OB Rag

Former San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders announced earlier in the month that he would be retiring at the end of the year as the head of the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce and, as he has been lauded, “capping a career of public service of more than 50 years.”

It’s true that Jerry Sanders has had quite a career — most of it, yes, in the public arena that began in 1973 when he joined the San Diego Police Department. Twenty years later he became Chief. He retired as Chief in 1999 and then headed the United Way of San Diego and then the local Red Cross in 2003. Sanders first ran for elected office in 2005 for San Diego Mayor — and won. He had two terms as Mayor and then went on to lead the Chamber where he’s been for the last 12 years.

The Chamber is and always has been quite a partisan (Republican) establishment network of powerful business and corporate interests — and Jerry became its face for over a decade — but it’s difficult to call that “public service.” But still ….

So, with his retirement from public service, Jerry has built quite a legacy.

Yet, from a progressive point of view, that legacy is a checkered one — and now stands as a warning to our current mayor, Todd Gloria. This appraisal will not follow the lavish praise Jerry Sanders has achieved from most media and press since his announcement — you may have guessed that by now.

But no, Sanders does have a checkered history with San Diego — and two events — stand out to cloud the shiny armor of a retiring public knight.

Local Union Calls It a Victory for Consumers and Workers

By Alina Selyukh / NPR KPBS / December 10, 2024

Kroger and Albertsons saw their $24.6 billion merger blocked on Tuesday by judges in two separate cases, one brought by federal regulators and the other by the Washington state attorney general.

What would be the biggest grocery merger in U.S. history is now in legal peril after over two years of delays. The companies could choose to continue their legal appeals or abandon the deal. They await another ruling in a third lawsuit in Colorado.

By Mahdi E Diab / Op-Ed San Diego U-T / December 11, 2024

As a family physician treating San Diego’s homeless population, I witness firsthand how the city’s increased reliance on street sweeps is undermining our efforts to end homelessness while creating a costly public health crisis.

In recent days, I watched a patient break down in tears after losing the only photograph he had of his son during a sweep. Another patient ended up in the emergency room after police discarded his insulin and heart failure medications — medicines that cannot be replaced due to Medi-Cal’s monthly refill restrictions. While a third relapsed into addiction due to an arrest and the stress caused by losing all of their personal possessions. These are not isolated incidents but daily occurrences that illustrate how street sweeps actively harm our most vulnerable neighbors.

On Saturday December 14th, San Diego Bird Alliance will be hosting its annual Wandering the King Tides event and welcoming the public to witness and participate in documenting this remarkable natural occurrence. The event will take place at Kendall-Frost Marsh Reserve, offering visitors a unique vantage point to observe these extreme tides and their impact on Mission Bay’s last remaining coastal wetlands.

Wandering the King Tides: view the last remaining acres of tidal marsh habitat disappear during the highest tides of the year, and paint this unique event! We’ll be photographing, sharing Kumeyaay ethnobotany, identifying birds and painting a time-lapse of the King Tides

Date: Saturday, 12/14/24
Time: 6:30am – 10am, speakers 8:30am – 9am
Location: Kendall-Frost Marsh, Pacific Beach Drive, San Diego, CA 92109, near Crown Point Drive

City Sued SeaWorld for more than $12 million in back rent and fees from Pandemic Days

By Lori Weisberg / The San Diego Union-Tribune / December 10, 2024

More than three years after SeaWorld was first told it owed millions of dollars in back rent that went unpaid during the pandemic, it has now reached a settlement to pay the city of San Diego $8.5 million.

That sum, while close to the $8.8 million that city officials originally said was unpaid, falls short of the more than $12 million San Diego was seeking in a lawsuit it filed last year alleging breach of the lease that governs rent for the park’s Mission Bay site.

By Kate Callen

A city budget crisis is a golden opportunity to dump a failing project – so long as nobody cares how much money was already spent on it.

Mayor Todd Gloria just pulled the plug on his Civic Center Revitalization, a venture that struggled out of the gate in May 2023. Anyone back then could see that the dingy downtown complex needed restoration. But no one familiar with City Hall’s string of botched real estate deals felt bullish about it.

The approach to municipal redevelopment in the Faulconer-Gloria era has been, in essence, “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show!”

From 101 Ash Street to the Kearny Mesa truck yard to the East Village Ritz-Carlton to Midway Rising to Kettner & Vine, eager mayors have unveiled ambitious endeavors with much fanfare but little due diligence or independent analysis.

The outlook for America is very dismal if Trump carries through on his threats to deport millions of undocumented people – which he made again this week in a TV interview.

Specifically, California’s agriculture will close down if the people who pick the vegetables and fruits are removed from the fields. And, notably, the costs of those foods will skyrocket, even if offset by the missing mouths of those deported.

Since the pandemic, foreign-born workers have taken positions in such sectors as construction, agriculture, technology and health care, fields where domestic labor supply has been a challenge for those looking to hire. Immigrant workers made up 18.6% of the workforce last year, a new record, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

From 2021 to 2023, 1 in 3 workers in California were immigrants, according to the California Budget & Policy Center. Certain sectors, such as agriculture, are closely watching developments on immigration plans, as the industry has increasingly relied on H-2A workers on temporary visas to fill roles in production.

Plus, there would be a ripple effects from deportation, such as the closure of farms in the state and the reliance on importing food from overseas due to a dwindling labor force. That means higher costs to the consumer.

Sure, check out these great photos from OB’s Holiday Parade Dec. 7, 2024.

By Beth Demmon / San Diego Magazine / Nov. 20, 2024

Many, many people have been a part of building the Southern California seafood industry into the renowned enterprise it is today. Now, two of these pioneering groups—both from California, family-owned, and currently run by the second generation of the families that built them—are uniting as one.

The Brigantine, Inc., the restaurant group behind The Brigantine Seafood and Oyster Bar, Miguel’s Cocina, Ketch Brewing, Ketch Grill & Taps, Topsail, and Portside Coffee & Gelato, is in the process of purchasing The Fish Market’s two San Diego locations and adding the brand to the Brigantine family of restaurants.

By Gary Wonacott

In late in 1970’s, the Port made an agreement with the FAA air traffic controllers to change the departure track from 270 (bottom dashed line) to 290 (middle dashed line) for departures 10 pm to 6:30 am. That was referred to as the 290 nighttime noise abatement agreement. Those housing units close in to the end of the runway experience the highest single event noise levels.

At that time there were two different federal laws that mandated evaluation of changes in flight departure tracks to ensure that noise was not being shifted from one housing tract to another. While the distance the track is moved is small, there is still a substantial noise shift. This was, I believe, intended to be a temporary noise relief measure

Former San Diego City Manager Jack McGrory Testified He Informed Gloria of “Great Deal for Taxpayers”

By Arturo Castanares – Editor-at-Large / La Prensa / Nov. 29, 2024

A statewide university official testified under oath that he briefed San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria twice in 2022 on details of an offer for a free-to-taxpayers sports arena but the Mayor instead kept moving forward on selecting a private developer who had donated more than $100,000 to his election campaign.

Jack McGrory, a member of the 25-person California State University Board of Trustees and former City Manager for the City of San Diego, is the first official to detail a 2021 proposal received from Denver-based Oak View Group (OVG) to fund and build a new sports arena within the SDSU’s Mission Valley campus.