San Diego — Pete Wilson's ex-maid, Josepha Klag, is set for a deportation hearing in United States Immigration Court here this coming Wednesday. Allegations that Klag had been in the country illegally when she worked for Wilson and his then-wife Betty back in the 1970s helped derail Wilson's presidential bid two years ago ... Advocates for the handicapped, who are suing the City because the newly expanded Mission Valley stadium doesn't have enough parking, seating, and bathrooms for the disabled, have inadvertently set off a new round of controversy inside city hall. "The stadium doesn't come up to code, period," says one source. "And that includes earthquakes. Forget the cripples. God help the folks in there when the big one comes." The source says that only the new portion of the stadium is quake-worthy. The City, exempted from state seismic safety laws, didn't have to upgrade the rest of the 70,000-plus-seat stadium to current earthquake standards. "They could have done it, but it would have cost way too much. People like [Reader publisher] Jim Holman [who helped finance this year's stadium referendum drive] would have bashed us from hell and gone," complains another source. The disabled activists claim in their suit that the retrofits are two years overdue. Ironically, another handicapped activist helped mastermind the successful effort to avoid a public vote on taxpayer financing for the stadium expansion. "I'm frightened that if it goes to a vote, people might not understand what's at stake for us - complete accessibility to the stadium," Peter Mirche, a handicapped veteran, told the Union-Tribune during the heat of last December's petition drive.

Commerce vs. Scripps

The San Diego Commerce, a small legal newspaper owned by the giant Daily Journal Corporation of South Carolina, is claiming that San Diego city officials rigged the bidding for the city's lucrative legal advertising contract in favor of the Daily Transcript, owned by a La Jolla branch of the Scripps family. In a recently filed lawsuit against the City, the Commerce alleges that officials changed specifications - including requiring bidders to have pages exactly the size of the Daily Transcript's - just before bids were due. "But for being excluded from the bidding process by reason of the arbitrary and unreasonable restrictions added by Defendants that didn't exist in the 1995 Bidding Specifications," the suit adds, "the Commerce would be eligible to submit a bid which would be lower than the bid submitted by the Transcript and would result in the savings of monies to the City and the taxpayers."

Controversy and visitors bureau

Brenda Harris, that exPSan Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau executive who left town to work for the National Baptists Convention and then got enmeshed in an ongoing soap opera involving church leader Henry Lyons, is in the headlines again. This time it's Denver, where Mayor Wellington Webb is backing away from his pledge to give the Baptists $50,000 to hold their convention in his city. Harris, the church's convention planner, arranged the controversial deal with the city. The big-spending Lyons and Harris have been romantically linked in newspaper accounts of church malfeasance, but she denies they're anything but coworkers and good friends. Webb, a Baptist himself, says the allegations about Lyons are "very disturbing and certainly need to be investigated," according to the Rocky Mountain News.

Meter's running

A cabby whose head was in the wrong place at the wrong time has lost his lawsuit against the San Diego Marriott. Qadir Fazl had dropped off some passengers at the waterfront hotel and was leaning into the trunk of his cab just as the doorman slammed down the lid. Fazl claimed he was unable to return to full-time work as a cab driver and that he suffered a cerebral concussion, posttraumatic headaches, and herniated spinal disks. The jury concluded the hotel was not negligent ... A San Diego dentist was the hit of the Third International Conference on Breath Odor, held last week in Vancouver, British Columbia. Clifford Yudelman showed off his Breath-So-Fresh tongue cleaner, a long piece of plastic that allows patients to scrape off the back of their tongues where odor-causing bacteria lie.

Contributor: Matt Potter