A few days ago, I was startled to wander into a spat between Carl DeMaio, who’s running for Congress, and Jason Roe, a former consultant to DeMaio.
It became clear there was more to learn if I dug deeper. There was. This is what I pieced together.
Turns out, that minor spat was actually the first surfacing of a year’s worth of awkwardness and hostility that has estranged DeMaio from several of the people who surrounded him throughout his meteoric rise in San Diego politics. And that includes the consultants who led his mayoral campaign in 2012 and one of his closest associates, Felipe Monroig, an old friend who moved to San Diego to support DeMaio and now serves as deputy chief of staff to Mayor Kevin Faulconer.
• On the national stage, the Washington Blade reports that DeMaio announced that he supported national legislation barring employers from discriminating against LGBT people. And he slammed national gay rights groups that oppose him, saying they can’t stand that Republicans are getting better on the issue. That drew a rebuke from former San Diegan Fred Sainz at the Human Rights Campaign.
Sacramento Report: Smart Stop Lights
Assemblywoman Marie Waldron, who represents North County areas, says she’s getting excited about traffic lights.
Really.
She wants the state to be able to use money generated from the cap and trade law to fund synchronized traffic lights. How it works actually is kind of exciting, and it’s the story that leads this week’s Sacramento Report, by Brian Joseph.
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What We Learned This Week
• San Diego’s tax burden is relatively low but the state’s overall is high and that, according to one group, is holding back business here.
• We’ve distilled five myths of San Diego’s business climate.
• If you look past the sniping, DeMaio and Scott Peters agree on a lot about women’s issues.
• Whether teacher evaluations have the significance they should is an open question but how often those evaluations happen in San Diego is not. Here, by the way, is the origin of teacher tenure here.
• Charter schools are attracting parents for a reason. San Diego’s largest school district might do well to understand it.
Quick News Hits
• If you don’t want to feel more anxiety or depression about the consequences of California’s drought, do not look at this post from National Geographic. Unreal.
• The county is going to make changes to the slush fund each supervisor gets to hand out to nonprofit groups. In particular, some of the personal and promotional benefits that come to supervisors for handing out these public grans will be curtailed. (inewsource)
• Michael Robertson, the libertarian entrepreneur who founded MP3.com, tried to request the license plate data collected by SANDAG on his own car. SANDAG collects data on license plates from a network of surveillance cameras. A judge has denied the request (U-T). Here’s Robertson’s commentary in our own pages about local government surveillance.
• San Diego’s unemployment rate is down.
• Electricity use is up. Way up.
Quote of the Week
“I think it’s a strategic mistake by the business community and by so-called Republican politicians to not offer a positive alternative. What they’re doing is they’re putting themselves in the position of being the party of no.” — Carl DeMaio on the push to repeal the minimum wage increase in the city of San Diego.
Quote of the Week II
“I wish I could as easily erase my involvement in his 2012 campaign as he seems to have.” — Political consultant Jason Roe on DeMaio.