San Diego, CA
What's open and closed on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in San Diego

Martin Luther King Jr. Day is observed on the third Monday in January, celebrating the life and legacy of the Civil Rights leader, as well as a commitment to service.
Here’s what services will be impacted in the county and city of San Diego.
No Delay in Trash Collection:
There will be a normal schedule for trash and recycling collection services on Monday within the City of San Diego. Residents in other cities should check with their waste service for holiday service schedules.
The Miramar Landfill, Greenery and Recycling Center will be open during normal hours, from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Container sales at 8353 Miramar Place will be closed.
Parking:
Time restrictions on on-street parking and yellow zones within the City of San Diego will not be enforced. Red, white and blue zones will still be enforced every day.
Be aware that parking on Port property and in different cities may vary.
Parks & Recreation:
- County parks, preserves and campgrounds will be open during normal business hours
- Balboa Park will be open, though all public buildings and museums in Balboa Park will be closed. The following will also be closed:
- Balboa Park Activity Center
- Botanical Building
- Municipal Gym
- Morley Field
- Check with individual museums and other park attractions for their holiday schedules
- Golf courses will be open, holiday rates will apply. Visit the golf course page for more information
- Chollas Lake will be open
- City reservoirs will be open at regular hours
- Mission Trails Regional Park and its Visitor Center will be open
- Tecolote Canyon Natural Park will be open
- Tecolote Nature Center will be closed
- All city recreation centers and city pools are closed
- All community centers are closed
- All city skateparks will be open
Facilities at Several County Parks will all be closed:
- The Valley Center Community Hall will be closed
- The Fallbrook Community Center will be closed
- The Lakeside Community Center will be closed
- The Spring Valley Community Center will be closed
- The Spring Valley Gym will be closed
- The 4S Ranch Recreation Office will be closed
- Community Teen Centers
Valley Center Community Hall and Adams Park Pool
Offices
- All Administrative Offices in the city of San Diego will be closed
- All County offices, family resource centers, libraries and animal shelters will all be closed
- The Testing, Employment Information Center and Background/Fingerprinting offices within the Personnel Department will also be closed
- The Family Justice Center will be closed. Individuals needing help with domestic violence should call 9-1-1 and/or the Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-888-385-4657
- Open Space and Maintenance Assessment District Offices will be closed
Public Safety
Police and fire emergency crews will not be impacted by the holiday. The citywide emergency dispatch center will be on duty.
Sheriff’s Department patrols, animal control emergency response and all essential services will continue.

San Diego, CA
Returning home: Shubhanshu Shukla to splash down off coast of San Diego | India News – Times of India

Indian astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla (Shux), who, along with three other Axiom-4 (Ax-4) crew members undocked from the International Space Station (ISS) at 4.45pm Monday, will return to Earth around 3pm Tuesday (July 15).“Ax-4 crew are on track to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere and splash down off the coast of San Diego… Dragon will also announce its arrival with a brief sonic boom prior to splashing down in the Pacific Ocean,” SpaceX said Tuesday. Ground teams are continuously monitoring Grace — the Dragon capsule Shukla and other astronauts are travelling in — and will give multiple “go”, “no-go” commands until the de-orbit burn, scheduled for around 2.07pm on Tuesday (July 15). Among other things, the teams will check for weather conditions to ensure that both the crew and the recovery teams are able to operate safely at the recovery site, off the coast of California.“Key weather parametres that teams will watch out for will be that there’s no rain or lightning at the recovery site. They would also look at the wind speed, which should not be more than 10 miles per hour,” an Axiom representative had said Monday.About 50 minutes after the de-orbit burn, Grace will deploy the drogue parachutes, a minute before deploying the main parachutes. As per current plan, Grace is expected to splashdown.Upon splashdown, recovery teams will reach the capsule, perform safety checks, and prepare it for lifting onto the ship using a hydraulic cradle. Once this is complete, the first medical checks are completed, following which the crew is transported back to land on a helicopter and taken for further medical evaluations, mission debriefs, and recovery procedures. During their time at the ISS, the Ax-4 crew performed more than 60 experiments from 31 countries, including India, US, Poland, Hungary, UAE, among others. Seven of these were led by Isro.US astronaut Nichole Ayers, part of the Expedition 73 crew currently aboard the International Space Station (ISS), posted photographs of her giving the Axiom-4 crew members, including Shubhanshu Shukla, haircuts at the orbital lab. In her post on X, she said: “We said goodbye to our Ax4 friends today [July 14]. I was just reminiscing on the haircuts from last weekend! After a long quarantine, I think it was nice for them. We joked about how I might have a future in the haircutting business when I get back on Earth, but the reviews are still out.”
San Diego, CA
How many middle managers does San Diego really need? City leaders remain at odds, despite their new budget.

The recent fight at San Diego City Hall over how many middle managers the city employs could signal the start of a shift away from such jobs in the future, after years of their ranks quickly growing.
The battle over middle managers, which emerged during controversial budget negotiations this spring, pitted Mayor Todd Gloria against city labor leaders — and eventually most of the City Council.
Labor leaders lobbied for sharp cuts to middle management positions so the city could lay off fewer front-line workers like librarians and parks maintenance staff in its effort to close a $350 million deficit.
The Municipal Employees Association stressed that there are more than five times as many high-paid middle managers known as “program coordinators” and “program managers” at the city as there were a decade ago.
During that same time, the MEA says, the overall city workforce has grown by only 20% — making middle managers a significantly larger portion of the city’s 13,000 employees.
Gloria and his staff don’t dispute those numbers, but they released a new study in May finding that middle managers make up a smaller percentage of city staff in San Diego than in most other large cities they analyzed.
According to their study, 8% of San Diego’s workforce are middle managers — a bigger share than in San Jose, Los Angeles and New York but smaller than in Dallas, Phoenix, Houston, Chicago and Austin.
Gloria’s staff also says the rise in such jobs has been necessary as the city has tackled more complex issues, expanded resident services and had to comply with more state and federal mandates.
“Growth, modernization and new programs often require the decision making, judgement and independent development of policies and procedures, and in some cases the creation of entire programs or entire departments,” said Gloria aide Alia Khouri. “These types of responsibilities are designated for unclassified management positions.”
Nearly all of the city’s middle management jobs are unclassified, meaning they are not part of the civil service system and the people in those jobs are not represented by a labor union.
The dispute over middle managers culminated last month with City Council members lobbying for cuts to those positions and eventually making some cuts themselves despite objections — and a formal veto — from Gloria.
The council cut two management jobs in the Communications Department and eliminated two of the city’s five deputy chief operating officer positions in a compromise budget it approved 7-2 on June 10.
It then reiterated its desire to cut those jobs when it overrode Gloria’s line-item veto, which had sought to restore all of those middle management jobs, in a 6-3 vote on June 23.
Gloria has so far declined to eliminate any of those management positions, even though the new fiscal year that the budget covers began July 1.
A spokesperson said the mayor does not plan to cut any positions or make any personnel decisions at the direction of the council.
“The mayor will continue making staffing decisions based on what’s needed to run a responsive and effective city government,” said the spokesperson, Rachel Laing.
She said the mayor will find cuts or savings elsewhere to cover the salaries of those workers. It’s not clear whether the council will challenge the mayor’s refusal to eliminate the jobs.
Mike Zucchet, MEA general manager, said this week that the council’s actions and the increased attention the council is giving to middle management jobs is still an important and fundamental change.
“It’s an unmistakable, seismic shift,” said Zucchet, praising other members for joining longtime middle-management critic Councilmember Vivian Moreno. “I think the level of scrutiny from the council will be much different — from the whole council, not just Councilmember Moreno.”
Since the battle began in the spring, Gloria has presented the council with many fewer requests than usual to create program manager and program coordinator positions, Zucchet said.
But the number of such jobs at the city, which typically pay between $200,000 and $250,000, has skyrocketed since fiscal year 2015 from 70 to 393 — up 461%. And the pace of the increase has accelerated, with more than 100 of those 393 positions created since fiscal 2023, Zucchet said.
“They love those positions,” Zucchet said of the mayor’s staff and city department heads. “You get to hire whoever you want, you don’t have to deal with any pesky rules, you get to pay them twice as much as you’d pay a classified employee and there’s not a lot of transparency as to what goes on with these positions.”
Khouri, a deputy chief operating officer who authored the new study comparing San Diego to other cities on middle managers, described an entirely different set of motives for the city’s hiring of so many middle managers in recent years.
San Diego needs so many because it is at the “forefront of a rapidly changing world” and is “home to innovative companies in the life science, biotechnology and research/manufacturing industries,” she said.
Governments must evolve to keep pace with the changes around them, Khouri said, and San Diego has recruited new talent in key areas to do that.
“This has primarily been enabled through the creation of new unclassified positions in the areas of data analytics, cybersecurity, cloud data storage, business intelligence, homelessness, climate change and resiliency, sustainability, mobility, talent acquisition, employee development and retention, veteran engagement and more,” she said.
Zucchet pushed back on her study’s finding that San Diego has comparatively few middle managers, contending the study is skewed by the comparison cities it uses.
Cities in Texas and Arizona have more unclassified jobs because municipal labor unions are less powerful in those states, but not all those jobs are middle management, he said. “We’re talking apples and oranges here,” he added.
He said the two most comparable cities to San Diego in the study, Los Angeles and San Jose, both employ significantly lower shares of middle managers — 6% in San Jose and 4% in L.A., compared to San Diego’s 8%.
“You could look at this study and say San Diego has twice as many as L.A. and 33% more than San Jose,” he said.
He pointed out that the mayor’s initial draft budget in April had proposed cutting 300 front-line positions, including librarians and recreation center assistant directors, and only one middle management position.
But Laing noted this week that the mayor had already consolidated some departments and made other changes last winter that reduced management staff.
”The mayor in February significantly trimmed management positions, consolidating departments to eliminate 31 management positions and $5 million from the city’s annual budget,” she said. “The mayor’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 further trimmed management positions in keeping with his commitment to optimal efficiency and fiscal responsibility.”
San Diego, CA
University of San Diego students help remove heavy metals from water

SAN DIEGO (KGTV) — While the product may look strange, Dr. Michel Boudrias is leading a team of students at University of San Diego with what might be the future of ocean cleanup.
“It smells like a like a fish market,” undergraduate student Nikki Cardino says. “But like not one that you wanna buy any fish from!”
That stench is the smell of success, if you ask the group.
After months submerged in Mission Bay or off the coast, the boom turns from bright white to muggy brown, and is filled with microplastics, hydrocarbons, heavy metals like copper and arsenic, and even invasive species.
“It’s one of the most effective ways of doing this,” Associate Professor of Environmental and Ocean Sciences at University San Diego Dr. Michel Boudrias says. “This is why the [Los Angeles] port and the marinas are very interested in working with us.”
Dr. Boudrias and his team of students is partnering with Earthwise to study how these sorbents can be a low-cost, and high-impact way to clean our water.
“It’s about cleaning up the oceans, makes sense that you have surfers and marine scientists working together,” Dr. Boudrias says.
One of his students is Gunner Kolon, a Texas native and University of San Diego graduate student, who found his passion for the ocean after getting his license to scuba dive at 12.
“When I came to San Diego it was a perfect opportunity to dive deeper into that passion and learn more and get into projects just like this.” Kolon says.
And this project, the team believes is just the beginning.
“This is going to end up in ports all across the world eventually,” Cardino says. “This is something that’s relatively inexpensive, it’s accessible and I think that is a huge part of what is gonna make this project work.”
Unlike cheaper, overseas-made versions, Earthwise’s booms are made in the U.S.
“The most important and I think that makes it different is that we’re not just putting it there and letting it happen,” Dr. Boudrias explains. “We’ve added the science piece.”
And for Dr. Boudrias, it’s about more than cleaning oceans, the research is also about building the next wave of ocean protectors and allowing students to become part of the larger San Diego ecosystem in the Blue Economy through workforce development.
“It’s a place for me to train my students and give them jobs and careers in the future,” Dr. Boudrias says.
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