The county of San Diego’s willingness to do anything significant in providing shelter for homeless residents in areas outside of cities was thrown into question recently when Nora Vargas, the chair of the Board of Supervisors, announced she would try to rescind a plan to place 150 sleeping cabins on a Spring Valley lot where homeless people are already congregating.
Tuesday, the full board of supervisors will decide whether to actually rescind that plan.
Our two questions: Will they? Our Lisa Halverstadt asked each of the supervisors and none, except Terra Lawson-Remer (the only one facing a serious re-election challenge), offered a substantive opinion. She said she would be opposing Vargas’ plan.
The second question: Would the state still give a planned $10 million to the county to fund the project if county leaders decide not to do it? Probably not. Vargas has said another site would be identified but none has come up.
Read Halverstadt’s full post on these two big questions.
The Mayor Talks to Voice
San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria sat down with me in the Voice podcast studio for a special episode that posted Friday. I had 45 minutes with him and we spent about 30 minutes on homelessness.
I wrote about a couple of the more interesting exchanges here in the Politics Report. I asked him why, for example, the city would pay $2,000 to $3,000 per month, per person, to shelter about 1,000 people in the new mega-shelter he wants to set up at Kettner and Vine. That could cover rent for them for actual homes, even in San Diego.
His answer: The people the shelter would serve could not handle living on their own.
We also discussed his perspective on tax increases that could be on the November ballot and why his workers are cracking down on beach yoga.
Listen to the full podcast here.
Politics Report: Legislators Could Deal a Blow to Stormwater Tax Supporters
San Diego City Council President Sean Elo-Rivera says his office has not been reaching out to legislators in San Diego even though many of them are trying to significantly modify a measure they already put on the ballot. The changes they want to make to ACA 1 would hurt Elo-Rivera’s plan to put a stormwater tax on the November ballot.
Chris Ward, who represents much of the city in the Assembly, told me he was in favor of the changes.
The changes: ACA 1 will be on the ballot in November. As it reads now, it would make it significantly easier to raise any local sales, property or parcel tax to fund construction of public infrastructure, including affordable housing. Only 55 percent of voters would be needed to support measures that raise those taxes, not two-thirds. But Ward and other lawmakers want to make it more appealing to voters by limiting it to bonds and related property tax increases.
The whole explanation of that is in the Politics Report.
Read it and excerpts from the mayor’s interview here.
Sacramento Report: Housing Advocates vs. the Coastal Commission
The California Coastal Commission says you should not believe a recent report put out by the nonprofit Circulate San Diego about how it holds back important housing developments on the coast. Why? Because Circulate gets money from developers.
The unusually direct attack on a critic’s integrity came in an official statement by the commission in response to Circulate’s findings that the Coastal Commission has inappropriately protected coastal communities from having to contribute to efforts to address the housing crisis. Cities like El Cajon have had to accept more housing than cities like Del Mar.
Deborah Sullivan Brennan has all the back and forth in this fascinating debate about the role of the Commission and whether it is doing its job or serving as a tool of mostly wealthy coastal residents hostile to any nearby development.
Also in the Sacramento Report: An update on the how reparations supporters want to abolish forced labor of inmates, who are key to fighting wildfires. And an update on a plan to lure home insurers back to the state.
10 million for 150 sleeping sites? 67K per site? Are politicians nuts?