When Mayor Kevin Faulconer gave his State of the City speech last week, he acknowledged some hard truths.
On homelessness, he confessed he and past leaders let the problem fester far too long.
“We pursued universal consensus while homelessness continued to rise,” he said. “We tried to please everyone at the risk of helping no one. Those days are over.”
In this week’s podcast, Scott Lewis and Andrew Keatts analyze the mayor’s State of the City speech.
Faulconer recognized his own role in the type of not-in-my-backyard politics that makes it hard to get things done, saying everyone wants housing and other services for homeless people, but no one wants those things in their own neighborhoods. And the mayor drew a line in the sand in support of the city’s ongoing effort to clear the streets of homeless encampments, saying the city would “no longer tolerate the use of a sidewalk, a riverbed or a tarp as a home.”
Also interesting was what the mayor didn’t say. Faulconer barely brought up the search for a new police chief or the future of the former Chargers stadium site.
Lewis and Keatts also sat down with the mayor Friday for an in-depth interview that will appear in the Voice of San Diego Podcast feed soon. Stay tuned.
Bryan Pease is best known for his animal rights activism. An environmental attorney, he’s been in the national spotlight for his work to protect seals at the La Jolla Children’s Pool. More recently, he made headlines as one of a group of protestors arrested in Barrio Logan when then-presidential candidate Donald Trump came to town.
In the second half of the show, Lewis and Keatts talk to Pease about his City Council run to represent District 2.
The attorney has run for political office before, but those failed campaigns were short and less serious. This time, he says he’s for real.
He said he supports rent control, a revamped Section 8 housing voucher program, better tenant protection, banning whole-home vacation rentals and increasing both the amount of affordable housing developers are required to include when they build a new project.
“There’s also obviously a huge homelessness and housing crisis in San Diego and San Diego City Council has been really dragging its heels on implementing some very basic tenant protections and policies that other, similarly situated cities have,” he said.
Pease also thinks it’s time to talk to marine biologists and other experts about the best way to handle SeaWorld’s captive orcas.
“I’m in favor of whatever is best for the orcas,” he said.
Hero of the Week
The hero this week is David Hilton, a Scripps Institution of Oceanography scientist and researcher who died from cancer earlier this month. Hilton was a renowned geochemist.
Goat of the Week
The Union-Tribune’s Greg Moran this week revealed that the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department spent nearly $900,000 to provide security while President Donal Trump’s border wall prototypes were built in Otay Mesa. The federal government is the goat this week for forcing the Sheriff’s Department to spend so much money protecting eight slabs of concrete.