OB Rag

By Mona Gable / AAA Magazine / Illustration by Alexia Lozano / July 10, 2025

A couple of years ago, the city of San Diego permanently closed the Ocean Beach Muni­cipal Pier. A study deemed the battered landmark “beyond its useful life.” With sea levels rising, the city judged it too impractical to spend millions of dollars to repair the structure. The final blow came in December 2023 when a storm knocked out a support pile, which promptly sank. My heart sank, too. If it were any other pier, I might not have cared so much. But this was my pier.

Christened in 1966, the 1,971-foot pier was—and for the moment, remains—the longest concrete pier on the West Coast. At its end, the pier split into a T, making it seem to reach forever. I was 13 the year it opened. Already a die-hard bodysurfer, I longed to join my brothers as they surfed next to the pier. But back then, girls were not particularly welcome in the male-dominated surfing world.

So the top of the pier became my refuge. I could walk out to where the waves were cresting—past the fishermen waiting for their lines to tug, past the tourists snapping photos—to watch the guys ride to shore. I could lean over the rail, gaze down into the water, follow the tides and riptides, and sometimes spot dolphins.

By Jeff McDonald / SD Union-Tribune / August 8, 2025

A Superior Court judge on Thursday, August 7, ordered attorneys for San Diego homeowners challenging the city’s recently imposed trash pickup fee to meet and confer with lawyers defending the city before he considers whether to expedite a trial.

Judge James A. Mangione issued the order after a 30-minute hearing at which the plaintiffs asked for their trial to begin in September, before the upcoming tax rolls are finalized. The parties will meet to discuss their differences and potential remedies over the next several days and present their positions to the judge at a hearing scheduled for Tuesday.

The plaintiffs argue that the trash fee adopted by the City Council in June violates the state constitution by exceeding the city’s costs of trash pickup and say officials plan to divert some of the new revenue to pay for other projects. They sued in May, weeks before the council voted 7-2 to impose the trash fee. Now they want a trial before the 2025-26 property tax rolls are finalized with the county treasurer-tax collector.

“The indirect evidence supports the reasonable inference that the city is doing this to plug financial holes,” said Michael Aguirre, the former elected San Diego city attorney who represents the 15 homeowner plaintiffs.

By Steven Mihailovich / Monthly San Diego U-T / August 6, 2025 

About 20 local activists from Neighbors for a Better Pacific Beach attended their first Pacific Beach Town Council meeting after recently becoming members.

They led the discussion on housing policy and proposed developments by questioning representatives for City Council President Joe LaCava and state Assemblymember Tasha Boerner on where their bosses stand on accessory dwelling units during the July 16 meeting. LaCava and Boerner’s districts include Pacific Beach.

Cambria Head, LaCava’s representative, was asked about the City Council’s repeated delays on a ceremonial second reading to pass an ordinance that would reform the city’s ADU Bonus Program. It was approved on June 16.

Ross Tritt, Boerner’s representative, was asked about Boerner’s position on Senate Bill 79, which, if passed, would annul the city’s 30-foot height limit for buildings within a half-mile of public transit.

By Patty Ducey-Brooks

Elda Developments CEO, Ahmed Eldahmy, has made several recent statements to the press that community members “refuse to participate in the solution” for his proposed 14-story high-rise, located in the heart of a Middletown residential neighborhood. He has also characterized the opposition as “wealthy neighbors living up the hill” who “do not care about the housing crisis and instead appear only to care about protecting their net worth.” Furthermore, he recently paid for a KUSI informercial with Roy Roberts that aired on August 4th where he claims to be trying to work with residents.

The Stop Columbia High Rise effort is supported by over 1,000 residents, including renters, homeowners and local businesses. They are opposed to this high rise for the many harmful issues it creates, documented here  (www.StopColumbiaHighRise.org).  Eldahmy’s attempt to mischaracterize the opposition as wealthy landowners reveals the company’s disregard for the neighborhood and its tone-deafness to the growing resistance.

By Kate Callen 

In 2018, the last election year when San Diego City Council District 2 had an open seat, the winner, Jen Campbell, was best known for being David Axelrod’s cousin. Before her first term was up, Campbell faced a recall effort, and she was replaced as Council President amid charges her staff illegally influenced the redistricting process.

In 2022, Campbell ran for re-election as a tarnished incumbent. Then a funny thing happened. A dark money group linked to Mayor Todd Gloria blanketed District 2 with hit pieces smearing Lori Saldana, Campbell’s formidable Democratic challenger. Saldana finished third behind obscure Republican Linda Lukacs, and Campbell kept her seat.

The 2026 open seat election will be consequential for a district hard hit by City Hall’s subservience to developers. From a 10-unit complex on a small Clairemont cul-de-sac to a 56-unit mid-rise at a major Point Loma intersection, giant housing projects are hammering D2 neighborhoods.

By Lynne Miller

First: These were my thoughts  after attending the Ocean Beach Planning Board meeting Tuesday, August 5, at the OB Rec Center. The meeting was one hour, and a big thank you to the OBPB for taking the time to research, conduct meetings, and for being available to OBceans. Without your willingness to serve we would have no lifeline to the City Leadership!

The ‘what’? The CRMP, the Coastal Resilience Master Plan Board! Remember about a year ago we stuffed ourselves into a very hot, overcrowded room at the OB REC! The chair of the Resiliency Advisory Board, Julie Chase, that day, was faced by a kind of mutiny. Neighbors insisted that the structure of the meeting change from a cooperative learning activity to a larger meeting where all questions and ideas were heard.

Remember? So the committee took a whole bunch of information that was written on big poster papers. We thought that would result in ‘back to the drawing board’ for CRMP. We think that might have happened, but we don’t know? Next, there was a follow-up ZOOM meeting, and many people online asked questions, and like the first meeting, the committee went away with a lot of things to consider. What happened?

Editordude: On Thursday, August 7, local attorney Cory Briggs commented on the post “Mission Bay Park Committee Votes Against ‘Surplus Land’ Proposal” and we thought it was too important for a comment so here’s it is elevated to a full on ‘rant.’

By Cory Briggs

Yesterday [August 6] the mayor’s czar on this issue called me and tried to persuade me that both of them really want a hotel on the site but just can’t seem to figure out how to get around the Surplus Lands Act. This is gonna be their public-relations mantra — “we don’t want to build housing in Mission Bay Park (MBP) but the law forces us to give housing developers first dibs” — even though the mayor and city council are not following the Surplus Land Act (SLA) process for other city-owned property outside Mission Bay Park.

So it’s even more clear to me than it was before the call that the mayor is pushing to build high-end housing on the site. Yes, a minority fraction of it will have to be affordable” under the SLA, but the overwhelming majority will be high-end housing if the city goes down the SLA road.

At the meeting, Councilmember Joe La Cava tried to make it sound like the city could start down the SLA path but then take the city off the path after a 90-day period of trying to negotiate with a developer in good faith. He surely knew that was a lie when he said it because he has dealt with the SLA plenty during his pre-politician career.

by Ernie McCray

I just put a Carlos Fuentes novel down,
a book that will be nameless
because these words
aren’t to be interpreted
as a book review,
other than to say
it was a nice read to say the least,
a typical narrative
from a man whose imagination
can shape realities
into fantasies,
his characters routinely
traveling somewhat cosmically
back and forth
over the lines between
truths and myths,

The Rag is in the beginning of our annual summer fundraising campaign. And we have to express that keeping the Rag alive does take donations from our readers and supporters, for afterall, a free press is not “free.”

We do have expenses — our annual server bill is $900 alone; plus subscriptions, utilities — and we actually pay many of our writers and reporters for reporting on community meetings and on issues that no one else covers.

Here are 17 Reasons to Support the OB Rag:

1. Our Progressive Politics: we stand for the Constitution, liberty and democracy and for a woman’s right to choose. We are diametrically opposed to Trump’s banana republic and against his authoritarianism — which include plans for the end the Rule of Law. We’re for racial and gender equality.
2. We Oppose the Direction that San Diego Has Been Going: the current city leadership has been taking us down the wrong road in its imposition of un-democratically-forced rules that threaten our neighborhoods, like the Bonus ADU program and Complete Communities.
3. We have been at the forefront of forcing reforms to the ADU policies along with neighborhood groups and networks like the San Diego Community Coalition and Neighbors for a Better San Diego.
4. We stand for more affordable housing, renters’ rights and an end to the corporate ownership of our housing stock. We also find it unacceptable that large campaign donors can reap the award of public land and development projects.
5. We also focus on maintaining parks and the public common — such as Mission Bay Park. We broke the story of how the Mayor wants to break off sections of Mission Bay and make them “surplus lands” in order to lease them to commercial and private interests in order to bring a cash-strapped city with a few bucks.

by Madeline Nguyen / Times of San Diego / Aug. 5, 2025

Pacific Beach residents have sued a controversial San Diego developer to stop one of the biggest backyard apartment complexes the city has ever seen: over 100 units packed into two neighboring lots.

Dozens of neighbors and tribal members rang in the lawsuit with a protest Monday against the complex’s developer, Christian Spicer of the firm SDRE, outside the PB properties where he plans to build his Chalcifica project.

Wielding signs reading, “No predatory development,” the protesters shared concerns that echoed many outlined in the lawsuit: that the mega-project will pack street parking, endanger the environment and sit on the site of a culturally significant Kumeyaay village.

SDRE plans to put six three-story apartment buildings and 70 parking spaces across the two lots. The project is slated for an east Pacific Beach neighborhood dominated by military housing and single-family homes.

The brewing legal battle represents the latest twist in the broader fight over what officials call unexpected, “outlier” accessory dwelling unit projects.

By Geoff Page

What follows is a more detailed accounting of the Mission Bay Park Committee meeting on August 5. As recounted here in The Rag on August 6, the committee sent the city a clear message by voting 7-2-1 against the city’s proposal to declare Mission Bay park land surplus land.

The city’s position and the opposition’s position at the meeting are detailed in the following paragraphs.

City’s Position

Andy Field, Director of the Parks and Recreation Department, presented the city’s surplus land proposal. His first references were to the City Charter to explain how Mission Bay lease revenues are shared.  Field referenced Article V, Executive and Administrative Service, Section 55: Parks and Recreation, SubSection 55.2: Mission Bay Park and Regional Parks Improvement Funds.