Not Everything Is Broken Down South 

Former Chula Vista Mayor Mary Casillas Salas had some pointed words for me last week. 

“I don’t think you paint Chula Vista in a positive light,” she said with characteristic bluntness. 

“I’m a paid subscriber to Voice of San Diego and I would like to see positive news reporting,” she said. “The community needs that. When they see all this bitterness and conflict, they don’t want to volunteer for things.” 

Public officials often say such things to reporters. It comes with the territory of revealing unwelcome facts. 

But Salas has a point. 

Voice’s motto is: “Investigative Journalism for a Better San Diego.” The main way we accomplish that goal is by pointing out what’s not working so people can fix it. 

But there’s more than one way to improve a community. Sometimes shining a light on things that work can have an equally beneficial effect. Inspiration is a powerful motive. 

With that in mind, I decided this week I would report only good news about the cities I cover. A lot of people out there are working hard to make their communities better. Here’s a sampling. 

Chula Vista’s Strategic Plan 

Last week, Chula Vista City Councilmembers voted on one of those issues that nobody pays attention to but that will affect pretty much everyone in the city. 

The Council unanimously approved the city’s latest five-year strategic plan. 

Boring? Not at all. The plan lays out a roadmap that will determine how the city’s government spends its money, what it works on and what the city will look like in five years. 

City spokesperson John Cihomsky said it’s not a pro forma document. City employees really do base their work on the priorities laid out in the plan, he said. 

Here are just a few of the tasks the plan prioritizes for city employees: 

• Completing the Millennia Library. 
• Evaluating police resources with an eye to determining whether to build a new eastside substation. 
• Evaluating whether to build an eastside senior center. 
• Surveying city streetlights and figuring out how to keep the city safely lit at night. 
• Updating the city’s homelessness strategy. 
• Getting better at sending emergency alerts. 
• Developing a master plan for fire services. 
• Getting better at prioritizing local businesses when procuring outside city services. 
• Developing improvement plans for the Elite Athlete Training Center and the city’s urban core. 
• Revitalizing Broadway. 
• Adopting an outdoor dining ordinance. 
• Partnering with local schools to connect students with career pathways. 
• Launching a new city website. 
• Strengthening efforts to hire local people for city jobs. 

Every Chula Vista reader of this newsletter will be affected by at least one of those initiatives. 

Aren’t you glad city officials are approaching the work thoughtfully and carefully? 

Just think, you could be living in a certain big city a few miles north that, these days, doesn’t seem able to plan its way out of a paper bag. 

National City’s ARTS Program 

Also last week, leaders of National City’s beloved A Reason to Survive community arts program delivered their annual update to city leaders at Tuesday’s City Council meeting. 

ARTS, as the program is known, is a nonprofit organization that provides an array of visual arts programs to local families, students and young people involved in the justice system. 

The organization leases the former site of the National City Library near City Hall via a cooperative arrangement with the city. Hence the annual public update. 

While reporting a story on ARTS last year, I saw how effective their work with young people can be. 

This year, the organization hired a new executive director following the departure of former director Lucy Eagleson, who took a job with a San Diego philanthropy. 

The new director, Marisol Alvarado, formerly worked at San Diego’s Monarch School Project, which serves homeless youth. 

Alvarado told councilmembers she’s excited to be in National City and serve a community that she described as having a unique spirit of resiliency. 

“We’re proud to be here, and we’re here to see this partnership growing,” she said of ARTS’ partnership with the city. 

Alvarado and Olympia Vasquez Ojeda, who served as interim director following Eagleson’s February departure, reeled off some stats about ARTS’ accomplishments this year. 

Over the past 12 months, they said, ARTS worked with 3,200 local young people, helped those kids create more than 12,000 works of art, hosted 25,000 visitors at 120 events and raised $1.8 million in operating revenue from donations, philanthropies and government partnerships. 

They previewed a must-see event in fall: ARTS’ annual Dia de Muertos program, which takes place the evening of Oct. 30. 

Just picture what a community of creative kids will do on a holiday tailor-made for artistic expression. I plan to be there. 

Imperial Beach’s Civilized Campaign Season 

There’s a three-way mayoral campaign in Imperial Beach but you might not know it. 

Unlike the bruising political culture in other South County cities (here’s looking at you, National City), I.B. these days is living up to its laid-back beach town reputation when it comes to campaigns. 

It’s not always like this in the small city that punches above its weight when it comes to urban problems. Indeed, under former Mayor Paloma Aguirre, an activist at heart, the city’s political scene was high-stakes and fast-moving. 

This year’s mayoral race between incumbent Mitch McKay, City Councilmember Matthew Leyba-Gonzalez and former school construction administrator Karl Bradley may heat up as the election nears. 

For now, it’s pretty mellow. 

That might have something to do with the temperament of the three candidates. 

McKay routinely describes himself as a pragmatic consensus-builder. 

“To go in with pitchforks and torches and kill the Frankenstein monster, it doesn’t speak to my pragmatic nature,” he said recently of his governing style. 

Leyba-Gonzalez works for a labor union and likely will benefit from an infusion of outside spending from labor groups – a possible source of campaign heat. 

But personality-wise, he’s not a grandstander. 

Indeed, unlike most public officials I cover, he doesn’t appear to love the sound of his own voice. He rarely talks during City Council meetings. When he does, it’s usually short and to the point. 

His campaign website has the usual shoutouts to working people that have become standard fare for San Diego County Democratic candidates. 

Besides that, his main pitch to voters is an annual cleanup day he sponsors in his City Council district, plus the establishment of some little streetside library kiosks and an annual high school career fair. 

One of his campaign photos shows him standing in shorts and flip-flops astride a fat-tire strand cruiser beside the Tijuana River estuary. He’s grinning like a guy on vacation. 

Call it Teamsters meets beachside Mayberry. 

Bradley’s campaign website also cranks up the small-town friendliness. 

There’s a bit of feistiness in his self-description as the race’s most qualified, transparent and progressive mayor. 

Bradley has criticized McKay for assuming office by City Council appointment. And he has promised a more confrontational approach to the federal agency responsible for treating sewage in the Tijuana River. 

But scroll to the bottom of his campaign homepage and you come to a poster featuring Pumpkin the cat wearing a blue “Karl Bradley for Mayor” bib. 

“Paws up for a purr-fect Imperial Beach!” the poster reads. “Pumpkin’s trolling the streets for votes! Vote Karl!” 

Wouldn’t it be nice if, even just for one day, politics everywhere else was more Pumpkin, less Pit Viper? 

Stay mellow, I.B.