San Diego, CA
San Diego’s cost-of-living committee led big policy fights in 2025. The City Council is ending it.
A year after creating a special committee on cost-of-living, the San Diego City Council is shutting it down.
Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera, who chaired the committee, said he was content to let it die as the council had plenty of work to do completing policy initiatives that started there.
The committee took on some of the most high profile and divisive issues that the city considered last year, such as the successful effort to increase the minimum wage for tourism workers to $25 starting in July 2026.
But it also operated just as city officials passed new and increased fees that added to residents’ cost of living. The city’s new monthly trash fee, hikes to parking rates around town and increased charges for using city facilities all hit residents’ bottom lines this year.
Elo-Rivera stood by approving those fees with one hand while trying to combat costs with the other.
“The cuts on the table that those fee increases mitigated or avoided — library, recreation center and park hours services — were things the community said they didn’t want cut,” he said. “The fees we established were the most fiscally responsible way to avoid those cuts.”
Elo-Rivera is still pushing two other cost-of-living initiatives that could pass in 2026. One is a joint effort with the county to ban landlords from charging hidden fees tacked on to rent. The other is a potential June ballot measure to impose a $5,000 per-bedroom tax on vacation rentals or second homes.
“I completely understand why someone would say, ‘If you want to fix the cost of living, don’t raise these other costs,’” Elo-Rivera said. “We proposed a vacation home tax for the specific purpose of having the things that city residents want and deserve, without the cost of that resource falling on the backs of middle class and working class San Diegans.”
San Diego this year also became the first city in the country to ban grocery stores from offering digital-only deals, another initiative that started at the committee.
Elo-Rivera said the fees the city passed this year “only made it more important to have urgency to address cost-of-living increases driven by corporate greed, those that are disproportionately felt by everyday people.”
Councilmembers Henry Foster III and Marni von Wilpert also served on the select committee. Elo-Rivera credited them for stepping up.
“Everyone wants to talk about affordability, but nobody wants to own it,” he said. “There’s a tension there, but those two weren’t afraid to stand next to this issue and wrestle it.”
San Diego, CA
SDPD investigating suspicious death
UNIVERSITY CITY (KGTV) — San Diego police are investigating the death of an 81-year-old woman who was found unresponsive in her apartment in the 6300 block of Genesee Avenue.
Officers and San Diego Fire-Rescue personnel responded to a 9-1-1 call at about 11:56 p.m. on March 6.
First responders found the woman in her bedroom, unresponsive and “positioned awkwardly on a bed.” Despite immediate life-saving efforts, she was pronounced dead at the scene.
Detectives from the San Diego Police Department’s Homicide Unit were called to the scene due to “unusual circumstances,” police said. The cause and manner of death remain undetermined.
Investigators are working with the San Diego County Medical Examiner’s Office to determine what happened.
Anyone with information is asked to call the Homicide Unit at (619) 531-2293 or Crime Stoppers at (888) 580-8477.
This story has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.
San Diego, CA
One killed in fiery three-vehicle crash on 805 freeway in San Diego
A person was killed Sunday in a fiery three-vehicle crash on the Jacob Dekema (805) Freeway in San Diego, authorities said.
The crash occurred at 4:22 a.m. Sunday on the northbound freeway south of Miramar Road, the California Highway Patrol reported.
At least one vehicle struck the center divider and caught fire, the CHP said.
The numbers one through five lanes of the northbound freeway were closed at 6:01 a.m. for an unknown duration.
No further information was immediately available.
San Diego, CA
Veterans weigh in on U.S. involvement in Iran
“It seems pointless. They change the reason for aggression against Iran daily,” Army Veteran, Forest Gray said.
Gray was among dozens of protestors who gathered at Memorial Community Park in Logan Heights Saturday calling for an end to the war in Iran.
Seeing the conflict play out is personal for him. Gray served eight years in the front lines in the Middle East.
“I fought in Iraq and you know, everyone wears the uniform, and gets deployed, we kind of expect and accept that we have to put our lives on the line, but ideally it should be a sense for a greater good. I don’t see what greater good there is here,” Gray said.
Gray is not alone.
Jonathan Chavez who served in the U.S. Marine Corps at Miramar Base in San Diego also disagrees with the U.S. involvement in Iran.
“No one wants these wars, no one has asked for these wars. Public opinion in this country is also very clear, the vast majority of Americans do not support these conflicts,” Chavez said.
Some Iranian Americans took a different stance last week, as hundreds took the streets of Clairemont.
“It was a feeling of euphoria knowing that my people are free, knowing that a dictator that has ruled Iran with iron fists for well over 37 years, has been killed, has been pushed out of the power and we can have a democratic Iran,” Bobby Shah told NBC 7.
Despite the sentiment, Saturday’s protest was hosted by an organization opposed to war in the Middle East.
They used signs and chants to make their stance clear: Stop the War in Iran.
Watching from a distance we found Marine Corps Veteran Chris Mondestin.
Even though he was not part of the protest, he also opposes the war saying the conflict should stay between Iran and Israel and the U.S. should stay out of it.
“It’s real scary. It’s real scary because I know there’s a lot of people that are truly against this war, but they don’t have much of a voice. That’s why I was kind of happy to see this, because we do have a voice. We just got to speak loud,” Mondestin said.
He also worries about the effects the war could have on the country’s safety, economy, and relationship with countries in the Middle East.
According to Iranian Diaspora Dashboard from UCLA’s Center of Near Eastern Studies, about 600,000 Iranians live in the U.S. and about half of them are in California.
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