OB Rag

By Gary Wonacott

In 2018, a a few days before there was to be a vote on then Mayor Faulconer’s proposed short-term rental regulations, I met with then Councilmember Chris Ward.  In the meeting, I expressed concerns about the mayor’s proposed approach resulting in a huge wave of STRs in Mission Beach, but Councilmember Ward said that he was more concerned that there may not be a sufficient number of applications to pay for enforcement, and without enforcement, the program was doomed.

And here we are again. After being assured by Councilmember Jen Campbell and her staff going back to the Memorandum Of Understanding (MOU), we find that once again Councilmember Ward’s prediction has come true.  There are too few applications to ensure that the program can fund a strong enforcement plan.

Let’s Hear It for the Team

By Joni Halpern

There is a little team of five of us — two in San Diego, one in Palm Springs, and two in Washington State – who work hard all year long to keep a roof over the heads of one small local family headed by a single, disabled parent.  It’s a struggle, but our team has triumphed over homelessness that has threatened this low-income family for many years.

Occasionally over the years, our efforts have faltered, as in this year when rents have climbed so high, and everyone’s costs have  increased so much that our treasury for assistance has been rendered insufficient — temporarily at least.

With our friend now residing for a short time with relatives while she tries to find another place,

The question has to be asked: given the unexpectedly low numbers of short-term rental applications the city has received, is San Diego’s much-vaunted short-term rental program on the verge of collapse?

We now know that from today’s U-T piece by Lori Weisberg,

“In all, the city received 3,110 whole-home vacation rental applications from throughout the city, excluding Mission Beach, said San Diego Director of Communications Rachel Laing. For whole-home rentals in just Mission Beach, the application submittals totaled 1,291, she said.”

The annual Christmas Bird Count headed up by the San Diego chapter of the National Audubon Society will mobilize a team of nearly 150 volunteers to count every bird they can within a designated area for the annual Christmas Bird Count.

It all happens on Saturday, December 17, and the Society is doing this to document bird species which help track the response of birds to a changing planet.

Last year, San Diego’s count recorded 211 species and helped California to lead the US

by Ernie McCray

Had so much fun
the other day
with my offspring
at a nice café,
with one brief
moment
when I had to
wipe a couple
of tears away,
as I shared a story
about one of my two
children who passed away

The first arrest has been made in the November 18 assault and battery of an OB man on Newport Avenue.

Dajour Hardaway, 24, was arrested by Murrieta Police on just after 10 p.m. on Sunday, December 11 on felony assault charges stemming from an incident where Woody Boethel was attacked by four people as he walked his dog in the 5000 block of Newport.

By Lori Weisberg / San Diego Union-Tribune / Dec. 14, 2022

Restaurants in San Diego’s beach areas are facing a tough new regulation for outdoor dining that will now require them to replace any lost parking they occupy on public streets.

The new requirement, approved Wednesday by the California Coastal Commission, threatens to upend plans by beach-area restaurateurs looking to retain outdoor seating areas they had erected in the street during the pandemic, when mandated indoor dining closures sharply curtailed business.

There’s still lots of snow in San Diego’s mountains, as evidenced from this screen grab

The half-brother of the slain insurrectionist from San Diego was granted probation after a jury convicted him in November of a misdemeanor battery count and a hate crime allegation.

Roger Witthoeft, 34, was found guilty of the hate crime because he struck a Latino San Diego Gas & Electric worker in Point Loma and shouted racial slurs at the man. He was also convicted of violating the victim’s civil rights. The worker was directing traffic around a work site at the intersection of Voltaire Street and Mendocino

The Fusion Breakthrough Suggests That Maybe Someday We’ll Have a Second Sun

By Bill McKibben / The New Yorker – Reader Supported News / Dec. 13, 2022

In the meantime, we need to use the sun we’ve already got. On Tuesday, the Department of Energy is expected to announce a breakthrough in fusion energy [it did]: — scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have succeeded for the first time in making their complex and expensive machinery produce more power than it uses, if only for an instant.

The San Diego Union-Tribune ran a guest Op-Ed on Tuesday, Dec. 13 with an online headline of “Empty bike lanes a telling comment on who has clout in San Diego.”

Bill Slack, a retired former university administrator who now lives in Golden Hill, asked a pertinent question after seeing hardly any bicycles along the bike paths on 30th Street which he frequents often:

Is this a monumental rip-off perpetrated by a very small but clearly well-organized special interest group of biking enthusiasts?

Slack continues:

The final design for the Ocean Beach Library has been unleashed by the City. The current “art deco” entrance is being preserved in the $11.9 million expansion of one of San Diego’s oldest neighborhood libraries, originally built in 1928.

Construction won’t begin, however, until the winter of 2024. Completion is expected the spring of 2026.

The expansion, when completed will include 4,300-square-feet and will require the removal of the annex building. Facilities in the new library will include: