Voices: What People Are Saying

This is our first roundup from around the Sandiegosphere, featuring items of interest that wash up in the region’s high tide of opinion and comment. In these posts, we’ll include op-eds and remarks from anywhere on the web that matters to San Diego, both official and informal, including op-eds, letters, story comments, web forums, Facebook statuses, Twitter and elsewhere. As long as they’re interesting and relevant, they’ll be noted, whether they’re made by the talking heads and chatterati (the Sandiegorati?) or by regular Joes and Janes.

• What one might call an attempt to steal money from the poor and homeless, Rich Geisler at San Diego News Room calls a “bold move … of foresight and smart political maneuvering.” Geisler, on the board of the Southeastern Economic Development Corp., a redevelopment agency, is talking about the secret deal in Sacramento that removed limits on downtown redevelopment.

He also says Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposal to end redevelopment agencies led to “scrambling, posturing, and [an] all-out fire drill,” what our politics reporter Liam Dillon refers to as a Mardi Gras. Loading up on bacon before Lent!

• Stimulated by our story about another local Republican legislator in favor of dumping redevelopment agencies, @ColinParent and @evanSDlabor discussed whether two is a trend. Will GOP representatives “piss off developers or hike taxes“? An answer for Dems and GOPers alike: I’m all out of love! Redevelopment can’t find a friend. (Rev that thirty-year-old earworm up: “I’m so lost without you, I know you were right, believing for so looooong…” )

• The Union-Tribune editorial board supports an effort to make cockfighting a felony.

• “Charging those who cause traffic accidents the cost of responding to those crashes seems pretty clearly to be an adjudication of liability or a form of punishment. That should trigger the application of Fifth and 14th Amendment due process protections, and that means a judicial finding,” argues the North County Times opinion staff. “What kind of burden are we imposing on the traffic court?”

• “It’s amazing to me that (VOSD CEO) Scott (Lewis) calls cutting funding for arts an attack on the arts community. Funding those programs is an attack on taxpayers,” writes reader Shawn Fox on a story about Councilman Carl DeMaio and his penchant for ticking off the establishment, the antiestablishment, the unestablished, etc.

• SanDiego.com asks, “Should the city outsource trash collection?” In the North County Times, Thomas Arnold says outsourcing is the path to budget salvation for Oceanside.

• Rachel Laing, deputy press secretary to Mayor Jerry Sanders, says this headline is a “derisive and mocking,” making Assemblyman Nathan Fletcher “sound trite”: Fletcher: I Love Schools.

• User Scott McLachlan writes, cynically, that even though Chula Vista has cut services to the quick, “Of course, there will be officers available for DUI checkpoints and cherry patches.” A cherry patch is place at which cops lie in wait for the frequent violations that happen there. “Cherries” is slang for the flashing lights on top of police cruisers.

• “With the number of food allergies, diabetes and other issues, a full time nurse should be mandatory,” writes user Debbie O’Toole. Tell that to San Diego Unified, which wants to use a traveling pool of nurses next year instead of schools having their own. Goodbye, Nurse!

Send comments you’d like to have included here to Grant Barrett, engagement editor for voiceofsandiego.org: grant@voiceofsandiego.org or (619) 550-5666 or @grantbarrett on Twitter.