This year has marked a lot of changes for how Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans relate to other Americans and government officials. Maya Srikrishnan caught up with Consul General Marcela Celorio, who represents Mexico in San Diego, and asked her about the state of affairs. While Celorio says she’s not seeing as many deportations as during the Obama era, “the speech, the intolerance, the anti-immigration speech. That has been what really has been making an impact,” she says.
The Mexican consulate in San Diego serves Mexican people living in the area, typically helping with passports, birth certificates and promoting trade. But their role in this region has been changing. “We have been evolving from those traditional functions to a more modern view of our activities,” Celorio says, which includes what she calls “consular diplomacy,” where the consulate is actively engaging agencies in the county to advocate for Mexican people.
Finding Quality Preschools
Parents of school-aged children will know that a robust community of parents and teachers awaits them once a child enters kindergarten, but the years prior to that are what Mario Koran calls “the informational dead-zone of parenting.” That’s because parents with kids at that age are left to raise children largely alone and without community support. “This is ironic, given the large and growing body of research that shows early childhood is the most important time in a child’s lifelong education,” Koran writes.
But now, San Diegans are getting access to a new resource that helps parents locate preschool options and understand their quality. The San Diego County Office of Education and the YMCA have partnered on a website that pulls in public and private preschools and rate them according to several factors, such as adult-to-child ratios, safety, and staff members’ education.
Koran also writes about the results of a recent survey of top leaders at San Diego schools, and what the over-working of principals means for schools and parents.
Short-Term Rentals: San Diego Explained
San Diego is still wrestling with how to regulate short-term house rentals, and recently there was more drama when the City Council decided to docket a meeting to make big progress on the issue and then cancelled the meeting at the eleventh hour. Through the fits and starts, city leaders may have begun to coalesce around some outlines for a possible solution. Lisa Halverstadt and NBC 7’s Monica Dean look into what we can expect in the next short-term rental proposal in our most recent San Diego Explained.
That’s our weekly video series. If you prefer a written version, here’s Halverstadt’s go-to FAQ on the whole situation.
El Cajon Rejects Homeless Feedings
The City of El Cajon is now enforcing tough laws targeted at the homeless, which ban pan-handling and sleeping on sidewalks, KPBS’s Susan Murphy reports. But the city has also gone one step further, and is banning groups from holding food-sharing events for the homeless. “Church groups and charities are temporarily prohibited from providing their usual dozens of weekly potluck-style meals to throngs of homeless people at city parks,” Murphy reports. The mayor says food preparation needs to be more sanitary.
Expensive Mess At San Ysidro School Board
San Ysidro school board member Rodolfo Linares is calling for the resignation of the district’s interim superintendent Arturo Sanchez-Macias, after Linares says the board was deceived. Linares says the deception resulted in a large payout to former superintendent Julio Fonseca that wasn’t approved by the board, according to inewsource’s Leonardo Castañeda. Fonseca ended up being paid at least $1 million for the 26 months that he worked for the district, Castañeda writes.
Selling The Old Library: Round Two
The city of San Diego wants to take another swing at building something new at the site of the old central library Downtown. Previously, the city had sought out ideas for using the space in the technology sector, and expressed interest in leasing. This new request for proposals takes a much broader and more direct vision: the city wants to sell, not lease, the property and it wants to make as much money as possible, the Union-Tribune reports.
Lightning Round
• There’s a new program in the works that aims to entice developers to set aside some of their residential units for middle-income earners, which is people who make up to $82,500 a year. (Union-Tribune)
• Former councilmember Donna Frye found out the process has changed for approving law firms to work on behalf of the city when that same law firm is also representing parties suing the city, and she’s suing to undo the change. (San Diego Reader)
• Hexavalent chromium is a heavy metal linked to cancer and was the subject of the movie Erin Brokovich. “The state water board last month eliminated a rule restricting how much of the heavy metal is permitted in drinking water supplies.” (Union-Tribune)
• We are going to re-open the Park Boulevard railroad crossing to vehicle traffic, to “allow vehicle traffic to go all the way from Balboa Park to the harbor, without detouring to 5th or 1st Avenues.” (NBC 7)
• Voters in Poway will decide an open space issue related to a golf course on Tuesday. But it may just be a proxy vote on whether voters think the golf course’s owner is obnoxious, the Union-Tribune’s editorial team writes.
• San Diego’s Meb Keflezighi, who most famously won the Boston Marathon in 2014, will retire from running competitive marathons after he runs the NYC Marathon this weekend. (New York Times)
Seth Hall is a local writer and technologist. You can email him at voice@s3th.com or follow him on Twitter: @loteck.