Morning Report: Akilah Weber And La Mesa's Changing Politics

By Voice of San Diego, the Voice of San Diego

June 8, 2021

La Mesa and the rest of the state’s 79th District have a new representative in the Assembly, but that’s far from the only political change the East County suburb has seen over the last three years.

La Mesa went from a City Council governed mostly by Republicans to one without a single registered Republican, and a string of high-profile incidents have provoked long-running demands for police reform and accountability.

Akilah Weber’s rise in city leadership has coincided with this transformation, as VOSD contributor Bella Ross lays out in a new piece.

Weber is entering Sacramento politics “after helping lead a city of about 60,000 that became a microcosm of issues playing out across the nation during the Trump administration, making topics such as police reform almost impossible to avoid,” Ross writes.

And she has big shoes to fill: those of her mother, Secretary of State Shirley Weber, who preceded her in the seat.

“I told my daughter, ‘Understand this, you are going to inherit all of my friends and all of my enemies,’” Shirley Weber told us. “Let’s hope that my enemies are a smaller group than my friends.”

• The Union-Tribune, meanwhile, examined how La Mesa businesses are faring one year after the protests and riots.

Yellow Tier on the Horizon

Take a look at San Diego County’s dashboard of coronavirus stats and you’ll see nothing but green, indicating the county’s numbers are heading in a positive direction.

“On Tuesday the county reported a testing positivity rate average of 1.3% – a rate low enough to land us in the yellow tier,” NBC San Diego reports. “But in order to make it there, the county needs to report a similar average again this week.”

Next week is also when the tiers disappear. The governor pledged to eliminate the system and remaining restrictions by then as long as things are going well.

They’re going well: Today was the first day the county’s old dashboard of triggers showed all good check marks. Nothing is currently triggered, not even the pesky outbreaks limit that was the subject of our lawsuit.

Maybe we’ll get to switch to yellow for a minute right before the tiers disappear, just to say we did it. We want to retire in yellow like our other county friends.

Understanding Mexico’s Big Election

In terms of the number of open seats, Sunday marked Mexico’s biggest election ever.

In the latest Border Report, VOSD contributor Gustavo Solis breaks down some of the election dynamics to be aware of, including a devastating string of incidents of political violence that has plagued this cycle.

The race for governor of Baja California is an especially colorful one that includes the mayor of Mexicali, a gambling magnate who’s been caught with ammunition and an endangered white tiger at various points and a former Miss Universe who’s backed by an alliance of political parties. Preliminary results have Marina de Pilar Aviles Olmeda, the mayor of Mexicali who’s a member of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s MORENA party, in the lead.

In Other News

• Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton argues that a San Diego federal judge who compared assault rifles to Swiss Army knives in a recent ruling makes the case that judges shouldn’t get lifetime appointments. He refers to Judge Roger Benitez as “the gun lobby’s best friend in recent years.”
• The Cajon Valley school district plans to open all of its schools this summer for free enrichment programs, using federal CARES Act funds, NBC San Diego reports. The district was the first in the county to open its campuses to students last summer, which eventually drew the attention of the New York Times.
• A Wall Street Journal feature on North County beach towns begins with a pretty devastating burn against North County beach towns: “Legoland, Disneyland or La La Land. Visitors who head north from sunny San Diego are often aiming at a theme park or bigger city.”

The Morning Report was written by Sara Libby, and edited by Scott Lewis.

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