Downtown’s East Village neighborhood is supposed to be a place where residents can live, work and play, but it turns out that it’s missing an important piece — work.
As our Kinsee Morlan reports in a new story, “an unprecedented building boom is under way, but of the approximately 25 projects in the pipeline in East Village, only four are office buildings. The rest will be mostly apartments and retail.”
This could produce more than a marketing miss. San Diego is trying to become a leader in protecting the environment, but it’s hard to do that when residents of a big new work-play-live neighborhood have to go elsewhere to work. And East Village’s restaurants and shops could have trouble surviving without office workers wandering around.
Not everyone thinks it’s a problem, though. One downtown booster thinks the neighborhood is just following a typical development cycle.
Morlan’s story analyzes the lack of office space and possible solutions.
More Water Testing in S.D. Schools
The San Diego Unified School District is testing more schools for lead in water after high amounts were found at Emerson-Bandini Elementary School. NBC 7 reports that five schools are being tested per day, and it has a map of where the testing is being done.
All district schools, including charters, will be tested by June. Results will appear here.
We recently reported about how a therapy dog led to a discovery of tainted water at Emerson-Bandini.
Wait, Emerson-Bandini? Yup. The school, which has been around for almost a century, is named after philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson and Juan Bandini, an early Californian and settler of San Diego. Here’s a a photo of Bandini and his rather fierce-looking daughter. A penny (or more) for her thoughts?
Settlement Talks Over Beachfront Nuke Waste
The ultimate fate of the “beachfront nuclear waste dump” at the now-defunct San Onofre nuclear power plant is still up in the air, but settlement talks in a court case have begun. Still, “the likelihood that the talks result in the immediate removal of the 3.6 million pounds of waste from San Onofre’s bluff are slim, observers say. Construction of the ‘concrete monolith’ dry-cask storage system is well under way, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars,” the Orange County Register reports.
Some surfers at one of SoCal’s most legendary surf breaks are sounding the alarm, but the Surfrider Foundation reportedly thinks there isn’t a better solution than to store the waste there, at least temporarily.
S.D. Tries to Recapture Fishing Prominence
In a multi-part series, inewsource is chronicling a bid to rejuvenate San Diego’s slumbering commercial fishing industry, an effort that’s pushing fishermen “into unfamiliar territory — the negotiating table.”
“If executed as planned, Seaport — a redevelopment of downtown’s Central Embarcadero expected to cost more than $1.2 billion — could revitalize what was once San Diego’s defining characteristic: a thriving commercial fishing industry,” the news outlet reports.
North County Report: Oceanside Nibbles at ‘Road Diet’
Oceanside has been trying to make part of the main drag of Coast Highway less friendly to cars and friendlier to everyone else — pedestrians, cyclists, landscaping lovers. But now it seems to be pulling back, possibly because of a familiar backlash from businesses that worry about losing customers.
This is the lead story in this week’s North County Report, our weekly compilation of North County news.
Also in the North County Report: A push for more murals in downtown Oceanside, a big haul for a 2018 rival to Rep. Darrell Issa and a bid to crack down on loud bars in Encinitas.
Quick News Hits: Say Yap to the Dress
• “Qualcomm said Wednesday that it has been ordered to pay smartphone maker BlackBerry $814.9 million in an arbitration dispute over patent royalties,” the U-T reports. “The payment comes as Qualcomm’s patent licensing business is increasingly under attack from government regulators and smartphone makers.”
• A report says 43,000 young people ages 16-24 in the county aren’t working or going to school. (KPBS)
• The ACLU is suing the feds here and elsewhere to get details about how customs/immigration officials put the president’s travel ban into effect. (U-T)
Meanwhile, the first lawsuit against the border wall has been filed by an environmental group and an Arizona congressman. (Washington Examiner)
• And now this. Here’s a dispatch from Rancho Bernardo posted online the other day: “small dog in orange dress walking up viceroy dr at 5:45 p.m.” The pooch appeared to be lost.
Let’s hope she found her way home to a matching pair of heels.
Randy Dotinga is a freelance contributor to Voice of San Diego. He is also immediate past 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.