Morning Report: Could San Diego's Largest Project Address The City's Biggest Crisis?

By Voice of San Diego, the Voice of San Diego

October 18, 2022

The San Diego City Council on Tuesday discussed their goals for the redevelopment of the city’s downtown civic core, six blocks in and around City Hall.

Those blocks include the recently-acquired (and controversy-plagued) 101 Ash St. and Civic Center Plaza buildings plus crumbing City Hall and City Operations buildings. The city has projected those four buildings collectively need more than $260 million in repairs.

The state of the city’s shoddy assets helped inspire what city leaders and boosters hope will be a massive facelift to the city’s center.

The project is also quite possibly one of the city’s most challenging infrastructure and land-use projects yet. And on top of that, council members made it clear that homelessness and housing should be top priorities for how the city moves forward with the project.

The redevelopment must follow the state’s Surplus Land Act, which requires a minimum of 25 percent of the proposed housing to be affordable. That means the housing must be affordable to San Diegans making no more than 80 percent of the city’s area median income – or roughly $104,100 for a family of four.

Councilman Stephen Whitburn said during the meeting that shelter beds should be the No. 1 priority, adding that prioritizing homelessness would be the “make or break issue” for him.

“How are we going to get people off the streets if there’s nowhere for them to go?” Whitburn said. “This is our chance to fix that.”

Councilwoman Marni von Wilpert called for a new homeless service navigation center as part of the project. She was critical of the current facility — a shuttered indoor skydiving building turned homeless service hub.

But City Council President Sean Elo-Rivera said a navigation center wouldn’t be the best use of the land.

Mayor Todd Gloria created a Civic Center Revitalization Committee last month that will provide input to the council on how to redevelop the area. Their final recommendations are expected to be presented to the council at the end of the year.

Environment Report: Energy Bills Are Slated to Rise, Again

According to a filing at the California Public Utilities Commission last week, San Diego Gas and Electric wants to raise its price per kilowatt hour of energy by 20 percent. That amounts to about a $23 monthly increase on the average residential energy bill.

It’s precisely what San Diego’s local publicly-run power companies warned a few months ago: SDG&E bills would spike again come 2023.

That’s what San Diego Community Power and Clean Energy Alliance argued after the company did the opposite, lowered rates, a move those public power companies said was deceptive at the time.

Read the Environment Report here.

In Other News

• It’s been nearly a year since an underaged girl told San Diego police that she was gang raped by members of the San Diego State University football team at a party off campus. The Union-Tribune reports that prosecutors have not filed charges. We recently wrote about the case too, and brokedown how the university ended up on the sideline of the investigation.
• The U-T also got some polling numbers on Measure B, which if passed, would allow the City Council to study and impose a special fee for trash service to all city residents. The polling had some mixed results on the mention of fees, though.
• Orange County is getting ready to stabilize a stretch of railroad tracks disrupting rail service. Train service to San Diego has been suspended since last month for Amtrak and MetroLink. (Times of San Diego)
• Poway Unified School District had hundreds of students call out sick with flu-like symptoms. Only 15 students tested positive for COVID as of Monday, school officials said. This comes a few days after Patrick Henry High School reported hundreds of respiratory illness cases among its students. (Fox 5)
• That Greater White-Fronted Goose that everyone is talking about was likely confused, experts said, when it landed on the field during Wednesday’s Dodgers-Padres game. (Kansas City Star)

The Morning Report was written by MacKenzie Elmer, Tigist Layne, Lisa Halverstadt and Andrea Lopez-Villafaña.

Voice of San Diego is a nonprofit news organization supported by our members. We reveal why things are the way they are and expose facts that people in power might not want out there and explain complex local public policy issues so you can be engaged and make good decisions. Sign up for our newsletters at voiceofsandiego.org/newsletters/.