San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer said the thing that everyone wants to say when he delivered his second State of the City speech Thursday night: “The state of our city is strong.”
He gave a much more ambitious speech than this time last year, including a pledge that San Diego would find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease.
Here’s the Union-Tribune’s rundown:
Expanding and upgrading San Diego’s parks system, getting homeless veterans off the streets and rebuilding the city’s middle class are among the priorities Mayor Kevin Faulconer laid out Thursday night in his annual State of the City address.
Faulconer also endorsed for the first time Councilman Mark Kersey’s proposed infrastructure ballot measure, vowed to place a convention center expansion plan on the ballot and said there’s still a chance to keep the Chargers in San Diego.
Faulconer’s biggest initiative appears to be a parks plan. He said the city would add or renovate 50 new parks in the next five years.
We’ll have a bunch of context on all of the mayor’s ideas later this morning. But, as a preview, here’s our take on Kersey’s ballot measure and the major problems the city has with veterans’ homelessness.
Chargers Owner Still Wins Despite Losing
If you look at the last few days of twists and turns in the saga of the Chargers in San Diego, you might think Chargers’ owner Dean Spanos suffered a defeat at the hands of the NFL when they gave the green light to the St. Louis Rams to move to Los Angeles. But Scott Lewis writes how that kind of defeat looks pretty great, when you consider the options now in front of Spanos.
“He was given first right of refusal to move to L.A.” alongside the Rams, Lewis writes. And, should he decide he prefers to stay here, “San Diego officials are talking about enhancing the deal they’re offering him,” writes Lewis. All told, Spanos is looking at a future much brighter than the one he faced last week, “defeat” or not.
More Day In NFL
The constant flow of wild news about where the Chargers will end up took a break on Thursday. InsideSoCal took a moment to catch up on where the Chargers stand now. The Union-Tribune got all mushy and fantasized a scenario where the Chargers come running back into the arms of San Diego, complete with the firing of Mark Fabiani that would clearly be required.
The mayor of Carson isn’t yet giving up hope of getting a stadium project in his city. In a hail mary tweet, he says unresolved issues with the Federal Aviation Administration puts the Inglewood stadium plans in doubt. Meanwhile, just in case they’re wrong, they are looking for anyone else who might be interested in building on top of their landfill, the L.A. Times reports.
As we all ponder the idea of new stadiums (here or there), HuffPo wants to point out that St. Louis will, for quite some time, still be piling money into their stadium, regardless of whether it is empty. (Sounds familiar.)
The Rise of Imperial Beach
Imperial Beach, long known for being a cozy beach community near the border, has some big changes coming its way. A big hotel project and fancy new restaurants are coming online, and at least one big retail center is planned, which will bring a national grocery chain to the city for the first time. “The development surge is being touted for increasing the local housing supply and adding new commercial amenities,” Maya Srikrishnan reports.
One of the most notable pieces of the development boom is the relatively small amount of opposition to each project. Of course, no growth comes without concerns: “People living in Imperial Beach are concerned about things like parking and community character,” Srikrishnan writes, with one resident surveyed replying that many IB residents like it the way it is and don’t know why people are trying to “fix” their city.
The Learning Curve: Those So-Called Learning Styles
One oft-repeated claim about how students learn in the classroom is that each student has a type of learning that works best for them. You’ve heard of the types: visual learners, auditory learners and kinetic learners are all supposedly differing types delineating the method best used to help get the material to stick with that student. But Mario Koran reports how experts have found very little evidence to back up the theory that catering to a student’s “style” produces better results.
“It’s true that students might prefer a certain way of receiving information, but that doesn’t mean they actually learn more effectively in one set way,” Koran writes in the latest installment of The Learning Curve. Still, using multiple methods of teaching the same material reinforces the learning and is “just good teach strategy.”
Why We Flood: San Diego Explained
Last week saw the streets of San Diego turn into a system of rushing rivers and streams, which tends to lead people to ask that troubling question: “Is my car supposed to be floating?” The city is supposed to keep waterways clear to help prevent flooding in the city, but the state has a bunch of rules which make that difficult to actually do. Ry Rivard joined NBC’s Monica Dean to get past all the finger pointing in our most recent San Diego Explained.
News Nibbles
• That huge plume of methane from a ruptured natural gas well in northwestern Los Angeles is bringing the joy of breathable “benzene, toluene, xylene” to even more neighborhoods than they thought. (Inside Climate News)
• Uber drivers are tired of the low fares being offered in San Diego and they aren’t going to take it anymore. (Union-Tribune)
• One lucky Powerball player in Chula Vista was only one number off from splitting the jackpot with three other winners. (NBC 7)
• The Navy sailors caught up in an international incident with Iran on Wednesday were from San Diego. Fortunately, the ordeal got resolved very quickly. (Times of San Diego)
• On public transit, make way for disabled and senior riders! The Metropolitan Transit System is stepping up enforcement of its prioritized seating rules. Breaking the rules will cost you. (NBC 7)
• If you do use MTS transit, for some reason you can’t load up a card with money and use it for rides, despite the feature being promised years ago. Now they’re promising a smartphone app. (KPBS)
• If you want to remain popular and out of jail, one tip I have for you is to not go around clubbing baby seals. (NBC San Diego)
Seth Hall is a local writer and technologist. You can email him at voice@s3th.com or follow him on Twitter: @loteck.