Morning Report: Give Me More Time

Mayor Jerry Sanders lauded his past performance in treating San Diego’s budget ills yesterday but said permanent fixes to the city’s financial health won’t come anytime soon.

In fact, Sanders said in his annual State of the City address, he’d like as many as 18 months to figure out what to do about San Diego’s ongoing budget deficits.

As for now, he said, San Diego is on the right track and serves as a model government, although he told us later he’s not actually aware of anyone using the city as a model.

Sanders also bashed the “simplistic” idea of bankruptcy and promoted a new football stadium, which he said could go before voters in 2012.

We’ve got many more details in our main story about the mayor’s speech, plus a transcript. And we’ve got other coverage, including a stop-motion photo slideshow, complete with a soundtrack, that gives you a behind-the-scenes look at the speech through the eyes (and ears) of our photographer.

We also have a neat graphical representation of the words that Sanders used most often in his speech.

Trust us: This graphic is more fun to look at than it sounds. Among the most commonly used words: “will” and “can.” I couldn’t find any sign of “can’t” or “won’t.” That says a lot, doesn’t it? (Or maybe it says just a little: that the mayor is — news flash! — a politician.)

In other news:

• If Assemblywoman Lori Saldaña wins election to the county board of supervisors, she doesn’t want herself or anyone else to be limited to two terms (eight years). The five-member board has been in place longer than some high-schoolers have been alive, annoying critics who fear the current supervisors will only stop getting elected when they’re six feet under. (And some wouldn’t put it past them even then.)
• Speaking of ballot measures, a committee of San Diego City Council members is considering placing almost a dozen before voters. Among them: measures that would impose a tax to maintain the San Diego Zoo, increase the size of the City Council and the city’s school board, and tie City Council member salaries to the median income in the city.
• Charter schools were set up, in part, to free teachers from government rules and union regulations. So why is a local charter school going union?
• You may have read in our pages about the so-called “shadow inventory” — foreclosed homes that aren’t on the market yet but could go up for sale and drag down prices. Our editorial cartoonist wonders if they’ll cloud the optimism surrounding the housing market among sellers.
• Orange alert! Our Photo of the Day captures one of the stunning sunsets we’ve been having lately. Did you know that “the sun is a mass of incandescent gas?” (Some people I know are big balls of hot air too, but I digress.) In our photo soundtrack, They Might Be Giants offers even more helpful solar facts.

Elsewhere:

• He’s back! Carlsbad self-help guru James Arthur Ray, whose sweat-lodge ceremony in Arizona turned deadly for three participants last fall, will begin his seminars again next month here in San Diego.

  The Arizona Republic has more on claims by Ray’s lawyers that he wasn’t at fault for the deaths.

• The massive Merriam Mountains housing development in North County is still alive, the UT and NCT report, after the Board of Supervisors decided to hold a second hearing on the 2,600-home plan. The first ended in a 2-2 tie with Ron Roberts absent.
• The effort to allow CCDC, the city’s downtown redevelopment arm, to spend more money than originally contemplated over its lifetime took a first step forward yesterday, the UT reports. Such a move is considered vital to getting the Chargers deal done downtown.
• Finally, the NYT takes a look at “The No Lock People” — those brave souls who refuse to lock their doors, even in Manhattan or — surprise! — San Diego.

  The story quotes a 32-year-old guy named Matt who has no lock on the door of the house he rents with two other men. “We have three big-screen TVs in our living room, which faces out on a busy main street,” Matt tells the paper. “I don’t know if we’re asking for it.”

I do.

— RANDY DOTINGA