OB Rag

The San Diego City Council recently approved a nearly $3.2 million settlement in a federal lawsuit case, Michael Bloom, et al. v. City of San Diego, which challenged the existing Vehicle Habitation Ordinance. The settlement set new rules for how the City is allowed to enforce its ordinances against unhoused people who sleep in their vehicles or RVs during a three-year period.

VEHICLE HABITATION ORDINANCE

City Municipal Code Section 86.0137 prohibits the use of streets for storage, service, or sale of vehicles or for habitation stating: It is unlawful for any person to use a vehicle for human habitation on any street or public property, unless specifically authorized for such use by the city manager:

by Joaquin Antique

After years of planning and one year of construction, a new hiking trail has opened at Cabrillo National Monument. Named “the Oceanside Trail”, it is an approximately 0.7 mile (one way) dirt and gravel pathway that leads from the whale watching overlook near the Old Lighthouse down a series of switchbacks and stairs to the start of the Coastal Trail near the Monument’s tidepools.

By Brittany Hook / Scripps – UCSD / April 25, 2024

In the spring of 2020, a historic red tide event occurred in waters off Southern California. Driven by a bloom of the dinoflagellate Lingulodinium polyedra, this event brought nighttime displays of bioluminescence to beaches along the coast, from Baja California to Santa Barbara. While the bloom gained international attention for its stunning visual displays, it also had significant negative impacts, including mass mortality among fish and other marine organisms.

By Chas Smith / Beach Grit / April 24, 2024

A San Diego lifeguard is back home after nearly losing his life while surfing Nicaragua. Todd Rice, 23, was in the Central American country enjoying a fine pulse of swell when a panga ran him over deeply cutting his leg. The hit nearly caused Rice to lose consciousness but he mustered the internal fortitude to fashion a tourniquet from his leash and control the bleeding until help arrived.

by Ernie McCray

The war between Israelis and Palestinians is affecting Arab and Jewish students in our schools, requiring educators to tend to the learning and emotional needs of both groups of young people.

But many Arab students claim that they aren’t getting the amount of attention that their Jewish counterparts are receiving. These students took part in a focus group as part of a study conducted by a doctoral student who is from the local Arab American community.

Students say they’re feeling alone, unheard, extremely uncomfortable with the way the armed conflict in Gaza is discussed on their campuses.

By Braden Cartwright / Daily Post -Palo Alto / April 24, 2024

Cities that are against state housing mandates have won their lawsuit against the state of California that challenged a controversial law allowing four homes on properties where only one home had been allowed before. The ruling means that Senate Bill 9 has been invalidated in charter cities, including Palo Alto, according to the lawyer who won the lawsuit.

“This is a monumental victory for all charter cities in California,” said attorney Pam Lee,

by MacKenzie Elmer / Voice of San Diego / April 22, 2024

The ongoing war between public power proponents and San Diego Gas & Electric looked more like a battle between the municipalization advocates and union labor Thursday [April 18].

Each team’s respective poster-bearing players – with signs that read either “fire SG&E” or “municipalization is union busting” — took turns encumbering the live feed webcast of the City Council Rules Committee’s public comment period. But almost no one from a labor union spoke in favor of the proposed government takeover of the energy grid. Proponents had hoped the City Council would consider putting up a ballot measure and spare them the burden of collecting signatures.

By Ryan Fonseca / Los Angeles Times / April 24, 2024

‘Managing mode, not solutions mode’

San Diego’s mayor created a department in 2021 to find solutions to the homelessness crisis, signaling a new direction. It hasn’t made things better. The city’s homelessness count increased 35% from 2022 to 2023. Nearly half of the unsheltered people counted were considered chronically homeless.

Homeless deaths increased about 135% over five years, up to at least 624 last year, according to the San Diego County Medical Examiner’s office. For every 10 people who find housing in San Diego, 13 people become homeless for the first time, says a 2022 report by the Regional Task Force on Homelessness.

By Eric Duvall / Pt Loma-OB Monthly / April 16, 2024

“See that big old tree,” Scotty Hunter would say as he regaled his cronies. “Teddy Roosevelt planted that tree.”

Quite a claim, you’ll agree. The fact that the great Afrocarpus gracilior, or African fern pine, stood in a shady section of Point Loma’s Wooded Area made that pronouncement even more remarkable.

Tall tale? The big tree certainly was tall. True story? Not really, no.

By David Helvarg / Daily Kos / April 22, 2024

The rightwing Heritage Foundation has written “Project 2025,” a plan for what it hopes will be a second Trump administration.  The plan calls for rapidly expanding fossil fuel emissions and includes a chapter on opening up the Department of Interior’s lands to mineral mining and oil drilling written by Wise Use veteran, William Perry Pendley.

30 years ago, I wrote a widely-read book, ‘The War Against the Greens,’ describing how a “populist” backlash against environmental laws and violence against grassroots activists was ginned up by western public lands corporations seeking to defend their federal subsidies in mining, logging and cattle grazing.

By Gary Robbins / San Diego Union-Tribune / April 20, 2024

A decision by Point Loma Nazarene University to limit the screening of a documentary about the Bible and homosexuality has angered students who say the move was disrespectful to the gay community and is having a chilling effect on free speech and academic inquiry.

The outcry is the latest in a series of controversies that have strained relations between the small, private Christian school above Sunset Cliffs and members and supporters of the LGBTQ+ community.