This weekend will be kind of strange for the Voice of San Diego. On Sunday, the site will be dark all day. By Monday morning, we should wake up with a new look and functionality.
A good part of our staff and partners will be working all day Sunday to get our new house in order. All our old stories, images and even comments will be imported to the new site. Unfortunately, any comments you put on the old site after Friday will be lost.
Thanks for your patience. The new site has nice new features but most importantly, it’s a better path for us long term.
• You can give us some initial thoughts (or really let us have it) at a special Member Coffee Tuesday morning at 8 a.m. at the Barrio Logan Mercado Room, 1985 National Avenue. We’ll be there with County Supervisor Greg Cox. The theme? “What’s the Deal: What does the county actually do?”
Big Homeless Center Struggling to Deliver on Expectations
When the $38 million Connections Housing facility opened up downtown, local leaders spent an hour in front of a huge crowd celebrating it as a major “we-did-it.” But some of the promises they made are proving very difficult to achieve.
The service providers who were supposed to be in-house have not arrived. The city and the organization running the place don’t know how it will be funded after this year. And it may not be as cutting-edge as touted.
It is, however, still early. We offer a few things to watch for as the facility settles in.
Mayor Filner, Fowl Smell Fighter
The mayor told reporters last week that he had a special plan to squelch the acrid stenchthat’s been bothering residents and worrying business owners near La Jolla Cove.
Our Lisa Halverstadt reports that the mayor is undaunted by regulations that have bogged down other ideas and he thinks he could have a temporary fix in place by Memorial Day. That’d be welcome as it’s during the hot days that it gets bad.
But we haven’t seen the plans yet.
Whack Crack Attack Goes National
Thursday, we vetted a mailer sent out by City Council candidate Myrtle Cole that alleged her rival Dwayne Crenshaw was involved with crack cocaine. The officer she quoted in the mailer had said it was wrong 10 years ago when the attack first came out and reiterated to our Liam Dillon that it was still wrong.
Crenshaw responded and U-T San Diego wrote an editorial about it, giving Voice of San Diego — “an online news organization” — a nod for the effort.
Worse for Cole and her consultant, Larry Remer, however, might be that the mayor of Toronto allegedly was caught on camera smoking crack. This makes crack and politics a potential trend and that made Cole’s mailer nationally interesting. Wonkette picked up on it in a hilarious rundown of crack and politics news from its “crack investigative team.”
More News
• This week’s Sports Report leads with our collection of insights about why Los Angeles is as (or more) valuable to the NFL without a football team as it would be with one.
• We have a new post in The Stumblr feed featuring bad sidewalks.
• Bike to Work Day highlighted some infrastructure problems in San Diego, Megan Burks writes. On the good news front, Montezuma Road heading toward SDSU has always been a dangerous one for bicyclists. But now, it’s gotten a huge improvement.
• The ACLU weighed in on the Scripps Ranch High twerking suspensions with a letter calling on the school to reverse course on related discipline, the U-T reports.
Our Sara Libby recently wrote about the twerking video gone viral and the suspension.
• UC medical centers including ours are starting to cancel elective surgeries in the face of a looming strike.
Quote of the Week
“This is politics.”
— Political consultant Larry Remer, who created a mailer this week for City Council candidate Myrtle Cole that included a previously debunked line of attack about her rival’s supposed involvement with crack cocaine.
I’m Scott Lewis, the CEO of Voice of San Diego. Please contact me if you’d like atscott.lewis@voiceofsandiego.org or 619.325.0527 and follow me on Twitter (it’s a blast!):