Category: San Diego

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

Monday, September 14: City Council, 10:00 a.m./2:00 p.m.

Agenda:

Item 200: Award a Construction Contract with Skanska USA for the El Camino Real to Via De La Valle Project

Why it matters: Awarding $57.4 million for a 9-year relocation and upgrade of a deteriorating half-mile road makes sense. But given San Diego’s sorry record of capital project management, any city endeavor of this size needs close and constant scrutiny.

Item 201: A Resolution to Demand Local Control in the Deployment of Autonomous Vehicles

Why it matters: The city plans to develop a process for tracking and monitoring AV violations and impacts on public safety.

By Paul Krueger / Times of San Diego / Sept. 10, 2026

The Aug. 26 conclusion of the lawsuit challenging San Diego’s inflated trash fee has prompted the release of new details about the cost to taxpayers of a divisive and unnecessary legal dispute.

The lawsuit was sparked by a City Council vote that approved a “world-class” trash and recycling program with new bins, weekly recycling, bulk-item pick-up, “radio frequency identification” tags and other add-ons.

Those perks — plus salaries for additional city employees to deliver the services — bumped the estimated baseline fee from about $23 a month to more than $40 monthly.

Taxpayers revolted. Facing both a ballot measure and a lawsuit, the City Council in May approved a compromise that significantly reduced both the fee and the scope of service.

The settlement scuttled the proposed ballot measure and resolved the lawsuit. But the dispute was still a drain on city finances.

Join veterans and others to protest the ongoing war in Iran …. time to bring the troops home.

by Ernie McCray

It’s so refreshing,

especially nowadays,

to hear ideas being expressed

in loving ways,

and I listened, recently,

to a few speakers,

at a forum sponsored by

H.O.M.E.

the abbreviation for

Humanitarian Outreach for

Migrant Emotional Health,

who spoke with affection concerning how the organization

goes about its mission to ensure

that the voices of asylum seekers,

ICE detainees,

and immigrants in removal proceedings

By Muir Avenue Ale

Amtrak has ruined my vacation, and I’m pissed.

For years, Amtrak has sold the California Rail Pass for $159. For the right kind of traveler and the right trip, it’s almost too good to be true. During a 21-day period, you can use the pass for seven days of nearly unlimited travel (four trips per day).

The pass includes these four train lines:

• Pacific Surfliner: San Diego to San Luis Obispo
• Gold Runner (my favorite): Bakersfield to Bay Area
• Capital Corridor: Bay Area
• Coast Starlight: Los Angeles to Dunsmuir

These trains are connected by a bunch of bus routes, which the pass covers. Two of these buses even take you into Nevada (Reno, Las Vegas) for no extra charge.

By Point Loma Observer

Last week, Voice of San Diego updated readers on Awaken Church and its “out there” pastor, Jurgen Matthesius, including a link to a recently posted supercut of clips from Matthesius’ sermons. The clips include his claims that he shrank a child’s inoperable tumor through prayer and that God called on him to pray for the tanks to stop during the Tiananmen Square massacre, prompting him to spontaneously speak in what the article characterizes as “Asian-tinged tongues.”

“Out there” is putting it mildly.

But Matthesius and Awaken Church are not simply a religious curiosity. As many Rag readers know, their influence extends into San Diego’s political arena.

In 2024, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported that Richard Bailey, now a candidate for San Diego City Council District 2, assisted members of the Awaken Church’s political arm, RMNNT, in their efforts to get elected to local office.

‘It Shouldn’t take a law suit to force the Commission to follow state law to protect tenants.’

by Cody Dulaney / inewsource / September 8, 2026

The illegal rent increase saga that has for years dogged San Diego’s largest housing agency is nearing an end.

The San Diego Housing Commission, which hands out more than $300 million every year in Section 8 vouchers to help low-income tenants pay rent, agreed to settle the latest of two lawsuits related to approving rent increases that exceed the cap set by state law. Under the agreement obtained by inewsource, the agency is set to pay nearly $6,000 in litigation costs and provide records that would show whether rent increases previously approved by the agency were lawful.

Housing attorneys and advocates across the state are hailing the outcome as a boon to Section 8 participants, who rely on vouchers to pay rent, and taxpayers, who fund the program. The Housing Commission declined to comment, citing ongoing hearings.

The settlement marks the latest development in a years-long controversy that drew in the California Attorney General and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, while taxpayers and Section 8 voucher holders bore the costs of rent increases that went unchecked.

By Debbie L. Sklar / Special to the OB Rag

In 1855, a group of San Diegans began prospecting for coal on Point Loma.

The project was an ambitious one. The San Diego Coal Co. hoped to develop the deposit into a local source of fuel and a profitable business for its investors. A local coal supply also could have helped San Diego compete as a coaling station for steamships and potentially benefit from future railroad development.

The men behind the venture were associated with San Diego’s small Mormon community. Among them was Ephraim Green, a former member of the Mormon Battalion who later said he had noticed coal on Point Loma before leaving San Diego in 1847.

The story has acquired a mythology of its own. One version says the Mormon prospectors were acting on a “revelation” that coal could be found there. But the historical record tells a more complicated story.

Reports of possible coal deposits on Point Loma dated to at least 1849. In 1855, Green returned to California and told members of the Mormon colony at San Bernardino about the coal he remembered seeing on Point Loma. He eventually led interested men to the site.

The prospecting soon became a formal business.

The San Diego Coal Co. was formed in November 1855 by Green, H.C. Ladd, George Warren Sirrine and Seth Benjamin Tanner.

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 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.

Players Have Begun Petition to Restore Hours

By Michael Hernandez

A group of pickleball players are waving their paddles in frustration after a reduction of hours at the North Clairemont Recreation Center leaves them without a court to play on.

New hours of operation, as part of city council-approved budget cuts, went into effect for at least 16 different rec centers in San Diego at the end of last month, including at the North Clairemont Rec Center at Officer Austin Machitar Memorial Park.

For years, a tight-knit band of pickleball players have called the facility home, taking advantage of the free pickleball lessons offered every Tuesday and Thursday at 9 a.m. and the open-play from 10:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. However, under the new schedule, hours of operation would drop from 60 down to 40 hours, and the center would not open on Tuesdays and Thursdays  until 2 p.m., virtually eliminating their routine morning games.

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.