We’re part of Speak City Heights, a collaboration between KPBS, The AjA Project, Media Arts Center San Diego and us. The project has its own website, which pulls together content from all the partners.

Now, we’ll start rounding up the best of that work weekly. Here’s the first one:

• A new candidate’s joining the City Council race in District 9, reports KPBS. Long-time Latino activist and business owner Mateo Camarillo will challenge the only other candidate running in the new, Latino-majority district, current District 7 Councilwoman Marti Emerald.

[H]e decided to run in part out of frustration that no Latino candidate had emerged.

“It’s not right that all this effort went into creating a district, and then there’s no candidate,” said Camarillo, who was also a member of the commission that redrew San Diego’s City Council districts 10 years ago.

Here’s where new District 9 is (shaded brown below):

Here’s some context about the new district’s makeup from us last fall:

More than 50 percent of the district’s residents are Latino. And while it also includes more politically active, affluent, whiter neighborhoods like the College Area and Kensington-Talmadge, its largest population base is in City Heights, which makes up just more than half of the district’s 145,000 residents, according to Census figures.

For more on the District 9 race, check out Speak City Heights’ archive.

• Speak City Heights sends out a weekly email on called Field Guide (you can sign up here). This week’s edition focused on San Diego’s mayoral candidates through the lens of public safety.

Learn more about the candidates running for mayor with our special page.

• Five calls out of six to the county’s food stamps help line don’t get through, U-T San Diego reported this week on an internal county report. That’s more than 350,000 calls a month. KPBS spoke to two critics of how the program is run who say the county report’s conclusions affirm their belief that there’s a lot of room for improvement in the county food stamps program.

For more on the food stamps program, check out our 2010 special report on county social services.

• Several nonprofits will collaborate on getting more eligible permanent residents to vie to become U.S. citizens, reports KPBS.

• On Friday, Speak City Heights also rounds up news from Twitter that pertains to the community. This week: How a federal bill could affect local transit, the growing education gap between the rich and poor, and L.A.’s curfew policy.

• Bonus: An L.A. Times story on the popularity of cellphone carrier Cricket’s music service opens with a scene in City Heights:

In a neighborhood chock-full of Mexican, Vietnamese and Somalian restaurants, Larry Woelfel, a 40-year-old unemployed lab technician, waited with two dozen customers to buy cellphones and service from a San Diego company called Cricket Wireless. …

Cricket customers like Woelfel, who pay as little as $45 a month for unlimited text, talk and data, are plunking down $10 more for unlimited music.

Dagny Salas is the web editor at voiceofsandiego.org. You can contact her directly at dagny.salas@voiceofsandiego.org or 619.550.5669.

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Dagny Salas

Dagny Salas was web editor at Voice of San Diego from 2010 to 2013. She was an investigative fellow at VOSD from 2009 to 2010.

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