Morning Report: How to Disagree

Former state Sen. Steve Peace helped set up the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority — pulling the administration of the airport out of the Port Commission’s umbrella and charging the new entity with exploring the possibility of a new air transport.

Now, Peace writes in a commentary that it’s time to eliminate the entity.

“To airport professionals, the customer is the airline not the passengers and certainly not the community at large. This narrow vision is a death sentence,” Peace writes.

Have a different view and want to run it on the site? We’re working hard to improve a new system for submitting content to the site:

Step 1: Register here.  

Step 2: Click the link to Log In with your new screen name.

Step 3: Go to “manage users page.”

Step 4: Go to “My Contributions”

Step 5: Choose to submit an article or a photo.

After that, it will go into a system and we can determine if it’s a letter, op-ed or something different (maybe a topic for a guest blogging appearance on one of our writers’ popular blogs). Nearly 200 people have registered to comment on the site and we’re going about verifying them so they can submit at any time. If you have already registered, you can log in at the top left corner of the website and follow the above steps.

If you have any trouble, e-mail your piece to any of the beat writers, editor Andrew Donohue, web editor Sarah Johnson or me. It’s a new day for interacting with voiceofsandiego.org and if you register, we’ll soon be offering you some great invitations.

Now, onto the news:

• Starting when World War II sapped the United States of workers, an agreement between Mexico and the United States allowed hundreds of thousands of Mexicans to work in this country. The program ended in 1964 but many of the older workers still carry their tattered documents from the period. Now a local nonprofit, Casa Familiar, is helping some of them recover money the government withheld from their checks.  We have the story.
• For those who have been reading Rich Toscano for a while, like me, you know how interesting it is to watch the graphs he has updated for years evolve. Now, he says, it looks like home prices — up for seven months in a row — have stalled, at least for now. But he doesn’t see much “predictive value” in the change.
• Two-time mayoral candidate and businessman Steve Francis also has a new commentary on the site. He says the mayor has missed an opportunity to reform the fundamentals of a troubled City Hall. “Like a teenager looking for date money under the sofa cushions, the city will once again transfer money from funds promised for certain infrastructure spending to prop up General Fund operating expenses.” You know what to do if you disagree with him or have something to add.
• San Diegans will be deeply interested in this New York Times story — not just because it quotes local political consultant Larry Remer. The U.S. Supreme Court will be hearing three cases — two next week — concerning the federal “honest services” anti-fraud law. The law, has been used locally to prosecute, among others, Remer, former City Councilmen Ralph Inzunza and Michael Zucchet, and former members of the city’s pension board. But it is difficult to understand and, if Justice Antonin Scalia gets his way, it is short lived.
• The New York Times also profiles former San Diego Padres GM Kevin Towers.
• The Union-Tribune has run a couple of pieces recently about local residents getting seemingly ground up by San Diego county government. The first piece a week ago, concerned an older couple trying to downsize their living arrangements. And today, the paper runs a story about a Chula Vista couple the county handed a $35,000 bill to clear fire hazards from their property in Julian. They say they didn’t get proper notice.
• Finally, I tried to think of the most relaxing thing to do on Saturday after an intense week. And that turned out to be a bit of writing about our thoughts on the technology voiceofsandiego.org uses, our direction and our mission. Again, you know what to do if you disagree with me.

— SCOTT LEWIS