Bob Filner says he needs money. His meager fundraising in the race for mayor has him concerned. After a debate Thursday night, he explained why to our Liam Dillon.
I think the Democrats took it for granted that I was going to get into the runoff. They said, “You don’t need money.” I think they’re wrong. I hope this is a wakeup call that says, hey I can get screwed on here. I could be the odd man out.
Filner also made it clear for the first time that he is officially against the current plans to expand the Convention Center. He wants to combine the project with a new football stadium and he wants to protect labor’s interests on its governing board.
• Speaking of the Convention Center, one of our readers’ comments about its proposed expansion made it into our Top Five Comments of the Week compiled by Dagny Salas.
A Troubled Police Officer’s Supervisor
A police officer accused of fixing traffic tickets was the supervisor of the notorious former cop Anthony Arevalos, and he was under investigation when he served as a key witness in Arevalos’ trial. “The testimony provided some of the most concrete evidence that officers within the department knew Arevalos acted suspiciously but did nothing to address the behavior.”
What We Learned This Week
Hotel Room Tax Hike Is a Tax Hike: The city attorney wants us to come to terms with the fact that the city’s planned hotel-room tax hike to fund a major expansion to the Convention Center is legally questionable.
Voters twice rejected increases to the hotel-room tax in 2004. The city attorney said the city could clear it all up simply by letting people vote again rather than go through the complex steps supporters are taking to avoid a vote.
If they do avoid the public vote, the city attorney is only signing off on the plan because he’ll immediately take it to court to be validated because he’s not sure if it’s legal. By doing that, he’s in essence by suing all possible people who might sue the city to challenge it. Councilman Todd Gloria told KPBS that they’d always been planning to do that but “It clarified the city attorney’s position as being more hesitant than I think we all believed him to be.”
Major Crimes Fell (But Mission Beach Is Blowing Up): The police have reported a drop in crime across the city but some areas struggled — a lot. See where your neighborhood landed in this great map. We filtered the data further for City Heights, where crime trends were mixed.
People Like Talking About Art: We had a fantastic gathering Wednesday for our second Meeting of the Minds. Catch up on what people were talking about after it and on Twitter.
The U-T’s Just Getting Warmed Up: U-T San Diego’s new owners made a splash with their huge editorial advocating for a new stadium and sports complex on the waterfront downtown. CEO John Lynch told KPBS we should expect editorials like that every month and that they will be “backed up” by stories as well.
• Speaking of a stadium, local conservative consultant Jen Jacobs mused about the Super Bowl coming tomorrow. “$150 million to Indy for the Superbowl. That would be nice for the SD!” Yes, money is nice. But I took the chance to remind her about what Indianapolis had to sacrifice for its stadium. Bloomberg View yesterday provided a brutal view of what taxpayers there had to do to make it possible.
• Finally, the NFL’s commissioner said that the league: a) doesn’t want to add more teams, b) wants all the teams it has to stay in the cities they’re in but c) also wants Los Angeles to have a team. No, it’s not just you — one of those things will have to change. The U-T has his answers to relevant questions at a news conference Friday.
The New Yorker and Tijuana
San Diego Magazine has a good Q&A up with Dana Goodyear, the staff writer who wrote this week’s profile on Javier Plascencia in The New Yorker. The story’s got San Diego abuzz. Goodyear notes the beauty of our train station and that the energy of our city is “young, tech, homebrews.”
The Pacific Beach Chupacabra
The internet is good at two things: Spreading outlandish garbage and clearing said garbage up. We can only hope for more of the latter.
A few days ago, a guy took a picture of a rather hellish looking being that washed up on the shore in Pacific Beach. Friends emailed it to the vice.com blog and called it a “Chupacabra/Montauk Monster-looking creature.”
It’s indeed an awful looking little creature. He (or she?) is not something you want to see, say, surfing.
But Discovery News says scientists who looked at it concluded it is not a demonoid or chupacabra, but a “marsupial commonly known as an opossum.”
I don’t know that this makes me feel better, though. Opossums were already unpleasant. Now that I know they can look like that after what couldn’t have been a good experience in the water, I’m going to be even more freaked when I come across one again.
I’m Scott Lewis, the CEO of voiceofsandiego.org. You can contact me directly at scott.lewis@voiceofsandiego.org or 619.325.0527 and follow me on Twitter (it’s a blast!): twitter.com/vosdscott.