Category: San Diego

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

Monday, April 6: City Council, 2:00 p.m.

Agenda

Item 251: Propositions for the November 3, 2026 Ballot Forwarded for 2nd Committee Review

Why it matters: Two of the five measures under review seek changes related to how the Transient Occupancy Tax applies to online travel companies. The other three would establish free parking at city beaches and bays (Campillo), remove term limits for the City Auditor (Lee), and reform campaign finance and ethics laws (Elo-Rivera).

By Nadia Lathan and Deborah Brenner / Cal-Matters / April 6, 2026

When Republican Rep. Darrell Issa quit his reelection campaign last month, Democrats celebrated. Now, some are worried.

Issa’s exit is seen as a mixed blessing among Democratic officials who have eyed flipping his San Diego House seat for years. While demonstrators at a No Kings rally last weekend were exultant to see him leave the race, local Democratic organizers are more guarded. The Republican who took his place, San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond, is a longtime local official with name recognition, fundraising connections and community relationships — without Issa’s close ties to President Donald Trump.

“If anything, Jim Desmond is a slightly better candidate than Darrell Issa in some regards,” because he is not as closely affiliated with Trump, said Dan Rottenstreich, a spokesperson for Marni von Wilpert, one of two leading Democrats in the race.

Twenty years ago, the San Diego Reader ran a long cover story called “90 Years of Curl,” an in-depth review of surfing history, particularly in San Diego, written by Jeannette DeWyze.

Then this year on March 30, the online version of the Reader republished it as “San Diego surf heroes going back to 1910 — When Duke Kahanamoku tried the OB Pier.”

[What OB Pier would that be? The one that is permanently closed right now was opened in 1966. There was another pier built earlier – south of where the 66 pier is.]

This story first appeared in the Reader on December 14, 2006.

There’s a good chance Ralph Noisat caught the first wave in San Diego. He died in 1980, and as he wasn’t a man to brag, his pioneering role might have been lost were it not for his board. He made it himself when he was a boy, and it was still in the Noisat family home in 1998 when Ralph’s daughter, Margie Chamberlain, was preparing to sell the Mission Hills residence. Chamberlain realized the heavy wooden board might have historic value, so she called the California Surf Museum in Oceanside. No one there knew anything about Noisat, but the museum staff was thrilled to accept the board when they heard what Chamberlain had to say about her father.

Here are samples of photos sent to us last weekend, too late for the live-blog (that shut down about 5:30 pm after beginning at 8:15 in the morning) that we now would like to share.

Downtown San Diego — Waterfront Park

From Change Begins With ME .Indivisible.

Tribe Never Consulted During Planning for Hidden Valley Ranch Housing Project

by Katie Futterman / inewsource / March 29, 2026

Tribal leaders have found human remains and evidence of a burial site – first in October and twice this March – at the construction site of a housing development first approved in Poway over 20 years ago.

The San Pasqual Band of Mission Indians is calling on the city and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to stop work on a portion of a 420-acre site on the east side of Old Coach Road immediately.

In October, Johnny Bear Contreras, the chair of the cultural committee for the San Pasqual Band of Mission Indians, got a call from fellow cultural monitors telling him to come take a look at the Hidden Valley Ranch project.

When he arrived at the site of what’s slated to be 41 single-family homes, he found just what the tribe had expected: human remains.

by JW August / Times of San Diego / April 2, 2026

A San Diego council member suggested at a recent committee meeting that the city look into ways to take revenue from golf division leases to help fund all parks and recreation needs.

The Golf Enterprise Fund provides for the care and maintenance of the city’s three public courses. At the end of last year it held an impressive $55 million.

With a city facing a $120 million budget shortfall in the coming fiscal year, this tempting target is fodder for those tasked with filling the gap. Councilman Sean Elo-Rivera, at a Land Use and Housing Committee meeting last month, asked that city staff study the possibility of shifting more money away from the golf fund to cover other expenses.

In 2025, the gross revenue for San Diego’s municipal courses was $41.4 million, 9.9% of which was paid to the general fund.

by Tessa Balc / Times of San Diego / March 31, 2026

The next chapter in San Diego’s pursuit of Midway Rising will play out in Sacramento.

State Senator Akilah Weber Pierson introduced a bill last week to exempt the project from review under the state’s landmark environmental law and make way for the plan to redevelop the roughly 50-acre area around Pechanga Arena into an urban district with 4,000 homes, acres of parks, and a new arena.

[Please see original for any and all links.]

Weber Pierson’s proposal follows a California Supreme Court decision not to review a previous court ruling that threw out a 2022 voter-approved initiative to raise the height limit in the Midway area. The lower court ruled that the city failed to consider the environmental impacts of allowing taller buildings there.

Midway Rising’s developers quickly said the court’s ruling would not halt their project, because other state housing laws allowed them to exceed the height limit regardless.

The Home Team Act has been introduced in the U.S. Senate which would if pass keep the Padres in San Diego — at least for another year.

Here’s Phillip Molnar at the San Diego U-T:

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders is behind a bill that would prevent the Padres from leaving in the future — and would have kept the Chargers in San Diego. Some say the government has no place in dictating where private businesses operate.

Sanders, I-Vermont, and U.S. Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, recently introduced the Home Team Act, which would require team ownership to provide one year of notice before moving a team to a new location if the team would move across state lines or to a new metropolitan area.

During that year prior to the proposed relocation, the franchise in question would be available for other prospective owners to purchase “at a fair and reasonable price.”

San Diego is especially sensitive about teams leaving after the Chargers went to Los Angeles in 2017. Recently, the Padres have entertained several offers to sell, igniting fears someone may take the baseball club somewhere else.

Editordude: The following is an unsolicited response to a recent Rag post entitled, “Open Letter to the Demonstrators at the Corner of Sunset Cliffs & West Point Loma,” which has garnered quite a bit of attention but not a lot of actual dialog, which was our intent in publishing it. Until this … from Code Pink activists. 

Dear Clandestina Urbanista,

We appreciate you taking the time to write. We also want to be straightforward in response.

We are members of the San Diego chapter of CODEPINK, and we speak for our chapter only. Together with members of Veterans For Peace, Jewish Voice For Peace, and several other organizations throughout San Diego, we gather each week because what is happening in Gaza is not an abstract “complexity” – it is mass killing, carried out with the full support and funding of the United States government. As U.S. taxpayers, we refuse to be silent in the face of it.

We reject the framing that asking the public to hold “all sides” equally, in this moment, is a neutral act. It risks obscuring the scale, power, and ongoing nature of the violence being inflicted on Palestinians, as well as Iranians and Lebanese.

The City of San Diego has begun the process of replacing the 44-year old Mission Beach lifeguard station. On March 14, the city began fencing off the existing lifeguard tower from the public and started installing a temporary lifeguard tower and trailer just north of the current dilapidated station.

“These temporary facilities will allow lifeguards to operate safely and efficiently while plans are developed to upgrade the existing station,” the city of San Diego said in a released statement at the time work began.

This is all well and good — a lifeguard station that old deserves to be replaced. And the surrounding community deserves it also.

Yet — what about the Ocean Beach lifeguard station? It’s even older than the Mission Beach one. It was built in 1980-1981. (See comments to that post.)

Sure, the city can argue that the Mission Beach station serves a larger community and there’s more beachgoers there than in Ocean Beach. Okay, replace them both.

This also fits a pattern all too familiar with observant OBceans who’ve seen city resources go to other communities over the years — no, over the decades. South Mission Beach got a new lifeguard station; Pacific Beach got a new station; La Jolla got a new one.

But not OB.

Perhaps due to the marginal size of the neighborhood — not that many voters or property owners — Ocean Beach has been repeatedly passed over on infrastructure projects that have been needed.

Every Saturday at 10:30 am. San Diego Climate Mobilization Coalition Meetings April 4th, 11th, 18th and 25th

Every Saturday 10 am – 12 pm Peace Vigil for Palestine:

The San Diego River Park Foundation has volunteer opportunities in Ocean Beach:

Every Sunday 1:30 pm – 4 pm Otay Mesa Vigil

League of Women Voters EMPOWERING VOTERS & DEFENDING DEMOCRACY Information on upcoming forums for City Council Primary Races:

April 1st, 8th and 15th Wednesdays 4:30 pm – 5:30 pm Resist Trump Flash Banner Action –

April 2nd Thursday 6 pm – 7:30 pm Surfrider Open House

April 4th Saturday 4pm -7 pm Jewish Voice for Peace San Diego Passover Seder

April 4th Saturday 4 pm – 6 pm Spring GBM with Green New Deal

April 5th Sunday 11 am – 2 pm EASTER SUNDAY OUTREACH — Factory Farms Awareness Action

April 6th Monday 6 pm – 8 pm Friends of Famosa Slough 40th Anniversary

By Bruce D Coons, Barry Hager and Geoffrey Hueter / Op-Ed San Diego U-T / April 1, 2026

San Diegans face housing affordability challenges. But if policy solutions are going to work, they must be based on evidence rather than assumptions.

San Diego’s biggest affordable housing program isn’t on paper — it’s already built. Our older and historic homes are doing more for affordability than any subsidy program in the city.

A new independent analysis released recently by PlaceEconomics, “The Urban Vitality Blueprint: A Data-Driven Analysis of Equity, Affordability, and Vitality in San Diego’s Historic Districts,” examines the role that historic districts and older neighborhoods play in housing, affordability and sustainability across San Diego. The findings challenge several widely repeated claims in the city’s current policy debate.

Historic districts are often portrayed as low-density neighborhoods that limit housing growth. In reality, the opposite is true. Here are a few key facts from the report: