In the midtown community of Banker's Hill, a convertible Mercedes drives down Olive Street straight through the intersection with Third Avenue and onto a narrow paved driveway. The car coasts past a wooden sign displaying …

Ever since the “strong mayor” form of governance was adopted Mayor Sanders has been hard to find at city council meetings. It’s been even harder for the average citizen to get his attention. On October …

On October 29th, San Diego County’s Environmental Health Department confirmed that a new case of hantavirus was found in a rodent at Mission Trails Regional Park, making it the fourth such case found this year. …

Just before 6 o’clock, on October 28th, the Fire Marshal for the City of La Mesa stood outside City Council Chambers. The room was at capacity. No one would be allowed in unless seats became …

The City of Encinitas has been toying around with Hall Park -- a proposal for a 44-acre park with five lit soccer fields, two baseball fields, a dog park, and walking trails -- for over …

At the October 21st Chula Vista City Council meeting, Chula Vista resident Carlos Lopez approached the podium for his three minutes of public comment. Trailing him was his friend and neighbor, Theresa Acerro. In Lopez’s …

At the October 20 meeting of Greater Golden Hill’s Maintenance Assessment District (MAD), the board members sitting at the U-shaped set of banquet tables outnumbered the audience eight to three. The poor turnout contrasted with …

During the October 15th meeting of the Imperial Beach City Council, a request for a continuance by applicant Jim Kennedy to install a T-Mobile telecommunications tower next to an apartment building resulted in a bad …

Amid the 11 acres of “lush tropical” backdrop at Kona Kai Resort and Spa on Shelter Island, Mayor Jerry Sanders addressed the San Diego Taxpayer’s Association on the economic hardships the city of San Diego …

A small group of Mission Hills residents are so adamant about scoring parkland for their neighborhood, they are willing to spend over a million dollars to hardscape a third of an acre of environmentally sensitive …

On October 8, the Oceanside City Council meeting got off to a fiery start. The first speaker, Ray Melendrez, president of the Oceanside Firefighters Association, accused Councilman (and mayoral candidate) Rocky Chavez and Councilman Jerry …

District 3 councilmember Toni Atkins issued a press release on October 7, asking for reconsideration of the Navy’s plan to redevelop the Navy Broadway Complex. The project puts 15 acres of waterfront property into the …

On June 3, Election Day, Steve Aceti’s cell phone wouldn’t stop ringing. Calls came flooding in about Proposition G, a measure to help fund sand replenishment on Encinitas beaches by charging an extra 2 percent …

Mayor Sanders has stopped shaving in the shower; altering his shaving habits, he says, saves about 25 gallons of water per day. “It takes a while to shave this big of a face,” Sanders joked …

A congregation of community preservationists gathered in the creaky upstairs room of the Grace Lutheran Church on Park Boulevard on September 30th for a candidate forum with council candidates Sherri Lightner, Stephen Whitburn, Todd Gloria, …

On Saturday, September 27th, a small crowd of civilians assembled inside Building 12 of the Navy Broadway Complex for the first of three public hearings on the redevelopment of the 15.5-acre site in between North …

Inside Alliance Gym, near downtown Chula Vista, Eric Delfierro bustles from one end of the gym to the other, sweating almost as much as the 15 mixed-martial-arts fighters he is training. Of those 15 fighters, …

At the “town hall dialogue,” on September 20th, in the middle of a discussion about possible ways of revamping San Diego’s city council, Councilwoman Donna Frye gave an example demonstrating the ways in which the …

James Bond, councilmember for the City of Encinitas, serves as chairman of the budget-and-finance committee for the Metropolitan Water District &mdash the multi-member agency responsible for supplying water to nearly 16 million residents throughout Southern …

On Tuesday night, the Carlsbad City Council issued an order to the city’s 184 restaurants...and it wasn’t for take-out, either. The city council voted unanimously to add a subsection into the city’s municipal code, Title …

At 9:00 a.m., Saturday morning, under the steady hum from the air conditioner inside Salvation Army’s Fellowship Hall, District Six councilmember Donna Frye and councilmember-elect from District Five Carl DeMaio conversed with a sparse crowd …

It’s been seven years worth of workshops, hundreds of thousand’s of taxpayer dollars, and hundreds of volunteer hours, for Cardiff to finally agree on a General Plan for their community. It started back in 2001 …

Greater Golden Hill’s Maintenance Assessment District is looking for someone to fill the program-manager position. Yep, program manager Alia Kanani is moving on. The MAD committee isn’t seeing this as a bad thing because this …

Escondido councilmember Ed Gallo and Sam Abed have been talking about implementing an overnight-parking ordinance for 18 months. They’ve heard complaints from constituents about crowded residential streets and a growing trend of multiple families dwelling …

The Hillcrest Town Council held a community forum on September 9, with District Three candidates Stephen Whitburn and Todd Gloria fielding questions from members of the community. The two candidates attempted to distinguish themselves and …

It’s back! The 301 University project is back — bigger and badder than ever, and the Hillcrest community is reeling. Warnings went out to the community during the September 2 meeting of the Uptown Planners, …

The Del Mar City Council wants to be marketable: more distinguishable from its coastal sister cities. They want a brand name and to have their own catchy slogan. In local government lingo, they want to …

Faith Paulus remembers growing up in the ’50s, the good old days of playing in the sprinklers and drinking from the hose on a hot day, when people could spend hours outside without a plastic …

Some residents in the Marston Hills area of Hillcrest are scared to let their children play outside, frightened to walk their dogs, and leery of parking on the street outside of their house. Apparently, road …

In 1980, the City of San Marcos made a pledge: for every 1000 residents they would have five acres of parkland. Over the past 28 years, the population of San Marcos has swelled to more …

Welcome to La Jolla, home to champagne riches and caviar dreams, where you can shop for anything from Manolo Blahnik boots to 2009 beemers. Just be sure to stay far away from Via Capri and …

The City of El Cajon is broke, and according to a July press release, the community is losing nearly $6 million a year. “The City of El Cajon has a fiscal crisis, which is not …

A recent inspection by Blaylock Engineers found that the Imperial Beach pier is in need of a makeover — a $1.6 million makeover, even though the port commission deems the pier to be in “generally …

Sam Lopez is the environmental director for Urban Corps, a nonprofit agency that gives young adults jobs such as weed abatement and graffiti and trash removal throughout local communities while helping them earn high school …

Moments before Wednesday’s meeting of the Imperial Beach City Council — which would include a debate over allowing residents to own pet chickens — city manager Gary Brown brought out a bucket of fried chicken …

It was business as usual during the first 30 minutes of the meeting for Greater Golden Hill’s Maintenance Assessment District (MAD) on August 18th. Back-and-forth squabbling over the purchase of 28 state-of-the-art trashcans with dog-bag …

Give me a K...give me an N...give me an S... What’s that spell? Kensington. At the August 13th meeting of the Kensington-Talmadge Planning Committee, Louise Guarnotta, the treasurer for the Kensington-Talmadge Community Association, updated the …

For over an hour, 29 residents of southwest Chula Vista pleaded to Mayor Cheryl Cox and Chula Vista’s council members to rescind the approval of energy company MMC’s proposed “peaker” power plant slated for their …

Hugo Salazar is positive that all hell would break loose if a new power plant were proposed for a wealthy area such as La Jolla or Rancho Bernardo. Salazar, spokesperson for the Stop the MMC …

In an alleyway in Ocean Beach, near the intersection of Newport and Bacon, Keith Morgan sits in a white plastic chair padded with two pieces of cardboard. He’s slept in that chair since May, when …

There’s a party going on at Universal Nightclub -- located on the corner of University Avenue and Vermont Street in Hillcrest -- and the celebration has lasted far too long. Residents of the community and …

Acoustic guitarist Shawn Rohlf has played Sunday mornings at the Hillcrest farmers’ market for 11 years. “It’s the most difficult gig of the week for any musician,” says Rohlf, who’s fronted the 7th Day Buskers …

For over two years now, the City of San Diego and local residents have wanted to stabilize the cliff on Aldine Drive in the Kensington/Talmadge area. They fear the cliff will give way when substantial …

At last week’s city council meeting for the Chula Vista City Council meeting, councilmember Steve Castaneda persisted in moving for a citywide ban on plastic bags. “ I end up with a stack of them …

At the July 23rd Ocean Beach Town Council meeting, James Lawson from city councilmember Kevin Faulconer’s office asked the town council for their opinion. “We just wanted to hear your feedback about how the Fourth …

The phone rang yesterday evening. It was David Skillman, chairman of the MAD oversight — er, advisory, um, oversory? — committee for greater Golden Hill. Skillman called to say he is to blame for not …

Ocean Beach resident Rob Lewis is tired. He says that two to three nights out of the week -- instead of catching some Z's -- he’s phoning the police about the noise and smoke coming …

At a weekly Reader meet-up, at North Park’s Claire de Lune coffeehouse, I was prepared to hear typical neighborhood concerns from residents; too much graffiti, not enough police, errantly positioned stop signs, the usual type …

Five residents of Greater Golden Hill stood outside the clubhouse at the Balboa Park Golf Course on July 21. Some held green mailers with handwritten notes scribbled on both sides of the page. Resident Jim …

Before Thomas Weller leaves his El Cajon house and “goes out to play,” he looks like a character from the movie Mystery Men: he puts on black shin-guards (like the kind worn by baseball catchers), …