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Mark Bartlett, Chula Vista City Council D1 | Candidate Profiles for the November 2018 Ballot

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Chula Vista is the second most populous city in San Diego County. With nearly 300,000 people, we are projected to grow immensely in the next coming decades. Chula Vista is also a city that is booming. Our city is coming back with a strong resurgence after a sluggish decade wherein budgetary decisions made by the previous administration had a direct impact leading to the downward trend.

New development and construction are cropping up across the city, and community leaders, as well as elected officials, know our city has a bright future. The Bayfront Project, Millenia Project, the potential four-year public university, and the flourishing of our Third Avenue Downtown center are just some of the city’s major growth activities.

We have quite a lot for which to be thankful; however, I would not be running for office if I saw everything as idyllic and perfect. Chula Vista, for all its strengths, has significant pitfalls that elected officials must address. We have a lack of public resources in our northeast corner of the city.

  [Read more…]

Center Cut Steakhouse: Chef Ramon takes Surf & Turf to Chula Vista

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You’ll love their plush booths that throw you back to the days when cuddling up and having a private conversation with your significant other was the best kind of evening. For the socially rambunctious who miss the days when dives were “the thing,” they also have a bar open from 6pm to 1:30pm.

The bar is what kept the establishment afloat until Chef Ramon Gomez came onto the scene. Center Cut Steakhouse is actually 25 years old. However, six years ago the original owner passed away. The restaurant then went through a series of owners.   [Read more…]

Largest Elementary School District in the State: Chula Vista

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Chula Vista Elementary School District (CVESD) is the state’s largest elementary school district (K-6) and good news: the CVESD outperformed its county and state counterparts in 2016 with 62% of students meeting or exceeding the standards in English. In math CV students scored 49% on average compared to the county’s 44% and the state’s 37%.

However, you’ll still want to be careful. In May 2016, shortly before the election primary, Larry Breitfelder-Navas and consultant Kenneth Moser filed a complaint with the Fair Political Practices Commission saying that three trustees: Eduardo Reyes, Leslie Bunker and Francisco Tamayo made campaign violations connected to reporting donations and spending during the 2014 school board election. Now careful. Breitfelder-Navas only named three Democratic trustees and Breitfelder-Navas is a Republican who ran for Chula Vista City Council in 2012.   [Read more…]

San Diegans Voice Concerns to State Officials About Air Quality, Environmental Justice, and Climate Change

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By David Harris / San Diego 350

What do you get when you bring together 120 environmental activists and residents from environmental justice communities in a room with a dozen state regulators? If you’re lucky, dozens of ideas for incentivizing renewable energy, improving public transit, and protecting neighborhoods from toxic industrial fumes.

This is exactly what happened on July 14th when the California Air Resources Board (CARB) sponsored a workshop on climate change at the beautiful new Cesar Chavez campus in Barrio Logan. Local residents, whose voices are rarely heard by policy makers in Sacramento, came out in force to speak out about air pollution from local industry, the need for better transit options, and the impacts of climate change on communities already impacted by poor air quality.
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The Great Eastern Expansion: Where Is The Plaza?

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By Barbara Zaragoza

City staff and developers envision a city that will include professors, engineers, highly trained athletes and international tourists. There will be new boutique shops, gourmet restaurants and a transit system to bring even more people to visit this bustling downtown. An explosion of binational trade is anticipated, since the border is only 2 miles away and executives will be able to go across the Tijuana bridge directly in and out of the Tijuana International Airport.

While talking to city officials and developers, I have found their excitement to be authentic. The hotels are certainly something community members in eastern Chula Vista have been waiting for, along with abundant local jobs and public transportation. But I’m a writer, not a marketer, and I have to ask myself: is there something wrong with this picture?   [Read more…]

The Millenia Project: San Diego County’s New Downtown

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By Barbara Zaragoza

Last week, I spent a lot of time explaining the vast expansion taking place in eastern Chula Vista. Eleven villages total mean about 60,000 new residents will move into the area within the next twenty years. So far, villages 1, 5 and 7 are built out. Village 2 is underway. That leaves villages 3, 4, 8, 9 and 10 still under development.

According to the Otay Ranch General Development Plan, the idea of the village was to “provide a sense of community and social cohesion in a “small town” way, and reduce dependence on the automobile for local trips.” (pg. 10)

Today, I want to go over the heart of the development called “Millenia.” This will become the center piece of Otay Ranch plan, a new downtown with an office & retail district.   [Read more…]

The Great Eastern Expansion Into Chula Vista

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Chula Vista Is Set To Have An Influx Of 60,000 Residents

By Barbara Zaragoza

For decades community groups such as Crossroads II have noted that the City of Chula Vista is nothing more than a bedroom community. They explain that developers came into the region, created a mass of housing, but didn’t provide residents with essential amenities, such as jobs, adequate big box stores such as Walmart, smaller retail shops, restaurants, parks or hotels. In Crossroads II’s 2016 Annual Report, they wrote, “Because of the lack of commercial development, Chula Vista is second from the bottom in terms of sales-tax revenues per resident in San Diego County.”

The Chula Vista City Council has attempted to change this bedroom community into a bustling city where local and international tourists come to shop, eat and play. They’ve done it by attracting developers to the open stretch of land located in eastern Chula Vista known as Otay Ranch. Now, within the next twenty years or so, Chula Vista anticipates more than 60,000 new residents will flood into the area, including university students, Olympic quality athletes and Google-type executives. Their goal is to transition eastern Chula Vista into becoming a dense urban environment that is state-of-the-art in technology and also environmentally sustainable.

Excited? Convinced?   [Read more…]

Candidates Summary for Chula Vista’s Struggling District 4

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By Barbara Zaragoza

I’ve been covering South Bay elections all week, but the most important in the June 7 primary is Chula Vista’s City Council seat for District 4.

In July 2015, the City Council approved 4 Districts for Chula Vista. That means Chula Vista residents will only be able to vote for people running within the boundaries of our specific districts. It also means our council representative must live in the District for which they are running.

Two District Seats are up for election in 2016: District 3 and District 4. Because only two candidates qualified for the District 3 elections–Steve Padilla and Jason Paguio–they will go directly to the November ballot.

That leaves District 4.   [Read more…]

Bonds are Like Manure: The Flood Gates are Opening

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By William Richter / Focus On Chula Vista

Bonds are basically huge loans which are advertised as needed to repair crucial infrastructure or build new construction but are, unfortunately, often misspent. Some misspending comes from gold-plated projects, and/or contractors who are able to change the costs easily after they get the contract. Regrettably, there is no accountability for the misspending after the money has already been spent and the elected officials have already moved on.   [Read more…]

Roger and Norma Cazares: ‘Action Matters’

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Norma and Roger Cazares together and individually have helped change San Diego. They usually share the same political views although there have been a few exceptions. Norma supported Hillary, Roger supported Obama. Once again they are split with Norma once again supporting Hillary and Roger supporting Bernie.

Roger says that he is totally amused with the Republican party. They’re destroying the Republican party similarly to what Pete Wilson did in California. He is concerned that we will not have a two party system. Roger believes this is dangerous. Both agree there needs to be a two party system in order to hold each other accountable. Roger says both Trump and Cruz have helped bring the closet racist out of the closet.   [Read more…]

The Rainmaker, Charles Hatfield, and the Flood of 1916

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By Patricia Maxwell

Today’s residents of Chula Vista have much in common with citizens of a hundred years ago. Make that a thousand years or more. Southern California has always been an arid land, with cycles of drought, interspersed with wet years every now and again. In December of 1915, San Diego’s city fathers tackled the issue from a completely different angle. They hired a rainmaker!

The impetus for their decision was the unfilled Morena Reservoir in the mountains sixty miles east of San Diego. A rock-filled dam had been completed in 1912, but the reservoir had yet to be filled beyond a third of its capacity. Other reservoirs in the area shared the same problem. None were filled and the city was growing.

The rainmaker, Mr. Charles Hatfield, said “I will fill the Morena Reservoir to overflowing between now and next December 20, 1916, for the sum of $10,000, in default of which I ask no compensation.”   [Read more…]

When Liquor Flowed in Chula Vista

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Steve Schoenherr / South Bay Compass

On May 1, 1933, you could finally get a drink in Chula Vista. From the day the city was founded in 1911, it was a dry town.

Ordinance No. 11 passed in 1912 prohibited the sale of liquor and no bars were allowed. Of course, during the prohibition era of the 1920s, there were illegal speakeasies along highway 101, the “Road to Hell,” and Tijuana was open night and day for anyone who could get across the border. But when state voters in Nov. 1932 (including Chula Vista voters) approved the repeal of California’s Wright Act, the state’s “Little Volstead” prohibition law, it opened the door for new business enterprises.   [Read more…]

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