Category: San Diego

By Marty Graham / May 19, 2025

Remember that Measure B campaign for fairness and free bins?

In the last two weeks, about 47,000 San Diego households received letters kicking them off free city trash service they’d been receiving and leaving them to scramble to find private haulers. Nearly all are in buildings with more than four homes, both apartments and condos. (Existing service for a two cubic yard dumpster for trash only – not including recycling – at a North Park condo building currently runs about $300 a month, or about $38 per unit each month.

Coincidentally, the City Auditor released a report that concludes those private haulers are NOT paying their fair share of landfill costs. While the report said the loss belongs to the city, it’s obvious that taxpayers have been subsidizing trash costs for anyone using a private hauler – and for the more than 47,000 households who got kicked off free service.

By Jim Varnadore / May 17, 2025

You’re in the short rows with the FY-26 budget, and it still isn’t balanced.  There are some things you can do to help the budget without harming your constituents.

You should remove bike lanes from the FY-26 budget.  Bike lanes are miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles – a genuine waste of money. In the most recent 3,000+ miles I’ve driven around San Diego from San Pasqual to San Ysidro, no bicycle was present in any bike lane anywhere in the city.

By Steve Alexander / Times of San Diego / May 15, 2025

Mission Bay Park is a place where memories are made. Whether it’s a family outing, boating, camping, jogging or biking around this lush parkland and its glistening waterfront, Mission Bay is the crown jewel of San Diego’s park system.

That’s why, as former chair of the Mission Bay Park Committee and the Mission Bay Planners, I worked extensively on our goal of striking a careful balance of uses in this iconic area when the city of San Diego unanimously adopted the Mission Bay Park Master Plan in 1994.

By Kate Callen

San Diego’s widely-abused Bonus ADU policy lost more ground May 15 when the City Council’s Land Use & Housing (LU&H) Committee voted 3-1 to chip away at its most egregious aspects.

But even in the face of overwhelming testimony about the misery caused by saturation density, three of the four committee members doggedly stuck to the Todd Gloria script: If we build more and more housing, an infinite number of people can afford to live in a coastal city with a mild climate.

The proposed changes to the Bonus ADU program look good on paper. And they might work if developers and corporate lawyers don’t find devious ways to slip through cracks in the policy.

The committee voted to limit the number of ADUs per property and to cap units at two stories. Cul-de-sacs and high-fire risk areas would be off-limits. Some on-site parking requirements would be restored.

But these good intentions could easily collide with political reality. The City is brazenly redrawing fire maps to push high-risk areas into low-risk categories. The “Transit Priority Areas” have eliminated parking requirements in neighborhoods that don’t currently have bus lines and probably never will.

Proposed Limits Head to Full Council Vote in Early June

By David Garrick / San Diego Union-Tribune / May 16, 2025

San Diego City Council members endorsed major changes Thursday to a controversial city incentive for backyard apartments, including a proposal to limit the number per property.

The goal of setting a maximum is to prevent developers from drastically altering the character of single-family neighborhoods by manipulating the city’s incentive so they can build dozens of backyard apartments on one lot.

In addition to capping the number of backyard apartments per lot, the council’s Land Use and Housing Committee voted 3-1 to force people who build such units to pay infrastructure fees and to require parking for those that aren’t near transit.

The proposal also requires greater distances from property lines, limits backyard apartments to two stories and prohibits them on cul-de-sacs in areas with high wildfire risk.

The proposed changes now head to the full council in early June for final approval. Planning Director Heidi Vonblum said they could take effect as soon as late July, shrinking the window for outlier projects.

Legal Action to Protect Chollas Valley Residents

From Chollas Valley Planning Group

We’re reaching out with an important update on our ongoing fight for equity, safety, and justice in the Chollas Valley.

The Chollas Valley Community Planning Group (CVCPG) has filed a lawsuit against the City of San Diego for unlawfully approving “Bonus ADU” housing developments in historically underserved neighborhoods—without requiring basic infrastructure like sidewalks and accessible pathways.

These approvals are not just unsafe—they’re illegal. They violate:

• The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)

• The California Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA)

• And critically, the California Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) Law —  This law requires cities to actively dismantle segregation and promote equitable access to housing. The City’s actions do the opposite— allowing unsafe, inaccessible developments in low-resource neighborhoods while ignoring their legal duty to invest in infrastructure that supports fair housing for all.

On May 10, 1970, a 23-year-old UCSD fourth-year student burned himself to death in Revelle Plaza to protest the Vietnam War.

Editordude: I was at UCSD when George Winne burned himself to death — and wrote about it in my new book, The May 1970 Rebellion. The Rag has published a number of articles about George and those times (see here) and Patty Jones and I from the OB Rag were at UC San Diego in 2014 when a memorial for him was unveiled.

By Alex Reinsch-Goldstein / The Guardian — UCSD / May 12, 2025

It was just past 4 p.m. on May 10, 1970, when George Winne Jr., a 23-year-old UC San Diego fourth-year, strode out into Revelle Plaza.

Ten days earlier, then-President Richard Nixon had drastically expanded the Vietnam War by sending American troops into Cambodia. Four days after that, National Guard troops opened fire on a crowd of anti-war protesters at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four students. Massive anti-war demonstrations were taking over Revelle Plaza every week.

However, on Sunday, May 10, in this tense atmosphere, Winne walked alone. He held a sign that read: “In the name of God, End this war.”

Winne stood at the northeastern corner of the plaza, in front of what is now Galbraith Hall, and began to douse himself with gasoline. Then, he lit a match.

by Ernie McCray

My eyes have taken in
so much natural beauty
in my life,
as I’ve seen striking waterfalls
as I hiked
in Havasupai land
in the deep recesses of the Grand Canyon,
and in the wilds of Yosemite,
and I’ve watched in awe
as waves the size of buildings
crashed on the North Shores
of Oahu in Hawaii.

Residents, tenants, landowners and businesses of Ocean Beach need to step up and protect fire rings, library and Recreation Center hours from Mayor Gloria’s “slash and burn” budget cuts.

The mayor and city council are trying to trim $258 million from the budget.

Mayor Gloria wants to remove all the beach fire pits — which will save a whopping $135,000.

Supporters of fire pits say these savings for scrapping San Diego’s fire rings is out of line with what the city is. “That is why people come to San Diego is to have that beach culture experience, catching a wave during the day, having a beach bonfire at night, that’s what makes San Diego,” said Richard Bailey, a Mission Beach business owner and former Coronado Mayor.

In the end, there were forty-five activists and leaders from communities all over San Diego, and they held a truly historic meeting this past Saturday, May 10. It was and is a rare moment, a moment when that many neighborhood leaders and people active in their community meet together in one room with their own agenda — and without the presence of some governmental board, agency or council.

The beautiful and vintage Point Loma Assembly Hall — over one hundred years old –was the venue for this historic occasion. Hosted by folks from Protect Point Loma who provided the hall and pizza, there were brief welcomes and introductions from Frank G and Kate C of the coordinating committee. Then there was a dramatic moment — a roll call of the communities and hands shot up after each neighborhood was named. From Bay Ho to Encanto, from University City to Linda Vista, Ocean Beach to Mira Mesa, Middletown to Clairemont. La Jolla and Point Loma.

As people settled in, Kate C gave a special shout-out to two groups: to SOHO, Save Our Heritage Organization and to Neighbors for a Better San Diego, both of whom had done needed and crucial spadework on the issues for years.

Frank G then explained that the coalition was actually a coalition of community leaders — that hopefully some day would be a coalition of all the different neighborhood groups themselves — a direction the current network is moving. He said there’s at least two types of leadership. There’s one that shows by example and gets up to the top of the hill. Another is a type of leadership that gets to the top of the hill but takes everyone else with them. People nodded their heads and murmured in acquiescence. And the coalition, he said, needs that type of leadership right now.

Kate spoke of the three Planning Commissioners who back on May 1st were bold enough to just not go along with Mayor Gloria’s so-called ADU reforms, coming up with restrictions in number, height, set-backs, parking and adequate evacuation routes.

Residents of San Diego County have been subjected to two recent devastating news reports about our area.

A doctor expert says San Diego County’s jails are the worst than he’s ever seen them and are ‘far behind other jail and prison systems in California.’ The County has faced dozens of lawsuits that have cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars in recent years.

And children taken from their parents for their own safety were abused by county social workers. The county is currently confronting hundreds of lawsuits filed by now-grown victims who say they were sexual assaulted at Polinsky Children’s Center and other facilities.

San Diego County might have the best weather around, but perhaps it helps hide an ugly, dark underbelly.

U-T writers Jeff McDonald and Kelly Davis recently published the following on our jail conditions:

‘No meaningful treatment’: Doctor says San Diego County jails are the worst he’s ever seen —
An expert for the plaintiffs suing over jail conditions says San Diego County’s lockups are ‘far behind other jail and prison systems in California.’

First term Assemblymember LaShae Sharp-Collins wants to build homes and rebuild social safety nets in California and in her district

by Deborah Sullivan Brennan / Voice of San Diego / May 9, 2025

First term Assemblymember LaShae Sharp-Collins wants to build homes and rebuild social safety nets in California and in her district in southeastern San Diego.

Sharp-Collins was elected in November, replacing former Assemblymember Akilah Weber Pierson, who was elected to the state Senate. I sat down with Sharp-Collins last week to discuss her priorities for the 79th District, which includes La Mesa, Lemon Grove and parts of the city of San Diego.

The district skews heavily blue, with twice as many Democratic registered voters as Republicans, according to the San Diego County Registrar of Voters. Its population is about 43 percent Latino, 27 percent White, 13 percent Asian and 11 percent Black.

“This is the most diverse district, in my personal opinion,” she said. “I’m born and raised here. I love it.”