Officials with the Justice Department announced on Tuesday they arrested 12 local daycare operators on charges of federal fraud. The complaints allege the operators billed local childcare programs like the YMCA for childcare they did not actually provide, making out with more than $10 million in taxpayer funds meant to subsidize costs for low-income families.
The announcement comes months after right wing content producer Nick Shirley visited San Diego to film a video alleging widespread daycare fraud. Shirley came here shortly after producing a video that made similar allegations in Minneapolis
Back in February, we dug into what Shirley did – and didn’t – find in Minneapolis. The bar to prove fraud of this nature is high. Simply showing up at a daycare and claiming no children are present, as Shirley did, isn’t enough.
In contrast, federal officials surveilled many of the childcare facilities for weeks or months. During that period, they allege children were only present a handful of times. Daycare operators submitted fraudulent records that inflated children’s attendance, prosecutors say.
“These charges underscore a simple truth: anyone who steals from programs meant to support children will face swift and uncompromising accountability,” Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald said during the press conference.
Councilmember Calls for an End to ICE Activity in City Heights
In the past two weeks, at least four ICE arrests have rocked City Heights, one of San Diego’s most diverse neighborhoods. Haitians are grappling with the end of their temporary protected status, and a local organization says they’ve cancelled community events due to increased fear among community members, KPBS reported.
“San Diego has become the epicenter of what we call ICE kidnappings, because they come in unmarked cars and they literally surround people who are dropping their children at school,” said Galena Joseph, co-founder and executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance.
Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera said “the kidnappings have not stopped there,” and called for an emergency rally to condemn ICE activity in the neighborhood. The rally will be held at the City Heights Center at 4:30 pm today.
San Diego Dems May Start to Pay Chair
The San Diego County Democratic Party weighed a plan Tuesday to raise the pay of its chair from $0 to… something larger than that.
Details haven’t fully emerged, but the concept of professionalizing the Party by adding a paycheck to the chair role has been kicked around for years. Proponents say it would allow the chair more time to operate the increasingly complex machinery of the party without having to worry about working a day job.
Not everyone is stoked.
One former party leader wrote that the proposal was rushed and the process should be slowed down.
“This is exactly the type of proposal we should want to get feedback on, allow input into its creation, consider various alternatives — not shove through wording crafted by very few individuals, as fast as possible, in violation of the notification policy,” Cynara Velasquez wrote.
It got punted: The Central Committee discussed the idea at length. In the end, they tabled it until January.
Street Light Broken? Wait ’til 2028
From pot holes to storm drains, San Diego has no shortage of busted infrastructure. We get it, things break. The really frustrating aspect is how long it can take to fix them.
Take streetlights. According to a landing page on the City of San Diego’s Get It Done website, where residents can report fixes they’d like to see, the city takes a long, long time to fix streetlights. Currently, the estimated resolution time is 500 days.
In other words, report a broken streetlight today, expect a fix somewhere around Jan. 28, 2028.
We reached out to city officials to ask how accurate this estimated wait time is.
“The average response time of 500 days for streetlight repairs is a rough estimate that is the result of aging electrical infrastructure that repeatedly fails and the limited funding provided annually for maintenance and repairs,” wrote Anthony Santacroce, a spokesperson with the Transportation Department in an email.
He said the city maintains more than 55,000 streetlights and repairs aren’t as simple as replacing a light bulb. In fact, the repairs often involve damaged wiring, underground or series circuits.
Santacroce said when funding is available, repairs are being made. Most recently, he said the city has used parking meter revenue to fund streetlight repairs in Downtown, Mid-City, Pacific Beach, and Uptown. City crews fixed more than 2,000 streetlights in those neighborhoods in the last fiscal year, he wrote.
“While progress has been made, the significant backlog of streetlight repair requests has accumulated over many years and will require sustained investment in staffing and resources to make a sizable dent in the backlog,” he wrote.
Council Unanimously Approves Islamophobia Definition
Muslim community members and allies packed the council chambers Tuesday to support a working definition of Islamophobia. The Council supported it unanimously.
“The GOP has decided that Islamophobia is part of their campaign platform for 2026,” Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera said at a press conference before the vote. “This action is necessary… It’s a very, very important step in building the bridge that we could have had with our Muslim community all along.”
Of Note: The city’s Human Relations Commission, which was tasked with developing anti-hate definitions, never officially voted on the proposed definition. A special meeting to do so last week did not reach quorum.
Instead, the Council of American-Islamic Relations brought forward the definition, with the support of Elo-Rivera and Council President Joe LaCava.
Join Us for Coffee at Our New Digs
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In Other News
- The city of San Diego approved a settlement with Alia Khouri, one of Gloria’s former top staffers. The documents provided for the meeting do not say what “wrongful conduct” Khouri alleged. (inewsource)
- It got so hot last week that San Diego Gas and Electric set a new record for energy demand in a single day. The company reached a peak net system load of more than 5,000 megawatts, blowing past a previous record set in 2014. (Union-Tribune)
- Our former intern Rami Alarian has a scoop on SDSU President Adela de la Torre. In 2023, de la Torre engaged police on a student satire newspaper after an anonymous contributor published an invitation to the president’s home address. (The Daily Aztec)
The Morning Report was written by Jakob McWhinney, Mariana Martínez Barba and Bella Ross. It was edited by Will Huntsberry.
