Jay Porter operated The Linkery and El Take It Easy, two restaurants in North Park, until he recently closed both and moved to the Bay Area. Jed Sundwall got to wondering what it takes to drive entrepreneurs like Porter out of San Diego, and Porter had answers. We reprinted some of the highlights from their conversation.
“There isn’t much political will to do simple things to make San Diego a good place to live,” Porter said. “I want to live in a place that supports the things that city dwellers value.” For Porter, the city’s direction (or lack thereof) wasn’t the only issue. Another big issue was costs. “The sun tax has gotten pretty steep,” he said. “The relative cost of living in San Diego has gone way up compared to competitive towns, but without keeping up with infrastructure.”
The Endorsement Roll
Endorsements help match up people and causes with political candidates, and there’s no shortage of endorsements in San Diego’s race for mayor. Lisa Halverstadt collected a whole heap of the most high-profile endorsers for both Alvarez and Faulconer. Former City Attorney Mike Aguirre put himself on the pro-Faulconer side Wednesday. Aguirre’s dog followed up with his own endorsement on Thursday.
The Beer Report
If you’ve raised a glass of local craft beer to your lips recently, you may have suspected that San Diego’s brewers might just be on to something. A new report out about our local craft beer industry confirms what you might have guessed: Local breweries are popular, and resilient to boot. “The number of breweries and brewpubs more than doubled from 2011-2013,” reports Morning Report scribe Randy Dotinga. It’s not all rosy, though: Revenues aren’t climbing as fast as growth. But the study also provides “plenty of evidence that San Diego’s craft beer industry has a strong foundation that will help it weather any financial storm.”
Pricey Elections: San Diego Explained
While mayoral candidates rack up big donations from their supporters, it’ll be San Diego taxpayers who will be forking over the estimated $4 million needed to put on the special election. Lisa Halverstadt joined NBC San Diego’s Catherine Garcia over some delicious pie to find out why special elections are so darned expensive in our most recent San Diego Explained.
• Speaking of expenses, KPBS and Inewsource teamed up for a deep look into the personal finances of both candidates.
• You can go ahead and start gearing up for the next election cycle now: Candidates for City Council (in the even-numbered districts) started their official process for candidacy by collecting the necessary documents Thursday.
Top Cop Rethinking Drug Sentences
San Diego Police Chief William Landsdowne is backing an effort to get simple possession of illegal drugs knocked down to a misdemeanor instead of a felony. The effort is still trying to qualify for the November ballot. U-T San Diego asked Lansdowne why he supports the measure. “There’s such a need for this, and to downsize prisons and upgrade schools, I don’t know how you go wrong with that,” Landsdowne said.
Programming Note
Clarification: Yesterday’s Morning Report linked to a CityBeat column suggesting that a Latina woman quoted and pictured in a San Diego mayoral campaign flier was actually a resident of National City.
A spokesman for the Lincoln Club (which distributed the flier) said the woman, Tania Hernandez, is, in fact, a registered voter in San Diego. We weren’t able to confirm that. However, the Registrar of Voters said several registered voters in San Diego have that name, but none in National City.
News Nibbles
• Friends and enemies of San Diego Fact Check, take note. A new classification will soon be added to the list. You who peddle in huckster propaganda should take no comfort.
• Another San Diego police officer is suspected of sexual misconduct while on duty.
• L.A. has better weather than San Diego, someone dared say. They failed to mention that L.A.’s rampant smog problem also makes for more colorful sunsets.
• Local company Websense will move to Texas after that state paid $4.5 million for Websense’s parent company’s patronage. The Austin-American Statesman has the details of the deal. Meanwhile, other companies have continued to move their operations to San Diego, without us having to pay out millions of dollars or endow them with large tax incentives, U-T San Diego reported.
• Those crudely-dug drug tunnels that connect San Diego to Tijuana might be created on the backs of slaves. This man says he was one of them.
• San Diego is one of many homes to the country’s first Muslim fraternity.
• What do you do if you’re an elephant with an infected tusk? You hope you can get a hold of the chief veterinarian at San Diego Zoo.
Careful What You Wish for
Tales of the bizarre and funny continue to come out of the Winter Olympics in Sochi, but while you’re watching the big event you can stop and marvel at this idea: San Diego wants to host the 2024 Summer Olympics. We’ve already got an exploratory committee and, according to its chairman, are “looking very, very good for 2024.”
The Sochi Olympics are estimated to cost $51 billion, a number that looks very, very big to those of us who struggle to imagine how to come up a fraction of that number to fix our most basic infrastructure challenges. But at least visitors would probably be able to touch the tap water here (it’s “very dangerous” in Sochi). We probably could benefit from all the public transit that would be required. But we’d probably need a new stadium, or five. Cue the U-
T editorial!
Seth Hall is a local writer and technologist. You can contact him at voice@s3th.com or follow him on Twitter: @loteck.