VOSD Podcast: No Silver Bullets

By Nate John, the Voice of San Diego

February 10, 2023

VOSD Podcast host Andrea Lopez-Villafaña brought in County Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer this week to get a temperature check for the Board of Supervisors.

The foremost issue in the region is homelessness. (Duh.) And that’s what most of this discussion was about.

“We have challenges,” Lawson-Remer said. Seniors comprise about 25 percent of our region’s homeless population. To that end, Lawson Remer says the County is pushing a pilot program to provide rent subsidies to seniors — an effort to stop them from becoming homeless in the first place, which is cheaper than pulling someone out of homelessness.

A conjoined issue with homelessness — for which the County is responsible — is behavioral health. We’re hurting for behavioral health workers, as Supervisor Nathan Fletcher explained in our Politifest panel on homelessness. And now, we’re on track to have 18,000 too few behavioral health workers by 2030, according to Lawson-Remer. To that end, she says the Board just allocated $15 million to “catalyze new growth” in that workforce.

In this interview, during the second half of the show, you’ll hear some of the biggest hurdles and newest ideas the County’s got as we look ahead to 2023. But if we’re talking CARE court, multi-million dollar partnership grants, or “live-well mobiles,” Lawson Remer’s firm on the fact that it’s all gonna be a slog. “No silver bullets.”

It’s our Birthday!

If Voice was a human, we could smoke, vote and get a tattoo. But instead we decided to update our mission statement and official “What We Stand For” doc. The tramp stamp will have to wait.

Our new mission: Investigative journalism for a better San Diego.

On the pod this week, Lopez-Villafaña along with cohosts Scott Lewis and Andrew Keatts discuss how we got here, what the mission means and how it drives our journalism.

Celebrate our birthday with a gift if you’re the gifty type.

Also On Deck…

Some big union news this week. The region’s largest police union in San Diego, the Deputy Sheriff’s Association, replaced its board president and VP following some internal complaints and grappling over workforce and “culture war”-type issues.

And on the education front, High Tech High approved its first union contract after more than a year of negotiations.

Lewis and Keatts also analyzed yet another signature gathering effort that’s (mostly) dead. The City Clerk and County Registrar say the effort to raise a parcel tax to fund parks and libraries has come up short. On the show, we explain how we got here and where this effort could go next.

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