Category: San Diego

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

Monday, January 26: City Council, Closed Session, 10:00 a.m.

Agenda.

Item CS-1: Conference with legal counsel regarding 56 flooding litigation suits brought by nearly 2,000 residents.

Why it matters: It’s been a full two years since Southeastern San Diego neighborhoods were flooded because the city failed to maintain storm drain channels. Victims are still seeking reparation.

By JW August – Special to the OB Rag

The San Diego region, which has a history of birthing hate groups, most notably white supremacy organizations, has seen an increase in the number and the power of these groups locally – and there have been also increases seen across the country.

White nationalist groups aren’t just about the hatred of Black, Latino / Hispanic and Jews but they’re also about “remaking the country as an ethnostate, where citizenship is limited to whites,” Rachel Carroll Rivas of the Southern Poverty Law Center told Times of San Diego.

Rivas says the National Coalition For Men, now headquartered in San Diego, is “very much impacting young men who are joining this male supremacist movement with claims of what true masculinity is.” Researchers are finding that the anti-feminist appeal to young male voters, instrumental in Trump’s recent election, is helping recruit people to the male supremacist movement.

This recruitment and indoctrination of men by these types of extremist groups is expanding, not just locally but across the globe, Rivas says.

For more about these Men’s Rights Activists go to SPLC website .

The OB Rag also interviewed criminologist and civil rights attorney Brian Levin who provided  information on the hate trends from 2025, when President Donald Trump entered office. Levin is projecting we will be seeing a drop in reported hate crimes in San Diego and elsewhere.

ICE OUT FOR GOOD — San Diego County Solidarity Actions & Nationwide Minnesota Day of Action

Friday, January 23, there are coordinated rallies and calls for boycotts across San Diego County as part of “ICE Out for Good”, aligned with the broader Minnesota Solidarity Day of Action opposing recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations and demanding accountability, community safety, and human rights protection.

These local actions are connected to nationwide demonstrations and economic solidarity efforts responding to the federal ICE enforcement surge in Minnesota and the fatal shooting of 37-year-old Renée Good — an unarmed civilian killed by a federal ICE agent during heightened immigration enforcement activity earlier this month — which has sparked widespread protests and national outrage.

SAN DIEGO COUNTY ACTION SCHEDULE — JANUARY 23, 2026

Billionaire Geoff Palmer Sued the City for Having to Include Some Affordable Housing Units While His Company Builds 1,000s of Units in San Diego.

By Dorian Hargrove / CBS8 / January 22, 2026

A Los Angeles landlord who owns more than 15,000 units in Southern California and is set to build more than 2,500 apartments in San Diego has lost his lawsuit seeking to get out of including affordable housing units in his projects.

According to court documents obtained by CBS 8, on Jan. 16, a federal judge dismissed billionaire Geoff Palmer’s lawsuit, which claimed the city’s inclusionary affordable housing rules were unconstitutional and akin to the government seizing private property.

Currently, Palmer’s company, G.H. Palmer, is finishing a 1,642-apartment project on Convoy Street in Kearny Mesa and is waiting to build nearly 1,000 additional units at a separate project in Grantville.

In Dec. 2022, before construction began on the Kearny Mesa project, Palmer’s company requested that the city exempt the project from the City’s Inclusionary Affordable Housing Requirement. The program required Palmer to set aside 10% of the units, or 164 in the case of the Kearny Mesa development, or to pay “in lieu of fees” for opting out.

The city denied Palmer’s request.

In Sept. 2023, Palmer sued the city, alleging the law was unconstitutional and violated private property safeguards.

Thousands of Minnesotans chanting “No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here,” are marching through downtown Minneapolis to demand ICE leave the state.

The chants ring through the crowd—clearly energized and undeterred by freezing temperatures—that includes teachers, electricians, community members, and others from seemingly countless organizations

Many of the signs refer to Renee Good, a poet, Minneapolis resident and 37-year-old mother of three who was killed on January 7 by an ICE agent.

Good’s killing has been raised throughout the day, including during an act of civil disobedience by faith leaders at the airport, and during an accompanying news conference there.

The civil disobedience from Minnesota faith leaders resulted in the arrests of about 100 clergy who engaged in civil disobedience by blocking a key road at the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport Friday morning, according to the ICE Out of MN coalition.

/By Michael Sainato and Rachel Leingang / The Guardian / Jan. 23 2026 

A “no work, no school, no shopping” blackout day of protest was kicked off by community leaders, faith leaders and labor unions on Friday, January 23, in protest against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) surge in the state.

The “Day of Truth & Freedom” protest comes in the wake of the killing of Renee Good, the unarmed woman killed by a federal immigration officer in Minneapolis earlier this month.

By Anonymous Point Loma Resident

I noticed that City Councilmembers Jen Campbell and Joe La Cava — who is council president — have items before the City Council meeting on January 27, excusing them from attending council meetings.

La Cava gives specific dates, Campbell does not.

Given Jen’s general lack of concern for residents of District 2 and her absence from District matters, this open- ended recuse from some/ all/ unspecified meetings is troublesome.

by Michael Zucchet / Voice of San Diego / January 21, 2026

In his Jan. 13 op-ed published in Voice of San Diego, former Coronado Mayor Richard Bailey argues that increased spending and poor management are the real culprits of the city of San Diego’s budget woes.

But in many of the issue areas that Bailey cites (personnel and pension costs, lack of public safety spending and trash collection fees) San Diego is in line with or even outperforming other cities – including the city of Coronado under Bailey’s leadership as councilmember and mayor for 12 years:

• According to the Census Bureau, the city of San Diego’s population steadily grew more than 7 percent between 2010 and 2024 to 1,404,000. During the same period, the population of Coronado decreased 5 percent to 18,000. Despite this decline in residents, Coronado’s general fund personnel budget rose 89 percent from FY 2014 (Mr. Bailey’s first full fiscal year in office) to FY 2026.  During the same period – with a rising population – San Diego’s general fund personnel expenditures rose 76 percent. Coronado has one city employee for every 70 residents; San Diego has one employee for every 107 residents.

By Kate Callen

Balboa Park’s institutional stewards joined forces to denounce Mayor Todd Gloria’s paid parking fees in a January 21 press conference that delivered ominous news about the fees’ early impacts.

The 19 park leaders were brought together by the Balboa Park Cultural Partnership to announce a new website, that will serve as a portal for pressuring the City Council to shelve the fees.

The leaders stopped short of demanding a total repeal. They chose a milder stance: “to express our serious concerns and go on record requesting the reconsideration of the vote supporting paid parking.”

But they did (finally) challenge Gloria’s hype that the new fees will go straight into overdue park maintenance. And they would not rule out the idea of a public-private partnership, modeled after the New York City Central Park Conservancy, that would wrest management of the park away from City Hall.

“I think our community should and can have that larger discussion,” said Peter Comiskey, the partnership’s Executive Director.

Early data on attendance and revenue have borne out dire predictions that paid parking will drive away the visitors who keep the park solvent.

By David Helvarg / Golden State / Jan. 13–20, 2026

In November, the Trump administration released a map that alarmed a lot of Californians. It showed the waters off the entire 1,100-mile state coastline carved into potential “program areas” for new oil and gas drilling.

For 40 years, there’ve been no new oil lease sales in the state’s coastal waters, and Californians of all political stripes overwhelmingly – 72% according to a Public Policy Institute poll – hope it stays that way. When its legacy offshore wells run dry, the state  should be done with ocean drilling for good.

President Trump, of course, likes nothing better than to bait California, love-bomb the oil and gas industry, attack clean energy and overturn Biden-era actions (President Biden banned new drilling in the same federal waters Trump now wants to exploit). The latest Interior Department plan for six lease sales between 2027 and 2030 is one more White House jab at Golden State values.

But here’s the thing: It’s far, far from a done deal.

First a little  background.

A little local airfield was home to the country’s first regularly scheduled airline

By Eric DuVall / Point Loma — OB Monthly SDU-T / January 14, 2026 

When we left our expedition into the soggy bogs of Dutch Flats last month [see here for Part 1], the 1920s had come roaring into San Diego, and the Marines had landed. The Point Loma Golf Club had flourished for a brief 13 years before missing the cut.

Taking flight
The second decade of the 20th century had seen San Diego become one of the world’s hotbeds for innovation and development in the nascent field of manned flight. Many aeronautical firsts occurred in the equable skies above this city. The first seaplane flight, the first aerial loop-the-loop, even the first night flight — considered an extremely dangerous and even foolhardy experiment — was successfully executed by Maj. T.C. Macauley in 1913.

Col. Jimmy Erickson had taken the first aerial photographs from a plane in 1911. Army Air Service Lts. Oakley Kelly and John Macready are credited with several firsts, including the first nonstop transcontinental flight, from New York to San Diego, in 1923. The first transcontinental flight of an airship, the Navy’s enormous USS Shenandoah, terminated, rather precariously, at North Island’s Rockwell Field the following year.

You may have noticed that all of these air innovations were of the military variety. Commercial aviation, in particular air travel, which we take for granted these days, was not a thing at all a century ago.

By Kate Callen

Years ago, when attorney Everett DeLano challenged the City of San Diego for violating the Clean Water Act, the city insisted it should not have to pay penalties because taxpayers would have to foot the bill.

“In the legal system, we call that ‘externalizing the costs,’” DeLano told a packed audience at a January 17 San Diego Community Coalition forum. “You make other people pay. And that applies now.

“State laws are encouraging a tremendous amount of development. But we’re in a situation where we have a lack of infrastructure, so communities are paying the costs.”

Today, DeLano is one San Diego’s foremost land use attorneys. His recent victories against high-density projects include the Save Our Access lawsuit to restore the 30-foot height limit in the Midway/ Pacific Highway area, which includes Mayor Todd Gloria’s pet Midway Rising project.

DeLano didn’t start out fighting predatory development. He began his career as an environmental lawyer with the Sierra Club in Denver and the Natural Resources Defense Council in Los Angeles pursuing what he calls “natural resources defense.”

His abiding belief in environmental protection – whether the “environment” is an estuary or a neighborhood – has propelled DeLano into a string of court wins to mitigate the harsher impacts of rampant growth.