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Chula Vista, At Long Last, Is Ready for Its Own Public Arts Program

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It’s been a decade since Chula Vista put the kibosh on plans to require public and private developments to put a small percentage of project costs toward public art.

Chula Vista Councilwoman Pamela Bensoussan said the Council at the time didn’t have the support of the business community or city staff, so it didn’t adopt the plan that included the proposed fees.

Then, in 2008, amid the economic downturn and budget cuts, the city completely cut staff and funding for its cultural arts program. Aside from an ongoing grant program funded by a percentage of ticket sales from the Sleep Train Amphitheatre, city support for arts and culture in Chula Vista languished for years.

Recently, though, the city has shown a renewed interest in the arts. In April, Chula Vista hired Lynnette Tessitore-Lopez to head up the cultural arts program. She’s been busy collecting community input and putting together the city’s newest cultural arts master plan.

Bensoussan said the latest arts plan, after its precursor failed 10 years ago, stands a good chance of getting approved at Council on July 26. The plan makes public art fees voluntary, and she said is more comprehensive than its predecessor.

“It’s much different than the previous plan and really awesome,” Bensoussan said. “It’s also been a decade and the economic impact of art wasn’t readily accepted back then like it is now.”

The current draft of the city’s cultural arts master plan, in part, suggests striking partnerships between the city and businesses and existing arts groups to create public arts projects, proposes changes to the appointment process and powers of the city’s Cultural Arts Commission, calls for leveraging the city’s proximity to the international border by partnering with groups like Tijuana’s tourism board and encourages the use of non-traditional spaces – vacant retail space and commercial storefronts – for staging arts and culture events.

To fund it all, the city would pursue grants from institutions like the National Endowment for the Arts. There’s also a recommendation to look into using a portion of Chula Vista’s hotel taxes, a pool of money that’s small but growing thanks to new development on the city’s east and west sides.

Tessitore-Lopez acknowledges that public art fees will be voluntarily, but says the city will likely include incentives to “highly encourage” developer participation. She’s also talking to project managers of three major developments under way in the city – the Port of San Diego’s Chula Vista Bayfront Project, the big Millenia development in eastern Chula Vista and the proposed university and Innovation District project – to ensure public artworks are included.

“There are definitely opportunities there,” she said. “But in the meantime we still want to do a lot, and there’s a lot we can do in the city’s non-traditional spaces.”

Tessitore-Lopez said if the plan’s adopted, the first task is mapping the city’s existing arts and culture assets so she’ll have a better handle on what’s there and what isn’t. Once that’s done, she said the city will have a more concrete plan for how to boosts the arts in the city.

Vallo Riberto, an arts instructor at Chula Vista’s Southwestern College who has helped run the school’s art gallery for years, said he’s glad the city is taking steps to increase arts and culture in Chula Vista, but he doesn’t have big expectations for the plan’s eventual impact.

“I don’t think Chula Vista will ever take off as an arts district like Barrio Logan has taken off,” he said. “And that’s simply because we just don’t have cheap rents. … It also has to be a groundswell. The arts movement has to be started from the grassroots of a community. I don’t think the city can create an arts movement.”

Tessitore-Lopez doesn’t pretend that the city’s new master plan will turn Chula Vista into the region’s next big arts district – she said the goal is to use arts as an economic driver while also improving the quality of life for residents. She agrees that in order for the plan to be successful, the city will need buy-in from the artistic community.

“I think it absolutely takes a grassroots movement,” she said. “But it also comes from the top down as well. I think the two need to meet together to make it work.”

Leticia Gomez Franco, an independent arts consultant and curator who lives in Chula Vista, said she’s surprised it’s taken so long for the city to create a cultural arts master plan, but it comes as the city is seeing a small cultural renaissance.

“It’s the perfect time,” she said. “There’s this new fresh wave of energy coming into Chula Vista, and that’s aside from the new breweries and hipster stuff that’s coming in. Just a couple of months ago, I got approached by one of the downtown businesses, a deli. … They’ve been there for 20 years, but now they want to turn their shop into a cultural space. … So that could be a spark that will help get the ball rolling for the master plan.”


Without a Safe Place to Park, Those Living in Their Cars Are Stuck in Neutral

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The big white van isn’t the home they would’ve chosen but it’s the home they have. It’s where 41-year-old Alex Alarcon, his pregnant wife and children have slept for months.

Early on, the Alarcons parked their van on a National City street each night, fearing their van could be hit by another car and weary of strangers who judged them. One woman threatened to call Child Protective Services on the family.

“They look at you like insects in the street,” Alarcon said.

The Alarcons’ story is far from isolated. This year’s annual homeless census found nearly 1,850 people sleeping in cars, RVs or other vehicles across the county, more than double the total in 2015. That represents 21 percent of the countywide homeless population.

Those who work with the homeless say that number likely undercounts the volume of San Diegans living in their cars. Many don’t want others to know their predicament and they’re often on the move, in search of a place to park where they won’t be bothered or ticketed by police. There are few safe havens for them.

The Alarcons and hundreds of others have found one through Dreams for Change, a nonprofit that runs two parking lots for homeless people living in their cars.

Photo by Jamie Scott Lytle
Photo by Jamie Scott Lytle
Sabastian lives with his parents in their van, which they've been parking at a lot in Chula Vista.

Each night, the nonprofit opens up lots in Chula Vista and Golden Hill and pairs those who stay there with case managers and other resources to try to help them get off the streets permanently.

But Dreams for Change recently learned it’ll need to move out of its Chula Vista lot at the end of August. The social service agency that’s now leasing out the overnight parking lot told Dreams for Change it plans to lease or sell the entire property.

That single Chula Vista lot serves as many as 350 people a year and the nonprofit’s waiting list has hit an all-time high, Dreams for Change CEO Teresa Smith said.

Smith founded Dreams for Change in 2010 after realizing during the recession that more people were staying in their cars after losing their homes – and that there were scant resources to help them.

City ordinances through San Diego County complicate matters. People who live in their cars can be cited for parking on city streets for too long or sleeping in their cars. Few public or private lots allow around-the-clock parking free of charge.

Attorneys who have represented homeless clients who live in cars say they’re often penalized for overnight parking or habitation, which means they’re using a vehicle as a temporary or permanent living space. Then they can be hit with fines or even have their cars impounded.

“They start getting tickets and then the car gets impounded and then they’re on the street, which is not better,” said Scott Dreher, a lawyer who’s filed multiple suits against the city.

Indeed, three others who are homeless and live in their vehicles – but don’t stay in the Dreams for Change lot – told me they’ve been hit with a series of tickets over the years and regularly take steps to avoid them, including moving their vehicles at least every 72 hours and parking in lots or on streets where they don’t think they’ll be bothered. Sometimes they still are.

All that work can be overwhelming, especially for families with children.

Dreams for Change has managed to move some families, including the Alarcons, to their lot in San Diego as they seek a new space.

Alarcon said he’s grateful his family won’t be forced to park on the street again.

Those who remain in Chula Vista dread what could be next.

Anita, who asked that I not print her last name, has spent evenings in the lot with her four girls since last March.

She’s appreciated the supportive community that’s developed within the parking lot and the overnight bathroom access.

Now she’s mulling where her family can safely park starting next month.

“It’s hard, very hard to realize that we’re gonna step outside this parking lot, that we’re not gonna have this,” she said.

Keva Hubbert, who’s has taken refuge in Dream for Change lots twice since 2010, isn’t sure of her next stop, either.

She’s parked in the Chula Vista lot for about a month and hasn’t told her daughter what might be next. She doesn’t want to scare her.

Photo by Jamie Scott Lytle
Photo by Jamie Scott Lytle
Keva Hubbert, her daughter and grandson have been sleeping in their car in the Turning Hearts Center parking lot in Chula Vista

Instead, she’s worked tirelessly to find a landlord who might accept her Section 8 voucher. She hasn’t found one yet and is praying she’ll secure something before the end of the month.

“Hopefully we’ll be safe,” Hubbert said.

Smith said the group will do its best to bring all families with children to its San Diego lot but can’t move everyone.

“The reality is, for most of them, it’s gonna be back to the streets,” Smith said.

Finding a replacement lot isn’t proving easy.

The group’s work hasn’t always been welcomed. Vista officials ordered Dreams for Change to shutter its lot in that city in 2013, saying it violated zoning rules.

Three years later, Dreams for Change has approached multiple churches and property owners in the South Bay, hoping to find a new home. No one’s welcomed them yet.

Maya Srikrishnan contributed to this story.

Correction: An initial version of this story misstated the percentage of unsheltered people living in their cars in San Diego County. The latest point-in-time count estimated 21percent of the region’s homeless are living in vehicles.

Chula Vista’s Measure P Requires a Leap of Faith From Voters

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Once the city of Chula Vista decided to ask voters for a sales tax hike to fund infrastructure fixes this November, it had two choices.

It could craft a measure that ensured the money would go to infrastructure, requiring two-thirds support, or it could raise the money with no legal guarantees for how it’s spent, requiring a mere simple majority.

City officials ultimately decided the measure likely wouldn’t pass if it needed a super-majority, so Chula Vista voters will decide whether they want to raise their sales tax by half a cent for the next 10 years and trust that city officials will use it how they promised.

“The City Council has expressed its intent to spend these monies exclusively on City infrastructure, facilities and equipment,” reads the city attorney’s analysis of the measure. “However, because the tax is a ‘general purpose’ tax, the City Council would reserve the right to spend the tax revenues for any lawful City purpose.”

The city has been working toward this measure for years. A committee was formed to look at the city’s infrastructure needs in 2014.

The committee and city staff documented all the public infrastructure, from roads to police cars to parks to fire stations, mapped them out and determined how close they were to failing, the likeliness that they would fail and the consequences to city residents of those failures.

The city determined it had about $71.7 million worth of infrastructure that was high-risk, meaning it was already failing or on the verge and would have severe consequences if it failed. It also found that $279.1 million worth of infrastructure was medium-risk.

“We’re not really that different than most cities in the nation in that we have failing infrastructure,” said Maria Kachadoorian, the deputy city manager. “We do collect gas tax money, TransNet money and we do seek out grants. But we’ve gotten to the point now where we needed to bring something forward or its going to make things more difficult. Finding money in the budget would mean drastic cuts in services.”

The city estimates the measure will generate roughly $16 million in the first year and $176 million over 10 years.

In April, city staff told the City Council it could either put a sales tax on the ballot, or a bond to borrow the money.

The bond would be reimbursed by future revenue from an increase in local property taxes. It would have allowed the city to guarantee a certain dollar amount to be raised and to specify what projects would be included. It would also require a super-majority to pass.

The sales tax, without legally dedicating the money for a specific purpose, would only require a simple majority vote.

“It’s two different thresholds and we know that if you bring this to a two-thirds vote, you are really likely to lose it,” Chula Vista Mayor Mary Salas said during a June City Council meeting in response to concerns over how the money could be spent if it wasn’t legally bound by the ballot measure.

Those concerns persist among people who oppose the measure.

Mike Diaz, a retired firefighter and candidate for Chula Vista City Council, said the tax will hurt the poorest families in Chula Vista and he’s concerned the funds aren’t earmarked for infrastructure.

“There is absolutely no way to guarantee that the money is going to be used for what they say,” Diaz said.

John McCann, the only City Council member who voted against putting the measure on the ballot, expressed similar concerns during public hearings.

“There is no specificity,” McCann said at a July City Council meeting. “There is no accountability and ultimately it comes down to the council.”

Changes to the makeup of the City Council over the next 10 years could also change how those funds are used, no matter what the current Council is promising, he said.

Photo by Bianca Bruno
Photo by Bianca Bruno
Mary Salas at her home in west Chula Vista.

Salas called the concerns unfounded.

In an interview, she said opponents and supporters of the measure alike will watch like hawks how the revenue is used, and funds won’t be diverted easily.

“I’m sorry we can’t convince people that we’ll use those funds for what we say we will,” she said during the July City Council meeting in which the measure was placed on the ballot.

Kachadoorian agrees.

“It’s a temporary 10-year sales tax,” she said. “It’s going to go away. If we swept that into pensions and salaries, we would be setting ourselves up for a financial crisis.”

The city has done several things to try and assuage concerns over the use of the money. The money raised will be separated into a separate line in the city’s budget. The City Council adopted an intended expenditure plan, which provides a detailed breakdown of how the funds should be spent – though it in no way legally binds the use of the money. The measure would also create an independent oversight committee, which would review the spending plan and annual audit reports in public hearings.

City staff will also bring a plan to borrow money with a promise to repay the debt with the tax’s future revenue within 30 days if the measure passes, Salas said. This would provide the city with funds to immediately start fixing the most critical infrastructure issues and would legally bind the money to infrastructure projects, she said.

While opponents have voiced concerns at City Council meetings, there is no funded opposition against the measure.

Salas started her own committee to raise money in support of the measure. She said she’s personally been calling developers who have projects in Chula Vista to ask them to donate.

So far she’s raised around $85,000 that she’s used exclusively on mailers. That includes a $10,000 donation from RIDA Realty Investment Corp., which is building the big hotel and convention center on the Chula Vista Bayfront, and $10,000 from the Building Industry Association PAC. HomeFed and Millenia, which are working on large developments inland, also donated $10,000 and $1,500, respectively.

“I’ve been the sole person who has been fundraising for this,” Salas said. “I have been calling on the development community in particular. Their homes won’t sell if we don’t have good roads, good sewage.”

Salas said she isn’t worried about the content of the measure stopping voters, but one thing does have her worried.

“I think whenever you’re voting on a sales tax measure, you’re asking the community to make a value judgment,” Salas said. “I can advocate to our community and the citizens know exactly where we need to make those expenditures. But my biggest worry is it’s on Page 2 of a very long ballot.”

The South Bay’s Craft Beer Boom Is Upending Assumptions

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Chula Vista’s Third Avenue is lined with breweries and tasting rooms. Two new tasting rooms have been approved in National City. In Imperial Beach, Coronado Brewing Company is building a 10-barrel brewery with a 7,000 square-foot restaurant.

Anywhere else in craft beer-devoted San Diego County, openings like these would be unremarkable. But the South Bay has long been one corner of the county the craft beer boom hasn’t touched.

At the end of 2015, San Diego County had 114 breweries and brewpubs – only two of which were located in the South Bay, according to a National University System Institute for Policy Research study.

When I asked the brewers, bar owners, city planners and real estate agents in the South Bay to explain the disparity, some cited land use issues and local politics, but most pointed to assumptions about who’s drinking beer there. Citing the region’s generally low incomes and its minority-majority population, some brewers, sales representatives and distributors from outside the South Bay have assumed residents there only have taste buds for macro brews, like Bud Light, Corona and Dos Equis.

The South Bay’s mini craft beer boom, though, is upending those assumptions.

Perceptions and the #SouthBayUprising

“The biggest hurdle has been the perception that the South Bay either didn’t want [craft beer], wasn’t ready for it, or didn’t have the market for it,” said Eddie Trejo, co-owner of Machete Beer House in National City. “All these misguided perceptions: It’s low-income; there is mostly Mexicans and Filipinos; they don’t want [craft beer].”

When he and co-owner Joann Cornejo opened Machete in February 2015, they became National City’s first craft beer-centric business. Though many breweries were supportive in getting their brews on tap, uncertainty about the South Bay was still common. Many sales representatives for distributors and breweries would say, “We aren’t selling new accounts right now,” putting Machete on a “waitlist,” which is the polite way in the sales world for saying, “No,” Trejo said.

Trejo also worked as a tour guide for breweries. Whenever he would pick up a group from Chula Vista and bus them north to the county’s well-known breweries and brewpubs, Trejo said his colleagues would let out a collective groan: “Why are they coming? Why do they want craft beer? Do they even know?”

Those reactions are familiar to Gonzalo Quintero, general manager of La Bella Pizza Garden on Chula Vista’s Third Avenue. Though La Bella has been serving craft beer for the past 20 years, the first to do so in the South Bay, Quintero looked to expand its tap list in 2012. During the expansion, craft beer sales reps told him much of the same: Only light beers and Mexican beers would sell in the South Bay. Quintero eventually got enough craft brews to fill the majority of La Bella’s 24 handles, and overall, sales have increased. Despite the growth, the skepticism remained.

Earlier this year, a San Diego brewery from outside of the South Bay invited Quintero to try its beers. Quintero thought he was there to shop for a new brew. During the meeting, however, one of the brewery’s staff members accidentally told Quintero the real reason they had invited him: The brewery wanted to use La Bella as a gauge for how its beers would do in the South Bay.

“This isn’t a petri dish for you,” Quintero said of the brewery, which he declined to identify. “There are a lot of people on this block putting their savings, their blood, sweat and tears into it.”

In 2015, Trejo started the hashtag #SouthBayUprising, which has become the unofficial rallying cry for the push to bring more craft beer options to the region. In 2016, Trejo, along with other craft beer bar owners, local brewers and advocates for the South Bay, formed the South Bay Craft Beer Business Association.

To understand the void that South Bay’s craft beer scene is working to fill, it is helpful to look at places of abundance.

Where Craft Beer Does Thrive

San Diego City Council District 6, which includes northern central neighborhoods like Kearny Mesa and Mira Mesa, is known as the “beer belt.” It’s home to about two-thirds of the city’s craft beer breweries. Since the end of 2015, eight new breweries have opened, said Chris Cate, the Council member for District 6. He says breweries are attracted to the district since much of the land is already zoned for industrial use, the close proximity to White Labs, which manufactures liquid yeast for brewers, as well as wanting to be near internationally known brewers like Karl Strauss, Green Flash and AleSmith. “There is a close-knit relationship that they have,” Cate said. “They want to make sure others are successful.”

Todd Davis, a commercial realtor who was involved with Stone Brewing’s first lease in 1996 and has worked with The Lost Abbey, Ballast Point and Karl Strauss, said craft beer business owners think of the easiest place for the customer base to get to them. “If you’re central,” Davis said, referring to places like North Park, “you can still get people from the South Bay.”

Tony Raso, who is opening a bar in Chula Vista, also works at Fall Brewing’s tasting room in North Park. “I card people every day at work. I work five nights a week, and about one in every five, or one in every six IDs that I check says ‘Chula Vista,’” Raso said.

Although consumers from the South Bay are seemingly lured north, the phenomenon validates what advocates, business owners and brewers from the area have been saying all along: The South Bay drinks craft beer.

Vince Vasquez, an economist at the National University System Institute of Policy Research, thinks the growing thirst for craft beer within the South Bay correlates with rising family incomes among Latino households. In Chula Vista, nearly 60 percent of the population is Hispanic, and the median household income is $64,576, slightly higher than county and state levels.

For Jill Davidson, president of the San Diego Brewers Guild, the craft beer scene was always on its way to the South Bay. It was just a matter of time and geography. “The epicenter was more north,” Davidson said. “It blossoms at the epicenter, and it blossoms outward.”

She doesn’t believe the assumptions that culture and ethnicity were ever holding back the craft beer scene. She points to the success of Baja’s craft beer industry.

“As craft continues to grow, expand and collaborate across the border, it is going to help identify the power of San Diego beer and Baja beer,” Davidson said. “I think there is so much opportunity there, and it kind of exemplifies what an amazing culture exists.”

Changing Minds – and Regulations

Alan Cassell, a Chula Vista realtor who owns several properties along Third Avenue, thinks it’s not just assumptions about people who live in the South Bay that have held back the success of craft beer there. There are assumptions about people who live outside the area, and whether they’re willing to go there.

“Most people probably just remember Chula Vista as a place you pass when you go to TJ,” Cassell said.

Real estate agents, brewery investors from La Jolla and North County and two business groups from North Park and Ocean Beach that originally looked to brew or sell craft beer passed on the opportunity to do business in Chula Vista, he said.

Photo by Jamie Scott Lytle
Photo by Jamie Scott Lytle
Mario Maldonado has a beer at La Bella Pizza Garden in Chula Vista.

To combat the stigma, the city has doubled down on efforts to put out the welcome mat for potential businesses and investors.

In May 2014, the city’s principal planner, Scott Donaghe and Craig Ruiz, principal economic development specialist, wrote a letter to breweries throughout the county.

“The city is committed to streamline the entitlement process to make locating and opening a brewery, brewpub or tasting room, smooth and simple,” the letter read.

Donaghe took brewery owners on walking tours that included promising properties. The city also got creative with antiquated land use policies that barred alcohol production beyond certain industrial zones. To draw brewers to Third Avenue, Donaghe led an effort to define the function of brewing craft beer as akin to baking bread – after all, they share the same main ingredients of water, yeast and grain.

National City is also functioning under restrictive land use policies when it comes to alcohol production and even consumption.

“Alcohol is sort of a polarizing thing,” said Martin Reeder, the principal planner for National City. Reeder says residents are still wary of a growing bar scene, after National City Boulevard earned a bad reputation for noise, drunk driving and public urination decades ago.

Reeder has assured the city that the craft beer scene is different: higher prices, a different atmosphere and different clientele.

Reeder’s explanation was enough for the City Council to approve tasting rooms for Embarcadero Brewing and Novo Brazil, which brews in Eastlake.

Native Sons of the South Bay

Cassell is working with several business groups with ties to the area. One of them, Three Punk Ales, is reshaping an old department store into a brewery and tasting room. Two of the three punks, Steve Garcia and Kevin Lewis, met at Bonita Vista Middle School and grew up in Chula Vista. Recently, a San Diego brewer outside of the South Bay told Garcia that he was entering a dead market. Garcia brushed the comment aside.

Three doors down, at the corner of Third Avenue and Davidson Street, Raso, also a Chula Vista native, is planning to open a craft beer and wine bar named Bar Sin Nombre, the result of a last-minute scramble to fill out liquor license paperwork.

“I’m raising my kids in a community where my wife and I were both raised. And I can help create a neighborhood, where, when they grow up, they want to go and hang out with their friends, versus what I had to do, and shoot north,” Raso told me.

Across the street, local artist Pete Caso is finishing up a colorful mural to serve as the temporary storefront during the construction of Groundswell Brewing’s new tasting room. The owner, Kevin Rhodes, is a Chula Vista resident.

Raso points down the street to Chula Vista Brewery, its logo, “CVB” with baseball cap lettering displayed on the front. Timothy Parker, the owner, has lived in Chula Vista for the past 16 years.

Raso looks out toward the bars and breweries along Third Avenue. “I have full confidence that if it’s done right, it’s going to work here forever.”

Chula Vista Sees Homelessness Drop Following Measure Targeting Large Vehicles

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As street homelessness spikes countywide, Chula Vista seems to be experiencing a different trend – likely fueled by policy changes.

The annual point-in-time count results announced late last month revealed the South Bay city saw a 31 percent year-over-year decrease in the number of folks living on the street or in cars and tents.

Street Homelessness in Chula Vista

The decrease follows a change in how Chula Vista polices oversized vehicles parked in the city, and the creation of a new police team focused on homelessness.

Both Chula Vista and neighboring National City implemented oversized vehicle ordinances last year requiring permits to park RVs, trailers or other large vehicles on city streets. Both saw decreases in vehicle homelessness while the rest of the region saw a slight increase.

Other cities, including San Diego, already had measures on the books.

“One of the reasons that the number of homelessness in Chula Vista may have dropped is we passed an ordinance prohibiting the parking of recreational vehicles on city streets last year,” Chula Vista Mayor Salas said at a press conference last month. “We try to do things differently.”

Indeed, this year’s homeless census revealed the number of folks counted living in vehicles in Chula Vista fell by a third from 2016 to 2017. National City, which passed a similar ordinance, saw an even more dramatic 66 percent decrease.

Salas and Chula Vista housing manager Leilani Hines both said they’ve noticed a drastic reduction in large RVs parked on city streets since their city’s new rules went into effect last May.

Since then, police report they’ve written more than 460 citations for violations of the parking ordinance.

This year, volunteers with the Regional Task Force on the Homeless, the group that conducts the census, counted 30 fewer vehicles housing homeless people.

A larger figure was included in public reports. Each year, the task force interviews dozens of homeless people and uses information from those who live in cars to calculate a multiplier to estimate the average number of those staying in cars.

This year’s multiplier was 1.66, slightly lower than last year’s.

Using that math, the task force calculated 174 homeless Chula Vistans were sleeping in cars the night of the count, compared with 251 last year.

Yet advocates warn that decrease doesn’t necessarily represent a smaller homelessness problem.

What it could show, activist Michael McConnell said, is that homeless people felt forced to move elsewhere.

“I think the most important thing to remember is homeless people don’t disappear. They don’t just, ‘Poof, I’m gone,’” McConnell said. “They move on.”

He argued cities should take a unified, regional approach to addressing homelessness rather than introducing sometimes contradictory rules and policies that can complicate homeless residents’ efforts to get off the street.

Salas stood by the ordinance in an interview last week. She said it wasn’t aimed at pushing out the homeless but rather at addressing safety and blight.

“We have to weigh the impact to the neighborhoods that these vehicles park in and what that means to the quality of life to the neighbors that live there,” Salas said. “That’s the tension that we’re always dealing with.”

There’s reason to believe Chula Vista’s reduction in vehicle homelessness might have been even more dramatic than the numbers show. Until last fall, nonprofit Dreams for Change operated a Chula Vista safe haven for folks who live in their cars. Dozens parked there each night to avoid potential tickets or safety risks elsewhere. The Dreams for Change lot shut down last year.

Kelsey Kaline, who coordinated this year’s point-in-time count for the Regional Task Force on the Homeless, said the Dreams for Change lot’s occupancy wasn’t recorded in the 2016 homeless census. It’s not clear why. In 2015, volunteers counted 47 cars in the census tract that included the Dreams for Change lot.

Vehicle homelessness wasn’t the only driver of Chula Vista’s decrease in homelessness.

Task force data showed a 44 percent drop in people counted on the street this year.

At the same time, census-takers noted the number of people on the street more than tripled in neighboring National City.

That could speak to homeless people moving across city lines.

Armando Vergara, National City’s director of neighborhood services, believes an influx of people from other areas, particularly downtown San Diego, helped drive up National City’s numbers this year.

“You see that they’re getting pushed a little from other parts of San Diego,” Vergara said. “They’re trying to survive. They’re trying to find a place.”

Chula Vista officials prefer to focus on what happened within their boundaries. They emphasize the creation of a new police team to help homeless people in the city.

Since last year, the team has regularly conducted outreach with the hope of moving people off the street.

Chula Vista Police Lt. Henry Martin, who supervises the homeless outreach team, said they’ve worked with a county mental health clinician and others in the community to connect nearly two dozen homeless people with help since the team officially began work last August.

Martin stressed the team’s goal has been getting folks off the street rather than on enforcement.

“That’s going to be our last resort so we can hopefully provide them with any other opportunity to help themselves,” Martin said.

National City, meanwhile, has hired nonprofit Alpha Project to offer help too.

This Mayor Boosts Housing, Highway and Transit Projects But Still Takes a Backseat at SANDAG

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You might have seen Chula Vista Mayor Mary Salas on TV before November’s election.

Salas, one of the county’s first Latina mayors, appeared in a commercial urging voters to support Measure B, which would have approved the sprawling 1,700-home Lilac Hills Ranch development near Valley Center, in northeastern San Diego County.

The development would have been more than an hour away from Chula Vista. Yet there was the city’s mayor, leading the charge for it.

The measure lost resoundingly — roughly 63 percent of county voters rejected the project.

Salas also appeared on mailers sent to households across the county supporting the measure. Alongside her picture was a map of where the project would be located in the county –the project and Chula Vista are so physically far apart that they couldn’t both fit on the same map.

Back in November, Salas declined to talk about why she supported the measure.

Now Salas said she got involved in selling Measure B because she knew Lilac Hills Ranch developer Randy Goodson from a project he worked on in Chula Vista years ago and the developer asked her for help.

She didn’t take a position on the project itself, and said its loss simply shows voters don’t want to make land use decisions at the ballot, but called her cameo in Measure B ads “utterly indefensible.”

“We do have an incredible housing shortage in San Diego County and Chula Vista has really borne the brunt of developing a lot of housing,” she said. “Yet, there are other areas of San Diego County that have been very reluctant to do their share to provide housing. Our duty to build housing should be shared by every part of the county.”

Salas also supported SANDAG’s Measure A, a half-cent sales tax measure that would have raised funds for transportation and infrastructure projects countywide. The measure had support from developers and construction firms but generated  opposition from anti-tax advocates on the right and many South Bay environmentalists and politicians.

She also successfully passed a tax increase for Chula Vista — a campaign she got housing developers to almost fully finance.

Salas has consistently supported almost every major development, every tax increase supported by developers and SANDAG and every issue that builders support in the community. On top of backing Lilac Hills Ranch and Measure A, she helped approve the massive master-planned communities in Otay Ranch as a planning commissioner in the ‘90s. She also wants to build up Chula Vista’s Bayfront to help spur the city’s economy.

Yet Salas, Chula Vista and the South Bay continue to take a backseat to more powerful politicians and regional priorities. It’s particularly true when it comes to SANDAG, the regional planning and transportation agency. Salas said she wasn’t able to get a leadership position at SANDAG, even though she was the only applicant. While South Bay residents are some of the county’s most avid transit users and financiers, SANDAG decided against expanding Interstate 805 and instead purchased an existing toll road, the SR-125, which users have to pay for. Chula Vista is poised for aggressive growth with the large Millenia project to the east, the Bayfront to the west and the University, while other cities in the county like Encinitas fight state-mandated housing growth.

Now Salas faces frustration from her left flank — environmentalists and liberals who had different expectations for her.

Marcus Bush, a former planning commissioner in National City who was against Measure A, had volunteered for two of Salas’ campaigns.

“It was really hurtful,” Bush said. “We in the environmental community, we had hopes that she would finally hold regional leaders accountable. But has she really been a progressive leader? I think most people would think she hasn’t.”

‘I Was Unacceptable to Them’

Salas said she struggled to earn a leadership role at SANDAG.

“I haven’t had the best experience with SANDAG,” she said. “I have a little bad taste in my mouth about how things operate there from a governance structure.”

Salas said she put in an application for a position called “Second Vice Chair” a couple years back, which would have put her on track to chair the SANDAG board one day. She was the only applicant.

A nominating committee was supposed to meet about the position, and then the general SANDAG board, which is made up of elected leaders from around the county, would vote on it.

Salas said the committee never met. She said she was told board leaders didn’t want to bring forward anything that might get in the way of the board voting on Measure A, which was very controversial.

“So I was a good girl and I said, ‘OK, alright,’” Salas said.

When the vote on Measure A happened months later, Salas said she was then told that it was too far into the year to vote on the second vice chair role.

“They invited me to apply the next year and by that time, I was just fed up with it and I thought, ‘You know, I did my homework. I asked to meet with all of these mayors so they could get to know who I was and, you know, I was unacceptable to them for some reason,’” she said.

The following year, Salas decided to support Imperial Beach Mayor Serge Dedina for the position, but when the day came to consider the position, she said, SANDAG leadership abolished it.

“I just thought that was a little transparent,” she said. “It was a little ‘Keep the South Bay out, keep the Democrats out.’ Whatever.”

Steve Padilla, who became the first Latino and LGBT City Council member in Chula Vista in 1994, the city’s first Latino mayor in 2002 and was recently re-elected to the City Council, said what Salas is experiencing is part of a constant struggle for South Bay leaders.

“Political and economic power in Chula Vista and most of the region was in the hands of the same demographics for a long time,” he said. “Power doesn’t let go of power very easily. I saw people be dismissive of her because she’s a woman and a woman of color. I experienced some of the same things myself.”

San Diego City Councilman David Alvarez, who represents the South Bay portions of the city of San Diego and is running for the County Board of Supervisors in 2020, agreed.

“The North and South divide is sharply represented north and south of 94 freeway,” Alvarez said. “Our communities don’t have the infrastructure, don’t have the parks, don’t have access to the amenities. Access to the bay from the Convention Center south is very limited. That’s emblematic of the lack of attention that regional leaders give South Bay.”

Balancing the Economy and the Environment

A granddaughter of immigrants who married young and grew up on the poorer, western side of Chula Vista, Salas said she’s an advocate for the environment and human rights – one former city employee even remembers the mayor on the front lines picketing to shut down the South Bay Power Plant.

Salas says she stands by her decision to support Measure A, even though it got her some criticism and won her nothing at SANDAG. Her constituents are some of the county’s biggest users of public transit, but many of them also depend on highways to get to work every day.

“I’m really committed to the environment, but I’m also a very pragmatic person and I have to look at the needs of all people,” Salas said. “Sometimes, the things that are the best practice environmentally can harm others financially.”

She supports AB 805, a bill written by Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher that would require an independent audit of SANDAG and allow transit agencies like the Metropolitan Transit System to levy their own measures. That could address some of the regional differences and appease the all-transit coalition that opposed Measure A, Salas said.

In Chula Vista, those who have worked with Salas appreciate – though they don’t always agree with – her pragmatic form of progressivism.

“She won’t be showing up at GOP meetings any time soon,” said Republican Chula Vista City Councilman Mike Diaz. “But she’s a consensus-builder.”

Salas worked hard to sell Measure P, a local tax increase for infrastructure that was approved by Chula Vista voters in November. She started her own fundraising committee for the measure and personally called developers with projects in the city to fund mailers she sent to residents, urging them to support it.

Critics of the measure, including Diaz, took issue with the fact the money raised would go into the city’s general fund and wouldn’t be legally allocated to the infrastructure projects promised.

“During my campaign in the fall, I went to the City Council and opposed it,” Diaz said. “And the mayor at the time, she kind of singled me out and said, ‘Mr. Diaz, well when you get elected, you can hold our feet to the fire.’”

Diaz said he appreciated how Salas handled that situation and in the end, the people of Chula Vista not only got a source of funds to deal with its failing infrastructure, they got Diaz to help ensure the money is spent properly.

“I think the citizens see that consensus-building in Chula Vista and they want that to continue,” he said. “On the Council, we all have a role in that, but at the end of the day, the mayor is the one that leads the meetings and she’s the one that could really steer the discussion down one path or the other and right now, we’ve been able to have everyone give their opinion.”

Michael Meacham worked at the city of Chula Vista for decades alongside Salas as director of Conservation and Environmental Services and director of Economic Development before retiring in 2015.

“She’s a smart politician and she’s going to do what she thinks is a necessity for the community,” Meacham said. “It’s rare I think – and I am a progressive person – to have somebody who has progressive values like Mary, but also has a strong background in economic sustainability. She recognized it’s a lot harder to worry about the environment when you first have to worry about having a roof over your head.”

Salas said she has no intention of running for other regional positions, like county supervisor in 2020. She plans to run for re-election in 2018 and, if she wins, retire at the end of her term, at which point she’d be 74.

“I’m doing the best job in the world for somebody who was born and raised in Chula Vista,” she said. “This is what I like. This is what I understand. I understand the work of a city council and mayor. I understand how cities work, why we exist, why we function and our responsibility to provide services to our community. Why would I want anything else?”

Clarification: An earlier version of this post said Mary Salas is the first Latina mayor in the county. She is one of the first Latina mayors in the county.

 

Culture Report: Chula Vista Mulls Cutting Its Arts Program

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Tuesday night, Chula Vista City Council members will consider a budget that eliminates its cultural arts manager position.

The proposed cuts come after the city just adopted a new cultural arts master plan late last year.

Lynnette Tessitore is the city’s cultural arts manager, and her job accounts for the city’s entire cultural arts budget. Her role is to implement the city’s new plan and build a stronger arts and culture presence in Chula Vista.

In May, Chula Vista City Manager Gary Halbert presented a budget to City Council, but was asked by the three members present to return in June with a budget option that included funding to hire new firefighters.

The Chula Vista firefighters union has long been pushing City Council for more money for staffing, calling it an important public safety issue.

Leticia Cazares, chair of the city’s volunteer Cultural Arts Commission, said she understands that the city needs to hire more firefighters. But she said a federal grant the city applied for would provide funding for firefighters and could be approved as early as August. She said even if the grant doesn’t come through, she hopes City Council will consider making cuts elsewhere and keep its commitment to arts and culture in Chula Vista alive.

“We have this new plan, but could have no budget at all to make things happen,” she said. “I just think there’s a more responsible way to a long-term solution.”

Halbert said he, too, thinks the proposed cuts, which would eliminate 14 positions citywide, are too drastic.

“My recommendation to the Council is not to make the cuts and instead make some minor modifications to the budget to make sure some firefighters are hired mid-year,” he said.

Chula Vista Councilman Steve Padilla said he won’t back the proposed cuts, and he said it’s unlikely his colleagues will either.

“It’s an option, but it’s an absurd one,” he said. “I don’t think you’ll see any Council members embrace it. It really isn’t in line with what the Council wants to take place.”

You’re reading the Culture Report, Voice of San Diego’s weekly collection of the region’s cultural news. Sign up here to get the weekly report delivered to your inbox. 

San Diego City Council Fends Off Big Arts Cuts

Arts advocates are claiming a tentative victory after Monday night’s budget hearing, in which the San Diego City Council restored arts funding to about $14.6 million.

Photo by Kinsee Morlan
Photo by Kinsee Morlan
City Council members Chris Ward, Lorie Zapf and David Alvarez speak at a rally protesting budget cuts to the arts.

That’s down just 3.5 percent from last year’s budget for the city’s Commission for Arts and Culture, which uses the majority of its money to fund over 100 local arts and culture organizations.

Mayor Kevin Faulconer originally proposed cutting the city’s Commission for Arts and Culture funding by 31 percent. Arts advocates and a few City Council members called the cuts draconian.

After the backlash, the mayor’s revised budget in May recommended about a 15 percent reduction, but arts advocates and the same City Council members said the cuts were still too drastic. 

A coalition of arts advocates have been pushing the mayor and City Council to boost arts funding to $15.5 million this year, in part, because the Council itself adopted a Penny for the Arts plan in 2012 and set higher arts funding goals that have yet to be fulfilled.

Arts funding could, however, be cut by the mayor again. Faulconer can veto changes to the budget, and the City Council needs at least six votes to override his modifications.

Some arts advocates I talked to are worried the mayor will be looking for extra money to fund the $5 million special election he’s vowed to make happen, so they aren’t ready to declare a final victory just yet.

A High-Tech Installation at the Car Rental Center, Jimmy Buffett on Broadway and Other Arts and Culture News

• The San Diego International Airport unveiled its new 1,600-foot public art installation on the exterior of the Airport Rental Car Center. An artist team called Ueberall International created the piece, which uses digital screens and a new technology to create dynamic designs and animations.

Photo courtesy of the San Diego International Airport
Photo courtesy of San Diego International Airport
"DAZZLE" by artist team Ueberall International

• “Escape to Margaritaville” is officially heading to Broadway. (U-T)

• The public art project Parkeology has partnered with the binational arts organization Cog*nate Collective to transform Balboa Park’s Plaza de Panama into an interpretive center where anyone who signs up can take a free trolley tour to the U.S.-Mexico border that uses storytelling and other creative ways to explore the border’s history. (CityBeat)

• San Diego State University is known for its furniture design program, which is why I’m not surprised by how utterly awesome these SDSU students’ chairs are. (Design Milk)

• Though many of the catchiest commercial jingles come from major brands, a few local companies have created their own poppy little earworms. Ever catch yourself singing Toyota of Escondido? Yeah, me too. A mysterious local musician who calls himself  Shades McCool has taken those sticky ditties and turned them into a live show. (Reader)

• San Diego state prison inmates were treated to a TEDx event a few weeks ago. Watch for photos and videos of the event here.

• The iconic Balboa Park Carousel is being sold to the Friends of Balboa Park. (U-T)

• Longtime San Diego arts blogger Patricia Frischer went to see the Wonderspaces exhibition I told you about last week and called the traveling show “a memorable experience of sights and sounds.”

• The U-T’s Sandra Dibble spotlights the BorderClick project, which works to “shed light on the border as experienced daily by tens of thousands of cross-border commuters.” (U-T)

• The NTC Foundation, the nonprofit that operates many of the buildings in Arts District Liberty Station, celebrated the 10-year anniversary of its Dance Place center.

• The U-T calls the Spanish Village Art Center the “hidden treasure of Balboa Park.”

• VOSD’s own Maya Srikrishnan will be playing violin in Mainly Mozart’s “San Diego Makes Music” community collaboration concert Sunday at Balboa Park.

• There’s a free dance performance happening in City Heights.

• Look at all the ladies who’ve been nominated for this year’s “New Contemporaries” exhibition organized by the San Diego Visual Arts Network. Many of the artists in the show, which opens in Barrio Logan Saturday, go on to be awarded the “emerging artist” San Diego Art Prize.

• Civic Youth Orchestra turns 60 this month. (U-T)

• A controversial mural in Encinitas is being replaced with a new mural by the same artist, but the artist says it has nothing to do with complaints. (The Coast News Group)

• The San Diego Repertory Theatre’s Jewish Arts Festival is under way, and so is the annual Mainly Mozart Festival.

• Artist Melissa Walter is the new artist in residence at the 1805 Gallery in Little Italy.

• An exhibition that asks artists to explore climate change is opening at the San Diego Central Library this week.

• The annual San Diego Festival of the Arts is this weekend.

Food, Beer and Booze News

• San Diego Magazine says these are the best restaurants of the year. Yelp, though, has a totally different list of the region’s best eateries.

• Assemblyman Todd Gloria gave Mariposa Homemade Ice Cream some props.

Eater has the scoop on a North Park taco swap.

• Y’all can start swinging by my neck of the woods for good pastries again.

Kinsee Morlan is engagement editor at Voice of San Diego. Email her at kinsee@vosd.org. Want to recommend this culture newsletter to someone? Share this sign-up link.

For Homeless Families in the South Bay, Schools Provide Far More Than Education

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This is Part Two in a series on the hidden homeless families of San Diego’s South Bay. Read Part One here.

Mirinda Quillopo keeps baby wipes in her office, just in case students don’t have a place to shower. Veronica Medina stocks her shelves with backpacks and shoes. Molly Ravenscroft has a bag of clothes in her car at any given time.

They all work for public school districts in the South Bay of San Diego County. Their jobs are to ensure that even the most impoverished students have a chance at an education by helping them meet their most basic needs.

These women play a part in what has become a common role for public schools in poorer neighborhoods. Schools in the South Bay are now providing students with far more than an education – they’ve become a hub for students and their families to find everything from a place to shower to help with school enrollment to assistance applying for public benefits.

Schools use different criteria to define homelessness than organizations that do official counts of homeless populations. For a child to be homeless in the eyes of the Department of Education, they need to “lack a fixed, regular and adequate nighttime residence.”

That means if a child is couch-surfing, or if they and their family are living in a motel, trailer park, campground, substandard or overcrowded living situation or in an emergency or homeless shelter – schools consider them homeless.

“If a family comes in and says, ‘We’re living with grandma for a month and then with my brother for a month – that’s homeless,” said Pamela Reichert-Montiel, director of student support and accountability at South Bay Union School District. “You don’t have to be living in a car.”

Other government agencies, like the Department of Housing and Urban Development, define homelessness much more narrowly: A person counts as homeless if he or she is living in a place not meant for human habitation, or in an emergency shelter or in transitional housing.

The disconnect between how schools and other government agencies define homelessness means many families considered homeless by a school district don’t qualify to access government services for homeless families.

Ravenscroft, a family services program coordinator at Sweetwater High School District, asks families questions like, “Do you have a key to the place you’re staying? How many people are staying in the home? Do you stay in the same place every night?” to gather how stable a family’s living situation is.

Sweetwater High School District has about 650 students in unstable living situations. Roughly 20 percent – or 1,473 – of students in South Bay Union are classified as homeless. The majority are living in arrangements where multiple families pack into a dwelling.

San Ysidro School District has the largest homeless student population in the county – roughly a third of its students are considered homeless. That’s about 1,500 students. At one elementary school in the district, more than 40 percent of students live in an unstable housing situation.

Public schools nationwide reported 1.2 million homeless children and youth in the 2014-2015 school year. That is a 34 percent increase since the recession ended in the summer of 2009. Homelessness among unaccompanied homeless youth increased by 21 percent over the past three years – a trend mirrored in San Diego, where the last homeless census in January – despite its shortcoming in tracking these populations – found a spike in homeless youth of 39 percent.

Schools are the primary public entity tracking these families. Because education is compulsory, schools come in contact with children and families more than any nonprofit or government entity. Now, they’re going beyond educating students and caring for entire families when a child loses stable housing.

“They’re the only universal institution,” said Barbara Duffield, head of School House Connections, a Washington D.C.-based organization that advocates for laws and policies to support homeless students and their families. “They’re the only place where kids experiencing homelessness have the right to be. They don’t have a right to shelter, they don’t have a right to housing, but they have a right to the classroom.”

Duffield said safety concerns, fear of children being taken away by Child Protective Services (though CPS won’t take children away if a parent is poor or homeless as long as they are caring for the child) and immigration concerns can all be reasons why families seek out unconventional and sometimes unsafe situations – like living in a junkyard – to avoid being on the street.

“They want to stay under the radar from authorities,” Duffield said. “The very nature of family and youth homelessness is different and isn’t going to be as visible.”

♦♦♦

For Natalia Mele, a student who was living without her parents in high school, Ravenscroft would make a seemingly small gesture. When Ravenscroft and Mele would talk, Ravenscroft would always ask how Mele was doing. At the time, she was the only adult in Mele’s life who ever did that.

Mele’s mother left her when she was in seventh grade, and Mele had been living with a friend, Stephanie Juarez. Juarez’s family struggled to find stable housing – the girls can list at least 10 different addresses where they lived at some point in high school.

Mele met Ravenscroft her senior year of high school. Mele had been absent a lot, and when school administrators started asking questions, they realized she was in an unstable living situation.

Photos by Gabriel Ellison Scowcroft
Photos by Gabriel Ellison Scow-croft
Natalia Mele, left, moved in with Stephanie Juarez, right, in middle school after her mother, who suffers from a mental illness, moved to Tijuana and left her without a home.

AUDIO: Listen to Juarez describe what life was like when Mele was living with her family.

 

Ravenscroft remembers the time she took Mele to an event at Southwestern College, where Mele, 20, now studies.

That day, Mele toured the campus and went to informational sessions.

During one event, Ravenscroft said she was sitting next to Mele when “she turned to me and said, ‘Thank you for bringing me,’ and I just felt this relief, like, ‘OK, she’s going to be fine.’”

Ravenscroft’s days in her role are always different, but they often entail meeting with homeless students to ensure their needs are met. She’s constantly on the phone and e-mailing with parents, school staff and local service providers.

One middle school student who met with Ravenscroft asked her to check in on the student’s mother because she was worried about the stress her mom felt, trying to find a job and a home.

Another mom reached out to Ravenscroft concerned by what should have been good news – she had gotten a job. But she was worried she’d lose it because she didn’t have a place to shower.

♦♦♦

The money schools have available to help homeless families is limited.

California schools with larger populations of low-income and disadvantaged students can use Title I or McKinney-Vento federal funds, intended for disadvantaged populations, or state “Supplemental and Concentration” funds from the Local Control Funding Formula, but most of those pots of money aren’t intended solely for homeless students and their families and also go toward other underserved populations, like English-learners.

President Donald Trump’s budget proposal has school administrators at South Bay schools concerned because it cuts many funds that allow them to provide meals to their students. Many homeless students eat nearly all of their meals at school.

School districts with high numbers of homeless and impoverished families have homeless liaisons, student services, counselors, volunteer coordinators and others who help provide everything from student meals to shoes and clothes to toothpaste and showers. Some schools offer English classes. Most of the schools work with service providers to help connect them with other resources, like help seeking jobs or housing and have created hubs in each district where families can go to access these resources.

AUDIO: Sonia Tanner is a student program facilitator at Sweetwater Union High School District who works with homeless students. Listen to her describe her job and what she sees with the families she works with.

 

Some family resource centers, like those in South Bay Union School District, are funded entirely through Title I funds from the Department of Education, limiting assistance to families who have students enrolled at the school.

Other school districts have taken things a step further. Sweetwater School District opens its family resource centers to the entire community – it provides the space and the two centers are primarily staffed by nonprofit employees. The district also strategically placed centers where there were vacuums in community access to social services.

A grant funded through the Department of Education allowed Castle Park Middle School to become a hub of social services where anyone in the neighborhood – whether they have children in the district or not – can come for classes, clothes, food and to apply for benefits, like CalWorks or Medicaid. The grant is managed by South Bay Community Services, a nonprofit in South County that works with homeless individuals and low-income families.

“The reality is education affects everything. So if we’re ever going to make long-lasting change, the focus should be through education,” said Mauricio Torre, who works on the grant project for South Bay Community Services. “If a child has food insecurities or they don’t have housing or the parents are working two jobs and they don’t have the ability to spend quality time with their kids doing homework, they’re not going to come to school every day ready to learn.”

There have been few studies on the link between education and homelessness, but one 1999 study by the National Survey of Homeless Assistance Providers and Clients found that 21 percent of homeless adults surveyed nationally said their first period of homelessness predated their 18th birthday. In San Diego’s 2017 annual homeless census, one in every 10 people on the street experienced their first instance of homeless before they turned 18.

Medina, the homeless student liaison in the San Ysidro Elementary School District, herself experienced homelessness growing up, shuffling between family members’ homes and living in motels with her mother. After failing ninth grade, in large part because of the instability and many school absences, Medina had to finish high school through a learning center – an alternative education route – provided through the San Ysidro Elementary School District.

“You know, I share my story with my students,” Medina said. “I’m not ashamed of how I was raised, and I was blessed not to fall into the same footsteps as my parents. Sometimes a lot of our students need that support because they end up following the same cycle, so you need to catch them early and explain to them that they need to go to school.”

In many ways, schools are uniquely positioned to see and help homeless families and their children, but there are some major challenges. For one, schools can’t provide housing.

“Schools can’t do everything nor should they be expected to do everything,” said Duffield.

In other parts of California, there have been more strategic efforts to identify homeless families within school districts and house them.

In San Francisco, the nonprofit Hamilton Housing Solutions has a partnership with San Francisco Unified School District to identify and help families who are homeless or facing eviction. When a counselor, social worker, nurse or other school employee learn a family is about to become homeless or is newly homeless, Hamilton has a “rapid response team” that goes to the school to meet with the family, assess their needs and enroll them in one of its rapid re-housing programs.

For advocates like Duffield, this is a step in the right direction, but the first thing that had to happen for such a partnership to occur? The city, in addition to school districts, had to acknowledge that all these families were homeless.


Don’t Let Chula Vista Become the Wild West of Marijuana

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Chula Vista has a big choice to make when it comes to marijuana: Should it oppose an initiative from an outside group that would legalize marijuana sales and distribution, or should it draft its own version?

CommentaryI oppose the sale and use of marijuana. That said, there are two distinct paths the city can take; the right path or the best path.

The right path would for the city of Chula Vista to continue to prohibit the sale of marijuana. Marijuana brings a lot of negative consequences, from increased homelessness, increased drug-related traffic deaths, children overdosing and other problems.

The problem with the right path, though, is that it may not be winnable at the voter booth. In other words, can we oppose and defeat the initiatives submitted by the marijuana industry? The two initiatives submitted to the city of Chula Vista are loosely worded and will not provide the protective restrictions as seen in other city ordinances. As written, these initiatives will make Chula Vista the wild west of marijuana.

The best path may be to create our own initiative that legalizes the production, cultivation and sales of marijuana in a more responsible way.

The reality is that, like Proposition 64, which legalized the recreational use of marijuana across the state, the local marijuana initiatives may have a good chance of being passed. I want to make sure that doesn’t happen.

A city initiative would most likely prohibit dispensaries from operating too close to schools, day care centers, churches, playgrounds and other similar buildings – restrictions the current initiatives don’t have. A city initiative would also include restrictions on who could operate a marijuana-related business. This might include prohibiting felons or those who have operated an illegal dispensary in Chula Vista. The city’s initiative would also tax the sale of marijuana in Chula Vista, ensuring that we create a funding stream to address all the problems that are created by this drug, including money for administration, criminal prosecution, police, emergency services, homeless services, inspections, education and treatment.

But the best path has its own disadvantages, too. For one, it legalizes a substance that the federal government still classifies as a class one drug. So what happens if the federal government starts to really crack down on the sale of marijuana? No one has a clear answer.

The second problem it creates is a black market for cheaper products. All of the restrictions, regulations and taxation on legal marijuana will make it much more expensive, thus creating a lucrative black market for illegal marijuana. Chula Vista is already experiencing overt illegal marijuana sales. My district has at least nine illegal dispensaries operating. Why would we think that would go away if we allow dispensaries to operate legally in our city?

No matter what path the Chula Vista City Council takes, we must provide our city attorney with the resources to prosecute owners of illegal marijuana dispensaries. Our city attorney currently enforces our prohibition on marijuana dispensaries by going after tenants and building owners in civil court. This has proven to be a very slow and ineffective way of closing down illegal dispensaries. We can change that by providing our city attorney with additional staff who have prosecution experience.

Lastly, many supporters of marijuana legalization say it can bring millions in new taxes to the city. The fact is that most of the money generated would be spent on education, regulation, enforcement, treatment, reducing homelessness and administration.

I and other city officials visited Aurora, Colo., recently to see how it is dealing with the industry. The police officers there are saying they are understaffed and have not been given any additional resources to deal with the sharp rise in crime.

So while it might not be the right decision, the best decision is for city leaders to carefully write our own initiative that legalizes the production, cultivation and sales of marijuana in a much more responsible way than the marijuana industry’s initiative. The difference is that our initiative would be focused on protecting the community.

Mike Diaz represents District 4 on the Chula Vista City Council. Diaz’ commentary has been edited for style and clarity. See anything in there we should fact check? Tell us what to check out here.

Some Homebuyers Back Out of Chula Vista Development Following Methane Discovery

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The Village of Escaya sits at the base of the Otay Landfill, which may be responsible for some potentially dangerous gases found in the soil. / Photo by Ry Rivard

For years, the city of Chula Vista and a string of developers have been working to put subdivisions in the eastern part of the city. Now, as homebuyers hope to move into the newest development by Christmas, they’ve run into an unexpected hitch: Their homes may not have running water.

The Otay Water District is refusing to issue water meters to the 950-home Village of Escaya after developers discovered methane and other potentially dangerous gases in the soil.

The methane issue at Escaya was first reported by inewsource.

The developer and its consultants are investigating a variety of possible sources for the gases, including the nearby Otay Landfill. One of the landfill’s garbage piles, covered and now looking very much like a natural hill, abuts and looms over the new subdivision.

Methane can be explosive in certain concentrations and cause suffocation in others, but the project’s developer, Carlsbad-based HomeFed, says it is taking action to mitigate any risks.

HomeFed gave would-be homeowners notice about the methane issues and told them they could use that new information to change their mind about buying an Escaya home. A few buyers walked away from Escaya because of the information, the company said.

“We understand it’s a difficult issue for people who haven’t dealt with it,” said Kent Aden, HomeFed’s vice president.

The Otay Water District’s main concern isn’t explosions, though: It’s worried methane and other gases – known as volatile organic compounds, or VOCs – could corrode its water lines.

“The issue is the lifespan of the system and the reaction of any of our materials to the methane gas,” said the water district’s general manager, Mark Watton.

The water lines, which are made of plastic, are already in the ground. But Watton has exercised one of the most powerful options California water districts have when it comes to land use decisions: refusing to issue water meters.

Without water, of course, the homes are uninhabitable.

HomeFed was surprised by the water district’s concern, which popped up a few weeks ago. HomeFed acknowledges it didn’t tell the water district quickly about the methane problem, but says that is because it didn’t think there was a problem for the water district.

“There’s a consensus of every consultant we’ve talked to that methane is not an issue for their water system,” said Aden.

HomeFed is working with Otay and hopes to get things resolved this week. Otay now somewhat unexpectedly holds the fate of HomeFed’s massive investment in its hands. Many homes are still under construction, but Escaya is only part of a series of developments HomeFed plans for area that could eventually include 13,000 homes.

The company said because it’ll be working in Chula Vista for years to come and has so much on the line, it is taking every step possible to make sure its homes are safe.

HomeFed’s outside consultants told the water district last week that methane and the other chemicals are unlikely to affect water lines.

“The water distribution systems can be installed and operated indefinitely, as proposed, with confidence that those systems will not be impacted by the very low levels of [volatile organic compound] vapors that have been detected at the site,” the consultant, GeoKinetics, said in a report.

Otay Water District hired its own consultant last month to review HomeFed’s reports.

HomeFed is hoping to resolve the issue quickly so several dozen buyers can move in by Christmas.

The methane issue was discovered earlier this year after builders came across water with an oily sheen. That wasn’t methane, it was petroleum, but it set off a round of testing that eventually turned up methane and the other gases.

Escaya – a made-up word meant to evoke “escape” and “sky” – is built at the foot of the Otay Landfill and adjacent to several salvage yards. It’s possible the oily sheen came from petroleum leaking from the salvage yards and that the methane came from the landfill.

GeoKinetics said the landfill was the likely source of the methane and other compounds, though the report is not conclusive.

The landfill’s owner, Republic Services, said it has multiple systems in place to collect and control landfill gas and monitor groundwater around the landfill. It noted that other sources – like the salvage yards –could be a source. Republic, however, did not rule itself out as a source of some of the gases.

It’s also possible that the methane is naturally occurring.

In 2001, after methane was found at several new developments across San Diego, the County Board of Supervisors mandated testing for the gas at any construction site where a lot of earth was moved. This kind of earth-moving is known as “grading.”

The presence of methane in soil is not itself a risk, but because methane is lighter than air, it can move upward and then concentrate to levels that become dangerous. Methane can explode at concentrations of 50,000 parts per million.

Initial tests at the Escaya site found concentrations at or above that, but later tests that are considered more reliable found the highest level of gas to be below the explosive level, at 38,000 parts per million. That highest concentration was on a lot that is eventually supposed to house a school. At other lots, the gas was found at lower levels and in some cases not detected at all.

HomeFed said it’s taking efforts to lower risk even further by putting vents in homes so that gases can’t build up in them.

In 2005, the county reversed itself on mandatory methane testing after it concluded that there was “no significant risk of methane gas intrusion into an enclosed structure or possible ignition of that gas from projects located on mass graded sites.”

So, the Board of Supervisors repealed the ordinance requiring testing.

Correction: An earlier version of this post said the Otay Water District is considering hiring a consultant to review HomeFed’s reports. It hired one last month.

North County Report: Digging into the Escondido Council’s Salary Increase

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Sam Abed, right, takes part in a candidate forum held by the held the Escondido Chamber of Citizens and League of Women Voters alongside Kristin Gaspar and Dave Roberts. / Photo by Jamie Scott Lytle

When the Escondido City Council voted to increase its own salaries by 10 percent over the next two years, Mayor Sam Abed made a couple of comparisons to justify the decision.

“The Chula Vista mayor makes $150,000. We’re making $60,000 here,” Abed said. “We should be confident enough to say we’re taking a reasonable compensation. $27,000 for the council is not big money – minimum wage at $15 (per hour) is $30,000 a year.”

Abed’s comparison, however, left out several key points.

First, as council members were quick to point out, only the mayor has a full-time elected position in Escondido. Like most cities in North County, council members are only considered part-timers and receive about $31,700 per year, so the $60,000 figure would only apply to Abed.

Even then, according to the city’s website, Abed actually earns about $73,000 per year – though by email he called that figure “misleading” because it includes a car allowance. Additionally, the minimum wage will be $12 per hour when the council’s salary bump takes effect, not the $15 per hour in Abed’s analogy.

Abed also said at the City Council meeting that the mayor’s salary should be compared against that of his counterpart in Chula Vista. Mayor Mary Salas received $139,415 in compensation during 2016, the latest year for which such information was available on the State Controller’s website. That puts Salas among the best paid mayors in California.

When asked why he used Chula Vista – where the population is 75 percent larger than Escondido’s – as the comparison, Abed said both are large, full-service cities. Escondido pays its mayor less per person when one considers the per capita cost of the salary, he said.

Escondido has a population of 151,613, while Chula Vista has 267,172 people, according to the Census Bureau. The Mayor of Chula Vista’s salary comes to $0.52 per person. In Escondido it’s $0.42 per person, using the $64,000 figure Abed said was his true salary, or $0.48 per person using the figure reported on the city’s website.

Escondido is the only full-service city in North County with a full-time mayor. Oceanside, with a significantly larger population than Escondido pays its part-time mayor $33,000, while Carlsbad pays its mayor $31,226.

Oceanside Moves Forward on Marijuana Rules

After months of work by an ad-hoc committee made up of elected officials and citizens, the Oceanside City Council is moving ahead with allowing commercial medical marijuana operations.

The Union-Tribune reports that the 3-1 vote came after Councilman Jack Feller, long an opponent of marijuana, voted to advance the committee’s recommendations toward becoming law, as long as the law was restricted to medical use.

Councilwoman Esther Sanchez cast the lone vote against the committee’s recommendations. Sanchez has also long been an opponent of marijuana, but said she helped shape a ballot initiative to allow commercial marijuana operations in Oceanside.

“I feel that I have been excluded from the dialogue now for – what, six months?” she said.

The U-T also quoted Sanchez as saying she wished the committee’s work had focused on the question of whether to legalize marijuana at all in Oceanside.

New Rules For Housing Elements “Sobering” for Encinitas

An Encinitas delegation that is working on a new affordable housing plan says its recent trip to Sacramento was “sobering.”

The Coast News’ Aaron Burgin writes that city leaders have realized their plan not only needs to be created and adopted – it needs to result in actual new housing.

The trip “drove home the difficulty of the work we have in front of us,” Deputy Mayor Tony Kranz said, according to the newspaper. “Not only the fact that we are way behind, but now there is a greater emphasis on actual construction of these homes.”

Also in the News

Camp Pendleton officials knew that erosion was exposing a gas line, with potentially deadly effects, months before an armored vehicle struck it in September and burned 15 Marines. (Union-Tribune)

The cause of the Lilac Fire may never be known. (Union-Tribune)

Neighbors of a nine-unit housing development in Leucadia have lost a five-year battle. (Union-Tribune)

Escondido is raising its development fees dramatically – though it will now be in line with what neighboring cities charge. (Union-Tribune)

San Marcos officials will consider a six-story hotel off Nordahl Road and State Route 78 next year. (Union-Tribune)

Carlsbad bans the use of toxic pesticides on city-owned properties. (Union-Tribune)

Chula Vista Redefines Affordable Housing, and Cuts Deal to Build Less of It

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An intersection in Chula Vista near the Olympic Training Center / Photo by Jamie Scott Lytle

In March 2016, Chula Vista officials struck a deal with one of the biggest developers around. The developers would build new dorm rooms for Olympic athletes and the city would call the dorms affordable housing.

Because of the deal, there will be fewer affordable apartments built for Chula Vista residents.

City officials thought they were getting a good deal. Chula Vista was taking over the Olympic Training Center from the U.S. Olympic Committee. To ensure the center’s future as a “valuable asset and economic driver,” the city wanted to provide housing for Olympians and other elite athletes. The deal allowed the city to get someone else to build the dorms for free.

For its part, Newport Beach-based Baldwin & Sons also thought it was getting a good deal. Like any developer, it must provide affordable housing whenever it does a big housing project. Baldwin & Sons is building several thousand new homes at Otay Ranch in Chula Vista and it’s on the hook to come up with several hundred new affordable units as part of the project.

Instead, the deal allowed the developers to build a 100-bed dorm for the athletes that would be given to the city. To prepare for this, the city in late 2015, had changed its definition of “affordable housing” to include rooms for “student/amateur athletes.”

Most Olympic athletes that aren’t named Michael Phelps aren’t making a whole lot of money from their sports. The city suspected that most athletes would qualify for affordable housing anyway, but wanted them to stay at the center and focus on their training rather than commuting from elsewhere in the region.

Typically, when Baldwin & Sons has to provide income-restricted affordable housing, it does so on its own property next to other homes it’s building to sell for full price. Typically, it also creates a mix of one, two and three bedroom apartments — enough space for hundreds of people to live in affordable units, including whole families. The city only wanted 100 beds for athletes, but the city said it would count each of those beds the same way it counts 100 apartments.

This meant Baldwin & Sons might be able to save some money. Some of the company’s other affordable units have cost about $55,000 apiece, said Baldwin & Sons senior vice president Stephen Haase. That means 100 apartments would cost about $5.5 million.

When the company signed its deal with Chula Vista, it said it could build the dorms for $3.2 million — a potential savings of about $2 million. It would also be building the dorms on city-owned land, rather on the developer’s own land, meaning it had more land to develop into market-rate homes.

There were some trade-offs for Baldwin & Sons, though. Sometimes it works with another developer that specializes in affordable housing who can help share the costs. In this case, Baldwin & Sons is paying all the costs.

Or, Baldwin & Sons sometimes hangs on to a piece of the affordable housing property until the end of what’s typically a 55 year price restriction. That allows the company to sell off the property for whatever the market can bear. In this case, the company is turning the athlete building over to the city. “There’s no economic benefit downstream for this project for us,” Haase said.

Chula Vista’s director of development services, Kelly Broughton, said the deal is a way to help prop up the Elite Athlete Training Facility, which is the new name for the Olympic Training Center.

“The city looked at this agreement as way to accomplish multiple goals,” he said in an email. “In doing due diligence for consideration of taking over the Elite Athlete Training Facility, the construction of additional beds to add additional athlete training capacity was fundamental to making the facility work financially.”

Broughton said Chula Vista has done a good job providing affordable housing. The city has roughly 7 percent of the total households in the San Diego region, but over 8 percent of the housing stock reserved for low-income people.

Besides that, he said, most of the athletes would qualify for low-income housing anyway. The Olympic Training Committee and staff found that most amateur athletes, “because of their training requirements and limited employment, fall into a low or moderate income category.”

In the case of this project, Chula Vista can define “affordable housing” however it wants and the developer only has to comply with that definition. But the city also has obligations to meet statewide affordable housing targets — and the state says this deal doesn’t cut it.

The new athlete dorms will not count as “affordable housing” in the eyes of the state, said Greg Nickless, a policy analyst at the California Department of Housing and Community Development.

Haase, the developer, said he hopes that the state will change its mind.

What does and doesn’t count as affordable housing has changed over time. For instance, granny flats — small housing units that are often converted garages or freestanding structures in homeowners’ backyards — didn’t use to count as affordable housing, but now the state is trying to make it easier to build them to help solve the affordable housing crisis.

But dorms aren’t supposed to count, and issues of who benefits from city-mandated affordable housing aren’t new. In National City, residents were upset when they realized that 201 new homes they had built for low-income people wouldn’t necessary be reserved for residents of the city. In Chula Vista, the athlete dorms are designed to be used by people coming to Chula Vista from elsewhere.

That shouldn’t be an issue, though, said Haase. Once they’re in Chula Vista, they’re in Chula Vista.

“The folks that are training at the center are residents of Chula Vista because they are using a facility in Chula Vista,” he said.

In the end, Baldwin & Sons doesn’t seem to be getting the deal it hoped, either.

The dorms were supposed to be open by July 1, 2017, and cost $3.2 million. Now, they won’t open until late spring or early summer 2018. In conjunction with delays, construction costs have tripled, according to the city, which is monitoring the project. The project is now expected to cost $10 million.

“If we knew that going in, we might have said, ‘Thank you very much, we’re going to build our own stuff on site,’” Haase said.

Haase blamed a variety of factors: The developer’s deal with the city required it to pay prevailing wage, which meant dealing with unions, something that Baldwin & Sons usually doesn’t have to do. The company also estimated its construction costs using the wrong building codes. And it’s dealing with a lot that has presented construction challenges.

In the end, however, the city is making the big bet — that the dorms will help revitalize the training center, which might have closed without the city’s intervention.

“The city felt there was a long-term opportunity down the road for their community rather than a vacant facility,” Haase said.

Chula Vista Offered Free Land and Tax Relief to Amazon Based on Nothing

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Chula Vista Amazon proposal

In its search for a university willing to take this land on the city’s east side, Chula Vista has offered to partner with online retail giant Amazon. / Photo by Jamie Scott Lytle

On Oct. 17, the city of Chula Vista joined a nationwide bidding war for the new Amazon company headquarters by offering $410 million worth of free land, property tax abatements and other sweeteners. Council members agreed, as a staff report put it, to return at an unspecified time with “appropriate studies and findings that are necessary to solidify our commitments.”

City officials were offering all of this without any certainty of what Amazon might actually bring in exchange. But the offer was not meant for Amazon, necessarily. The 50-page glossy that was produced for company executives is part of a decades-long effort to become more than a bedroom community, where residents only return to sleep, and promote Chula Vista instead as a place for tech companies to plant roots.

The city’s Economic Development Director Eric Crockett said officials hadn’t done the research upfront to know whether the giveaways would pay for themselves, because they decided not to spend money on consultants until knowing for sure that Amazon would select the South Bay as its new home.

“Getting them is a big win, but it’s about more than Amazon,” he said.

The company has delayed the first round of eliminations from the 238 proposals it received until early 2018, meaning officials will know any day if their pitch was good enough to keep going. Chula Vista was one of four local locations submitted by the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation, and the only city willing to give up something tangible in exchange.

Whether or not the region advances to the next round, Chula Vista leaders have made clear that their community — which has struggled to spark largescale job growth — should consider the free publicity a victory, as evidenced by at least one recent report.

“This book, regardless of what happens, should be on the desk of every commercial real estate brokerage company in San Diego County,” former City Councilman John Moot urged officials, referring to the Amazon promotional materials, at the City Council hearing approving the bid.

Officials had been working on those materials five months before Amazon announced its new headquarters sweepstakes, and quickly pivoted to accommodate the company, Crockett said.

In addition to its request for economic development incentives, Amazon provided the world with a list of its geographical, cultural and infrastructure preferences in early September. Company executives, for instance, want to be in a metro area with more than one million people, close to a highway and a few minutes from an international airport.

Municipalities across the country have lined up with unprecedented giveaways. Chicago has offered to give back between 50 and 100 percent of the income taxes incurred by Amazon employees to the company. Fresno offered to give Amazon joint control over 85 percent of the tax revenue generated on public projects. New Jersey would forgo $5 billion worth of tax incentives while Newark, the most populous city in the state, threw in an additional $2 billion.

Amazon is promising to hire 50,000 full-time employees with an average annual compensation package worth $100,000 over a 10-to-15-year period. It expects to begin work in 2019 and ultimately take up 8 million square feet.

All of which Chula Vista can provide through its designated innovation district and Millennia master plan, which is being developed in partnership with private interests.

At the October meeting during which the City Council approved its Amazon proposal, Solana Beach developer Lee Chestnut said he’d been trying to entice big tech companies for three years to Chula Vista’s east side. He name-dropped Google and was unusually candid at the podium, conceding, “As incredible as this is, and as optimistic as we all are, we probably won’t win.”

Gasps could be heard inside the chambers. Mayor Mary Salas appeared shaken, but she waited until Chestnut was done speaking to respond.

“You said we can’t win, but I think we’ve already won,” she told him.

With hundreds of acres of readily-developable land and officials willing to make the process as easy and cheap as possible, Chula Vista is poised for massive growth. In early 2017, officials launched a PR campaign to improve the city’s image as a safe and enjoyable place to visit, and the early results suggest the advertisements placed around San Diego County are working.

Attempts to attract a four-year university — including state legislation aimed at studying the demand for higher learning in Chula Vista — have been in the works since the ’80s.

The potential growth is not limited to the city’s eastern side. The Bayfront is one of the largest waterfront properties left on the West Coast and plans — after decades of efforts to make environmentalists, developers and bureaucrats happy — are in place for a 535-acre revitalization.

Even then, the projects have been slow to get off the ground.

“A lot of people, including elected officials, thought everything was going to change rapidly, but it didn’t happen,” said former Economic Development Director Michael Meacham, who also oversaw the conservation and environmental studies, and retired in 2015.

Meacham’s career with Chula Vista spanned 21 years, during which time he witnessed numerous setbacks, including legal battles and a severe recession. So, he understands why the current leadership would be anxious to throw incentives at companies.

Despite being the second largest city in the county by population, Chula Vista has ranked near the bottom of sales tax collection on a per capita basis, Meacham said. Most of the workforce commutes, buying food, gas and other goods outside the city limits.

Specifically, the city offered Amazon 30 years of property tax relief worth as much as $300 million, as well as the land encompassing its innovation district, valued at $100 million, at no cost. Officials promised to process discretionary design reviews for later phases of the development within 90 days and to give Amazon a say in targeting and selecting a university for the area.

The city also offered a $10 million transportation development impact fee credit, thanks to a $20 million grant that the federal government previously awarded to Chula Vista for bridge projects. It essentially waives the money that a developer would normally be required to provide for those projects, opting instead to use other federal dollars.

Criticism of economic development incentives has become widespread and mainstream in recent years.

Art Rolnick, a University of Minnesota-based economist who’s been tracking incentives for decades, described Amazon’s public bidding war as a form of economic blackmail that distorted local markets by forcing municipalities to pick and choose one company at the expense of other taxpayers.

“It’s corporate welfare,” he said, complaining that the benchmarks to hold companies accountable for the job promises they’ve made are often weak.

In an interview, Salas defended the incentives by noting that the money wouldn’t come out of the general fund and that no capital would be advanced. “We’re not giving away the store,” she said. Rather, the incentives would be based on the value Amazon is offering to bring to the region, although that value remains unclear.

Salas said she knows, from her experience working in the California Department of Trade and Commerce, that often the jobs and investments promised by companies don’t materialize. But she also highlighted new hotels in the works, as well as existing drone- and automatic car-testing facilities, in Chula Vista.

“We’re a new city and a green city that’s been able to put in the infrastructure to support high-tech industry,” she said. “We’re really well positioned.”

So what happens if Amazon chooses Chula Vista and city-hired consultants figure out the returns aren’t worth the giveaways? Salas said she hadn’t thought that far ahead.

“You can’t count on a single big company to save the day because most of the job growth comes from small businesses,” she said. “We’re not losing sight that that’s where we also need to focus our energies.”

Top Stories: Dec. 29-Jan. 5

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An Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer directs men who are being deported to Mexico at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2015. / Photo by David Maung

These were the most popular Voice of San Diego stories for the week of Dec. 29-Jan. 5.

1. How California’s Plan to Protect Undocumented Immigrants Will Play Out in San Diego

California’s new law restricting how and when local law enforcement agencies can work with federal immigration officials is now in effect. Here’s how it’ll work in San Diego. (Maya Srikrishnan)

2. San Diego’s Economy is Fine Without the Chargers – Some Businesses Aren’t So Lucky

A year after the Chargers decamped for Los Angeles, San Diego’s economy is doing just fine. But without the economic activity from the team’s former fans, some local businesses are struggling. (Jonah Valdez)

3. Deal Between City and SDSU to Keep Playing Football at SDCCU Stadium Still Elusive

The city of San Diego and SDSU are still trying to hammer out a deal so the university can keep playing football at SDCCU Stadium after 2018, but it’s only getting more complicated. (Scott Lewis)

4. The Year San Diego Unified Established Itself as the Agency Most Hostile to Transparency

Over the last year, through outright denials or staggeringly slow responses to public records requests, refusals to discuss important decisions and misleading public statements, the district established itself as the public agency most hostile to transparency in San Diego. (Mario Koran)

5. Chula Vista Offered Free Land and Tax Relief to Amazon Based on Nothing

Leaders in the South Bay community would be happy to host Amazon’s new headquarters. But their real goal? To be taken seriously by tech companies. (Jesse Marx)

6. Chula Vista Redefines Affordable Housing, and Cuts Deal to Build Less of It

Chula Vista struck a deal to have a developer build new dorms for the Olympic Training Center instead of providing affordable housing in a nearby project. But now, a state agency has determined the dorms don’t count towards the city’s low-income housing obligations. (Ry Rivard)

7. What to Watch on the Homelessness Front in 2018

San Diego leaders rushed to implement a flurry of short-term solutions to a growing homelessness problem in 2017. Here’s what to watch in 2018. (Lisa Halverstadt)

8. City Council Republicans Call for Council Leadership Selection Overhaul

Fresh off a selection process that left him without a key chairmanship, City Councilman Scott Sherman and fellow Republicans are pushing for a change in how the City Council selects its leader. (Lisa Halverstadt)

9. So Say Them All: A Look Back at 2017’s Wackiest Quotes

A look back at scary Slurpees, nutty 911 callers, a foul-mouthed congressman, terrible tacos and much more. (Randy Dotinga)

10. Opinion: Want to Stop that Foul Odor? Give the Homeless More Bathrooms.

As a hotel manager, I learned that keeping the homeless out of the lobby bathrooms was the wrong approach. It’s time that businesses and philanthropic organizations step up and consider longer-term solutions to the city’s growing problem. (Tom Cartwright)

Morning Report: Neighbors Called Police on Human Smuggling House 53 Times

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Camellia Court in Chula Vista / Photo by Adriana Heldiz

Last November, police were in the process of stopping a car for a taillight infraction when the driver took off. He eventually led both San Diego County sheriff’s deputies and Border Patrol agents to a home in Chula Vista, where he barricaded himself inside for hours.

After the standoff, authorities alleged that the house was being used as a human smuggling operation — and that they’d stumbled upon it accidentally.

But as Voice’s Adriana Heldiz reports, Chula Vista repeatedly missed their chance over five years. Neighbors called police more than 50 times with complaints ranging from minor nuisance violations to assault and domestic violence.

Peters Meets with Trump While Sherman Pushes Reform

On this week’s podcast, Scott Lewis and Andy Keatts talked to Rep. Scott Peters about immigration and a private meeting that he and 12 other congressional Democrats held with President Donald Trump.

“I think the whole notion of a wall is boring and a waste of money,” Peters said. “I just think it doesn’t really matter what you dress it up like; I think it sends the wrong message.”

Also on the show: Peters acknowledged that he’s considering a mayoral run in 2020.

Joining the podcast by phone, San Diego City Councilman Scott Sherman again made the case for reforming the way Council presidents are appointed. In an op-ed Friday, he laid out his argument for a seniority-based system.

“The reform would encourage a level of cooperation on the Council and curb the heavy influence from outside special interests that are found on both sides of the political spectrum,” he wrote.

After being re-appointed late last year, Council President Myrtle Cole, a Democrat backed by labor leaders, stripped Sherman of his position atop a committee proposing housing affordability reforms. He is literally counting the days until he’s done with his term.

Guns for Gift Cards for Guns

Disturbed by recent news reports, Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher is introducing a bill that would prevent gun buyback programs from offering gift cards to places that sell guns. Allowing people to turn in old guns and use the gift card to potentially buy new ones is counterproductive, she argued.

“We’re either trying to get guns off the street or we’re not,” she told Marisa Agha.

Also out of the state Capitol this week, Assemblywoman Shirley Weber joined members of the California Legislative Black Caucus to talk about the housing crisis in African American communities. The caucus may push for legislative solutions and is waiting on recommendations from a group of realtors.

Arts Leader Steps Down

The executive director for the city’s Commission for Arts and Culture, a group that funds local arts nonprofits and manages the city’s public art program, announced Friday morning she was stepping down.

Dana Springs had been in the job since 2014 and has recently been caught between the mayor’s office’s demands for cuts to the commission’s budget and the arts community’s insistence that she hold the line. Morlan breaks it all down.

Marijuana Activists for Fletcher

The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department is aware of at least 38 illegal dispensaries in its unincorporated communities. Earlier this week, Morlan documented the expensive and ultimately useless efforts to shut down those businesses.

The marijuana industry’s position — echoed in a new op-ed Friday by one of its own — is that the ongoing ban is cruel and misguided because it denies patients in those areas the ability to safely and easily access medicine.

Pot proponents are coming out strongly in support of Nathan Fletcher, a Democrat running for the Board of Supervisor’s District 4 seat. “Fletcher alone can’t repeal the county’s cannabis ban, but his victory would be a start, and his voice could help change the conversation,” writes Jared Sclar, a communications consultant and college student.

Money for Nothing

A new report by San Diego’s independent auditor suggests that the system of handing out economic incentives is a total mess. The auditors were not completely clear on who is getting what breaks, because they aren’t being tracked, as summarized by the Union-Tribune.

City officials disagreed that the number of jobs created was a good measurement of success, although they did agree with eight other recommendations for reform.

Voice’s Lisa Halverstadt put together a handy guide to this topic a few years back, noting that the incentives are supposed to be vetted by the City Council. Officials can refund taxes, waive permit costs and provide bond financing for construction and upgrades.

In Other News

Tech news site the Verge reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, has officially gained access to a nationwide license plate recognition database provided by Vigilant Solutions. The Carlsbad police department, as Ruarri Serpa noted in a recent North County Report, submits the information collected by its own readers to a database managed by the company.

The Medical Examiner’s Office says the number one cause for homeless deaths in 2017 was drug overdoses. The total number of deaths increased over the previous year — not including the hep A outbreak. (inewsource)

A San Diego cop has accused officers in Hemet of physically abusing a suspect, destroying evidence and other acts of corruption. (Union-Tribune)

 Plans to re-do Mission Valley’s Riverwalk golf course will be filed next month. Those plans include a 4,300-unit housing development and a new trolley station. (Union-Tribune)

Top Stories of the Week

1. Illegal Pot Shops Are Opening Faster Than San Diego County Can Shut Them Down

San Diego County has banned pot dispensaries in its unincorporated areas, but sheriff’s deputies can’t enforce the ban because the locations that are shut down keep re-opening. Spring Valley has become the Wild West for illegal pot shops. (Kinsee Morlan)

2. Chadwick out, Michell in as San Diego City Hall COO

Kris Michell has been an influential player in City Hall politics before but her appointment as COO marks a major change for the role, which has generally gone to technocrats rather than political operators. (Scott Lewis)

3. Kristin Gaspar Is the Latest Republican to Seek Issa’s Seat

Congressman Darrell Issa’s sudden announcement not to seek re-election in California’s 49th District set off a frenzy of contenders on the right. Supervisor Kristin Gaspar has jumped in, too. The stage is set to divide GOP loyalties along county lines. (Jesse Marx)

4. A Reader’s Guide to S.D’s Deadly Flu Outbreak

As county deaths set a recent record, the local outbreak is making national news. Drugs are in short supply while overwhelmed hospitals ban visitors and try to cope. But the worst may be over. (Randy Dotinga)

5. Opinion: Can’t Find Housing? Thank the San Diego County Board of Supervisors

If they’re really concerned about the lack of affordable housing, they could reject on Wednesday plans for a proposed strip mall in unincorporated Lakeside. It’s located on a parcel zoned to accommodate moderately priced multi-family homes. (Jack Shu)

For the rest of the list, go here.


Reluctantly, Chula Vista Is Going All-In for Pot

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School children walk past an illegal dispensary on Third Avenue in Chula Vista on Jan. 25, 2018. / Photo by Vito Di Stefano

After kicking and screaming, Chula Vista leaders are on the verge of creating a legal marijuana marketplace that in some ways goes beyond the one established in San Diego.

Officials in the largest South Bay community have drafted an ordinance that would allow for three retailers per each of the city’s four Council districts. Those licenses could go to either public storefronts or delivery services — a first for the region and a major victory for those in the industry who’ve lobbied for more options.

The storefronts could sell recreationally while the deliverers could sell both medical and adult use products. No more than eight of the 12 retail licenses could go to storefronts.

California’s licensing system launched on New Year’s Day and, since then, hundreds of independent drivers — who’d operated in a gray area of the law — have either joined a dispensary, ended operations or gone underground. In San Diego, the only city in the region with a medical and recreational marijuana licensing system, officials have prevented anyone except storefront dispensaries from making house-calls.

Manny Biezunski, co-founder of Coast Drive Management, a delivery consulting company, said Chula Vista seems to understand that home-deliveries are a more discrete way for people to buy products. “And not only that,” he added, “Chula Vista is very thoughtful about small businesses and in many ways the delivery route is a lower barrier to entry.”

There’s no guarantee Chula Vista’s draft ordinance, released in December, will stay that way when the Council meets again on Feb. 6. But Elizabeth Wilhelm, president of the San Diego Cannabis Delivery Alliance, is pleased officials are thinking of patients who can’t walk or drive to storefronts.

If the ordinance stands, she said, it’ll be trumpeted around San Diego County as a model of smart regulations. “That’s something we can fly with and tell everybody else,” she said.

Chula Vista’s ordinance is also unique in that it places no restrictions on the number of licenses awarded to the growers, manufacturers, distributors and testers that make up the local supply chain.

It’s unclear whether zoning will be an obstacle for those businesses, as it has been in other places. But the proposed physical separations in Chula Vista are relatively less restrictive. For instance, storefront retailers would need to be 1,000 feet from day care centers and schools, and 600 feet from treatment facilities, parks and other “youth-oriented” entities. In San Diego, the distance is 1,000 for both categories — meaning some Council districts will see no marijuana outlets at all.

Chula Vista officials are proposing three retail marijuana licenses per each of the four City Council districts, so long as certain zoning requirements are met. / Rendering by Ashley Lewis

Proposition 64, the state measure that legalized marijuana for recreational use, was approved in Chula Vista by about 52 percent of voters, but let municipalities opt out of legalization.

Councilman Mike Diaz would be content to continue banning marijuana outlets, but he considered the alternative — an industry-backed ballot measure — much worse. The threat of an outside force that has a financial interest in the rules forced the city’s hand.

He and other officials have held workshops, and took a trip late last year to Aurora, Co., to tour outlets and talk to cops and industry people, he said.

“What we’re doing in Chula Vista is working slowly and methodically,” he said. “At the end of the day, we’re going to have as good an ordinance as we’ve seen around.”

Diaz is not crazy about the retail licenses going to delivery services, believing it creates an unnecessary risk of robbery. Instead, he’d prefer the manufacturing, cultivation and sales outlets be combined into a single, secured facility. That might bring down the cost of marijuana products and help challenge the black market, he said.

For that same reason, he’s encouraging staff at City Hall to produce an economic impact report, so that the City Council can get the taxing structure right.

The Council is also considering a ballot measure that, if approved by voters in June, would help pay for enforcement. In the fall, Councilman Stephen Padilla said his “nightmare scenario” involved voters approving a system of marijuana licenses “and there isn’t necessarily a link to financing.”

Officials have estimated, according to the Union Tribune, that a five percent sales tax — on top the state’s 15 percent sales tax — would yield between $4 million and $5 million annually, money that could then be used to hire additional cops, code enforcers and administrators who can make sure the system is operating as it should.

The Association of Cannabis Professionals is paying close attention. The industry group has drafted ballot proposals in parts of San Diego County where most voters supported Proposition 64 but where elected officials have been hesitant to open up the industry.

Chula Vista has been high on its list, but the ordinance being shaped by officials echoes many of the group’s demands.

“As long as all that stands, and they keep what they presented before, I think we’re pretty happy,” said executive director Dallin Young.

He did, however, highlight one point of criticism. Storefronts in industrial zones would need to go through the conditional use permit, or CUP, process, while the other applicants would not. The CUP is longer and more expensive to get through, requiring more hearings and time for public review.

“It puts storefronts at a disadvantage,” Young said. “Non-storefront deliveries could take up all the licenses before storefronts make it through the process.”

Alone in the South Bay

The situation in Chula Vista contrasts with the rest of the South Bay.

The opposition to marijuana is so strong in National City that leaders there banned adult-use dispensaries three weeks before California voters passed Proposition 64. There are no outward signs that attitudes towards either medical or recreational marijuana are softening.

At a City Council meeting in October 2016, officials complained about the potential costs on law enforcement and expressed fears children would start using it. Assuming that other communities in the region would allow dispensaries, Mayor Ron Morrison encouraged National City residents to simply drive on down the road for their purchases.

At the same time, Imperial Beach is working on its own ordinance, but it’s expected to be fairly restrictive because of the city’s limited commercial space. Officials released a map in December showing how few blocks are actually available — mostly those near California 75 and Palm Avenue.

Imperial Beach had one of the highest percentages of Prop 64 “yes” votes in San Diego County. But the vast majority of residents who were surveyed last month said they were fine imposing limits on the number of businesses and keeping those businesses out of residential areas.

A recent staff report recommended, at a minimum, setting aside two licenses for marijuana outlets, one of which is restricted to a single site that can cultivate, manufacture and sell on spot — what’s known in bureaucratic jargon as a “micro vertically integrated cottage” — capped at 15,000 square feet.

The other permit could go to a retailer, a delivery service that works with a retailer, or a laboratory that tests products for distributors.

Instead, the City Council asked at a meeting earlier this month that the two licenses be set aside for retail storefronts that could make home-deliveries.

Even so, Mayor Serge Dedina expressed frustration that more people hadn’t turned out to identify specific licenses that should be on the table. The City Council, he said, isn’t a “star chamber that’s supposed to arbitrarily make decisions for the community if they’re too lazy to show up. And I’m not gonna buy the attitude that people are afraid. We don’t live in a police state. Cops aren’t housing people who smoke. I’m gonna get the message out there.”

The two retail storefronts are not quite what the industry had in mind. Young said his group has enough signatures for a ballot proposal that would also give space to a marijuana lounge. But he’s withholding judgement until Imperial Beach officials release a draft of their possible ordinance next month.

Nearly every one of the 70 residents surveyed at a workshop in December said they would prefer the ordinance, which could be tweaked in the future by the City Council. A ballot proposal could only be undone by another ballot proposal.

When It Comes to Cannabis, San Diego Should Learn from Chula Vista

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Marijuana delivery service supporters rally for legality and regulation for the pot industry. / Photo by Kinsee Morlan

The people have spoken and they want their meals, groceries, technology and other essential products delivered to their doorstep in sixty minutes or less.

Is this a symptom of the modern consumer’s desire for instant gratification, a byproduct of their inherent laziness? I’d argue the opposite. Today’s shopper is highly evolved and efficient with how they spend their time.

Voice of San Diego CommentaryIn California, the newest commodity to be engulfed by the convenience of the delivery model is medical and adult use cannabis. Consumers view cannabis no differently than they do a pair of headphones from Amazon or a large poke salad from DoorDash. We want to place an order from our smartphone and trust that it will be delivered to us promptly and in good condition.

By not having to worry, or thinking too much about a purchase, we free up our brain to focus on activities we deem more important and beneficial to our overall happiness and well-being.

Cannabis retail stores are certainly awe-inspiring, secure and historic — but in many cities, they are also few and far between. With only 13 licensed storefronts currently operating in cities like San Diego, the scarcity of these storefronts means that consumers must deal with crowded lobbies, limited parking and longer than usual wait times.

All of which creates a nightmare scenario for the modern shopper, and after a few visits to the licensed store, the novelty of buying legal weed wears off. Locals quickly resort back to their on-demand delivery-only pipeline, often giving little thought as to whether that reliable pipeline is licensed or unlicensed.

The underground cannabis world currently accounts for a large percentage of delivery services throughout San Diego. This is partly due to the fact that the city and its surrounding municipalities (excluding Chula Vista) have been dragging their feet on regulating delivery-only businesses.

Unless you have access to millions of dollars in capital, the chances of surviving the stringent and extensive licensing process in San Diego is slim to none. This has left many cannabis small business owners with nowhere to go except underground. This is not the ideal situation for officials, consumers or cannabis entrepreneurs; Proposition 64 promised to erase the black market, not strengthen it.

So, what’s the solution? It’s simple: Create more opportunity by drastically increasing the number of licensed outlets that are legally allowed to sell medical and adult use cannabis to qualified consumers.

This does not mean that cities must allow cannabis storefronts on every corner. Quite the opposite. The state, in the eleventh hour, created a type 9 delivery license that has given cities the power to approve locations that are delivery-only.

Chula Vista’s recently proposed cannabis ordinance, which will be discussed and possibly voted on Feb. 6, includes a pathway for aspiring delivery services to receive a local type 9 delivery-only license. If the ordinance is passed, as currently stands, it will be a resounding victory for small business owners anxious to be recognized in the brave new world of cannabis compliance in California.

Chula Vista is preparing for a bright and prosperous future. Thankfully, if its proposed cannabis ordinance is implemented, the city expects to receive an estimated $5 million in taxes annually from these newly licensed businesses. Those added tax dollars should greatly assist Chula Vista in continuing to fund future expansions such as the Bayfront and on-going renovations to downtown’s fashionable Third Avenue Village.

As a citizen that resides in San Diego, I applaud Chula Vista’s forward-thinking efforts in allowing delivery-only businesses to begin paying their fair share of tax dollars and, in essence, granting them the opportunity to compete, on a level playing field, with other licensed and regulated cannabis businesses currently in operation.

San Diego, with a population of over 1.4 million, should look to Chula Vista for inspiration and eventually follow the lead of their partner to the south by amending the city’s current ordinance and creating a reasonable pathway forward for small business delivery service owners wishing to successfully operate.

Give customers the ability to pick and choose and allow for cannabis businesses to compete, innovate and improve.

Manny Biezunski is co-founder of Coast Drive Management, a cannabis delivery consulting company. See anything in there we should fact check? Tell us what to check out here.

Morning Report: Soaring School District Pension Costs

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A meeting of the San Diego Unified school board / Photo by Jamie Scott Lytle

Local school district pension payments are on the rise for a couple reasons.

For starters, the state’s pension funds — CalSTRS and CalPERS — decided to lower their annual expected earnings on investment. The higher the expected earnings, the less money an agency needs to put up, because the assumption is that the market will make up the difference.

Secondly, the state’s pension funds enacted plans to completely balance their liabilities and assets in the coming decades.

Combine those changes with local employee raises and early retirement incentive packages, and it’s easier to understand why some school districts around the region are feeling the strain.

“Pension costs at San Diego Unified rose from $90 million in fiscal year 2016, to almost $120 million this year,” Ashly McGlone reports. “Contributions are expected to rise to $136.5 million in 2019 and $153.6 million in 2020.”

McGlone also takes a look at Grossmont Union, Poway, Sweetwater and Vista school districts.

Lorie Zapf and the Great Vacation Rental Stalemate

If you missed our Member Coffee this week, don’t fret. In this week’s Voice of San Diego podcast, Andrew Keatts and Lisa Halverstadt echo a similar conversation they had at the gathering at Liberty Station about upcoming ballot measures.

The San Diego Housing Federation wants to raise property taxes to help fund roughly 7,500 apartments for homeless and other vulnerable, low-income populations. The group will deliver its pitch to a City Council committee next week for a $900 million bond.

On the second half of the show, San Diego City Councilwoman Lorie Zapf, who’s running for re-election in District 2, came in studio to talk about the impact of criminal justice reforms on the homeless population. She also talks about the City Council’s stalemate on meaningful vacation rental regulations and why the voting public may need to intervene.

“Our neighborhoods are just completely falling like dominoes,” she said. “And there are turnstiles of tourists living in single-family residential neighborhoods.”

Removing Limits for Cancer Treatment

California Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins introduced two interesting bills this week.

One removes any time limit for low-income and uninsured women receiving breast and cervical cancer treatment as part of a state-funded program. “There is no good reason to stop providing care while someone is still in need of it,” Atkins said.

The other bill would require hotel and motel employees to be trained in spotting the signs of sex trafficking and report those signs to cops. “San Diego is on the FBI’s list of top cities for sex trafficking,” writes Marisa Agha in this week’s Sacramento Report.

At the same time, the Senate unanimously approved whistleblower protections for legislative employees who want to report harassment and other illegal activity. Numerous lobbyists and staffers in California’s capitol have come forward in recent months to say they were harassed or assaulted and then professionally ostracized for complaining.

Also in the Sacramento Report, Democratic candidates for governor are preparing to debate in San Diego at the end of the month, an event that marks the start of the party’s convention. The California Republican Party is also hosting its convention in San Diego in May. Is San Diego now a swing region in California politics?

Commentary: Get With the High Times

Various elements of the marijuana industry will be paying attention to the South Bay next week when the Chula Vista City Council considers an adult-use ordinance — the second in a region of more than 3 million people. But as I wrote earlier in the week, the city is not exactly thrilled about what it’s doing.

Ahead of Tuesday’s public discussion, Manny Biezunski, a San Diego-based cannabis consultant, writes to encourage officials on. He gives them props for including drivers in the proposed licensing system.

“Consumers view cannabis no differently than they do a pair of headphones from Amazon or a large poke salad from DoorDash,” he says in an op-ed. “We want to place an order from our smartphone and trust that it will be delivered to us promptly and in good condition.”

Overheard in the South Bay

Chula Vista’s willingness to write regulations — even reluctantly — got me wondering whether the stigma of marijuana is waning in other parts of the South Bay (and San Diego).

I asked Imperial Beach Mayor Serge Dedina, among others, if he’s noticed a shift in attitudes. His city is considerably more liberal on these matters, I know, but I wanted his perspective anyhow.

He was adamant: Nothing changed in IB with the passage of Proposition 64. When he was seeking election in 2014 and knocking on doors, he said, “everyone I talked to was either high or wanted to get high.”

We Probably Need Another Plan for Getting Money to Build Things

Michael Smolens of the Union-Tribune argues we shouldn’t count on Congress and President Trump to solve the region’s transportation woes. Despite Trump’s plan to pump $1 trillion or more into state and local projects, the president, as I also reported last year, is more likely to get around $200 billion through Congress.

In a recent podcast, Scott Lewis and Keatts asked U.S. Rep. Scott Peters about whether San Diego would be able to collect what it anticipated from the federal government. The San Diego Association of Governments’ entire plan for local transportation depends on it getting more than $3 from either the state or federal government for every $1 it is investing in those projects.

SANDAG officials have acknowledged to make this come true, they expect legislators to pass yet another increase in the state’s gasoline tax and money from it will help SANDAG reach its goals. We’re not even certain the one just passed will survive a potential referendum.

Peters said any expectations of major federal investment in things like SANDAG’s plan should be managed.

“We think the Trump administration is eviscerating everything,” he said. 

In Other News

In addition to her annual pension, San Diego’s departing police chief is expected to leave with nearly $900,000 in a deferred retirement option program account. (Union-Tribune)

Campaign finance reports for the last three months of 2017 are trickling out this week, and Duncan Hunter’s campaign raised about $50,700, the lowest during its decade-long existence. The congressman is under federal investigation for campaign spending. (Union-Tribune)

The U-T also surveyed fundraising totals in the county races.

A former American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego and Imperial Counties spokeswoman is alleging that her firing was the result of age and sex discrimination and a hostile workplace. (Times of San Diego)

 President Trump’s border wall prototype project has cost the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department $1.4 million, about half of which represents overtime pay. (NBC 7)

The rapper MC Flow filmed a music video at one of San Diego’s Urbn Leaf dispensaries several weeks ago, but it just popped up on Reddit. Several commentators used it as an opportunity to complain about the price of the legal weed, which is echoed in shops across the city.

Top Stories of the Week

1. It Looks Like San Diego’s Preparing Its Vast Sports Arena Land for Redevelopment

San Diego owns many acres of land in the Midway District and it appears to be reluctant to extend leases around the Valley View Casino Center, and at the arena itself, beyond 2020. City planners are also finalizing new zoning rules for the area. It’s all heading toward a major redevelopment. (Lynn Walsh)

2. How Police Stumbled Onto a Human Smuggling Ring — At a House They’d Been Called to 53 Times

Neighbors called the cops 53 times on a home in Chula Vista. But it took pure dumb luck for Border Patrol and the San Diego County Sheriff’s to find out a human smuggling ring was operating there. (Adriana Heldiz)

3. Reluctantly, Chula Vista Is Going All-In for Pot

San Diego’s marijuana permitting system is up and running, while South Bay communities are still ironing out the details and taking vastly different approaches. In Chula Vista, the marijuana industry’s threats of forcing the issue onto the ballot have worked. (Jesse Marx)

4. Politics Report: Sports Arena Intrigue

We got a hold of a new poll. The DA and former DA go to the Women’s March. Labor Council goes with Fletcher for county supervisor. (Scott Lewis and Andrew Keatts)

5. Illegal Pot Shops Are Opening Faster Than San Diego County Can Shut Them Down

San Diego County has banned pot dispensaries in its unincorporated areas, but the Sheriff’s Department can’t enforce the ban, because the locations that are shut down just re-open. Spring Valley has become the Wild West for illegal pot shops. (Kinsee Morlan)

Check out the rest of the list here.

Top Stories: Jan. 26-Feb. 2

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Valley View Casino Center / Photo by Adriana Heldiz

These were the most popular Voice of San Diego stories for the week Jan. 26-Feb. 2.

1. It Looks Like San Diego’s Preparing Its Vast Sports Arena Land for Redevelopment

San Diego owns many acres of land in the Midway District and it appears to be reluctant to extend leases around the Valley View Casino Center, and at the arena itself, beyond 2020. City planners are also finalizing new zoning rules for the area. It’s all heading toward a major redevelopment. (Lynn Walsh)

2. How Police Stumbled Onto a Human Smuggling Ring — At a House They’d Been Called to 53 Times

Neighbors called the cops 53 times on a home in Chula Vista. But it took pure dumb luck for Border Patrol and the San Diego County Sheriff’s to find out a human smuggling ring was operating there. (Adriana Heldiz)

3. Reluctantly, Chula Vista Is Going All-In for Pot

San Diego’s marijuana permitting system is up and running, while South Bay communities are still ironing out the details and taking vastly different approaches. In Chula Vista, the marijuana industry’s threats of forcing the issue onto the ballot have worked. (Jesse Marx)

4. Politics Report: Sports Arena Intrigue

We got a hold of a new poll. The DA and former DA go to the Women’s March. Labor Council goes with Fletcher for county supervisor. (Scott Lewis and Andrew Keatts)

5. Illegal Pot Shops Are Opening Faster Than San Diego County Can Shut Them Down

San Diego County has banned pot dispensaries in its unincorporated areas, but the Sheriff’s Department can’t enforce the ban, because the locations that are shut down just re-open. Spring Valley has become the Wild West for illegal pot shops. (Kinsee Morlan)

6. Facing Budget Cuts, San Diego Arts Head Steps Down

Dana Springs is stepping down as the executive director of the Commission for Arts and Culture, a city agency that funds local arts nonprofits and directs the city’s public art program. (Kinsee Morlan)

7. Opinion: San Diego County’s Ban on Cannabis Is Cruel and Misguided

Despite the support of San Diego County residents, the Board of Supervisors is denying patients the ability to safely and easily access their medicine. (Jason Sclar)

8. The Problem With San Diego’s Business Subsidy Program

San Diego’s business subsidy program is a mess. The city doesn’t track it well, or have a good system of determining who deserves special assistance, and the benefits rarely go to the city’s poorest communities. (Andrew Keatts)

9. Special Education Costs Are Rising, But Money From State and Feds Isn’t

Special education costs are increasing across California, but the state hasn’t changed how much money it gives to school districts to help special education students. (Maya Srikrishnan)

10. Construction Groups Mull Opposing Hotel-Tax Hike

San Diego’s Associated General Contractors chapter and the Coalition for Fair Employment in Construction fear that a hotel-tax measure includes a backdoor attempt to allow a controversial project labor agreement. That could spell trouble for the tourism and labor coalition behind the measure. (Lisa Halverstadt)

 

Special Potcast: What Next for Independent Deliveries?

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Marijuana delivery service supporters rally in September 2017. / Photo by Adriana Heldiz

Sam Humeid has seen many sides of the marijuana industry. He ran a medical dispensary in Los Angeles at a tumultuous time. He later relocated to North County, where he counseled patients and delivered product directly to their door.

But on Jan. 1 — as the state’s regulatory system officially got off the ground — he was forced to stop operations. Cities across the region have either banned marijuana outlets or required that drivers work for licensed retail shops.

In the meantime, Humeid has been lobbying local city councils as part of the San Diego Cannabis Delivery Alliance and educating its members about the patchwork of regulations.

“Moving forward, it’s not so much that we’re looking to have pot-slingers running around the city,” he said. “It’s very much still a cannabis-therapy-practitioner kind of business, where independent retailers have their core group of 30, 50 or 100 patients that they know intimately.”

He joined us for the first “Voice of San Diego Potcast,” a podcast series we’re trying out that will work to demystify the world of marijuana culture and regulations and bring regular folks into the discussion.

Sam Humeid san diego cannabis

Sam Humeid wants cities to permit independent cannabis delivery services. / Photo by Kinsee Morlan

Kinsee Morlan and I also talked to Humeid about the prevalence of illegal shops, pending ordinances in the South Bay, the problem with an all-cash business model and more.

At the end of the show, we also heard from our friend and photojournalist Vito Di Stefano, who scoured the internet for two interesting marijuana-related stories. A California winery is converting into a Wonka Factory for weed. And is North Korea really awash in marijuana, as some media outlets claim? It’s all part of an occasional segment in the show we’re calling “Puff Piece.”

Send your suggestions, for guests and questions, my way.

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