Morning Report: La Jolla Revolutionaries Have Slim Chance

The La Jolla group seeking to create an independent city is once again short of the required signatures to provoke a long process that would lead to voters deciding on the secession.

But there’s hope: The agency in charge of the process, the Local Agency Formation Commission, is not rejecting the application just yet – officials say they may be able to find valid signatures in the thousands the Registrar of Voters rejected.

Priscilla Mumpower, the assistant executive officer of LAFCO, said the Association for the City of La Jolla was still 218 signatures short after they got an extension to collect more signatures when the first batch was also insufficient. But she said LAFCO has different standards than the Registrar of Voters and can accept signatures that the county did not.

For example, she said 42 of the signatures lacked a ZIP code with the signature and so LAFCO will accept them, pushing the magic number down to 176. She said the Registrar of Voters also rejected signatures where the signer shortened a formal name like “Christopher” to “Chris” or left off an “s” at the end of an address.

“Our statute says that if the signature includes a name and address in a manor that you can readily ascertain coincides with official records, it is valid,” Mumpower said. She said they would go through the more than 2,700 invalidated signatures with the La Jolla activists to check for ones that are close enough.

“It’s going to be a thin margin either way,” she said. 

If they get enough: This is what happens.

National City Council Boots City Manager

National City Councilmembers on Friday terminated the contract of City Manager Benjamin Martinez, citing management problems.

“We need to restabilize the ship,” Mayor Ron Morrison said after a hastily called midday meeting at which Councilmembers approved what Morrison called a “mutual agreement of separation” with Martinez.

Critics accused Councilmembers of firing Martinez on a religious holiday to evade public scrutiny. “Who does a meeting [to remove a city manager] on Good Friday?” one resident said during public comments before the meeting. 

Morrison and other Councilmembers said they held the meeting Friday because one Councilmember, Jose Rodriguez, had said he was unavailable most of next week.

What happened: Morrison and other Councilmembers cited an array of problems in city leadership as reasons for Martinez’s exit, including prominent personnel departures, expensive lawsuits against the city, a botched cannabis permitting process, inadequate representation of city interests in negotiations with the Port of San Diego and a projected budget deficit. 

Rodriguez, who has clashed repeatedly with Morrison on the Council, denounced Friday’s meeting – but not from the Council dais. Rodriguez refused to attend the meeting and instead watched from the audience, calling the meeting a “kangaroo court” orchestrated by the mayor to “silence public input.”

Martinez did not attend Friday’s meeting and could not be reached for comment.

“I’m looking for a good leader,” Councilmember Luz Molina said in explanation of Martinez’s departure. “We have fantastic people on staff that deserve good leadership.”

Read the full story here.

Republican Supes Say They Didn’t Get Invited to Dem Supervisor’s Party

Last week, Democratic San Diego County Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer gave the annual State of the County speech – and Republican supervisors Joel Anderson and Jim Desmond say they weren’t invited. Lawson-Remer says that’s not true.

What’s up with that? Lawson-Remer’s office told our Lisa Halverstadt the Republican supervisors’ offices didn’t indicate they were interested in attending when the Democrat who is now acting chair of the board was mulling an event format that wouldn’t violate the state’s open meetings law. Her team says she would have loved to have both supervisors at her big speech.

The clashing narratives are the latest kerfuffle for the politically divided county Board of Supervisors, which is now split 2-2.

Anderson, the board’s acting vice chair, told Halverstadt he learned of the State of the County event the day before it took place and was disappointed when he was told he couldn’t go due to an apparent state Brown Act violation.

Then Lawson-Remer gave a speech laying out a progressive game plan for the county to respond to the Trump administration, adding more fuel to invite-related questions.

Read the full story here.

Sacramento Report: San Diego Senator Seeks to Kill East Otay Mesa Landfill

Fifteen years ago, an overwhelming majority of voters approved a ballot measure that laid the groundwork for a landfill and recycling collection center in East Otay Mesa.    

Now, a local state senator is having second thoughts. Sen. Steve Padilla recently introduced a bill that would add new requirements to the proposed landfill, including additional public hearings and assurances that the landfill won’t worsen environmental conditions in nearby communities.

Padilla says voters weren’t well-informed about the full ramifications of placing a landfill in an area that already faces severe pollution. His bill “would give communities like ours that already face excessive levels of pollution the opportunity to have their voices heard,” he told our Deborah Sullivan.

David Wick, president and CEO of landfill developer National Enterprises, Inc., said Padilla’s proposal is overkill, because his company is already undergoing exhaustive environmental review.

And Wick said the true “environmental injustice” is the fact that “the existing three landfills in our county have become mountains of trash.”

Now the landfill has become an issue in the race to fill a vacant South San Diego County seat on the County Board of Supervisors. Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre, a candidate in the race, opposes the landfill.

“Putting it within the boundaries of the Tijuana watershed and exacerbating the threat that the Tijuana River poses for the entire South Bay is ludicrous right now,” she told Sullivan.

Her opponent, Chula Vista Mayor John McCann, takes the opposite view.

“As we are seeing major trash rate increases in San Diego, without being able to build a state of the art environmentally safe landfill, located away from neighborhoods, residents will see trash rates skyrocket and the community will lose hundreds of local jobs,” said.

Also in the Report: Acting Board of Supervisors chair Terra Lawson-Remer has plans for the county’s sizable fiscal reserves.

Read the full story here.

Podcast Gets Visit from Congressman

VOSD Podcast: Our latest episode features a special guest host – U.S. Rep. Mike Levin. Levin dishes on the future of U.S. politics in the Trump era and shares his thoughts about Democrats’ game plan and what the local impacts of federal spending cuts may be.

Also in the episode: Smart trash cans and bot students.

Listen to the full episode here.

In Other News

• Palomar Health’s board gave the CEO a vote of confidence in individual written statements collected by the Union-Tribune this week even as “bond ratings fall, debt levels increase, expenses severely exceed revenue and services are sidelined.” Other than that, things are going great. 
• Mexican law enforcement agents in Tijuana last week arrested an escaped California inmate wanted in the killing of a Tijuana state police chief. (Union-Tribune)
• Imperial County Supervisors fired their county’s chief executive officer earlier this month but still refuse to say why. (KPBS)
• Salk Institute plant biologists say they have found a way to use soil fungus that could eliminate the need for artificial fertilizer. (KPBS)
  Axios San Diego reports that weed sold in San Diego dispensaries is getting stronger, increasing the risk for cannabis poisoning.