Sometimes what you should look for is as important in news as what happened. If you missed them over the holidays, Andrew Donohue’s team did a great series of posts helping San Diego residents think about what will be coming up in their beats over the coming year.
I thought I would get the blog fired up in 2010 with a similar exercise.
I’ve asked a couple of dozen San Diegans to reflect on a series of questions about what they’re going to be looking forward to in 2010. I did it over e-mail. I know that has its limitations but it’s efficient for this type of thing. Some of the questions I gave to everyone. And some I customized for the person. Some of the people are well-known, others are I just wanted to check in with.
Obviously I couldn’t send this to everyone in San Diego (and yet, it would be cool if the city ever did something like that). So I’ll ask this: If you have the time to answer the below questions, please do and we’ll run it.
I asked them each these three questions:
What decision will you be paying attention to the most in the coming year and who will be making it?
Who is the most promising leader in San Diego these days and what do you think he or she might do in 2010?
What else are you looking forward to in 2010?
Then I asked them to rank the following major projects in order of priority for San Diego:
- A New Central Library
- An Expanded Convention Center
- A New City Hall
- A New Stadium
- A Performing Arts Center
- A New Wastewater Recycling System
- An Expanded Mass Transit System
- A Different Airport Infrastructure
Finally I asked them each to rank these local civic problems by how much they will worry you in the coming year — most worrisome at the top:
- Municipal Budget Shortfalls
- School Budget Shortfalls
- Infrastructure Decay
- Library Cutbacks or Eliminations
- Water Reliability Concerns
- Parks and Recreation Cutbacks
- Mass Transit Shortcomings
- Homelessness
- Drug Use
- Water Pollution
- Local Ecological Damage
- Crime
- Fire Protection Shortfalls
- Other (please specify)
- Other (please specify)
I’m going to start publishing the responses in the next post. I’m still waiting for responses and trying to follow up with some of the people I asked to respond, but there are several really interesting returns already. Thanks to those who took some time over the holidays to answer me.
— SCOTT LEWIS