The Morning Report
Get the news and information you need to take on the day.
When people hear about San Diego and Tijuana making a joint play to host the Olympics, they generally offer two responses.
The first is something like: You’ve got to be kidding.
And the second is basically: But we can’t even fix the roads!
The first one is hard to argue with.
The second has it backward, however: The people pushing this think it’s exactly what we need to fix the town up.
And our Kelly Bennett took note of just how much this should remind us of the discussions that led to the 1915 Panama-California Exposition that shaped a big part of our city and Balboa Park.
The international body that organizes the Olympics has this week once again crushed the dream of a joint bid between a Mexican city and an American one.
“Still, the idea – that the benefits of a monumental, expensive, complicated undertaking are ultimately worth all the headaches – echoes the pluck of the city’s forebears, 100 years ago,” Bennett writes.
San Diego boosters are adjusting for a bid from just this side of the border.
Assembly Folds on Arbitration Crackdown
The second story of our series on arbitration talked about a push to make public key information about the thousands of cases being hashed out by private judges. The data is hard to get, if not impossible. Will Carless updates that a push to give current laws guiding arbitration providers some teeth is dead in the state Legislature, at least for now.
What We Learned This Week
• The city attorney’s prosecution of a protester who wrote in chalk outside of a bank went viral nationwide, got embarrassing and ultimately ended in a solid fail we should all appreciate for a second.
• A lot has been made of the mayor’s decision to change his mind about a veto after a developer, Sunroad, donated to the city and causes he supports. But we told you this week about how Filner stopped another recent project in its tracks. That developer also forked over a similar amount and the project restarted. The deal made the city attorney feel icky.
• Also, here’s a bit more on how that deal with Sunroad happened. 10News and the U-T reported that the Department of Justice is investigating.
• The Sunroad debacle might have drowned out arguably the biggest news of the week: The city biffed on its effort to save millions from this year’s budget by proving to the employee pension system’s board that it would not raise so-called “pensionable salaries.” We provided a behind-the-scenes look at how a controversial and major vote went down.
• San Diego Unified School District persuaded voters to raise property taxes last year $60 for every
$100,000 of assessed property someone owns. All of the marketing and the main ballot statement said this was for repairs to schools and for charter schools. But one line buried deep in the literature mentioned swimming pools, and that may be enough to make it legal to build several new pools with the money.
The Sports Report
Your week in sports is here.
Quick News Hits
• Hundreds of Tijuana residents came out to see the fireworks from the border. Here’s a stirring photo of what that looks like posted by frontera.info.
• Mark Leibovich from The New York Times Magazine has written a book, “This Town,” about life in D.C. — “a city of patrons and protégés” — and excerpted an absorbing part of it for the Times. It features the rise and fall of San Diego-area Rep. Darrell Issa staffer Kurt Bardella.
• KPBS tells us about a new community radio station.
• From the U-T: The San Diego Association of Governments has been collecting data from local law enforcement reading our license plates across the county. It now has 42 million records of where we’ve been.
Now, can they predict where we’re going and what bad things we might do there?
Quote of the Week
“Too many goodbyes today.”
— Will Carless, on his last day at VOSD before he departs for Uruguay.
I’m Scott Lewis, the CEO of Voice of San Diego. Please contact me if you’d like at scott.lewis@voiceofsandiego.org or 619.325.0527 and follow me on Twitter (it’s a blast!).