Category: San Diego

Residents of Golden Hill are outraged over the response — or non-response — they’ve received from elected officials and the developer of a 180-unit mega project planned for “A” Street. This outrage has been translated into organizing a community meeting set for Monday, June 30th.

Organized by the Golden Hill Neighborhood Association, the meeting will be held at Pathfinders – 2980 Cedar street for 6 pm. The group has requested all of their elected representatives to attend in person. And the developer is scheduled to hold a presentation for 6 pm.

Residents have accused the developer and their elected officials have gone in hiding as community concerns over the mega project at street have mounted.

Finally, some good news from the City of San Diego. The City reached an agreement with SeaWorld over its unpaid lease payments last December 2024 and now will invest nearly $8 million in projects at local parks — including Robb Field. Council approval supposedly happened Tuesday, June 24.

The following is from a city press release:

Following approval by the San Diego City Council on Tuesday, June 24, the City of San Diego will invest nearly $8 million in projects at park facilities across the City, including major upgrades to Robb Field in Ocean Beach. The allocation of funds comes from a legal settlement with SeaWorld over lease payments owed to the City by the theme park dating back to 2020.

In total, 11 locations across the City have been identified to receive funding for a range of projects, with more than $3.6 million allocated for the long-overdue replacement of the restrooms and playground equipment at Robb Field.

By Geoff Page / June 25, 2025

When I read about the coming trash fee issue back in February, I decided to do the simple math to see how much trash collection actually costs per household. I needed two crucial pieces of information. How many households received city trash pick-up in 2023? And what did that pick-up cost?

To get the information, I submitted a Public Records Request (PRR) on February 26. The California Public Records Act (PRA) created a process for citizens to access public information. An OB Rag article I wrote that ran on October 6, 2023 explained what the PRA is and how to make a PRR in San Diego.
https://obrag.org/2023/10/how-to-make-a-public-records-request/

I sent a request for budget documents that showed two things: the number of households that were serviced by the city trash pick-up program in 2023 and the total budget for city trash pick-up in 2023.

The PRA allows an agency 10 days to provide a response to a PRR. Under certain conditions, the law allows the responding agency to take an additional 14 days. That is 24 days total. As of June 23, the city has taken 117 days and counting. That is nearly 5 times the number of days allowable by law.

The City of San Diego is clearly in gross violation of the state PRA. This is not news to local professional journalists and news organizations. Many have had to actually sue the city to make it comply.

By Madeline Nguyen / Times of San Diego / June 23, 2025

San Diego City councilmembers slammed Mayor Todd Gloria Monday afternoon for improperly spending millions in city dollars, even as he vetoed funding for homeless services and other aid organizations to tighten the city’s budget.

Councilmembers Kent Lee, Sean Elo-Rivera, Henry Foster III and Joe LaCava unloaded on Gloria for cutting funding to key community services and urged the council to overturn all of his vetoes during that afternoon’s vote.

It’s the latest development in the city council and the mayor’s tug of war over San Diego’s budget for the upcoming year as the city works to solve a $258 million deficit.

“(Gloria) labeled community investment, like cultural events and nonprofit support as a ‘discretionary slush fund‘ for the council,” Councilmember Foster said. “The council has not paid for employees that were not identified in the budget.”

“That has been the practice of this administration, the practice of this mayor and it’s time for that to end.”

By David Garrick / SD Union-Tribune / June 23, 2025

Cash-strapped San Diego’s aggressive search for more revenue includes a new plan to generate $3 million a year by allowing controversial digital billboards for the first time.

In addition to generating revenue, the plan would allow the replacement of dozens of static, old-fashioned billboards with a much smaller number of digital billboards in more strategic locations, city officials say.

Critics say digital billboards — which have been rejected by La Mesa and several North County cities in recent years — could make parts of San Diego look like an amusement park or a miniature Times Square.

Digital billboards, which are typically two-sided, feature bright electronic images that change as often as every four seconds as they cycle through various ads or public service messages.

Members of the public — who helped defeat similar proposals in other cities by packing public hearings and leading petition drives — will get a chance to weigh in, because city regulations now prohibit digital billboards.

But city officials are proposing to have the necessary rule changes approved in a way that has been criticized for reducing public scrutiny.

By Kate Callen / June 23, 2025

If you are furious because City Hall intends to get out of the fiscal mess it created by charging you unlawful trash fees, Mike Aguirre wants your help.

Aguirre is the lead attorney on a lawsuit seeking to block the trash fees on state constitutional grounds. He and co-counsel Maria Severson outlined the key legal issues to a packed forum on June 21 at the Mission Hills Library.

The 70 people who attended expected to be asked for donations. But Aguirre and Severson weren’t there for money. They wanted volunteers.

“To the extent you want to help us,” Aguirre said, “I want to use the Public Records Act to dig into the public records that are available to build a mountain of evidence to present to the judge. … We can’t take [the city] at their word. We need to find out all the particulars.”

By Jeff McDonald / SD Union-Tribune / June 21, 2025

Earlier this year, San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria fired Chief Operating Officer Eric Dargan and personally assumed those day-to-day city responsibilities.

At the time, Gloria was confronting a $258 million budget deficit and said the restructuring would slash the bureaucracy and better position San Diego going forward. He also promised more changes to come.

Dargan did not see his firing that way. The next month, he filed a lawsuit accusing Gloria and the city of racial discrimination and of targeting him because he is Black.

In his lawsuit, Dargan said the mayor and the city had failed to provide three months’ notice of its plans to part ways and — perhaps most important — the three months’ severance called for in his contract.

City officials rejected the allegations, saying he had been fired for cause, and pledged to fight.

But on Tuesday, the City Council is scheduled to consider a $146,000 settlement with Dargan — more than it would have cost to honor the severance agreement.

By The Prebys Foundation / June 22, 2025

What happens in Washington doesn’t stay there.  It reaches all the way into San Diego’s labs, hospitals, and classrooms.

Proposed federal cuts to medical research threaten the life-changing work happening right here at home. From childhood cancer breakthroughs to ensuring diverse voices shape the future of medicine, local researchers are at risk of losing the support they need to keep pushing science forward.

To explore these impacts, the Prebys Foundation and the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network are hosting a public forum on “This Affects All of Us: The Real Impact of Cutting Medical Research Dollars” on Thursday, June 26, 1:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. in the Neil Morgan Auditorium, San Diego Central Library, 330 Park Boulevard.

by Lynne Miller

Applause to each person and organization that helped put the brakes on the building frenzy! Take a breath, celebrate your hard work, and realize that your voice matters!  I know we often feel that there is no way to win, especially against a government that appears to be deaf to our concerns.

The Who’s down in Whoville come to mind.  Dr Seuss wrote a book, Horton Hears a Who, and to shorten the wonderful rhyme to a sentence, “their whole world was saved by the smallest of all”!

The Who’s were heard because they worked together and got everyone to shout.  I hear that there were 527 speakers who were ‘heard’ on June 16th in a meeting that ended at 9:00 pm!

Chris Poblete of Linda Vista brought his three children to Monday’s City Council Bonus ADU hearing. The four of them waited nearly 4 hours until he was called to speak. If you were there, you will remember him. Here is his testimony:

By Chris Poblete / June 20, 2025

I took time off work to be here. I’ve never been to a Council meeting. I wouldn’t know most of these wonderful people here if it weren’t for this issue that’s affecting me that I heard about five weeks ago.

Let me be clear. I am an ADU builder. I’ve built ADUs on two of my properties. Each ADU has two parking spaces. All my ADUs have below-market rental rates. It’s possible.

I encourage all my colleagues at work to do the same thing: Buy a house. Build an ADU. Help solve the housing crisis. You don’t have to be greedy about it.

This issue is affecting my cul-de-sac. It’s a safety concern because there is no parking. Christian Spicer of SDRE is building 10 units on a single-family lot. I didn’t know about this until four weeks ago when the excavator showed up and started digging for the construction.

By Jacob Aere and Carolyne Corelis / KPBS / June 18, 2025

Carl Luna has been observing political engagement in the San Diego region since the 1990s.

He said the crowds that showed up for the local portion of what organizers called Saturday’s nationwide “No Kings” protests were “unprecedented.”

“You had numerous events across the county, from Escondido down to the waterfront in San Diego. And in the city of San Diego you had the largest protest crowd I think that we’ve ever seen,” said Luna, who is director of the University of San Diego’s Institute for Civil Civic Engagement.

Take Action San Diego was one of the groups that organized the protest. Larry Stowell is a volunteer with the group and was in charge of tracking the crowd’s size.

Their crowd estimate on the day of the march was more than 60,000. Stowell said it came from a method, which looks at the density of people in one section of a protest, and multiplies that over the whole crowd. It’s called the Jacobs Crowd Formula.

The newly updated estimate of roughly 69,000 protestors uses a method that’s a little more high-tech — combining aerial news footage with on-the-ground video from the group’s own stationary cell phone.

by Levi Sumagaysay and Lauren Hepler / Cal-Matters / June 19, 2025

Brandon Mejia usually spends his weekends conducting a symphony of vendors serving pupusas, huaraches and an array of tacos at his two weekly 909Tacolandia pop-up events.

Half food festival, half swap meet, the events draw 100-plus vendors a week in Pomona and San Bernardino. They offer a way to “legalize” street food — vendors get a reliable location, cities collect taxes and enforce health codes — while patrons enjoy delicacies from all over Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. Spanglish music plays, people dance and kids flock to facepainting and pony rides.

But in the past week, that’s all come to a screeching halt. As the Trump administration ramps up immigration raids in California, some restaurants, worried about their workers or finding that customers are staying home more, are closing temporarily. Many street vendors are going into hiding, and some food festivals and farmers markets have been canceled.

Mejia called off all Tacolandia events last week. His mind raced about whether agents would come for his vendors as videos surfaced on social media of taqueros, farm workers and fruit vendors vanishing in immigration raids around LA and neighboring Ventura County.