Category: San Diego

by Sharisse Cohee / Fox5 SanDiego / Nov 18-19, 2025 

A woman in Point Loma pleaded guilty in federal court Thursday, Nov. 13, admitting she embezzled more than $8.5 million from her employer and spent a portion of the stolen funds on luxuries and high-end fashion.

According to a press release from the Department of Justice, Ping “Jenny” Gao, 55, embezzled the funds from her employer by draining four bank accounts belonging to his U.S. companies.

In her plea agreement, Goa admitted to funneling company funds into fraudulent accounts she created. She reportedly used the stolen funds on lavish shopping sprees at high-end fashion retailers and also purchased a $160,000 Porsche and a $2.9 million home overlooking San Diego Bay.

When the employer discovered the stolen funds, he attempted to sue Gao in San Diego Superior Court, during which she falsely claimed that the person suing her was an imposter and that the real owner of the company in China authorized her actions.

By Ralph Teyssier, S.E.

I wanted to respond to Geoff Page’s November 19 Rag article about bringing the city’s neglect of our Ocean Beach Fishing Pier to the forefront.

What should concern all of us is that this iconic public treasure — our beloved OB Pier — has effectively become a forgotten park resource under the Todd Gloria administration. What began as a promising effort in May 2021, when Mayor Gloria, less than six months into his first term, expressed strong enthusiasm for jump-starting a new pier, has now seemingly stalled.

For context, it’s important to remember that the initial momentum, via community urging, arrived when Mayor Todd Gloria, with help from Senate President pro Tem Toni Atkins, secured an $8.4 million state grant to begin design work. Details of that effort can be found on the city’s OB Pier Renewal Project page, including the recently posted Task Force White Paper:

This document — made public only after multiple requests — makes it clear that real progress is slipping away. The contrast between the 1½-year construction timeline in the September 2024 White Paper and the protracted 3½-year timeline currently shown on the city’s website speaks volumes about the administration’s waning interest. And just as the project loses momentum, the pier itself is literally disappearing, piece by piece. I doubt this level of prolonged neglect of a historically recognized coastal icon sits well with the California Coastal Commission.

Geoff’s reporting makes the demolition-by-neglect painfully obvious: copper and iron piping stolen, gates breached, lighting stripped, and the structure left unsecured and unlit

By Kate Callen

Southeastern San Diego has never had the resources of wealthier communities with robust business districts, sturdy infrastructure, parks, and open green space.

But it does have an extraordinary natural asset: a 31-acre hilltop plateau with a stunning panoramic 360-view of the San Diego-Tijuana coastal landscape.

A city with visionary leaders would seize this opportunity to create an iconic landmark, like the Griffith Park Observatory in Los Angeles, that draws visitors from far and wide. The attraction would transform the Emerald Hills-Encanto community. New businesses would spring up. A new civic pride would take root.

But that’s not what San Diego is doing. In its zeal to turbo-charge housing everywhere and anywhere, America’s Finest City intends to let a Texas-based developer build private homes on the hilltop site.

On November 20, the Planning Commission voted unanimously to support a development of 130 houses constructed by D.R Horton, the country’s largest home builder. The private enclave will resemble a fortress, disconnected from the surrounding community. It will have amenities like “pocket parks” that benefit the homeowners but not the general public.

Millions of American Drivers Are Monitored Nationwide in a Secretive Program to Identify and Detain Suspicious People

By Associated Press – Times of San Diego / November 20, 2025

The U.S. Border Patrol is monitoring millions of American drivers nationwide in a secretive program to identify and detain people whose travel patterns it deems suspicious, The Associated Press has found.

The predictive intelligence program has resulted in people being stopped, searched and in some cases arrested. A network of cameras scans and records vehicle license plate information, and an algorithm flags vehicles deemed suspicious based on where they came from, where they were going and which route they took. Federal agents in turn may then flag local law enforcement.

Suddenly, drivers find themselves pulled over — often for reasons cited such as speeding, failure to signal, the wrong window tint or even a dangling air freshener blocking the view. They are then aggressively questioned and searched, with no inkling that the roads they drove put them on law enforcement’s radar.

Once limited to policing the nation’s boundaries, the Border Patrol has built a surveillance system stretching into the country’s interior that can monitor ordinary Americans’ daily actions and connections for anomalies instead of simply targeting wanted suspects. Started about a decade ago to fight illegal border-related activities and the trafficking of both drugs and people, it has expanded over the past five years.

By U T Editorial Board / November 21, 2025

For more than a decade, The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board has called for a comprehensive push to make it much easier to build new housing in California. The extreme cost of shelter is why the Golden State has become the epicenter of American poverty. That won’t change until there are wholesale changes in state laws that make it easy to impede new projects or make them more costly.

Thankfully, the last two governors have shared this point of view. This year, Gavin Newsom got two laws enacted with far more promise than previous ballyhooed reforms to clear the way for considerable new construction: Senate Bill 79, which preempts local governments’ ability to block multifamily, multistory housing projects near transit stops, and Assembly Bill 130, which changes the California Environmental Quality Act to limit the ease with which spurious claims can be used to block housing projects.

But in San Diego, our big-picture support for streamlining review processes and making it easier to build is complicated by the city’s dismaying history on land-use decisions, especially the ongoing Ash Street debacle. Three recent commentaries on our pages provide fresh reminders that City Hall can’t be trusted to do the right thing.

On Nov. 12, local activist Danna Givot made a strong case that the city’s plans for explosive growth — 262% more residents and 316% more housing units — in the College Area in coming years were unaccompanied by meaningful proposals to improve infrastructure to deal with this transformational increase in density. It’s not NIMBYism to point this out.

By Donna Frye 

On November 11, 2025, I sent a question to the city regarding the Clairemont Community Plan Update. I used the email address the city provided to obtain more information about the plan.

It was a simple question about the northern industrial area east of I-5 and I received a prompt and courteous response the next day.

As I reviewed the update in more detail, I sent another email about the Height Limit Overlay Zone on November 13.

My email said:

“I am a bit confused about the Height Limit Overlay Zone and hope you can help me better understand that too, especially in the Villages, Corridors and Nodes. What is the height limit for each of the 9 Village Areas shown?  And how high could the buildings be in each of the 9 Village Areas if the state and city density program is used?  Could they be higher than 240 feet and if so where would that be? I appreciate your helping me better understand this.’”

I did not receive a response so I sent a follow-up email on November 17.  I even simplified my request for information.

By Paul Krueger

At this morning’s Planning Commission meeting, Thursday, Nov. 20, I demanded that Vice-Chair Matthew Boomhower apologize to the public — and his fellow commissioners — for his attempt to silence a speaker at the Commission’s November 9th meeting.

I read aloud Boomhower’s comment that the speaker shouldn’t be allowed to continue speaking because he supposedly made what could be considered some sort of “legal threat” against a project being developed by his colleague, Commission Chair Kelly Moden.

I also read aloud from the accepted summary of what sort of speech is prohibited when members of the public address a public body, and pointed out that nothing the speaker Boomhower tried to silence could, by any interpretation, be construed as prohibited speech.

See this interaction in this video of my comments (about 3 minutes in)..

By Frank Gormlie

It so happens that despite everything else, San Diego’s coastal 30-foot height limit has been thrust back into the the public’s consciousness and into the minds of Mayor Gloria and the nine city councilmembers who all sit in City Hall.

Just this October, California’s 4th District Court of Appeal ruled that the City of San Diego violated California’s Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, when it put Measure C — the initiative that aimed to eliminate the height limit in the Midway District — before voters on the 2022 ballot because the city did not sufficiently study the environmental impacts of taller buildings. The three-judge panel decision ruled in favor of plaintiff Save Our Access, and directed the trial court to issue a writ of mandate to invalidate the ordinance and restore the 30-foot height limit in the Midway District.

While some environmental activists were popping champagne bottles in celebration of the ruling, local developers, city council members and Mayor Gloria were wringing their hands because they immediately knew this court decision could have devastating implications for the massive redevelopment project called Midway Rising and its plans for 86-foot tall buildings in the Midway District. Ultimately, these folks did more than wring their hands — they made plans.

One month after the city lost this court appeal case, City Council members voted 6 to 2 in closed session to authorize a petition for review of the case to the Supreme Court of California. (Councilmembers Vivian Moreno and Raul Campillo were the ‘no’ votes, while Henry Foster was absent.) These city leaders want the state’s highest court to keep intact the ballot measure — which passed by only 51% — and allow the Midway Rising project to continue its redevelopment of the 1,324-acre Midway District.

It’s in this context then, that we must revisit the origins of the 30 foot height limit — and the 50 plus year fight to preserve it.

Afterall, the 30-foot height limit has been blamed for everything from the housing crisis to the lack of affordability at the coast, to the homeless situation. A lot of myths surround the measure and law, and some treat it as just a passing fancy of the seventies or as just another political initiative to be tossed aside by the changing winds.

They ignore — out of ignorance — that it was a citizen-driven measure and scores of volunteers — repeat, volunteers — gathered signatures for months and months, and in the end, collected 36,000 to place it on the 1972 ballot as Measure D. And it then passed overwhelmingly and decisively with 64% of the vote — it was a landslide. Nearly two-thirds of city voters voted “yes”. And it wasn’t just the coastal communities that voted for it – it was across the board – many neighborhoods went for it with the attitude, ‘they’re our beaches, too’. Ocean Beach and Pacific Beach voted for it by 80%.

The winning vote was immediately contested by the building industry.

By Seth Hall / Op-Ed SD Union-Tribune / November 20, 2025 

In his recent newsletter and across his social media accounts, San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria has been writing about how pleased he is that our city uses Flock Safety’s automated license plate reader (ALPR) technology, which is a network of 500 cameras blanketing San Diego roads, unblinkingly converting nearly 3 million vehicle images into trackable data every month. Gloria claims that hundreds of arrests have resulted from the technology’s use and millions of dollars worth of property have been recovered.

That’s not the whole story, though. As someone who works as part of the TRUST SD Coalition to understand the surveillance technology being used in San Diego, I know some other facts about Flock ALPR that should interest San Diegans.

For example, San Diegans might be interested in the June 2025 memo from San Diego Police Department admitting that San Diego’s Flock ALPR database had been left open to access by agencies outside of San Diego, resulting in thousands of searches of our vehicle records for reasons entirely outside our knowledge or control.

By Kate Callen

City Hall fiascoes in San Diego follow the same playbook. Elected officials rush into decisions that benefit people important to them. They seem bewildered when their choices detonate. Then they shrug and start planning their next political campaign.

Six Councilmembers – Joseph LaCava, Jen Campbell, Marni von Wilpert, Kent Lee, Henry Foster III, and Sean Elo-Rivera – adhered to the playbook November 18 by voting “Yes” for the detested Balboa Park parking fees. In essence, they chose to inflict pain on their weary constituents so they could protect the jobs of their cherished staff.

Two Councilmembers, Vivian Moreno and Stephen Whitburn, voted “No” to side with the public. And a third, Raul Campillo, voted “No” with a blistering takedown of how the city government has breached its fiduciary duty by refusing to curb its spending.

Campillo also echoed the concerns of two dozen public speakers: What if the new fees reduce park attendance, drive down park revenues, and generate less-then-projected funding?

After toying with higher fees, the Council settled on charging residents $100 and non-residents $300 for yearly permits. The original estimated revenue of $12.5 million this fiscal year would have helped shrink the $350-million budget deficit. The revised estimated revenue of $2.9 million to $4 million won’t make a dent.

From SOHO Newsletter / Nov.-Dec. 2025

The rallying cry “Yes in My Backyard” sounds positive on the surface. Who wouldn’t want to be part of a movement that claims to champion housing, inclusion, and opportunity? But behind the slogan lies a harder truth. In practice, many in the YIMBY movement, which is primarily run by corporate and political players, are speaking in code, really saying: “Yes in Your Backyard.” This, in fact, is the unspoken rallying cry of developer- and investor-funded interests that push density, demolitions, and deregulation into other people’s neighborhoods while protecting their own assets, investments, and privilege.

The modern YIMBY movement may or may not have begun with good intentions, but in cities like San Diego it has been co-opted by the for-profit housing industry and developer/investor-funded nonprofits. These groups have learned that “YIMBY” makes an excellent disguise, one that cloaks profit-driven lobbying in the language of social good.

Under this banner, policies are being hyped that remove community voices, weaken environmental and historic protections, and fast-track demolition over rehabilitation. The result? The loss of our most walkable, sustainable, and affordable neighborhoods, the very communities that embody the kind of living urbanists support.

By David Garrick / San Diego Union-Tribune / November 18, 2025

A sharply divided San Diego City Council voted 6-3 Tuesday to approve annual parking passes for Balboa Park that are intended to allow frequent park users to avoid daily and hourly parking fees coming in January.

The council’s approval of the permits, which will cost $100 a year for city residents and $300 a year for nonresidents, comes after city officials retreated last week from much higher prices proposed initially.

Council members who voted in favor called the lower rates a good compromise and stressed that Mayor Todd Gloria and his staff had made many concessions this year to the council and frequent park users.

Council members who voted against the permit fees — Stephen Whitburn, Raul Campillo and Vivian Moreno — criticized the entire idea of parking fees in Balboa Park.

Their comments echoed complaints from three dozen clubs and other organizations in the park focused on dance, gardening, beekeeping, model railroading, playing bridge and other activities.