The Morning Report
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Mira Mesa is growing fast.
As one of the city’s northernmost neighborhoods, Mira Mesa draws a huge amount of daily car commuters to its tech jobs, business parks and headquarters.
But some of the region’s highest-profile climate advocates say if it’s going to keep growing, the city needs to do more to combat the environmental consequences of that growth. So now they’re gearing up to sue the city of San Diego.
This week on the VOSD Podcast, hosts Andrew Keatts and Andrea Lopez-Villafaña discuss the city’s climate action plan — how its goals are literally never met — and how it squares with the Mira Mesa community plan.
School Sexual Misconduct
In 2017, a Grossmont teacher named Joshua Allen Barney was fired for making inappropriate comments and contact with a student.
But even though he was fired from that job — and school administrators and a court determined he did not understand how it was wrong and that he would likely do it again — he kept his teaching credentials.
Now he’s back in the classroom.
Keatts and Lopez-Villafaña lay out the story of that teacher, the incident that got him fired and how he got back to teaching despite a court’s findings.
This story is part of a long investigative series by Voice of San Diego on sexual misconduct in San Diego schools.
Anyone can submit anonymous tips to us at vosd.org/contact.
Bonus content: Our education podcast, Good Schools For All, examined how predatory teachers stay in the classroom. Our team reviewed multiple cases, the costs to schools, non-disclosure agreements and more. Hear that episode here.
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Thank You for another very good Podcast! I’ve come to look forward to listening to these on my weekend. Very insightful. That last story about the egregiously offending P.E. teacher being able to continue teaching in the same county in which he offended was highly disturbing. Thank You for the continuing essential reporting.
Glad to see that Andy has figured out one of the most egregious phenomena in San Diego city government. For decades, city hall politicians and their staff have considered doing something that was clearly illegal. Often these were violations of California’s Public Records Act, or the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and more recently they have been obvious violations of the city’s own Climate Action Plan (CAP). Often, local open government organizations and environmental and attorneys sent the city letters detailing the laws the city was breaking, warning the city that if it didn’t retract specific illegal actions and follow the law, they would sue the city.
Despite those clear, written warnings, city hall officials, often influenced by the local building industry, ignored those warnings, and blithely violated the law, as Andy explained in regards to the CAP. Then the city would be sued, and lose in the courts. Incredulously, in many cases, after they lost in court, city hall politicians and their staff complained when the courts made the city pay the legal costs and fees of the winning organizations and attorneys. This has been a ludicrous cycle which this city has practiced for decades. The most amazing thing about it is the way local voters seem forget these misadventures when the very politicians who caused them come up for reelection.