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BACKGROUND ON SIERRA CLUB’S CLIMATE ACTION PLAN LAWSUIT(S) AGAINST THE COUNTY 

JP Theberge Since 2012, Sierra Club has been challenging the County’s Climate Action Plans as being inadequate to meet the state’s emissions mandates.Sierra Club has prevailed every time. This last ruling has implications on both our local air quality, climate and how we choose to grow as a County: infill-oriented, sustainable growth or inefficient, congestion-inducing sprawl in the highest risk wildfire areas of the County. This is an update of an earlier article to reflect the most recent ruling (June 2020) in favor of Sierra Club by the court of appeals.   READ MORE

FOLLOWING THE MONEY ON 101 ASH STREET AND HOW MAYOR FAULCONER FLEECED THE CITY BENEFITING HIS BIGGEST DONOR 

JP THEBERGE, Incredible investigative work1 by Dorian Hargrove and the NBC7 investigative team laid out how the Mayor’s office and other City of San Diego officials allowed a questionable land deal to go through that generated significant profits for politically connected and influential special interests while causing taxpayers to waste hundreds of millions of dollars. The lack of scrutiny of the deal by the mayor’s office, members of the City Council and the city attorney’s office raises a lot of big questions. While NBC’s very detailed coverage (and the myriad other articles) make reference to big political donors2 who benefited, we thought it would be good to dig a little deeper on the players to show how entrenched corporate interests (and particularly the real estate and development industry) are in local politics. When campaigns are involved, obtaining influence via campaign donations, lobbying and fundraisers is a sure way to get elected officials to give corporate interests special treatment, sometimes at the expense of the public good. Now is as good a time as ever to consider measures to increase transparency and limit the influence of corporate interests on our elected officials. READ MORE

SERIOUS FLAWS IN SANDAG'S PRELIMINARY REGIONAL GROWTH FORECAST; WAS IT MANIPULATED OR WAS IT AN ERROR 

JP THEBERGE, The lack of transparency and potential conflicts of interest in the development of SANDAGs latest regional growth forecast (RGF) has important implications to the future planning of the region. SANDAG’s committee to develop the Regional Growth Forecast spent almost a year developing a reasonably accurate housing forecast which took into account a reduced population and jobs prediction for 2050. However, immediately after presenting these initial findings, they convened a second “expert review panel” that included two building industry consultants from the same firm – known critics of the county general plan for smart growth. Following that meeting, the housing forecast was revised upwards by close to 330,000 units, exceeding all the general plan capacities of the region by using erroneous demographic assumptions discredited by demographic experts. Grow the San Diego Way has published a detailed investigative white paper outlining how this happened (online, interactive version here and printable PDF download here). For a summary of the paper, read further. READ MORE