Escondido lawyer David Ferguson would like the San Diego Chargers to come up and look around. Stay a while. Maybe move in.
After all, Escondido has a lot to offer, he says in this weekend’s Q&A feature.
For one thing, Escondido — considered by some to be the last best hope for a local football stadium — “has a lot of positive things going for it in terms of its location, its infrastructure, the political climate,” Ferguson says. For another, it doesn’t have a “fatal flaw” like other potential sites.
Ferguson, a major player in the efforts to woo the Chargers northward, admits that there’s still a big hurdle: paying for a $1 billion stadium. But “that’s a Southern California question.”
In other news:
- Along with the release of its five-year financial forecast and the $179 million budget deficit it revealed, the city of San Diego also listed budget deficits for other cities in California.
Well, we did a little bit of fact checking on those numbers. Turns out, some of those figures were substantially overstated.
- We’ve been following the efforts of a Carmel Valley community to get the city of San Diego to build a park that residents have already paid for.
Now comes news that the park won’t be funded over the next five years. This won’t make residents happy.
- The city is threatening to crack down on a Little Italy apartment/hotel complex whose apartments were supposed to provide affordable housing to the community. The apartments appeared to be missing in action earlier this summer, and now they’re apparently being rented for less than 30 days.
- East County has a problem with legal drugs. Prescription drugs are much more likely to play a role in suspicious deaths in El Cajon, La Mesa and Lemon Grove than in other local cities, according to our research.
Prescription drugs that frequently contribute to deaths include OxyContin and Valium, among others.
It’s not clear what’s going on, but we’ll keep investigating this topic.
- Paging Tippi Hendren! Our Photo of the Day is positively Hitchcockian.
- Elsewhere: San Diego native Ted Williams got plenty of respect during his life, and there’s now talk of honoring one of the best baseball players of all time with a statue downtown. But in death, at least to judge by allegations in a horrific new book, Williams hasn’t been treated with grace.
A cryonics facility in Arizona stores his body, and a tell-all written by a company executive says a worker batted around his frozen head, which was balanced on an empty can of tuna, sending pieces of it flying around. And that’s not all. (NY Daily News)…
You may remember the infamous case of the “assistance” dog who was attacked by Escondido’s no-nonsense “Library Cat” in one of a series of violent encounters with unfortunate canines. The dog owner, a local newspaper reporter who said his pooch warned him of pending panic attacks by bringing him a ball, subsequently lost a $1.5 million lawsuit against the city of Escondido.
Researchers have looked into whether “medical alert” dogs have the ability to warn of medical attacks, reports syndicated columnist Cecil Adams this week, but they haven’t found any evidence that they can.
The Coffee Collection:
When Traffic Laws Don’t Apply: Once a month, hundreds of cyclists take over San Diego streets as part of a mass protest. Street signs and stoplights don’t stop them, and police stand by.
America’s Next Top (Airport) Supermodel: Why did an airport — the one that’s been busy raising fees on travelers and might hike them some more — feel the need to hire a model and makeup artist? And spend $86,000 on an annual report? We investigate.
Quote of the Week: “I just love the author’s concept of bicyclists as a ‘law-breaking mob of thugs’! And all the SUV drivers terrorized by the pedal-powered rebels-with-a-cause. Classic!” — A commenter responding to a letter to the editor bashing the bicycling protesters.