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Legislating a Just Transition off Fossil Fuels: San Diego Champions Lead on Climate and Energy Policies

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By Gladys Limon / Executive Director of the California Environmental Justice Alliance

Californians are united in our commitment to transitioning the state’s power grid to renewable energy. A strong step in that direction was the passage of SB 100 (De León) into law, which sets a goal of transforming our state’s electricity grid to zero-carbon sources by 2045, with an upgrade to the 2030 goal from 50 percent renewables to 60 percent.

Many California cities, including San Diego, Del Mar, and Chula Vista have set their city targets at 100 percent renewable by 2035.

Now, the real work begins: equitably implementing the transition. We need follow-up state and city regulations to ensure that the communities overburdened by fossil-fuel pollution and climate change impacts have ready access to the economic and public health benefits of this transition.   [Read more…]

It’s Been a Big Year for Transportation, More Needs to Be Done | Readers Write

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By Mona Rios

It’s been a big year for transportation in the San Diego region. Major transit lines have opened up, the public has been exploring new transportation technologies, and our transportation governing agencies have been overhauled for the better.

The year started with a bang as Assembly Bill 805 went into effect in January. This bill, authored by Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher and signed by Governor Jerry Brown, brought needed changes to the Metropolitan Transit System (MTS) and the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG). It’s made our agencies more democratic, more representative of voters, and it provided more oversight of our tax dollars.

At MTS, it required the chairperson to be a democratically-elected official. The Board of MTS selected city of San Diego Councilmember Georgette Gomez as Chairperson and myself as Vice Chair. It’s been an honor to serve National City and the region as Vice Chair of MTS.

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Michelle Gomez, County Board of Supervisors District 5 | Candidate Profiles for the November 2018 Ballot

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By Michelle Gomez

For the last quarter of a century, our county governing body has been dominated by fiscal conservatives who have turned a blind eye to crisis level problems impacting county residents. They have simultaneously built a bank account which could rival that of some small nations.

Term limits enacted within the last five years are finally bringing an end to their lackluster legacies and progressives are in the driver seat to flip a historically red seat. One that holds a tremendous amount of influence over how our daily lives are led here in San Diego County.

Our Board of Supervisors can and should be a force for good, one that ensures access to health and human services, which addresses our lack of affordable housing, and which protects the natural beauty of this place we are so fortunate to call home.

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Paul Avrich’s An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre | A Review

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By Mel Freilicher

An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre
by Paul Avrich
AK Press, 2018

The self-professed group of anarchists who comprise AK Press, a worker-run collective which publishes and distributes radical books, visual and audio media, has done a great service by reissuing Paul Avrich’s fascinating study of an American original. As Robert Helms suggests in his instructive Foreword outlining Avrich’s own background and achievements as the premier scholar of American anarchism until his death in 2006, this author “succeeded in rescuing this brilliant and compelling person from near non-existence.”   [Read more…]

District Attorney Summer Stephan Must Apologize to San Diego’s Jewish Community

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On Monday night, District Attorney Summer Stephan attended the vigil at the Congregation Beth Israel for the victims of the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. She stood on stage and sat in the front row.

However, when asked by a reporter from Times of San Diego about the anti-Semitic website that her campaign launched attacking George Soros during the June primary election, Ms. Stephan refused to answer any questions or acknowledge the issue. 

As the leadership team of the campaign for Geneviéve Jones-Wright, the target of Ms. Stephan’s race-baiting and fear mongering, we watched in horror as the voters of San Diego fell for hateful scare tactics.

  [Read more…]

Gun Violence: ‘I Gotta Do Something. Anything.’

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By John White / San Diegans For Gun Violence Prevention

How many times have you told yourself that?

Did you tell yourself that after Sandy Hook, when gun violence took the lives of 20 children and six adults?

Or after Las Vegas, when a man with guns left 58 people dead and 851 injured?

Or after Parkland, when 14 high school students and three adults died because of guns in the hands of somebody who shouldn’t have had them?

Or after Tree of Life in Pittsburgh last week, when gun violence combined with anti-Semitism to kill 11 and injure six in a rampage described as one of the deadliest against the Jewish community in U.S. history?

When you’re finally able to put down the remote control and step away from social media for a minute, that sentence is still nagging you, isn’t it?   [Read more…]

Readers Write | Why I Support Nicole Jones for the Southwestern College Board of Trustees

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By Michael Flanders

I am proud to provide this endorsement of Nicole Jones for Seat 4 on the Southwestern College Board of Trustees. I’ve seen firsthand how she creates culturally sensitive programs at Cuyamaca College that both facilitate equal access and level the playing field for the college’s diverse population of students. She will be an exceptional Board Member for Southwestern College at a time when the future success of both the County and the State lies squarely in the hands of its community college leaders.

  [Read more…]

Veterans For Peace Oppose Proposed Limitations for D.C. Demonstrations

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By Veterans for Peace

Veterans For Peace (VFP) strongly opposes the National Park Service’s proposed limitations on the right to demonstrate near the White House and on the National Mall. This is a thinly veiled assault on our democracy by attempting to erect barriers to criticism of an administration that is systematically violating the rights of people to freedom, liberty, and justice.

With chapters in every state and veteran members from WWII to the current era, VFP is dedicated to building a culture of peace, exposing the true costs of war, and healing the wounds of war.   [Read more…]

Yes To Affordable Homes Now. Yes to Proposition 10 | Readers Write

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By Ignacio Hernandez V. / ACCE

Today, more Californians are paying more than half their income on rent. Every day, the number of families struggling to make ends meet increases. According to the Los Angeles Times, every 5 percent of rent increase in Los Angeles today leads to 2,000 people becoming homeless. Seniors, families, workers, teachers, and all others on fixed incomes who have lived in their homes for years are being forced out due to unscrupulous real estate speculators.

We need a solution — and that solution is voting Yes on Proposition 10.

Passing Prop. 10 this November 6 is an easy, fair, and necessary step to help tackle the affordable housing crisis. We need to give back the right of local communities to make rental policy that’s right for them, not just for corporate landlords. Our local communities need all the tools at their disposal to address skyrocketing housing costs.   [Read more…]

Black and Brown Families of Victims Unite on National Day Against Police Brutality

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By R. Zamora

In San Diego 897 people have been killed by law-enforcement since the 1950s. My cousin, Jonathon Coronel, is among these statistics. My cousin was unarmed and surrendered on the ground, yet still shot 22 times by San Diego Sheriff’s Deputy Christopher Villanueva.

As if riddling one body with 22 hollow-point bullets wasn’t terrorizing to our community enough, Christopher Villanueva tortured another human being to death, Sergio Weick, just eleven months prior to murdering Jonathon Coronel. Villanueva fired 26 gunshots onto Sergio Weick. Someone who is firing excessive shots, so excessive that he had to reload his gun, onto one human being clearly does not fear for his life but rather enjoys asserting his deadly power.

Officers like him have been empowered to continue their terrorizing behavior thanks to the District Attorney’s refusal to charge any officers that have overstepped their boundaries for murder. Between 2005 – 2015 there have been 155 police killings and all have been deemed “justified” by the District Attorney’s office. Summer Stephan is continuing this legacy by refusing to hold police officers accountable for illegal behavior, ultimately condoning the stripping of due process. She is expanding police officer’s role into one of judge, jury, and executioner.   [Read more…]

An American Traveler’s Experience with Europe’s ‘Failing Healthcare System’

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By Karin Brennan

One inattentive moment was all it took to alter a long-planned, three-week European vacation. On my first morning in Amsterdam, I missed a step when heading for breakfast in my hotel. The next thing I knew, I was on the tile floor, dazed and bleeding. I immediately knew it was not good and that a hospital visit was in my immediate future. But, in Amsterdam? What would this cost? What kind of care would I get? As a taxi took my husband and I to the closest hospital, I was more than a little apprehensive.

What follows is my firsthand experience with the (emergency) healthcare systems in the Netherlands and Germany.   [Read more…]

Longtime I.B. Resident Supports Paloma Aguirre for City Council | 2018 Candidate Profiles | Readers Write

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By Drew Douglas

My family lived five blocks from the ocean in the heart of Imperial Beach when I was born, and there I was raised for most of my formative years. Life in our beach town was always closely tied to the waves and the tides, and it still is. It defined much of my childhood. Skateboarding or riding our bikes to the beach wasn’t just a ritual, it was a luxury we took for granted.

Walking home from the beach on a sunny summer afternoon, wearing a bathing suit, draped in a towel, the warm sun on your skin still freckled with dried salt and sand from the ocean — this is quintessential Imperial Beach. But we have continually battled a constant threat to this tranquility. And it hasn’t just hampered our way of life, it has hindered the economic growth of the community.

They say “all politics are local” but too often we become so engrossed in national political spectacles that we forget about our own backyard. I spent many a summer and winter day on the beaches of I.B. swimming, bodyboarding, fishing with my father from the pier, climbing on the rocks of the jetties to watch the sunset with friends or just soaking up the sun in the sand.   [Read more…]

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