Pieces of rubber tires. Sharp wire. Mangled rebar.
Mission Beach residents have been finding this junk all over the beach. The mess is apparently the product of a federal sand-dredging project. So whose job is to clean up the weird stuff?
In Other News:
• So much for the sleepy school board race in the northeastern parts of the city. It’s turned into a “Ross Perot situation,” as one observer puts it, with a wild-card write-in candidate (who might not legally be able to actually win, though she can legally run) and polarized rivals.
• If you’ve been listening to city officials the past few weeks, you’d think San Diego was on the road to even more ruin: next year’s budget deficit is expected to result in closures of libraries and community pools and recreation centers plus layoffs of cops and firefighters. The not-so-implicit message is that the city is doomed — doomed, I tell you! — unless Prop. D passes. The truth: The mayor could find new ways to bring money into the city without getting voters involved.
• The mayor had this to say a few days ago about Prop. D.: “I’m the one who triggers the half-cent sales tax and I won’t trigger it until we cut $73 million permanently out of our budget.” Is that true? Not exactly.
 Join thousands of San Diegans who get the day’s news in their inboxes every morning. Get the Morning Report now. |
• A city councilman and firefighters are battling each other over how much they make.
• Were two men who worked for a troubled company merely consultants who were out of the loop when things went wrong? Or were they executives, perhaps with larger roles than they’ve let on?
The City Council allowed a team of developers to move forward with their plans to buy an affordable housing project in Clairemont. Even so, two councilmembers had questions about two executives and their links to The Amerland Group, a troubled affordable housing developer.
As we’ve reported, five other executives who worked for Amerland and a subsidiary have been charged with manslaughter.
• With less than two weeks until the election, Councilman Todd Gloria has endorsed his previous opponent, Stephen Whitburn, in his race to replace Ron Roberts as county supervisor. The local gay community, in which Gloria is a player, has been divided (in some cases bitterly) over this race.
• Regardless of where you live in the county, you’ll want to check the latest edition of our TV series San Diego Explained: we look at ballot measures facing voters in the county, the city, the school district and Chula Vista.
Elsewhere:
• In the U-T: more “dissident former board members” at the San Diego Humane Society are worried that that “the society is not living up to a promise — made during fundraising for its new shelter — to end euthanasia of treatable or adoptable pets in the county by 2005.”
• A well-known Sacramento Bee columnist is appalled by the secret legislative deal that may make it easier for downtown to get a new football stadium: “These kind of deals drive the Legislature’s public standing, already abysmally low, even lower by creating the impression that its favors are bestowed just on those with political pull, like some tin-pot Third World dictatorship.”
Holy cow. If that tin pot gets a California tan, though, it might look golden.
• Local Assemblywoman Lori Saldaña refused to support the secret deal and vividly explains what happened to CityBeat: “It was awful. I knew exactly what they were trying to do. Marty Block was in on it, Mary Salas, Nathan [Fletcher] — and they’re all saying jobs, jobs, jobs! … Now they’re doing an end run because Nathan needs to vote for a budget and can tell the Republican leadership that he’d be willing to put up a vote because he strong-armed the Assembly to get this sweetheart deal for a Republican mayor in San Diego.”
• Kevin Williamson of the National Review, in looking at the “administrative fat” of San Diego’s city government, and of governments elsewhere, says there is “a whole parasite class of political hacks in lifetime sinecures with fat benefits and pensions who need to be encouraged to find productive work.”
• Finally: Oopsy-daisy. The Meg Whitman for governor campaign tweeted about an endorsement from the Deputy Sheriffs’ Association of San Diego County but accidentally linked to something completely different: “a Japanese video of a man in a pink tutu and stockings playing bass guitar,” as CNET describes it.
Dang it. I knew I shouldn’t have posted that video of myself on YouTube!
Please contact Randy Dotinga directly at randydotinga@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter: twitter.com/rdotinga.