OB Rag

By Mandy Havlik

Electric bicycles are transforming transportation but without clear rules and a strong safety framework, they are also making our streets more dangerous, especially for children. It’s common to see young riders without helmets, e-bikes speeding down sidewalks, and parents startled by close calls at intersections, school zones, and neighborhood walkways. The increasing frequency of these incidents is not just alarming, it is unacceptable.

Other cities in our region have taken decisive action. Poway, Chula Vista, Encinitas and Santee have all adopted e-bike regulations that establish clearer guidelines and elevate safety expectations. These cities recognize what San Diego has not yet acted upon; that e-bikes operated by untrained or underage riders pose real risks. As the largest city in the region, San Diego should not be trailing behind its neighbors in safeguarding its residents. It is time for our city to adopt the commonsense approaches outlined in California State Assembly Bill 2234 and implement them locally.

By Paul Krueger / Times of San Diego / Nov. 17, 2025

Five years after Home Depot’s corporate office announced the construction of a new superstore in Mission Valley, the concrete behemoth is rising from the dust on Camino del Rio South just east of Texas Street.

You can see the project move toward completion as you zoom along Interstate 8. The steel-and-concrete girders closest to the freeway are the backbone of the store’s 155,000-square-foot parking structure. That’s actually bigger than the store and its garden center with 125,000 square feet of shopping space.

This colossus will become the dominant structure on the disappearing south rim of Mission Valley. But who exactly will it serve?

There is no housing of any kind along this stretch of Camino del Rio South or even close by. Home Depot executives reportedly believe the new superstore will be a magnet for customers who live up the hill in Normal Heights, North Park, Hillcrest, and adjoining neighborhoods.

Audits Suspended for 9 Months in Summer of 2024 Due to ‘Backlog’

By Jeff McDonald / San Diego Union-Tribune / November 18, 2025

Bookkeeping practices at San Diego City Hall were so muddled that officials last year stopped auditing Mission Bay percentage leases, the lucrative rental agreements that direct a portion of tenants’ profits to the public treasury, an independent report has found.

The decision by Mayor Todd Gloria and his aides to suspend routine oversight of bayfront leases for nine months raised the city’s risk of losing money at the same time it was confronting major shortfalls in revenue.

It also prevented San Diego from imposing late fees and other penalties on tenants that failed to pay rent on time or otherwise meet the terms of their leases, the City Auditor’s Office reported.

Is This a Quixotic Move by City in Efforts to Eliminate the 30-foot Height Limit? State Appellate Court Ruled that 2022 Ballot Measure Was Illegally Placed Before Voters

By Jennifer Van Grove / The San Diego Union-Tribune / November 18, 2025 

San Diego will ask the state’s highest court to keep intact a 2022 ballot measure, recently deemed illegal, that sought to eliminate the 30-foot height limit from the Midway District.

Monday, San Diego City Council members voted 6 to 2 in closed session to authorize a petition for review to the Supreme Court of California.

The decision comes one month after the city lost, on appeal, a lawsuit to environmental advocacy group Save Our Access, which contested the legality of the ballot measure, known as Measure C.

In October, California’s 4th District Court of Appeal determined that the city violated California’s Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, when it put the ballot measure in front of voters before sufficiently studying the environmental impacts of taller buildings. The three-judge panel decision, in favor of plaintiff Save Our Access, directed the trial court to issue a writ of mandate, which would invalidate the ordinance and restore the 30-foot height limit in the Midway District.

The ruling could have devastating implications for new development in a part of town city leaders have said has been hamstrung by the 53-year-old building height restriction.

Around midnight and 1 a.m. Nov. 16, an explosive device was detonated in the alley between Cape May and Brighton east of Abbott .

No one was hurt but a truck sustained damage. The San Diego City Metro Bomb Squad was on scene gathering evidence and conducting an investigation.

Come inside and see the video by Charles Landon who interviews some witnesses to the sound of the explosion and the fireball.

By Paul Krueger

California has robust protections for citizen participation in the government process, with laws that require open meetings and encourage full public participation at the local level.

But City Council President Joe LaCava violated the spirit — if not the letter — of those protections today (Monday, Nov. 17) when he made it extremely — and unnecessarily difficult for San Diegans to keep informed about important actions related to a controversial building height limit in the Midway/Pacific Highway area.

The City Council met today in Closed Session to discuss — and probably vote on — Mayor Todd Gloria and City Attorney Heather Ferbert’s effort to overturn the recent appellate court ruling that reinstates the 30-foot height limit throughout the 1,300-acre Midway/ Pacific Highway district.

That unanimous appellate court ruling requires the city to perform a more comprehensive environmental study of the negative impacts of high-density, high-rise development in the Midway/Pac Hwy area. Armed with this additional information, voters would — for the third time — decide the size and shape of future development in that neighborhood.

By Rob Campbell 

This Thursday, November 20th, at 9am, at 7650 Mission Valley Road, San Diego, the San Diego Planning Commission will hear agenda item #2. This agenda item concerns what some call the “Radio Towers” of Emerald Hills.

In the historically Black enclave of the neighborhood of Emerald Hills in San Diego, the latest development upheaval lays bare how old injustices don’t die. They merely get repackaged in the language of progress.  What was once a promise of expanding parkland for a neighborhood long denied environmental justice or infrastructure, the last and largest green space is now being transmuted into a windfall for a for-profit multibillion-dollar corporation, with the full complicity of the City of San Diego and its planning apparatus.

The project in question — what locals call the “Radio Towers” — is a parcel on Old Memory Lane, formerly earmarked for new parkland in Emerald Hills, a “destination” park offering sweeping downtown and ocean views.  It is now slated instead to host 130 private homes with a single entrance and exit with an up-zoning at roughly 400% the density allowed in the same zoning white-neighborhood just to the north in La Jolla.

Here’s the brutal arithmetic of injustice:

By Frank Gormlie

I’m happy to share the news that two of the Rag’s current commentators and long-time San Diego journalist have received well-deserved awards of merit from local non-profit organizations.

J.W. August was honored by the San Diego Press Club with a “Best in Show” award for “Best Daily and Online Entry Excellence in Journalism.” August was recognized for his KPBS report on a detective in the Navy Criminal Investigations Division who is now serving time for abusing a federal prisoner in custody.

Paul Krueger was honored by the San Diego County Taxpayers Association with the Chairman’s Golden Watchdog Award for Grassroots Advocacy. Paul is a co-founder of both Neighbors for a Better San Diego and the San Diego Community Coalition.

by Caleb Lunetta / San Diego Union-Tribune / Nov. 15, 2025

Scottie Williams, a U.S. Army veteran and Ocean Beach resident, lived with intention, his family said Friday. When the 28-year-old said he’d do something — like finishing a job or committing to hanging out with someone — he’d do it.

On Sunday, Nov. 9 he approached the Silver Strand Half Marathon with that same level of commitment, strongly finishing the race in the same fashion he had completed so many other half marathons before. But after crossing the finish line and receiving his medal, the seemingly healthy Williams collapsed and died.

“It was a normal day,” said Sarah Lloyd, his older sister. “And then he just collapsed. They worked on him for a long time, and they just couldn’t bring him back.”

“We don’t have any answers,” she added.

Any talk of a quick invasion and easy ‘regime change’ is dangerously misleading.

By Mark Hertling / The Bulwark – Reader Supported News / Nov 13, 2025

OVER THE PAST FEW MONTHS, the United States has embarked on a controversial maritime campaign in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific targeting small Venezuelan and Colombian vessels alleged to be engaged in drug smuggling. Under an asserted “narcoterrorist” deterrence operation, the United States has thus far carried out nineteen twenty lethal strikes on small boats in international waters, killing at least seventy-six people, all undertaken without the transparency, oversight, or legal foundation that normally governs the use of American force.

The Trump administration insists these are long-needed and decisive counternarcotics operations. But U.N. human-rights experts warn that the strikes may “amount[] to extrajudicial executions,” and allies with territory and citizens in the Caribbean are raising alarms about legal exposure, civilian risk, and regional instability. With the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group near to arriving on station and President Trump threatening “hundreds more” strikes, the mission looks less like enhanced interdiction and far more like the early shaping operations for regime-change in Venezuela.

An unidentified male pedestrian was killed late Friday night, Nov. 14, when he ran across a street in the Midway District and was struck by a SUV.

Police responded at 11:11 p.m. to Hancock Street and Camino del Rio West, where they determined the 33-year old had run east across the intersection against the red “Don’t walk” signal. Then he was struck a BMW being driven by a 55-year-old woman driving north on Camino del Rio West. The woman driver had a green traffic light.

The San Diego Community Coalition, now in its seventh month, is hitting full stride with a series of “Town Halls with Newsmakers,” a campaign of outreach to underserved communities, and an email bulletin keeping members informed of upcoming City Hall meetings.

David Garrick, the San Diego Union-Tribune’s City Hall Reporter, will be our guest speaker at the Coalition’s second Town Hall forum on Saturday, December 13, from 12 noon to 1:00 p.m. at the Logan Heights Library, 567 S. 28 Street. Neighbors for a Better San Diego will co-host the forum, which is titled “This Just In: Covering the City Hall Beat.”

The series began October 25 when District 7 City Councilmember Raul Campillo met with community leaders from across the City. As reported in the Rag, “The unwritten rule at City Hall forums is that elected officials speak at length and on script while their constituents listen … A relaxed Campillo broke that rule and clearly enjoyed the spirited give-and-take.”

As part of its commitment to empowering all San Diego communities to fight predatory development, the Coalition will make informational presentations before south-of-Interstate-8 community planning groups beginning next month.