A quick drive by:
- I see that the schoobrary has been given the go ahead. Councilman Todd Gloria tweeted that he’s proud the city has the “vision” needed to carry this out. True vision would see a path toward righting the city’s financial woes by recognizing the complaints of taxpayers while asking everyone to sacrifice just a little; eventually saving and investing in an infrastructure that fostered economic growth; and then, putting San Diego into position not to build something out of envy of other cities, but to build something that made other cities envious.
Nope, San Diego is happy slapping together an underfunded main library; paying for part of it by putting an unneeded school in the top two floors; closing down branch libraries; falling deeper into debt and letting infrastructure continue to deteriorate.
Nice vision.
- On that note, I haven’t really spent much time looking at this from the school system’s perspective but this is kind of absurd.
Emily Alpert did a fantastic job running down the cost of the school district putting a high school in the top floors of the proposed downtown library.
Have you ever been to the new Lincoln High School? It’s unbelievable. I don’t think you can have nicer facilities and more amenities.
Yet it cost less per student and per square foot than the new school inside of a library. Yes, the school nobody wanted until it could help finance the new main library.
- Remember Wild Erp? The much-delayed, over budget, brutally difficult yet very promising new computer system San Diego City Hall is trying to implement? Looks like it’s delayed again — at least one big part of it. San Diego had planned to implement a new payroll system but now city officials are saying the employee pay reductions the city implemented a couple of months ago made it impossible to launch immediately.
Who knew lowering benefits and wages was such a hard thing to do?
Because of the change, operators will have to test the new system more, according to a memo from the city’s chief financial officer, Jay Goldstone to the City Council:
These additional test cycles are needed to reduce risk and ensure the payroll in SAP will be accurate. Based on the additional testing required, our Personnel and Payroll implementation date must be revised. In order to avoid costly rework of conversion and reconciliation programming, the new implementation date must coincide with the start of a new quarter, and is now set at January 1,2010.
Never fear, Goldstone assures everyone, this will not cost anything.
Never does.
- You might have heard about some complaints among users of iPhones about the phone and data service they are able to get with their AT&T plans (full disclosure: I am a new iPhone user and I love it). AT&T recently announced plans to bolster its service in Los Angeles and New York to squash — at least temporarily — what was becoming an uproar.
But little old San Diego isn’t as high of a priority. At least not until now. With Comic-Con — the massive nerd fest that last year brought 126,000 visitors to San Diego — is just around the corner, AT&T and others suddenly were worried that this would probably mean a lot of iPhones coming to a very small geographic area.
You don’t want to anger these people.
I called Steven Johnson, the spokesman of the San Diego Convention Center, if it were true that officials were worried about the iPhone convergence.
“True and resolved,” he said after checking. Johnson said that AT&T was rolling in apparatuses known as COWs, or “cell sites on wheels” that will be located actually inside the convention center to provide the needed bandwidth.
There has been much discussion about the needs of Comic-Con. It will supposedly outgrow the San Diego Convention Center and this has pushed local boosters into action hoping to expand the facility.
This is a reminder that there are other infrastructure needs in this town — a place that once tried to market itself as “Bandwidth Bay.”