San Diego, CA

Morning Report: Council Narrowly Overrides Some – Not All – Mayoral Vetoes

Published

8 months ago

June 24, 2025

Morning Report: Council Narrowly Overrides Some – Not All – Mayoral Vetoes

The San Diego City Council narrowly voted Monday to override some but not all of Mayor Todd Gloria’s moves to reverse changes to the city’s budget that the Council approved earlier this month.

After an initial failed attempt to bat back all of the mayor’s proposed line-item vetoes, a six-member majority voted to accept Gloria’s push not to count on $3 million in projected revenue from digital billboards the city doesn’t now have to balance the budget.

They also nixed a plan to hire a new chief operating officer who would take back duties that the mayor has taken on since he fired ex-top city bureaucrat Eric Dargan.

Other Council concessions: The 6-3 majority also voted not to restore Arts, Culture and Community Festivals grant funding that community leaders rallied to bring back and to partially reduce funding for stormwater projects and new Fire-Rescue positions meant to increase the city’s brush fire prevention efforts.

What a Council majority wouldn’t change: The City Council is sticking by revenue assumptions for paid parking at Balboa Park and at the San Diego Zoo, and for credit card transaction fees on parking meters. It’s also sticking with its plan to move staffers now in the Office of Race and Equity into the Office of the Independent Budget Analyst and to hire a new director. The budget the City Council approved also called for the elimination of two high-level city bureaucrats known as deputy chief operating officers who typically oversee multiple city departments and functions, two city communications positions and two management positions in the police and compliance departments.

Councilmembers Jennifer Campbell and Stephen Whitburn rejected these proposed changes while Vivian Moreno, who also rejected the budget the City Council approved on June 10, said she couldn’t support either proposal unless the city dramatically increased funding for stormwater projects.

What the mayor is saying: Gloria wants you to know that if things don’t pan out with budget projections, it’s the City Council’s fault.

“While the Council has now chosen to partially override certain vetoes, I remain concerned that these actions could still weaken our ability to stay on stable financial footing,” Gloria wrote in a statement shortly after the City Council vote. “If their assumptions don’t hold, they’ll be responsible for the fallout: midyear cuts, layoffs, facility closures, brownouts, and broken promises to the communities we all serve.”

What the Council’s saying: Council President Joe LaCava said immediately after the budget vote that he stands ready to schedule votes on budget changes as needed – and ahead of quarterly budget updates if necessary.

Before and during Monday’s vote, some councilmembers criticized the mayor’s line-item vetoes and argued Gloria was failing to respond to the demands of both the City Council and community members who spoke up at budget hearings.

Another Big COO Vote Coming Today

Former Chief Operating Officer Eric Dargan during a press conference at the O Lot Safe Sleeping site on the edge of Balboa Park and near the Naval Medical Center on Oct. 20, 2023. / Photo by Ariana Drehsler

Last month, our Lisa Halverstadt broke the news that the city’s former top bureaucrat, who Mayor Todd Gloria belatedly said he fired for cause, had reached a tentative $146,000 settlement with the city.

Today the City Council is set to vote on that proposed settlement, which is larger than the three months of severance that ex-COO Eric Dargan sought when he was abruptly dismissed in February.

The proposed settlement follows Dargan’s March discrimination lawsuit against the city alleging that Gloria reneged on a pledge to pay him three months’ severance after a dismissal – and an admission by Gloria’s office that he was fired rather than laid off.

In a report to the City Council about the proposed settlement, Assistant City Attorney Travis Phelps rejected the notion that the city was admitting it had mishandled the situation.

“The settlement is a business decision and the result of a compromise and dismissal of the litigation proceedings and is not an admission of liability by any party,” Phelps wrote. “(The) city and its representatives specifically disclaim any liability or responsibility to (the) plaintiff.”

Reminder: Under the city’s strong mayor form of government, a chief operating officer reporting to the mayor has typically overseen day-to-day city operations. After Dargan’s firing, Gloria took on that role in addition to his mayoral duties. The City Council has been skeptical of how this is working, hence an initial budget move to try to force Gloria to hire a replacement for Dargan. Gloria successfully batted back that change during Monday’s second City Council budget vote.

County Supe Votes to Watch Today

County supervisors are set to vote today on a proposed $8.6 billion budget.

The Union-Tribune noted that county officials pitched closing a projected $139 million shortfall by reducing capital spending and eliminating 190 positions, most of which are in the county’s Health and Human Services Agency.

The county board’s two Democrats last week highlighted county staff projections that the Trump administration-backed “Big Beautiful Bill” could cost the county $286 million annually.

On that note: Today, Democratic Supervisors Terra Lawson-Remer and Monica Montgomery Steppe will propose a plan to have county staff do a deeper dive on potential impacts and propose strategies to address those new costs, including potentially dipping into county reserves or seeking grants.

Refresher: The two Democrats’ proposal to make it easier to dip into the county’s large reserve fund failed earlier this year. The District 1 supervisors’ race will tip the political leanings of the county board, meaning the county is more likely to tap into its reserves if Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre is elected and likely kill it if Chula Vista Mayor John McCann wins the seat.

One more county vote: Supervisors Montgomery Steppe and Republican Joel Anderson are each more quietly proposing to spend up to $20,000 each from their office budgets to attend a six-day September Global Policy Leadership Academy field study on mixed-income housing in Vienna, Austria.

In a joint board letter, the two supervisors write that their participation in the LeSar Development Consultants trip will support county efforts to “increase affordable housing supply, reduce homelessness, and pursue sustainable development.”

“By authorizing this travel, the board will support Supervisor Anderson and Supervisor Montgomery Steppe in gaining valuable insights and learning best practices that can inform San Diego County’s efforts to increase affordable housing supply, reduce homelessness, and pursue sustainable development,” the letter reads.

What the supes are saying: Anderson declined to comment on the item, which will for now appear on the county’s consent agenda which is generally approved with little discussion. A spokesperson for Montgomery Steppe shared a statement that reiterated points in the board letter.

“Supervisor Anderson and Supervisor Montgomery Steppe were both invited to participate in this field study as panelists, sharing insights from San Diego’s housing efforts while learning from Vienna’s internationally recognized housing model,” spokesperson Ariel Gibbs wrote.

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In Other News

The Morning Report was written by Lisa Halverstadt and Andrea Sanchez-Villafaña. It was edited by Andrea Sanchez-Villafaña.

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San Diego, CA

San Diego Zoo Safari Park’s Elephant Valley: Get closer to elephants

Published

6 hours ago

March 2, 2026

Press Room

San Diego Zoo Safari Park’s Elephant Valley: Get closer to elephants

Todd Martens
| Los Angeles Times

San Diego — Before we see elephants at Elephant Valley in the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, we come face to face with destruction, only the wreckage is beautiful. A long, winding path takes guests around and under felled trees. Aged gray tree hunks form arches, for instance, over bridges that tower over clay-colored paths with hoof prints.

The design is meant to reorient us, to take us on a trail walked not by humans but traversed and carved by elephants, a creature still misunderstood, vilified and hunted for its cataclysmic-like ability to reshape land, and sometimes communities.

“It starts,” says Kristi Burtis, vice president of wildlife care for the Safari Park, “by telling the story that elephants are ecosystem engineers.”

Elephant Valley will open March 5 as the newest experience at the Escondido park, its aim to bring guests closer than ever to the zoo’s eight elephants, which range in age from 7 to 36, while more heavily focusing on conservation. The centerpiece of the 13-acre-plus parkland is a curved bridge overlooking a savanna, allowing elephants to walk under guests. But there are also nooks such as a cave that, while not previewed at a recent media event, will allow visitors to view elephants on their level.

In a shift from, say, the Safari Park’s popular tram tour, there are no fences and visible enclosures. Captive elephants remain a sometimes controversial topic, and the zoo’s herd is a mix of rescues and births, but the goal was to create a space where humans are at once removed and don’t impede on the relative free-roaming ability of the animals by keeping guests largely elevated. As an example of just how close people can get to the herd, there was a moment of levity at the event when one of the elephants began flinging what was believed to be a mixture of dirt and feces up onto the bridge.

“Our guests are going to be able to see the hairs on an elephant,” Burtis says. “They can see their eyes. They can see the eyelashes. They can see how muscular their trunks are. It’s really going to be a different experience.”

Elephant Valley, complete with a multistory lodge with open-air restaurants and bars, boasts a natural design that isn’t influenced by the elephant’s African home so much as it is in conversation with it. The goal isn’t to displace us, but to import communal artistry — Kenyan wood and beadwork can be found in the pathways, resting spaces and more — as a show of admiration rather than imitation.

“We’re not going to pretend that we’re taking people to Africa,” says Fri Forjindam, now a creative executive with Universal’s theme parks but previously a lead designer on Elephant Valley via her role as a chief development officer at Mycotoo, a Pasadena-based experiential design firm.

“That is a slippery slope of theming that can go wrong really fast,” she adds. “How do we recognize where we are right now, which is near San Diego? How do we populate this plane with plants that are indigenous to the region? The story of coexistence is important. We’re not extracting from Africa, we’re learning. We’re not extracting from elephants, we’re sharing information.”

But designing a space that is elephant-first yet also built for humans presented multiple challenges, especially when the collaborating teams were aiming to construct multiple narratives around the animals. Since meetings about Elephant Valley began around 2019, the staff worked to touch on themes related to migration and conservation. And there was also a desire to personalize the elephants.

“Where can we also highlight each of the elephants by name, so they aren’t just this huge herd of random gray creatures?” Forjindam says. “You see that in the lodge.”

That lodge, the Mkutano House — a phrase that means “gathering” in Swahili — should provide opportunities for guests to linger, although zoo representatives say reservations are recommended for those who wish to dine in the space (there will also be a walk-up, to-go window). Menus have yet to be released, but the ground floor of the structure, boasting hut-like roofing designed to blend into the environment, features close views of the elephant grazing pool as well as an indoor space with a centerpiece tree beneath constellation-like lighting to mimic sunrises and sunsets.

Throughout there are animal wood carvings and beadwork, the latter often hung from sculptures made of tree branches. The ceiling, outfitted with colorful, cloth tapestries designed to move with the wind, aims to create less friction between indoor and outdoor environments.

There are, of course, research and educational goals of the space as well. The Safari Park works, for instance, with the Northern Rangelands Trust and Loisaba Conservancy in Kenya, with an emphasis on studying human-elephant conflict and finding no-kill resolutions. Nonprofits and conservation groups estimate that there are today around 415,000 elephants in Africa, and the African savanna elephant is listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Studies of the zoo’s young elephants is shared with the Reteti Elephant Sanctuary in the hopes of delivering care to elephant youth to prevent orphanage. Additionally, the Safari Park has done extensive examination into the endotheliotropic herpes virus. “The data that we collect from elephants here, you can’t simply get from elephants in the wild,” Burtis says.

One of the two entrances to Elephant Valley is outfitted with bee boxes; bees are known to be a natural elephant deterrent and can help in preventing the animals from disrupting crops or communities. To encourage more natural behavior, the plane is outfitted with timed feeders in an attempt to encourage movement throughout the acreage and establish a level of real-life unpredictability in hunting for resources. Water areas have been redesigned with ramps and steps to make it easier for the elephants to navigate.

With Elephant Valley, Forjindam says the goal was to allow visitors to “observe safely in luxury — whatever that is — but not from a position of power, more as a cohabitor of the Earth, with as much natural elements as possible. It’s not to impose dominance. Ultimately, it needed to feel natural. It couldn’t feel like a man-made structure, which is an antiquated approach to any sort of safari experience where animals are the product, a prize. In this experience, this is the elephant’s home.”

And the resulting feel of Elephant Valley is that we, the paying customers, are simply their house guests.

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San Diego, CA

Man fatally struck by hit-and-run vehicle in San Diego

Published

18 hours ago

March 2, 2026

Press Room

Man fatally struck by hit-and-run vehicle in San Diego

A man in the Mission Bay Park community of San Diego was fatally struck Sunday morning by a hit-and run vehicle, authorities said.

The victim was also struck by a second vehicle and that motorist stayed at the scene to cooperate with officers, the San Diego Police Department reported.

The initial crash occurred at about 2:20 a.m. Sunday in the area of West Mission Bay and Sea World drives.

The pedestrian was in the southbound lanes of the 2000 block of West Mission Bay Drive when he was struck by a silver vehicle also in the southbound lanes. That vehicle fled the scene, continuing southbound, police said.

A 28-year-old man driving his vehicle southbound ran over the downed pedestrian.

“That driver remained at the scene and is not DUI,” according to a police statement. “The pedestrian was pronounced deceased at the scene.”

Anyone with information regarding the initial crash was urged to call Crime Stoppers at 888-580-8477.

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San Diego, CA

Here are the 9 San Diego County communities that set or tied heat records

Published

1 day ago

March 1, 2026

Press Room

Here are the 9 San Diego County communities that set or tied heat records

San Diego County is known for having wet, cold weather in February. But it had numerous hot spells this year. And when the month ended on Saturday a high pressure system produced heat that broke or tied temperature records in nine communities from the desert to the sea, the National Weather Service said.

The most notable temperature occurred in Borrego Springs, which reached 99, five degrees higher than the previous record for Feb. 28, set in 1986. The 99 reading is also the highest temperature ever recorded in Borrego in February.

Escondido reached 95, tying a record set in 1901.

El Cajon reached 92, three degrees higher than the record set in 2009.

Ramona topped out at 88, five degrees higher than the record set in 2009.

Alpine hit 88, four degrees higher the record set in 1986.

Campo reached 87, four degrees higher than the record set in 1999.

Vista hit 86, four degrees higher than the record set in 2020.

Chula Vista reached 84, one degree higher than the record set in 2020.

Lake Cuyamaca rose to 76, four degrees higher than the record set in 1986.

Forecasters say the weather is not likely to broadly produce new highs on Sunday. Cooler air is moving to the coast, and on Monday, San Diego’s high will only reach 67, a degree above normal.

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