : The following “Reader’s Rant” by Mr. Flynn is a response to Taking a Wide Lens on Mission Valley by Mary Lydon, published in Voice of San Diego.

A wide angle lens may not be the appropriate analogy for this discussion. It seems a telephoto lens for a close up was used here focusing on providing a stadium for the Chargers. The rest of the picture is fuzzy. What is troubling about these discussions is that they begin and end with the assumption that the city owned land in Mission Valley, now improved with Qualcomm Stadium is “dedicated for sports facility use.”

Have Progressives Given Up on OB ?

Psst! Don’t tell the government. Don’t tell the right-wing. But progressives, radicals, socialists, anarchists, leftists … whatever you want to call them – they’ve given up on Ocean Beach.