City Lights
When big business was selling the public on the need to approve multimillion-dollar school bonds, whose needs were they talking about? In 2008, a majority of South Bay voters agreed to open their wallets for …
These days, someone talking about a double-dip isn’t ordering ice cream. A double-dip is the dolorous possibility that the economy will slump again, after staging a very modest, government-goosed recovery from the worst downturn since …
Dennis Dickinson takes his dogs for a hike off Borrego Valley Road in Borrego Springs at 6:30 in the morning to avoid the heat. From the trail, Dickinson looks west toward San Ysidro Mountain. In …
Don’t look now, but corporate profit margins — earnings as a percent of sales — are back to where they were before the Great Recession began three years ago. A major reason is that companies …
Howard sits on a mauve recliner in the middle of his front yard, an area that he refers to as his office. He looks over a waist-high chain-link fence, on which hangs a handwritten sign …
There is an uncivil war raging in the United States. It’s between government employees and taxpayers who fear that those employees’ generous pensions will lead to inexorably higher taxes and more slashes in services. This …
Above the ripe yellow citrus pictured on Lemon Grove’s city seal, inscribed in the swash of the capital L, is “Best Climateon Earth.” While the weather may be ideal, the same can’t be said for …
The U.S. has lost more than 8 million jobs since the Great Recession began in late 2007. San Diego County has lost more than 80,000. They aren’t coming back soon, say local economists. A high …
Rochelle Becker would like to correct me. I wrote in a June 17 article that the two remaining reactors at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, located in the northwest corner of San Diego County, …
Should members of affluent communities blush when their leaders go scounging for federal assistance? Probably not in the view of Lynda Hunt, who was interviewed by the La Jolla Village News in May 2006. “San …
March 17 of 2003 was Don Bauder Day in San Diego. (I suspected that most city council members voted for it because they were gleefully celebrating my departure from the Union-Tribune.) The honor was no …
La Mesa's Heather McGuire bought a condo in 2006, got married the next year, and before long got into a fight — not with her new husband. She moved in with him. Her battle — …
Police drunk-driving checkpoints are big business. Just ask the City of Escondido, which has been racking up profits courtesy of federal grants and an aggressive vehicle-impound regime instituted by the Escondido Police Department with the …
‘If you build it, they will come.” It works in fantasy movies (Field of Dreams, 1989). But it hasn’t worked in San Diego’s East Village. As part of the $301 million ballpark subsidy, developers created …
There’s a wild place in the heart of San Diego that only a few people know about — visited by even fewer — and if San Diego State has its way, it may share the …
The heavily advertised Pacific Law Center was once San Diego’s best-known law firm, but its most controversial. Two years ago, Kerry Steigerwalt, a criminal lawyer who is regularly quoted on local television, gained control of …