Foibles

Hold on to your checkbook: an employee of the City-owned San Diego Convention Center is emailing local groups asking for participants to join a new Convention Center Expansion Task Force to help drum up public support for growing the downtown's massive convention center even bigger. The current structure blocks the waterfront for blocks. ... Mission Valley environmentalist Randy Berkman, who's been battling a big office building proposal there, says somebody hacked his website last week, erasing everything on it: "I had an easy-to-guess password, which in retrospect was dumb." ... Sempra Energy and San Diego-based United Domestic Workers of America each contributed $5000 to the California Community Empowerment Foundation at the behest of state Democratic senator Mark Ridley-Thomas, the foundation's chairman. According to a blurb on its website, the group "strategically drives public policy discussions in California with independent and reliable analysis which includes synthesized reporting from the Days of Dialogue (DOD) and Empowerment Congress programs."