San Diego News Fix

President Donald Trump arrived in San Diego today, kicking off an hours-long visit that began with a downtown fundraiser and will end with a quick tour of the border. The trip is his second to the city in 18 months and follows an April visit to the border city of Calexico.

Get up to speed about recent Supreme Court rulings, new immigration policies and the challenges asylum seekers face.

San Diego activists on Monday called for San Clemente High in Orange County to apologize for racial slurs they say were targeted at Lincoln High students at a football game Friday night. Both the Capistrano Unified School District and Lincoln High School said they each are conducting investigations into the allegations. Capistrano Unified spokesman Ryan Burris said Monday his district is reviewing about eight hours of video footage from the stadium, culling social media posts about the event and interviewing students. He expects that will take until about Wednesday or Thursday to complete, he said. Story: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/education/story/2019-09-16/activists-want-san-clemente-high-to-apologize-after-alleged-racial-slurs-against-lincoln-students

Amid increasing public sentiment for gun control legislation, Mayor Kevin Faulconer withheld his support from a citywide firearms safety measure. The San Diego Safe Storage of Firearms Ordinance was approved by the City Council in July and took effect Thursday. The measure requires guns in homes to be stored in a locked container or disabled by a trigger lock unless they are being carried by or are under the control of the owner or authorized user. It became law without the mayor’s signature. City Attorney Mara Elliott proposed the ordinance, saying it would guard against accidental shootings and keep guns out of the hands of children, people not allowed to have them and “individuals going through personal crises.” Column: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/columnists/story/2019-09-12/column-why-faulconer-laid-low-on-san-diegos-gun-storage-law

San Diego County is one step away from a form of rent control for the first time in its history. A statewide measure that would limit yearly rent increases to 5 percent, plus inflation, passed the state Assembly on Wednesday and the state Senate earlier this week. It now goes to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk where he is expected to sign it into law. While the law is a big deal for all of California — becoming only the second state to have a statewide rent cap — it also could be a seismic change for San Diego. America’s Finest City is one of the few large cities in the state not to have any form of rent control, and the county also has no laws for stopping skyrocketing rents. If signed by Newsom, the law would go into effect Jan. 1. Story: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/real-estate/story/2019-09-11/statewide-rent-cap-appears-likely-to-become-law-would-be-a-first-for-san-diego

City leaders have set in motion a 30-year plan for Mission Valley that flips the region’s focus from its roads to the San Diego River and the trolley system. It simultaneously creates room for 50,000 additional residents and 7 million more square feet of commercial development. Tuesday, the City Council voted unanimously to adopt the Mission Valley Community Plan Update and certify the associated environmental impact report. The approval is the last needed in a process that dates to 2015, when city planners first teamed with community members to come up with a new framework for Mission Valley. The land-use and policy document also cleared without a hiccup the city’s Land Use & Housing Committee and the Planning Commission earlier in the summer.

Rep. Susan Davis' retirement in the 53rd District came as a surprise last week, but her friends and political foes agree-- she was a beacon of civility who got things done for San Diego. Story: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/politics/story/2019-09-07/susan-davis-retiring-career-retrospective

The looming threat of a grocery store strike throughout Southern California was dissolving Monday as workers began voting on a new employment contract that appears to appease all parties. Clerks and other grocery staff from Ralphs, Vons and Albertsons are casting votes Monday through Wednesday on the new deal brokered over the weekend between the stores and the workers’ union, United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). Roughly 47,000 members of seven union chapters across Southern California and parts of Central California are eligible to vote on the new three-year contract. Worker sentiment appears strongly positive on the deal, which secured a bump in wages, healthcare benefits and pension contributions.

Assemblyman Todd Gloria leads Councilwoman Barbara Bry by more than a two-to-one margin among likely voters in the race to become San Diego’s next mayor, according to a Union-Tribune/10 News poll released Friday. Gloria leads Bry by a margin of 31 percent to 15 percent, with community activist Tasha Williamson receiving 8 percent support. The three candidates – all Democrats – are seeking to replace Republican Mayor Kevin Faulconer next year. With six months until the March 2020 primary, 46 percent of likely voters are undecided. That’s partly because 39 percent of those polled say they have no opinion yet of Bry, and 23 percent don’t yet have an opinion of Gloria.

The San Diego Fire-Rescue Department has a chronic understaffing problem. Now it has a plan of attack: It aims to add more than 200 firefighters over the next five years. The idea is to offset employees retiring or otherwise leaving the department and to create a relief pool of workers who can fill in for firefighters who call in sick or go on vacation, in an effort to trim skyrocketing overtime costs. But will the hiring spree solve the staffing shortage?

Shannon Glover came from England to San Diego almost 30 years ago for a uniquely American reason: She fell in love with Tom Cruise and “Top Gun.” Now she’s in a dispute that pits the country of her birth against the one she calls home. Her homeowner’s association in Carmel Valley has ordered her to stop flying the British flag, the Union Jack, outside her house. “Only the American flag is permitted,” the Notice of Violation says.

After a year of declines, gang-related crime in San Diego has spiked in recent months with the city logging twice as many homicides as the same time last year and 20 percent more gang-related crimes overall. A spate of shootings, retaliation attacks and other crimes has put the raw number of gang-related crimes this year far ahead of the number through July 2018. Police statistics show there were 463 gang-related crimes committed through June, up from 385 during the same period last year. That increase of 78 crimes is reflected in nearly all categories. https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/public-safety/story/2019-09-02/gang-crimes-spike-in-san-diego

If you have been working in San Diego County for the last decade and feel like you are in worse financial shape now, there might be a reason for that. Sluggish wage growth, exacerbated by rising housing costs, have eroded workers' buying power.Taking into account yearly inflation — which considers the cost of such things as housing, gasoline and food — overall wages in the county have increased just 2 percent from 2008 to 2018. That's according to an analysis by the San Diego Union-Tribune of data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Read more: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com//business/economy/story/2019-08-30/san-diego-restaurant-workers-see-wages-climb

Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment has opened a new gaming studio in Carlsbad, joining a bubbling hub of developers in the region working on mobile titles. WB Games is best known for its DC and Harry Potter games, including the recent augmented reality title Wizards Unite. Game of Thrones: Conquest is one of the studio’s bigger hits, grossing $214 million in revenue as of May. The new studio, which is making free-to-play mobile games, is hiring new workers across “all disciplines,” from art and design to business and engineering, said Tom Casey, the vice president and studio head at WB Games in Boston. Casey will also be leading the San Diego team. The studio has 15 job openings listed on its website. Read the story: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/technology/story/2019-08-27/warner-bros-opens-ncarlsbad-game-studio

A new Union-Tribune analysis of public disclosures related to Ricardo Lara’s successful campaign for state insurance commissioner shows that he accepted more donations from interested parties than was previously known. Lara collected at least $270,000 from 56 different people and companies with ties to the department he now oversees, according to a recent, more thorough examination of contributions reported to the Secretary of State. In some cases, the money came directly from insurers like Aflac or Blue Shield of California. In others, donations came from bail agents regulated by the department.

In the wealthy La Playa enclave of Shelter Island a handful of small piers dot the secluded coastline, relics of a different World War II-era bay. They have offered their upland homeowners, generation after generation, an uncommon San Diego privilege: Backyard parking for their boats. Now the Port of San Diego, which technically owns the piers because they are on public tidelands, is threatening to strip the benefit away as part of its Port Master Plan Update. The piers that start near the Talbot Street entrance to the La Playa Trail and end near Kellogg Beach must be made entirely public or torn down, the document states. Right now, people can walk out on the piers until they reach gates that restrict access to the private floating docks at the end. Only one, the La Playa Yacht Club Pier, can remain as is, meaning partially open to passersby but otherwise restricted to permitted users. Story: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/growth-development/story/2019-08-24/la-playa-docks-dredging-up-big-cont

Welcome to the golden age of scams. Scouring social media accounts and hacked databases for personal information, criminals have created new tools to attack the unwary. While investigators still see phishing attacks, the scattershot come-ons often vaguely addressed to “Dear Sir/Madam,” an increasing number of fraudsters favor “spear phishing,” scams that target individuals with frightening precision.

This month, farmers are reaping San Diego County’s 2019 hop harvest, thousands of pounds of Cascade, Chinook, Cashmere and other varietals. The entire crop is sold out and customers eagerly await shipments of the fragrant conical hop flowers, which look like leafy green cotton balls. Story: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/lifestyle/people/story/2019-08-17/experts-say-san-diego-county-is-not-hop-country-tell-that-to-local-hop-farmers

The Trump Administration is planning on ending limits on child detention of migrants caught at the border. The Flores agreement is a 1997 court settlement that sets rules for how the government must provide a minimum standard of care for children in custody, and prevents the government from keeping them indefinitely. The Trump Administration's new rules will be formally published Friday, and will be challenged in court.

County Democrats have made their decision on an endorsement in the 2020 Mayoral Race: It’s Assemblyman Todd Gloria. The move was key, as it is likely the next San Diego mayor will be a Democrat, and that party has a significant registration advantage. Gloria is expected to face off against fellow Democrat Barbara Bry in the 2020 general election. As of now, there’s no Republican candidate.