The Morning Report
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Almost every week we highlight some of your comments and hope you’ll join us in the discussions readers are having about the future of San Diego in the comments section.
Here are five comments from the week on a host of issues, from library hours to crime stats:
• Les Birdsall on “The Curious Case of Bob Filner’s Pension“:
Republicans are turning the word “pension” into a bad word. It isn’t.
It is a necessary element of a worker’s salary.
Every worker deserves a fair pension to support them when they are older and no longer employed. Once, the retired elderly were condemned to poverty. Democratic policy, Social Security, and company/government pensions changed that. If we slide backward, toward the past, we diminish ourselves.
• Jerry Hall on “How Crime’s Changed in San Diego: 12 Graphics“:
This is an excellent report. The FBI crime index is helpful because it lets communities across the nation compare apples-to-apples. I can’t wait for the day when we can create graphs like this and drill down to neighborhoods and layer in other datasets (i.e. number of police on duty, calls for service levels, out-of-service times, crimes solved etc.).
http://www.Crimemapping.com gives us some new mapping and reporting capabilities but, it still seems the public is being handled with kid gloves when it comes to our being given unfettered access to real-time crime stats.
I think it would also be great if VOSD took the lead and helped community advocates, police and other city agencies develop crime data standards insofar as to how they are used and quoted.
• Dawn Martin on “Promised Library Hour Increase Is Delayed“:
Not surprising that the City HR department is the hold up. As someone who’s worked with the City, I saw numerous examples of the HR department taking an unbelievable amount of time to hire people – even interns, which should be even easier, since there are no benefits to consider.
• Gregory Hay on “U-T CEO: Yeah, I Wrote That, and I’ll Write It Again“:
The other comments decrying the minimizing of the ‘port issue’ are wrong, IMO. The conversation regarding the port’s use/importance is a COMPLETELY different issue than the story here. This article is about the politicization of a media that supposed to be impartial (or, at least *try* to appear that way).
Lynch has just made a NON-veiled threat against the port. He has decided to use the bully-pulpit in its truest term, so *personal* gain; not professional, and certainly not for the benefit of the citizenry. This is not really a shock to many of us, as Lynch has made a number of allusions to his willingness to dictate the news instead of reporting the news, but now he is finally completely transparent and exposed.
We should all be outraged by this.
Not playing into his hands by asking to talk about the terminal instead.
• Shawn Fox on “Convention Center Could Cost City Millions More than Expected“:
Many large hotels already have convention center areas within their hotels. If a convention center is so important and useful, then why can’t it be completely privatized? The logic being used to support this city backed expansion could be used to justify a host of other public subsidies for nearly every business that you can imagine. Every business wants to make money from tourists and locals. Should they all get subsidized if they want to expand? It’s nice to know that someone is thinking about limiting risk, but that is really more of a ploy to make it seem easier to accept. It’s like putting a smoother coating over a pill to make it easier to swallow, but it doesn’t change the content of the medicine. But seriously, what exactly is so scary about just letting a convention center be more of a private entity just like a hotel?
Want to contribute to discussion? Submit a suggestion to Fix San Diego.
Dagny Salas is the web editor at Voice of San Diego. You can contact her directly at dagny.salas@voiceofsandiego.org or 619.550.5669.
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