OB Rag

By Lisa Mortensen

Yesterday’s [May 21] council meeting was a first hand look at the total Pay to Play culture of our city hall in their 8-1 vote to publicly recognize Vibrant Uptown as the community planning group.  This is a bunch of hand-picked (non-elected) minions of Todd Gloria.

They are his footmen you could say who are hellbent on getting the Plan Hillcrest high-rise, high density agenda pushed through in just a few months time and then begin their destruction and ‘one-size fits all, tear down the old, and build the new big box projects added to our landscape in all our communities, not just the Hillcrest core.  Here it comes, people!

By Mat Wahlstrom

Perhaps the only surprise about the foregone decision by the City Council yesterday to disenfranchise the citizens of Uptown was how messy it was.

For those who don’t know: back in 2021, at the behest of his pro-developer underwriters, Councilmember Joe LaCava began work to further hobble the 42 elected community planning groups (CPGs) that had already been crippled the previous year. He received approval to again rewrite the policies and procedures that govern CPGs.

At the time, it was mystifying why a second bite at the apple was even necessary. But yesterday the reason was made clear: It wasn’t about CPGs in general, but the Uptown Planners CPG in particular.

Uvalde Anniversary Quilting

Normal fee of $8 for museum entrance for the event will be waived for the Uvalde Quilting event.\

Please join us in remembering and honoring the children and teachers who died by gun violence in Uvalde, Texas.

You can add one stitch or many stitches to a quilt created in their memory.

The City of San Diego has notified the public that the City Council will hear an appeal of the decision to approve a 223-dwelling-unit, seven-story building at Perry’s Cafe on Tuesday, June 4th in Council Chambers.

15% of the units in the huge project will supposedly be affordable. At the edge of the interchange of two major San Diego freeways, Perry’s Cafe has been a mainstay for decades and sits within the Old Town planning area and in District 2.

First of all, did you know the city had approved this project? We did not. It flew by below our radar.

Here are more details:

From SanDiegoVille / May 20, 2024

The tiny biker bar with a big window, San Diego’s decades-old Cheswick’s West is under new ownership in Ocean Beach and will soon close to rebrand into a different concept.

In 1983, Ocean Beach resident Dean Hall opened Cheswicks West. Over the more than 40 years in business, the dive bar has hosted eclectic blend of patrons ranging from bikers, to surfers, to hippies and musicians, and everyone in between. Last year, a large brawl occurred outside of Cheswick’s, resulting in a stabbing and multiple people injured. Reportedly 17 Hells Angeles were indicted connected with the incident.

by Mat Wahlstrom

City Council will be deciding today, Tuesday, 5/21 on whether Uptown’s current Community Planning Group (CPG), Uptown Planners, will continue or whether a new CPG proposed by a group calling itself Vibrant Uptown will be chosen to take over advising the city on how our community feels about development.

We need your support on Tuesday! The developers who want to make Uptown into the new Downtown will be coming out in force. The people who promote 20 to 30 story high rise apartments will be there. The people who oppose off-street parking requirements in new buildings will be there. The people who don’t care why you selected Uptown to live and work in will be there. We need to be there too!

There are important ways you can help!

By Kate Callen / Times of San Diego / May 16, 2024

If you’re wondering why Uptown Planners has become a prime target of City Hall’s war on planning groups, the battle over the unpopular Plan Hillcrest offers a case study.

When the Uptown community first questioned the city’s radical proposal to shoehorn more density into an already congested community, the planning group went to work. After seeing what looked like development overreach — 50,000 new residents, 30-story buildings – they requested public records that might elucidate how this startling proposal was conceived and crafted.

The city responded with a 600-document data dump. Undaunted, Uptown leaders sifted through the pile and zeroed in on several dozen relevant document pages.

The following is from the Board of the OBCF

May 15 Town Hall Recap: Public Statement Regarding the Status of OBTC & OBCF

The Ocean Beach Community Foundation held a town hall meeting on Wednesday, May 15 at 7:00 pm to discuss the status and facts of the OBTC and OBCF organizations with the community. Below is a summary of our public statement from this Town Hall:

Introduction

As a board, we have a lot of information to share tonight, so we respectfully request to present everything before receiving comments and questions from the audience. This is an interim report, as work is still underway to uncover all of the missteps of the past and take corrective action. The facts that we are going to share may be shocking and as you process this information it may feel similar to the stages of grief and loss.

Check out Charles Landon’s video on the OB Kite Festival.

Lack of Trust Reason Power San Diego Couldn’t Collect Enough Signatures for Ballot

San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board / May 17, 2024

San Diego Gas & Electric is easily the least objectionable of the state’s three giant investor-owned utilities. It is not a corporate felon on “a crime spree,” as a federal judge described Pacific Gas & Electric in 2022. It didn’t launch the clandestine scheme to make ratepayers cover far too much of the cost of shuttering the broken San Onofre nuclear plant. Though SDG&E benefited, that was the work of an Edison executive.

Baristas Join UFCW Local 135 to Bargain for Better Wages and Working Conditions

San Diego, CA – Workers at Better Buzz Coffee’s Hillcrest location have achieved an important victory in their pursuit of better wages, fair treatment and improved working conditions. In a decisive election held by the National Labor Relations Board on Friday, May 17, the baristas, trainers, and shift supervisors voted overwhelmingly to join the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 135.

This worker victory marks the culmination of a determined effort by the employees, who organized under the name Better Buzz United. The workers cited concerns about wages, benefits, scheduling, and overall workplace safety as primary reasons for seeking union representation.

By Michael Livingston of Save Del Cerro

On January 9, 2024, in a 6-2 vote, San Diego City Council denied the All People’s Church (“APC”) application to build a 54,476 square foot, 900 seat facility, with over a dozen classrooms, over 20 offices, over 350 parking spaces, along with a 71,010 square foot two-level parking structure, at the intersection of Interstate 8, College Avenue and Del Cerro Boulevard.  In response, APC filed a federal lawsuit alleging religious discrimination.  All Peoples Church v. City of San Diego 24 CV 0562 TWR-MSB.

The City Council denied APC’s application based upon the inadequacy of the 2019 traffic analyses that APC used to support its application and the safety dangers that the proposed project created.  Both parties will now need to spend significant time and money litigating APC’s claims, when the traffic analyses and safety issues could have been decided years ago— indeed even when APC first made its plans — if APC had simply provided full and accurate traffic as well as safety analyses.