OB Rag

The San Diego Community Coalition publishes this email bulletin to keep our members and the general public informed about important Council and Planning Commission hearings and other city public meetings.

Monday, February 9: City Council, 10:00 a.m.

Agenda:

Non-Agenda Public Comment:  The Mayor and the Council just cut a ragtag deal to “reform” paid parking at Balboa Park (but still charge for the closest lots). So the topic won’t be on this week’s Council docket. But San Diegans can still express their views on the issue in person or virtually during non-agenda public comment. On Monday, non-agenda comment is scheduled early in the meeting at about 10:15 a.m. On Tuesday, the comment period is near the end at about 12 noon.

By Mark Sherman / The Associated Press – 7SanDiego / February 4, 2026

The Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed California to use a new voter-approved congressional map that is favorable to Democrats in this year’s elections, rejecting a last-ditch plea from state Republicans and the Trump administration.

No justices dissented from the brief order denying the appeal without explanation, which is common on the court’s emergency docket.

The justices had previously allowed Texas’ Republican-friendly map to be used in 2026, despite a lower-court ruling that it likely discriminates on the basis of race.

Conservative Justice Samuel Alito wrote in December that it appeared both states had adopted new maps for political advantage, which the high court has previously ruled cannot be a basis for a federal lawsuit.

Republicans, joined by the Trump administration, claimed the California map improperly relied on race as well. But a lower court disagreed by a 2-1 vote. The Justice Department and White House did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.

The justices’ unsigned order keeps in place districts that are designed to flip up to five seats now held by Republicans, part of a tit-for-tat nationwide

by Ernie McCray

Say what?
Students are facing
being suspended from school
for standing up|
against ICE’s
muggings and
cold-blooded killings
of citizens?

Based on what?
Doing the right thing?

I mean if I was still a principal
of a school
and my students
decided they wanted to make a statement
about some goons
who had never heard of
or cared about the Golden Rule,
I’d be out there with them,

by Michael J. Stepner and Mary Lydon / Times of San Diego / Feb. 4, 2026

For decades Paris, Barcelona and Brooklyn have been held up as models for humanely scaled, mid-rise housing neighborhoods.

This density is created by four-to-six story residential buildings. These communities have high rises and retail woven throughout, with pleasant walkable, tree-lined streets.

Here in San Diego, the award winning, 230-acre Civita urban village in Mission Valley stands in as our local model.

Mid-rise housing is part of Mayor Todd Gloria’s “Neighborhood Homes for All of Us” initiative. This type of housing is both necessary and appropriate — but it must be in the right location and provide the type of housing that affordable to those who need it.

The city’s 1979 General Plan stated in its urban design section that “the quality of the community is of overriding importance to the individual, since the most basic human needs must be satisfied close to home.” This is as true today as then.

Currently there is a lot of mid-rise housing being built. It is being built along commercial corridors and in the older neighborhoods.

By Shane Harris / Times of San Diego / Feb. 5, 2026

I live near Balboa Park, and I want to be clear about something from the start: my opposition to paid parking has nothing to do with convenience — mine or anyone else’s. This isn’t about saving a few dollars at a meter for me.

It’s about who gets pushed out when we turn one of the last truly public spaces in San Diego into a revenue stream. It’s about foster youth on group trips, families stretching every dollar, seniors on fixed incomes, volunteers who give thousands of hours to the museums, and working people whose livelihoods depend on foot traffic in the park.

Balboa Park was never meant to be City Hall’s cash register. For more than a century, it has served as San Diego’s shared civic commons — a place intentionally gifted to the people with the understanding that access would be open, equitable and free. That promise is now under threat, not because the park failed, but because the city chose to use it as a shortcut to address a budget problem it created for itself.

On Feb. 9, the City Council will once again take up the issue of parking fees in Balboa Park.

By Sue Taylor

Dear San Diego City Council Members:

I was born in the City of San Diego and graduated from Point Loma High School. I worked for the City of San Diego for 41 years, and I am also a volunteer with the San Diego Police Department. I now live just outside the City limits, about two and a half miles from Council District 9.

I want to directly challenge the claim that only City residents “pay for” Balboa Park. That claim may be convenient, but it is not how the City’s finances actually work.

Yes, only City residents pay property tax to the City. But what is consistently left out of this discussion is that most of any property tax bill does not go to the City at all. It goes to schools and the county. For a typical City household, only a few hundred dollars a year from their property tax actually ends up in the City’s General Fund. At the same time, a very large share of the City’s General Fund comes from sales tax and the hotel tax. Those taxes are paid heavily by non-City residents and by visitors.

OB Rag Staff Report

This follow-up to our December 2 “D2 Candidates: Follow the Money” report has the latest figures from Campaign Disclosure Reports (Series 400). Our continued review of these public records fulfills the Rag’s promise to “scrutinize the candidates in the 2026 primary: who they are, what they’ve done, what they say, and most importantly, where their money comes from.”

District 2 includes Ocean Beach, Mission Beach, Pt. Loma, the Midway, and Clairemont.  Councilmember Jen Campbell is “termed out,” so the district will have a new Councilmember next year.

Josh Coyne

Coyne is in first place in D2 fundraising totals with $93,002. That money includes a $30,000 loan he made to his campaign. According to the Voters’ Voice Initiatives, Coyne raised 6 times more money from outside D2 than from inside. Many of his contributors are business leaders and lobbyists. They include:

By Frank Gormlie

Ever since armed ICE agents shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis within a two week period this year, the mood of much of the country has turned against ICE and its enabler Donald Trump. Both Good and Pretti were acting objectively in protest of the masked, deadly agents terrorizing neighborhoods in the Twin Cities area.

Yet, this tragedy is not the first time armed agents shot and killed protesters in America. In early May of 1970, in the midst of college students nation-wide demonstrating against President Richard Nixon’s expansion of the Vietnam war with his invasion of Cambodia, National Guard troops fired into crowds of unarmed students at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four — two were not even demonstrating; one was a ROTC cadet and another was on her way to class.

The uproar that followed these senseless killings swept across the country like a tsunami and created a debilitating crisis for the establishment, Nixon’s administration and America’s higher education system. I know. I spent five years studying what happened that May on over 700 college campuses, and wrote a book about it in 2024 — The May 1970 Rebellion.

The former Rite Aid property in Ocean Beach has been sold for a cool $12.6 Millions. The 1.66 acre site at 4840 Niagara Avenue has been a tempting plum to pluck for months since Rite Aid closed and now it has happened. The retail building — which used to be a Mayfair market before Rite Aid — is 20,155-square-feet.

One of the largest  commercial real estate and investment firms in the country — if not the world — CBRE — facilitated the sale, with agents from CBRE (Chase Bank Real Estate) representing both the seller and the buyer in the transaction.

At this moment, we don’t know who the buyer is, but we do have a call into the CBRE media agent listed in the recent announcement dated Jan. 28, 2026.

A senior vice-president of CBRE, Reg Kobzi, was quoted in the announcement:

“This transaction underscores the enduring appeal and scarcity of well-located, parking-rich retail assets in San Diego’s coastal communities. Big-box retail opportunities like this former Rite Aid with on-site parking in Ocean Beach are extremely rare, reflecting strong investor confidence in the area’s fundamentals and tenant demand.”

By Kate Callen / February 4, 2026

A constant reminder of our city’s slow collapse sits in the side yard of my house. It is a beat-up black trash bin, and it isn’t going anywhere.

Weeks ago, without notice, crews swept through my neighborhood to haul away the old black bins. Residents like me who didn’t have them at the curb missed the boat.

Trash collectors told me the bin would be picked up the following week. That didn’t happen. And it didn’t happen the week after that.

When you drive around your community, you might see these stray bins lurking about. Some people leave them at the curb like a defiant middle finger. I belong to the group that hides them. I don’t want my neighbors thinking, “Does she really believe the city will pick that up?”

The funny thing is that my bin had been sidelined for more than a year. Remember how the original bins cracked over time? And people would press duct tape over the cracks?

Dozens of demonstrators gathered in front of the Rady Shell, Monday, Feb. 2, protesting the high electrical rates of San Diego Gas and Electric. It was held outside of DTECH, an annual meeting that bills itself as the largest gathering of utility professionals in the country.

One of the speakers at the meeting’s keynote session at the Rady Shell was none other than SDG&E President Scott Crider.

The protesters, from a number of environmental and community groups, pressed the utility of its high rates, a sore spot among San Diegans who have made their complaints louder lately. A big reason — SDG&E’s plan to increase rates again, which could make San Diego one of, if not the most, expensive cities when it comes to utility rates.

The U-T reported:

According to the California Legislative Analyst’s Office, average rates for SDG&E, Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison increased between 48% and 67% from 2019 through 2023. A blog post in 2023 by the Haas Energy Institute at UC Berkeley reported SDG&E had the highest electricity rate in California. …