The Morning Report
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City Council President Georgette Gómez is in charge, and she’s hoping the City Council will follow her lead and change city rules aimed at making developers build more affordable housing.
End. Of. Story.
She has listened to the building industry’s vociferous opposition to her signature policy initiative, which requires developers to either build more affordable houses when they do projects to pay more to the city so it can build more affordable housing. She settled on a simple response.
She’s not changing anything, report Andrew Keatts and Lisa Halverstadt.
Gómez says the time for negotiating is over, and she’s ready for a vote.
“We’re moving forward,” she said. “I think it’s fair.”
Obviously, builders disagree.
Running Tab for Sidewalk Repairs
The city has budgeted $600,000 this year to repair crumbling sidewalks. At that pace, it’ll take decades before sidewalks are smooth.
Over the past five years, the cash needed to repair sidewalks has jumped to as much as $100 million, up from a 2015 estimate of $57 million in needed repairs, reports Megan Wood.
“We’ve got 80,000 requests, or locations, that need to be repaired,” said Councilman Mark Kersey, who leads the City Council’s infrastructure committee. “We need to be figuring out every possible way that we can to get those fixed.”
For years, officials have talked about revamping the city’s illogical sidewalk repair policy, which we’ve reported on extensively in the past.
During the city’s assessment of sidewalks from 2014 to 2015, more than 85,000 locations were identified as needing repair. Since then, the city has repaired or replaced about 27,000 of those broken sidewalks, but at the same time found an additional 23,000 locations in need of repair.
What We Know About Who’s Going to College
New state data has a story to tell about who gets to go to college and what student groups our public school system is failing to serve.
In his column The Learning Curve, VOSD’s Will Huntsberry pulls out some of the most interesting pieces of data on who’s attending and completing college from San Diego County schools.
San Diego Unified performs very well as a whole when it comes to college attendance rates. But not all students fare equally.
“Latino students represent roughly 57 percent of the San Diego Unified population. And yet the district is failing to help them achieve graduation rates in line with their peers,” Huntsberry writes.
In Other News
- George Mitrovich, the president of The City Club of San Diego died at age 84. Mitrovich, a former spokesman for Robert Kennedy, was a reliable pundit on the state of San Diego’s public affairs for decades with a reputation for having contacts and friends in the highest places. “When our friend George said he knew someone, it was doubtless true, despite his forgivable tendency to drop more than a few names along the way,” wrote John Freeman, in an obituary he shared with us.
- Sixteen Marines at Camp Pendleton were arrested and accused of a range of illegal acts, including human smuggling. (NBC San Diego)
- San Diego Gas & Electric and the state’s other major utilities have agreed to put billions of dollars from its investors into a fund for wildfire victims in exchange for reduce liabilities when a wildfire occurs. SDG&E says a utility-caused fire is inevitable. (LA Times)
- La Jolla residents are upset about an SDG&E pole they say is too close to homes and trees. (NBC San Diego)
- City Councilman Scott Sherman wants the city’s auditor to be truly independent of the mayor and wants to change the city charter to make it so. (Union-Tribune)
- This Vice investigation shows how a burger from the Encinitas In-n-Out ended up on a street in New York.
Disclosure: Mitch Mitchell, SDG&E’s vice president for government affairs, sits on Voice of San Diego’s board of directors.
The Morning Report was written by Ry Rivard, and edited by Sara Libby.