District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis failed to recall that she had a meeting in 2012 with the moneyman who’s been implicated in a campaign finance investigation; we uncovered that meeting this week.
Now, we find that the meeting wasn’t on her calendar. In fact, her calendar was blank that day, a Friday in March, when she met with the man and the county sheriff.
“Not every meeting makes it onto the DA’s calendar,” a spokesman for Dumanis said. The meeting did show up on the calendar of Sheriff Bill Gore.
• We’ve created a timeline of all that we know about Dumanis and Mexican businessman Jose Susumo Azano Matsura.
In Drought, San Diego Used More Water
In a new story, we take a closer look at those numbers that show San Diego is actually using more water amid the drought. The good news: “The region is using slightly less water than it did in 1991, for example, when the county had roughly 2.5 million residents. The population is now closer to 3.2 million residents.”
Longtime locals may remember the drought year of 1991, when the LA Times discovered that the city’s largest private water was none other than the publisher of the Union and Evening Tribune. That was also the year of “Miracle March” when the skies opened just like the mayor predicted they would.
Undocumented Immigrants Diverted to Chula Vista
Protesters in the Riverside County city of Murrieta, not far from the border with San Diego County, blocked a road to keep buses full of undocumented children and women from taking the immigrants to a processing center.
The buses turned around and took the immigrants to Chula Vista, NBC 7 reports. They’d left the San Diego airport earlier.
Mayors in Murrieta and the North County city of Escondido are trying to fend off the feds and keep undocumented immigrants from being housed in their cities, even temporarily.
Timken Museum Director’s Out
The Timken Museum of Art, a tiny Balboa Park institution with free admission and stunning paintings, reached record attendance last year under its executive director, John Wilson. We talked to Wilson in a 2011 interview about the the challenges facing a museum — “probably the smallest internationally important art museum in the world” — that must embrace both the past and the present to survive.
Now, Wilson is suddenly out as executive director, Times of San Diego reports, and an art restorer is stepping in,
• VOSD’s weekly Culture Report takes note of a “dark comedy about a couple whose son is born with an oyster for a head,” an exhibit called “Spitting in the Wind” (be careful when you do that), the 125th birthday of Tijuana and the vision behind the Waterfront Park.
Quick News Hits: Harshing Their Mallow
• The drama continues in the South Bay, home to an endless corruption scandal. The superintendent of the Sweetwater school district, which runs middle and high schools in the South Bay, has been placed on leave. (U-T)
• In the Guardian (the U.K. paper, not the one at UCSD), an author profiles “life on the political equator” in the nexus of San Diego and Tijuana.
One problem: The story profiles the director of City Hall’s Civic Innovation Lab, which is now dead. The story highlights a quote from a scholar about the evolution of the border area that appears to say nothing at all: “These are millennial transformations with truly millennial implications for US politics and culture.”
• Mayor Kevin Faulconer went to a Republican National Committee meeting last month, and the ever-watchful Reader, as is its wont, is suspicious.
• Drive to the east and you’re likely to hit El Centro and then Yuma. They have the second and highest unemployment rates in the entire country, the LA Times reports, possibly because many farm workers are on unemployment between jobs.
• Self-promotion alert: As of this week, I’m the 50th president of the American Society of Journalists & Authors, a non-profit association that serves independent writers in the U.S. and Canada.
In lieu of a swearing-in ceremony, I’m asking members to just swear at me and get it over with. Hey! No cutting in line, people!
• The war against the annual Marshmallow War continues in Ocean Beach, as cops and concerned merchants try to encourage locals to “Mallow Out” on the Fourth of July. Yesterday brought a press conference about the messy and potentially harmful throwing of marshmallows, which have apparently been frozen and even set on fire, NBC 7 reports.
“It would not be realistic for us to be able to cite every marshmallow thrower out here, but we are hoping to see a reduction in that activity,” a police captain said.
Mark this week: It may be the first time in OB history that cops join forces with an anti-war protest.
Randy Dotinga is a freelance contributor to Voice of San Diego and president of the American Society of Journalists & Authors. Please contact him directly at randydotinga@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter: twitter.com/rdotinga.
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