OB Rag

Times of San Diego / May 30, 2024

Longtime San Diego County employee Ebony Shelton was the unanimous choice of the Board of Supervisors to be the new chief administrative officer, board chair Nora Vargas announced Wednesday evening.

The board voted in closed session May 23 to select Shelton, the deputy chief administrative officer/chief financial officer, but said it would not identify its selection until completing contract negotiations.

By Mat Wahlstrom

After three years of engaging in good faith with the City, it is clear that it was never possible to significantly alter Plan Hillcrest in response to community input. [Here is alink to our official position.]

The terms of the SB 2 Planning Grant used to fund it require no less than 14,000 units be facilitated by right. It was never a question of what density is optimal.

As a consequence, this ‘density at all costs’ has been achieved by a lack of duty of care to provide for adequate infrastructure, safety services, parks and recreation, and transportation.

By David Garrick / San Diego Union-Tribune / May 29-30, 2024

Controversial proposals to double the populations of Hillcrest and University City by allowing more high-rise housing are being debated Thursday by San Diego’s Planning Commission.

The commission will also discuss a related proposal that would change San Diego’s citywide blueprint for growth to prioritize climate-friendly housing opportunities near jobs, schools and mass transit.

The proposals for Hillcrest and University City, which city officials have been discussing for years, could be finalized this summer by the City Council if planning commissioners express support.

by Ernie McCray

Bill Walton.
The Big Redhead.
Dear friend.
Gone.

And I will miss him immensely
for the sheer joy
he brought to my life,
beginning when I first saw him
on a basketball court
in high school,
never having seen
such dominance
in a basketball game,

by Brad Willis / Times of San Diego / May 21, 2024

It was a full house of more than 500 concerned citizens last Sunday at the screening of the God & Country documentary at the Coronado Performing Arts Center. That’s because people in our community truly care.

We are concerned about the Christian nationalist political movement, and we don’t want the radical political hate group, Awaken Church, whose founder calls us unholy, unclean demons and threatens to run us out of town, coming here trying to take over our school board, exploit our military, attack our library, preach a false gospel and seek to, in his own words, “take the crown of our Crown City.”

By Matt Potter / San Diego Reader / May 22, 2024

Dark money assets and Toni Atkins

A $50,000 donor to the California ballot measure committee run by state Senate Democrat Toni Atkins of San Diego has been told by lawyers for the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission to stop withholding information about her potentially lucrative portfolio of real estate assets within the coastal zone.

Also …

Panera Got an Exemption from $20 Minimum Wage?

Editordude: Steven Mihailovich has quickly become one of the best reporters to cover OB and Point Loma. Here’s his latest on the morphing of the OB Town Council into something different.

By Steven Mihailovich / Pt Loma – OB Weekly / May 25, 2024

The Ocean Beach Community Foundation, formerly known for nearly six decades as the Ocean Beach Town Council, reported preliminary findings of an ongoing audit that revealed thousands of dollars unaccounted for in the various bank accounts and credit cards held by the Town Council.

The audit was triggered by a financial scandal that emerged under former OBTC president Corey Bruins.

By George Vargas / San Diego Union-Tribune / May27, 2024

Bill Walton’s passion for basketball was rivaled only by his passion for rock ‘n’ roll, in particular the music of the Grateful Dead. The San Diego-bred basketball icon — who died Monday at the age of 71 following a battle with cancer — saw the Dead perform more than 850 times, starting with a 1967 Mother’s Day show at San Diego State University’s Aztec Bowl.

“I loved the Dead right away, the first time I heard them,” Walton told this writer in a 1992 Union-Tribune interview. “I loved the speed, the dancing, the rhythm, the creativity. It’s just like being on a basketball team. Basketball, like good, creative, rock music, is never the same.” …

In recent decades Walton sat in as often as his schedule allowed with the Electric Waste Band, a leading Dead tribute band, at its weekly performances at Winstons in Ocean Beach.

by Ernie McCray

Looking through a box
of my mother’s things
I came across
“The Negro,”
a magazine
my mother used to subscribe to
when I was a child,
this particular issue
dating back to
June, 1945
when I was a seven-year-old,
and it brings back memories
of me listening
to conversations
my mother and her friends
engaged in
about articles they had read,

By Judi Curry

I am not a native San Diegan, but I bet that I have been here longer than many of the readers of this article.  I am, however, a native Californian, born and raised in Los Angeles. I have lived in Northern California while attending school at Berkeley and while husband and I both had good jobs in the Bay Area. I also lived in Arizona while husband and I had top jobs in neighboring school districts and I live in Bangor, Maine. But I always came back to California.

My experiences in these different areas provided me with many different situations – some very similar to ones facing us today.  For example, when we lived in San Simeon, following a big storm, Highway One literally fell into the ocean.  That road was closed for over a year while it was repaired.  (I have been told that since I left the area they have been numerous storms and the road has been closed again and again.)

Frequently, while living in Northern California, bridges were closed because of flooding, because of landslides and because of decay. 

It’s now obvious that Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito has been playing flag football in his court.

Two flags associated with Donald Trump’s ‘stop the steal’ movement have been flown outside homes owned by Alito. And for the first flag, Alito punted the ball.

An upside-down American flag, which has come to be a symbol associated with Trump, was displayed outside Alito’s home in northern Virginia. A photo widely distributed this past week shows the flag flying on Jan. 17, 2021, just days after Trump’s insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Dozens of the pro-Trump rioters were carrying similarly inverted flags and chanting slogans like “Stop the Steal.”

And now a second flag of a type carried by those rioters was displayed outside Alito’s beach vacation home in New Jersey last summer. The “Appeal to Heaven” flag which is a white flag with a green pine tree was seen flying at the Alito beach home.