The Morning Report
Get the news and information you need to take on the day.
Everyone knows to call 911 in an emergency. Fewer folks are familiar with 2-1-1 San Diego, a service that connects callers with referrals to veteran’s groups, homelessness resources, natural disaster help and other social service agencies.
The nonprofit call center is ramping up its efforts to become better known as a go-to resource in San Diego. Its budget is ballooning and the group recently unveiled big plans for a community-wide information sharing system.
“The dream is really to create the 2-1-1 to be the nonprofit hub of San Diego,” 2-1-1 San Diego board member Emily Einhorn tells VOSD’s Lisa Halverstadt.
Halverstadt reports on how the nonprofit is collecting and storing callers’ data and working to create an information-exchange system that allows social service agencies and other resource providers across the region to access useful details about the people who call 2-1-1 looking for help.
Sounds a bit Big Brotherly, right? The nonprofit says it’s all being done in compliance with the law and that, ultimately, the goal will be better, more coordinated care and less people-in-need slipping through the cracks.
Voice of San Diego’s New Elections Podcast
Who’s endorsing whom in San Diego and why?
Sara Libby and Ry Rivard dive deep into political endorsements in the first-ever episode of San Diego Decides, Voice of San Diego’s new biweekly elections podcast.
Guest Brian Pepin, the new president of the Lincoln Club of San Diego County, joins the podcast to talk about how his organization goes about throwing their political weight behind a candidate.
Libby and Rivard also discuss District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis and her stated policy against making political endorsements that often clashes with her practice of actually endorsing people in several races, the co-hosts imagine a world where they themselves are running for political office and share their dream endorsers and more.
Subscribe to San Diego Decides on iTunes and catch Libby and Rivard in future episodes breaking down some of this year’s most crazily complicated ballot measures and getting candidates talking. The newly minted podcast hosts hope to help make some sense of the policies and people we’ll all be voting on this year.
Arguing for and Against the Convadium and The Future of the Q
Fred Maas, the local attorney and developer who’s been hired by the San Diego Chargers to advise the team on building a new stadium, wants San Diegans to snuggle up to the idea of a downtown multi-use stadium and convention center, in part, because of its ability to fill San Diego’s urban center with big-time events like the Super Bowl, the NCAA Final Four and soccer games.
In an op-ed for The San Diego Union-Tribune, Maas gets into some of the details of the citizens initiative that lays out a plan, both for the downtown “convadium” joint-use facility and the future of the Mission Valley site.
explains why the pop-culture convention is pushing for a contiguous expansion of the convention center.
Among other things, he says the campus-style expansion the citizens initiative touts would be bad for big events like Comic-Con since many event organizers might be forced to rent both the main facility and the new one in order to thwart attempts by competitors trying to siphon attendees.
Notably, Glanzer did not say Comic-Con would move if things don’t go its preferred way. And that’s what attorney and Maas ally Cory Briggs seized on with a tweet that generated quite a thread of discussion that included city attorney candidate Gil Cabrera.
• The U-T’s Roger Showley takes on Briggs’ Citizens Plan and its plans for the Qualcomm Stadium site. He explains how the Mission Valley property will be optioned to local colleges and universities who’d be required to convert the building into “an educational complex, sports and recreation complex and an ‘urban rivers scientific interpretative center.’”
Quick News Hits
• For the first time ever, a law school will be put on trial and asked to defend the employment numbers it uses to help attract students. Thomas Jefferson School of Law is being sued by a former student who said she’s had a hard time finding a full-time job as a lawyer even though the school made it seem like it’d be much easier. The New York Times takes a good look at the case, which is unique since over a dozen similar lawsuits brought forth against other law schools have been thrown out in the past.
• The U-T crunches the numbers and finds that homicides in San Diego county went up 12 percent from 2014 to 2015. Murder-suicides went up dramatically but, big picture, San Diego still has a low homicide rate when compared to other big cities in the United States.
• Wow. This recently reopened movie theater in Tijuana sounds eclectic.
• Amazon has just one brick-and-mortar bookstore so far. The online megastore is about to open its second location in an upscale mall in La Jolla. (U-T)