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County Government Laid Bare

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Part I: Who knew the race for San Diego County Board of Supervisors could be so hidden, so mysterious?

County government leaders have gotten negative press lately with charges of complacency … neglect … elitism … callousness … and worse!  But that hasn’t stopped a vigorous set of candidates from vying for a seat on the tarnished Board of Supervisors.

What an intriguing mystery! It’s time for girl-crusader-for-good-government Nancy Drew to do some sleuthing.

She’s got five big questions about county government.  And she’s got a few question for the candidates whose eyes are glued on the June 2018 primary election.  All she wants are the facts, ma’am.   [Read more…]

Hierarchy of Elected Venerables

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You and I – as ordinary voters living in greater San Diego – have a mindnumbing number of opportunities to elect scads of people to serve as our public mouthpieces.

We routinely go to the polls or mail in our ballots to select the “public servants” we believe will represent our personal and community interests and improve our well-being.  Keeping up with who’s running for what is a daunting job.

In fact, if we built a totem pole made up of all our elected officials, it would surely reach the clouds, maybe even touch the sky.   [Read more…]

San Diego’s Dangling Participles

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Dangling participle – a piece of a sentence in search of its true identity.  Here’s an example: Sitting in the boss’s chair, deadly disease runs rampant among homeless people on the streets of San Diego.

What’s wrong with this sentence?  Something’s missing.  We can fix it this way: Sitting in the boss’s chair, Mayor Kevin Faulconer twiddles his thumbs while deadly disease runs rampant among homeless people….

An equally correct alternative might be: Sitting in the boss’s chair, the San Diego County Board of Supervisors lazily ignore their civic responsibilities as deadly disease runs rampant….   [Read more…]

San Diego’s Homelessness Calamity: You Have Just Entered the Twilight Zone

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Say what you want about the faraway White House. But watch what you say about City Hall and the people we elect to local government – they’re practically family.

They live in our neighborhoods. We have coffee with them when they’re running for office. We bump into them at the movies or supermarket. We could hop a trolley downtown and collar them at work. We elect them to work for us.

Their job is to pave the streets, limit what gets built on that empty lot around the corner, keep an eye on the police department, get the trash picked up, and make sure there are enough fire stations to keep us safe and good air-quality levels to keep us healthy and enough libraries and parks to help make us happy.   [Read more…]

Mayor, Mayor on the Wall

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We’ll start with a trick question: Is Mayor Kevin Faulconer the mirror image of President Donald Trump?  No, of course not! you’d probably say.

Kevin Faulconer is a pleasant, if unremarkable, go-along-to-get-along San Diego city councilman turned mayor:

“…born and raised in Oxnard California… learned to speak Spanish in grade school…  San Diego State University… member of the Kappa Sigma fraternity… one year as Student Body President of Associated Students. He and his wife Katherine, a small business owner, live in Point Loma with their two children. Before running for office… executive with the public relations firm NCG Porter Novelli and volunteered  on the Mission Bay Park Committee…” (see Wikipedia)

You might say that Kevin Faulconer is a lightweight Republican who goes down nice and easy in a city like San Diego.  He is decorum incarnate – never an unguarded sneer, never an unscripted rant.   [Read more…]

Ballot on Steroids: the Burden of Direct Democracy

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Norma Damashek / NumbersRunner

Still haven’t tackled those 31 propositions on your bloated November ballot? I counted 17 state, 2 county, and 12 city proposals on my sample ballot – enough to drive anyone nuts.

If you’ve been beating up on yourself for procrastinating – STOP! You are not the problem. The problem is the way we’re overusing and abusing the supercharged, direct-democracy ballot tools we call the initiative and the referendum.

Yes, let’s debate the value of representative democracy versus direct democracy. And weigh the pros and cons of ballot-box planning. Let’s juggle reform options for the signature-gathering process. And agonize over how to finance ballot initiatives and candidates. But let’s save it for another day.

Today, let’s get down to business, starting with some facts about ballot propositions:   [Read more…]

To the Victor Belong the Spoils

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Norma Damashek / NumbersRunner

Picture this: you’re at a crowded carnival. See that big beefy guy up on stage – the one with bulging pecs and thighs like a steel vise? Watch as he picks up that mallet, swings it high overhead, and smashes it down – smack on target. The bell at the top almost shatters with a ringing endorsement of this big tough guy. We all cheer.

Picture another carnival. Onstage is an international lineup of muscle-flexing politicians. See the iron-fisted man of steel Vladimir Putin? the vicious hanger-on Bashar al-Assad? how about the take-no-prisoners Kim Jong-un? And whoa! there’s a joker in the pack – the one with a muscle-bound mouth. Could it be the Donald, our very own wild card? Even he gets cheers.

Now picture a different carnival setting. Let’s make it city hall in sunny San Diego. Man-o-man, the politics on this stage are a feminist fantasy come true – not a grandstanding, fulminating, intimidating, testosterone-laden blowhard in sight (at least, not since Papa Doug Manchester pulled out at the U-T).   [Read more…]

San Diego is Led Around by the Nose

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How about taking a break from our city’s inane preoccupation with a behemoth sports palace for the San Diego Chargers?

And let’s give ourselves a break from the fiasco called a “Convadium,” a zany proposal to link a convention center annex to a new football stadium just down the street from our 18-acre ballpark. Talk about blocking pedestrian access! Talk about walling off the heart of downtown!
What self-respecting city in the USA would fall for such a ludicrous proposal?

So let’s NOT to take a break from simple questions like: Why are we even thinking about cramming a mammoth new football stadium into our modestly-proportioned, pedestrian-starved downtown streets? What rational person would want to do such a dumb thing to our city? Are we nuts, or what?   [Read more…]

A Well-Regulated City

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In my previous commentary, Poor Mayor Faulconer I used words like inconsequential… vacuous… lightweight… ineffectual… to describe San Diego’s current mayor.   Judging from readers’ responses, those adjectives seem to be right on target.

But the nagging question about how a political nonentity like Kevin Faulconer could run unopposed for a second term as mayor with nary a single qualified opponent willing to challenge him – has taken a new turn.

Gretchen Newsom ­– community activist, chairperson of the Ocean Beach town council, rejected contender for a temporary council appointment when Faulconer moved from his council office into the mayor’s office – shocked everyone at the recent County Democratic Party convention when she took the stage to declare that she would step into the void and challenge Faulconer in his run for reelection.   [Read more…]

Poor Mayor Faulconer

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By Norma Damashek

It’s enough to make you cringe, the way they toy with our mayor – those brawny Chargers/ Rams/ Raiders sports team owners, our insatiable hotel magnates, those downtown real estate purveyors, our Chamber of Commerce henchmen.  So many entitled guys diddling with our small-time politicians just for the fun of it, passing the time until they clinch their publicly-subsidized, taxpayer-financed killer deals.

But our mayor is a goodnatured sport.  He wears his what-me-worry grin even when he’s left flapping in the breeze, flailing like wet underwear strung up on the clothesline to dry.  One minute limp and aimless.  The next minute puffed up and billowing like a hot-air facsimile of a political contender hoping to score in big-boy Republican Party politics.

If presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is right about our country’s soul being captured by  mega-rich plutocrats bent on controlling the nation’s politics and economy, these megalomaniacs must have done their internships in San Diego.   [Read more…]

Progress, San Diego Style: Where More Gets You Less

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I’ve lived in San Diego long enough to remember what things were like “way back when.” And you know what? Not that much has changed!

True, there are more people living here than ever before. More restaurants and bars and multiplex theaters. More monotonous red roofs rimming bulldozed hilltops in the city’s north suburbs. Many more seals and sea lions hauling out on La Jolla beaches.

Also true is that nowadays you’ll find much more political clout embedded in the office of our mayor – a result of charter changes finalized five years ago. The new strong mayor governance system has great potential for making progress toward the goal of increasing the public good.   [Read more…]

Civic San Diego – Like a Hole in the Head

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By Norma Damashek

We need it like a loch im kopf.  A hole in the head.  It’s what people in the old days would say about a bad situation.  It’s what I say about Civic San Diego –the reincarnation of our former downtown redevelopment agency.

We need Civic San Diego like a hole in the head.  It’s time to get rid of it.

A quick backtrack:  It’s been three years since redevelopment agencies throughout California were terminated and instructed to wind downtheir uncompleted redevelopment projects and make good on their financial obligations.  Other cities complied by doing the job in-house, under public supervision.

Not so in San Diego.  To take care of the job in our city, former mayor Jerry Sanders created an unaccountable, autonomous corporation named Civic San Diego.   [Read more…]

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