State law requires school districts, like San Diego Unified, to provide space for charter schools. As more parents opt for them, this is causing some tension. Mario Koran visited one school facility shared by both a charter and and a traditional school to help explore the issue.
Koran went to the Mountain View neighborhood where an overhead walkway serves as the dividing line between the playground for the San Diego Cooperative charter school and Emerson-Bandini Elementary School. There are rules about when students can cross the line.
Charter school attendance is only set to grow and conflicts for space seem to be on the menu.
VOSD Sues City of Carson
The city of Carson and the Chargers have produced a plan for a new stadium that is already permitted. But the city of Carson told our reporter Liam Dillon, after a public records request, that it does not have any documents about the deal. None. This is hard to believe. Thus, VOSD is suing the city of Carson.
The Chargers say they’ve been negotiating with Carson, but city officials tell us that they can’t produce a single email, memo, letter, text message — or anything on paper, for that matter — regarding the deal.
• Negotiations between the Chargers, city and county begin Tuesday. VOSD’s Scott Lewis explains “how to know right away if they are real.” Lewis also describes the city attorney’s contortions to hide the contents of a message that’s “apparently so toxic and disruptive to the mayor’s strategy in dealing with the Chargers that the city is taking extraordinary measures to keep it confidential.”
• The race to LA is being driven by another proposal: an effort by St. Louis Rams owner Stan Kroenke to build a stadium in Inglewood. Sunday morning Kroenke’s team imploded the iconic Hollywood Park Racetrack to make way for the stadium.
VOSD Podcast: Inside the Private Stones Concert
The VOSD Podcast features guest Chris Cantore, a longtime local radio disc jockey who talks about attending the private Rolling Stones concert last week. Other topics in the podcast include a VOSD standoff with the city attorney, bungled predictions of San Diego’s growth and the Hero and Goat of the week.
• The U-T has the inside story of the private concert. Expenses included “a temporary quarter-mile fenced running track set up behind the nightclub so Mick Jagger could jog before appearing on stage.” Attendees included several wealthy executives like former interim Hewlett-Packard chairman Ralph Whitworth. He’s fighting cancer and reportedly helped convince the Stones to come not just to the Belly Up but to San Diego itself.
U-T Wants to Resurrect Balboa Park Plan
The U-T editorial board stands by the controversial Jacobs plan for Balboa Park, which seemed dead but could come back to life in the wake of a supportive court ruling: “It was a good plan before and it’s a good plan now.”
The plan would add more pedestrian-friendly space to the Plaza de Panama and other parts of the Central Mesa of the park. To accomodate traffic, it would construct a parking garage with a bridge to divert vehicles off the Cabrillo bridge. Here’s a visual explainer we did in 2011 — seems ages ago.
Councilwoman Sherri Lightner was the only vote against the project in 2012. Now she’s council president and her team told KPBS she has no plans to bring it back up. It’s not clear if it needs Council approval again. Almost all of the city’s political leaders supported the idea, but the public was divided, and a lawsuit by preservationists killed it. That ruling is what was overturned. The city did manage to reroute cars from part of the plaza, but the full project never came to reality.
Stronger Than a Speeding Bullet Train
Some day, decades into the future, a California-spanning bullet train may reach San Diego. But getting to us isn’t a priority. And now comes even more news that threatens to delay or kill the ultra-vulnerable project. Residents and politicians in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley are freaking out about the idea of a train going through their cities, following controversies in the Bay Area and the Central Valley. The city of San Fernando worries about losing hundreds of millions in business taxes when “sound walls” draw graffiti and withering looks. (LA Times)
Ex-Housing Manager: I Erred
The former manager of the Hotel Stanford affordable housing complex who’s now under investigation tells NBC that he’s working with the San Diego Police Department, adding: “I made a few serious mistakes in judgement and I am trying to do anything that I can to help correct those mistakes.”
Solar Tops the VOSD Charts
It was a sunny week for our weekly list of VOSD’s most-read stories: Topping the list are two articles about solar power, including a look at things you should know before making the switch.
Freezing Out the Drought
• “Sprawling green lawns around new homes, businesses and schools in California will be a thing of the past under new state building codes approved Friday,” the LA Times reports.
• Slate says the state of California’s snowpack has reached the “worst-case scenario.”
• U-T columnist Logan Jenkins takes us into his home bathroom and praises the water-thrifty value of miniature cold showers during the drought: “If half of San Diego County went stone cold, a cultural shift that inevitably would lead to much shorter and perhaps fewer unnecessary showers, the water shortage would be over faster than you can wrap your arms around your heart and scream, Brrrr!”
First thought: Fact Check! Second thought: Just wait until we hear from industry on this. Everybody knows you just don’t mess with Big Water Heater.
Randy Dotinga is a freelance contributor to Voice of San Diego and national president of the 1,200-member American Society of Journalists and Authors (asja.org). Please contact him directly at randydotinga@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter: twitter.com/rdotinga.