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City Continues to Mull Over Golden Hill District
Sanders' and his circle of henchmen are smug, lawless. The city attorney and staff abet. Over the 5 years that homeowners have struggled to fight what was obviously illegal from the beginning, the deputy city attorneys involved in the case repeatedly lied in council hearings and shamed themselves in court. Time and again, useless, legally ludicrous, harrassing objections were filed by the deputy attorney in court. She and Goldsmith should be sanctioned. The budget for the City Atty office is huge. We pay their salaries and pay them to lie and cheat. Sanders, the present and past council, and Goldsmith and the DCA have made lifetime enemies out of thousands of good, honest citizens. Shame. And the councilman offers limp laments and conjectures. Hey Todd: "if"??? Stand by .little bureaucrat lifer weasel. I'll call your "if" and raise it ten times.— March 22, 2012 9:23 a.m.
Qualcomm's Jacobs Gives Yet More Money to Gavin Newsom
The Reader has so many wonderful things to read! Thank you, Reader. Gavin loves his public-private partnerships (called PPPs, by those who follow). Maybe Gavin is so terribly interested in San Diego because his long-time bestie (crushy?) lives here, our very own PPP king, Marco Li Mandri. Gavin and Marco go back to at least 2004, when Marco wrote the PLAN for San Fran, and Mayor G authorized it. It was brand-new municipal code entitling Marco to earn a nice bit of the green by forming community benefit districts all over the foggy town. And that he did. Including the Fillmore Jazz District, in 2006." Alas, that PPP fell to its knees recently, killed by property owners who had grown weary of throwing their money away in big, fat assessments. The SF Examiner headline in July 2011 read: "San Francisco’s investment in Fillmore has yet to bear fruit" For all the dollars invested, the numbers were ugly. By December, the headline was "Music stops for San Francisco's Fillmore district"... "a 5-year-old special benefit district was disbanded when the largest property owners opposed its renewal"..."with infighting and questions raised over the use of funds." The municipal code Marco had written for Mayor G required that each district vote on renewal vote after 5 years. So, too bad. The party is over. If only the period before the required renewal vote was longer! Property owners would die, or sell and move on, and eventually there would be owners who wouldn't even know they were paying.— March 19, 2012 6:19 p.m.
Bill Would Use Property Tax Revenue to Promote Renewable Energy Projects
Why on earth would you think these guys are going to let you off the hook? NO. You will pay extra taxes to keep your renegade system.— March 19, 2012 5:52 p.m.
Bill Would Use Property Tax Revenue to Promote Renewable Energy Projects
This bill is sponsored by two of San Diego's finest, Hueso and co-author Vargas. I'll resist the temptation to complete the obvious joke about both of these guys' personal capacity to generate much more than 10 MW of wind... The bill's language "exempt[s] the creation of the district from the voter-approval requirement." And then the mayor and council can appoint their friends to the new infrastructure financing district's nonprofit governing board, which will, with fanfare and well-expressed fabulous dreams, hire a PR company and an executive director (someone who has written a lot of "green" advocacy letters to the press). They will meet in their newly leased downtown penthouse office, first to decide their salaries, then to write a budget, generous with office furnishings and travel allotments (they may need to travel to France or China to examine energy models). Then they will do photo-ops and interviews with the UT, and then .... will have complete authority to determine how to spend what is left of their sequestered property tax dollars. Yeah! That damn General Fund. Why doesn't it just go bankrupt!— March 19, 2012 5:51 p.m.
Will Golden Hill Residents Have to Pay for Their Now-Defunct Maintenance Assessment District?
Another question is whether the city will demonstrate that it has decided to become lawful, instead of lawless. They have behaved like a mafia so far. Every current councilmember who is presented with a new unconstitutional scheme to assess residential property owners and hand the money over to a business group should heed the warning letter sent in May of 2007 to councilmembers Hueso, Atkins, Peters, et al.: "Municipal Code Section 65.0202, as amended in 2003 [MAD code changes, on recommendation of former City Attorney Casey Gwinn, based on PBID laws as proposed by Marco LiMandri, New City America], includes provisions which on their face violate Article XIIID, Section (2)(1), of the California Constitution." Both Superior and Appellate courts found exactly that. Todd Gloria, on Mar 2 2012, recommended to the Independent Budget Analyst, Andrea Tevlin,that the FY2013 City budget "should fund an adequate level of resources to assist individual neighborhoods in the formation of special assessment districts." Tevlin included that goal in her recommendations to the Council on March 9 2012. Marti Emerald, on Jan 24 2012, issued a memo to councilmembers that a priority of her committee, Public Safety & Neighborhood Services, is "A complete overhaul of the City's Maintenance Assessment District policy." Let's hope they are recommending honest assessments and overhauls, and abandon their lies and deceits. Changing municipal code doesn't provide a legal loophole. No matter what a lawless City Attorney says. It does not. Bob Dylan said, "To live outside the law you must be honest." Get some honesty, council. You aren't held legally accountable for your actions, and so feel you live outside the law, but try being honest for a change.— March 18, 2012 2:04 p.m.
Neighbors have been calling the San Diego police for four years
cont... There are still meth dealer rental houses in South Park, but the dealers there know to lie low and not trash the place. When their college-student-type customers start parking their nice cars away from the buy house, in front of our house, that's when either the renter-dealers or their landlords get a phone call and a warning. And the customers, sitting in their parked cars sampling the goods prior to buying, thinking they are invisible, are surprised by a visit from big guy who they think is just jogging down the sidewalk wearing earbuds. Jogger bends down, taps on the window: "Get out of this neighborhood, never come back, your license plate has just been phoned into the police." And jogs on. It's funny to watch the panic. And we never see that same car again. The dealer-renter stops for a good while and goes somewhere else to deal. Or gets evicted.— March 9, 2012 8:17 a.m.
Neighbors have been calling the San Diego police for four years
Oh boy, does this bring back memories. South Park in the early 1980s...at that time many of the homes were still occupied by an aging WW II generation. A 30-something meth-head son of a woman next to the house we bought was living in her garage. The woman died and the "kid" moved into the house. Every tweaker-behavioral pattern you described was soon on full view, like a terrible but entrancing horror movie, running 24 hours a day. The yard filled up with mounds of junk; people pawed though the junk night and day. They fought, sometimes with strange instruments we learned were called "throwing stars." At that time, a cheap police band radio could be easily tuned to our police beat. We bought one, then started calling in fights between the tweakers. After realizing that police response to these fights wasn't going to result in permanent tweaker removal, we started tracking what the cops said to each other and how the dispatcher summarized our call and what was really prioritized. Bingo: stolen cars. With a good pair of binoculars, we started paying attention to the cars and license plates of people living in the garage, yard, house: Different plates, front and rear. No plates. Punched-out ignition. Expired registration. The calls to the police reported "suspicious people sitting in/driving/parking a car," plus make/model/plate info. This was what they needed. Almost always, makes didn't match plates or plates came back stolen. Outstanding warrants on car or owner. You would not believe the response. Multiple units. That put a big dent in the problem. Our beat cops really wanted to help, and gave us more tips. We got Code Compliance involved and Child Protective Services. It took a long time, and a willingness to go to court to testify, but the nightmare ended, finally. One thing: we were looked down on, as being too snoopy and not just minding our business, by quite a few live-and-let-live neighbors who weren't willing to help. We didn't know them well enough to understand why, but some of them were 60s generation, like us, and probably were recreational drug users and sort of anti-cop, stemming from the era of protest and heavy handed police response. That was just silly in our opinion, and we forged ahead alone. cont...— March 9, 2012 8:09 a.m.
Vargas Corporate Backers to be Fined for Hiding Identity
I love your extrapolation. Or interpolation. Whatever. Vargas is a dirty word. Why did the SD Democrats endorse him over Ducheny? Why? Why? Why?— March 7, 2012 7:11 p.m.
Vargas Corporate Backers to be Fined for Hiding Identity
Yes. Please give support Denise Ducheny, everyone, no matter where you live. Vargas in the US House is a horrible thought. Unless, of course, it might lead to a cell next to Randy Cunningham...— March 7, 2012 7:08 p.m.
Another Gandara Makes the News
I would be very slow to jump to conclusions over this. It's Texas. It is Texas! And Gandara is a Democrat. You must understand what that means and has been happening in Texas, for a very long time. Do NOT jump to conclusions. Fox News http://fox8.com/2012/02/24/police-el-paso-co-comm… is the only outlet broadcasting the story blatantly. That tells you something. And then there's this more enigmatic report: http://www.elpasotimes.com/news/ci_20041855— March 4, 2012 8:33 p.m.