We thought we might have a year to breathe after the great Ballot Measure Blizzard of 2016. We were wrong. San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer this week submitted his official request to the City Council to put up a special election in November. His primary concern is a hotel-room tax increase to fund the expansion of the Convention Center. The bulk of the money would go to that. However, it's expected that a much smaller amount would fund road repair and homeless services. As we discuss in this week's podcast, this seems dangerous. While the Convention Center and streets effort have clear goals, the homeless funding does not. The mayor and council are playing with fire if they push hard for a tax for homeless services without identifiable goals and an exact plan for what the money would fund. If the new revenue stream passes, but the city doesn't make any significant dent in the homeless crisis playing out in the streets, it could poison future discussions on the need for new tax revenue to alleviate the problem. The mayor is essentially saying: We know we need a tax increase, we're just not sure what for right now. Cynically, it almost looks like it's meant to make sure the Convention Center expansion has a better shot. We'll see what the City Council does to clarify things. It also seems clear that the November ballot will include the SoccerCity plan. The measure would allow a development group to gain control of the city-owned land at Qualcomm Stadium and clear permitting obstacles for a large development of homes, an entertainment district and a riverfront park. Oh, and a stadium. We previously did an in-depth interview with Nick Stone, one of the leaders of the proposal. We pushed him on a number of the specifics. The group announced this week that it had gathered enough signatures and submitted them to the city for verification. If they're valid, the city can decide either approve it outright, or give voters the the chance to decide by pushing it to a special election. It's looking more and more likely that it ends up going to a special election. On this week's show, we also looked into Attorney General Jeff Sessions' warning to cities about cooperating with federal immigration enforcement efforts and heard out State Sen. Joel Anderson's views on SB 54, the bill law enforcement officers are warning would shield violent offenders from immigration authorities. Here's a different take. Ever so slowly, we're getting more sophisticated with the podcast. Editing it a little better and sharper. Highlighting sponsors. Making it a little cleaner. The effort seems to be showing. Downloads are increasing and we're meeting more and more people who value the show. If you have ideas for guests or topics we should include, email Scott Lewis at [email protected]. If you'd like to sponsor the show and also have your company, event or idea highlighted, email Erin Zlotnik at [email protected].

The Qualcomm Stadium site is up for grabs, and it's looking more and more like SoccerCity and San Diego State University are facing off over it. The group of private investors who floated the SoccerCity ballot initiative have hired a flock of signature-gatherers working to get voters' support. Meanwhile, SDSU this week presented Mayor Kevin Faulconer and the city with its list of needs and wants for the Qualcomm Stadium site, including the university's desire to buy a big part of it for use in 30 to 50 years. On this week's podcast, hosts Scott Lewis and Andrew Keatts dove in to what SDSU's big announcement means for the SoccerCity plan. The school hasn't exactly come out against the initiative, but school officials did make it clear their not satisfied with what's on the table. Aside from possibly weighing in on the merits of the SoccerCity initiative, which, if it's not approved by City Council, could go to a special election, San Diego voters may have another big decision to make come November. Lewis and Keatts talked about Faulconer's plan to ask for a special election so the city can try to pass a tax hike to fund an over $600 million bayfront expansion of the San Diego Convention Center. The tax hike would also be used to pay for homeless services and road repairs, but Lewis and Keatts think it's a risky political move since San Diegans who vote yes will likely expect to see big, quick visible improvements in roads and homelessness, and so far the city does not have one clear plan for how to get more people housed. What Is a Good California Republican? Where does a good Republican stand on issues like free trade and cross-border commerce? It's an interesting time for Republican politics, especially in California, where right-leaning politicians seem more disconnected from the mainstream party line than ever. Ron Nehring, former head of both the county and state Republican Party and spokesperson for Sen. Ted Cruz's presidential campaign, joined the podcast this week to talk about the current state of San Diego and California's Republican Party. He said the party needs a big booster shot in the form of a strong and likable Republican candidate for governor. "That governor candidate has to define our party and communicate in a way that appeals to the broad cross-section of a very, very diverse state," he said. Nehring said he thinks Faulconer could be that guy since he appeals to people who don't necessarily think of themselves as Republicans. Also on this week's podcast, Lewis and Keatts check in on the SANDAG situation and update listeners on local politicians' opposition to Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher's bill that proposes sweeping changes to the agency. Hero of the Week The 2017 World Baseball Classic gets a big pat on the back this week. Its exciting games won the hearts of baseball fans everywhere. At Petco Park Saturday night, the World Baseball Classic created an electric atmosphere that reminded fans of what the game and the stadium can be. Goat of the Week The San Diego City Council gets goated this week for its party-line vote rejecting a change to school board elections. Passing the proposal would have made San Diego Unified School District's elections work the same way City Council elections do, but those who opposed it said that's not important. Those same folks recently pushed and passed Measure K and said just six months ago that making elections consistent was indeed very important.

San Diego City Attorney Mara Elliott says anyone running vacation rentals in San Diego isn't allowed within the city's current zoning rules. In a memo released this week, Elliott clearly states that short-term vacation rentals are not allowed in residential or commercial areas. Her city attorney predecessors, however, said things weren't nearly as black and white. Councilman Chris Cate joined hosts Scott Lewis and Andrew Keatts and shared his reaction to the big short-term rental shift. He said he was taken aback by the opinion, partly because it was so blunt in saying the use is illegal without much attempt to explain why Elliott's two predecessors were wrong. A City Council committee will meet next Friday to discuss short-term rental rules, and Cate shared details of his proposal, which, among other things, would separate whole-home rentals and home-sharing and allow them but require permits and  fees that would help pay for enforcement. "Even if you ban them, you're still going to need the enforcement because otherwise they're going to go underground," he said. Gonzalez: Time to Reform SANDAG Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez joined the podcast this week to talk about the details of her SANDAG reform bill. Gonzalez introduced AB 805 after Voice of San Diego revealed that SANDAG leadership knowingly overstated how much money a sales tax hike would bring in and understated costs of transportation projects voters approved in 2004. The bill proposes sweeping changes to how the region's transportation planning agency makes decisions and would also change who audits the agency. Gonzalez said the VOSD series on SANDAG hammered home the need for a new leadership structure at the agency. "Where's the accountability here?" she said. "It's time to reform it. It's time to take it on and not pussyfoot around." Also on the podcast, the density battle over building new homes around new trolley stops rages on, and Lewis shared a story about his friendly beach encounter with local Syrian families, some of whom left the war-torn country just months ago. Hero of the Week The San Diego Hall of Champions sports memorabilia museum gets the nod this week for agreeing to move to Petco Park to make room for the new Comic-Con museum. No goat this week, sorry folks.

SANDAG's faulty economic forecast system, which the agency knew about but didn't acknowledge until after Andrew Keatts revealed the problem, isn't the only thing that's been obscured from public view. This week, Keatts reported that the agency in charge of regional transportation projects also hid the fact that the cost of the projects it promised to voters in the TransNet program have risen by about $8 billion. It's now clear that SANDAG's revenue projections were far too high and its estimated project costs far too low, which means there's now a $17 billion funding shortfall. In this week's podcast, hosts Scott Lewis and Keatts talk about SANDAG's botched numbers and what it could mean for the future of transportation in the region. SoccerCity Proposal Numbers and Its SDSU Problem The investors behind the SoccerCity proposal want to turn Qualcomm Stadium and the parking lot surrounding it into a mixed-use development that includes a joint-use Major League Soccer and San Diego State football stadium, housing, an entertainment district and a big river park. Among the plan's detractors is Carl DeMaio, a radio host who's been talking about how the plan would mean a measly $10,000 payment to the city for the Qualcomm Stadium site. Lewis looked into that claim, and found that while the $10,000 number is indeed in the plan, it's listed as the minimum amount the mayor could determine the land is worth. Keatts and Lewis also talked about the plan with Beau Lynott, who runs Kabeer Thirty, a website covering San Diego State Aztecs football. A big part of the discussion surrounding the proposal is focused on SDSU's desire for a bigger stadium than the one envisioned in the plan. "San Diego State can probably kill this if they walk away from this completely," Lynott said. Also on the show: Kirby Brady and Mark Cafferty of the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation discuss their recent report that says SoccerCity will give the region a $2.8 billion economic boost. Lewis also talked about his problem with news organizations that claim to be impartial and objective, and the hosts analyze a recent tiff between city attorney Mara Elliot and a few City Council members. Hero of the Week The city of San Diego and its auditor's office, which earlier this year looked at traffic and pedestrian fatalities and identified the most dangerous intersections, get a nod for identifying these problem places and pledging to fix them by this summer. Goat of the Week Yup. Yet again, San Diego Unified School District earns the Goat of the Week dig, this time for gutting its internal audit department, a strange move for an organization that needs a good oversight arm.

Home prices in San Diego are high, but that doesn't mean we're in the middle of a bubble that's about to burst – it's more complicated than that. Rich Toscano, a financial adviser and housing market analyst, joined hosts Scott Lewis and Andrew Keatts to explain. He broke down the strangeness that's happening in San Diego's housing market right now. "The especially interesting twist this time around is the interest rates are very low," Toscano said, "rendering monthly payments actually pretty reasonable." Toscano dug into the historically tenuous relationship between interest rates and mortgage rates and answered everyone's burning question when it comes to the housing market: Is it a good time to buy? Spoiler alert: There's no easy answer, but Toscano does get down to brass tacks. While prices are indeed a bit higher than they should be, it's not absolutely nuts to buy a house right now. Murders in San Diego Up Again Murder rates in San Diego are up for the third straight year in a row. Exactly 100 people were murdered in San Diego last year, a number that's been climbing since 2014. San Diego Union-Tibune reporter Lyndsay Winkley joined the podcast to talk about her story that puts the alarming numbers into context. For one thing, she said it's worth remembering that San Diego is still pretty darn safe, especially when compared with other cities its size. "San Diego still has the lowest murder rate among the top 10 biggest cities," she said. Winkley also explains that the number is confusing since other violent crime in the city has gone down. She added that crime statisticians are always quick to point out that the numbers don't always point to a trend. Also on the this week's podcast, Lewis reacted to a letter sent by the local YMCA that said the organization would be raising membership prices due to the hiked minimum wage. Keatts and Lewis also talk about the SoccerCity plan that seeks to remake the Qualcomm Stadium site. Hero of the Week The California Supreme Court ruled this week that public business conducted by government employees on their own private cell phones or from personal email accounts is still subject to public record requests. It's a big win for open government. Goat of the Week San Diego Unified gets the goat again for its continued refusal to provide clarity about what's getting cut and what parents can expect after district officials are done shaving over $120 million from next year's budget.

Details of the SoccerCity plan have been unveiled, and pieces of it are already being scrutinized. Nick Stone, partner with FS Investors, the group that wants to replace Qualcomm Stadium with a new joint-use soccer and San Diego State football stadium and develop new housing and entertainment on the adjacent land, joined podcast hosts Scott Lewis and Andrew Keatts this week to dig deep into the proposal. Lewis laid out three main groups likely to oppose the SoccerCity plan: NIMBYs and environmentalists, rival investors who want the same plot of property and political institutions with concerns about how the public land is developed. Stone addressed each potential challenge and answered big questions like why the deal is a long-term lease versus a purchase. He also addressed concerns about density, whether the deal is a public land grab and other issues that have come up, including SDSU's apprehensiveness. Stone said it's hard for him to see the SoccerCity deal as anything but a gift to SDSU. "What we're doing is giving them a stadium," he said. "They come out of that owning their game day revenues, minus their game day expenses, but only half of the operating cost, because we're staying on the hook for the other half. It is functionally exactly a gift." San Diego Unified's Struggles  San Diego Unified has to slash $124.4 million from next year's budget. As details of the cuts have emerged, the district has been doing a big public relations push to try to explain why the cuts are happening. In a recent interview with NBC 7 San Diego, district Superintendent Cindy Marten characterized the budget cuts as a "long-term structural deficit." Lewis and Keatts analyze that claim, plus question whether the proposed cuts are, in fact, the type of permanent fixes that would solve the district's structural problems. Also on this podcast, Lewis can't get over these pictures of Rep. Darrell Issa serving coffee at a local Starbucks. Hero of the Week Discovering new planets is cool, which is why UCSD physics professor Adam Burgasser and his team at the school's Center for Astrophysics & Space Sciences get a big thumbs-up for their role in spotting seven Earth-sized exoplanets orbiting a nearby star. Goat of the Week National City Mayor Ron Morrison, at a Council meeting, voted in favor of asking SANDAG to investigate the agency's burgeoning forecasting scandal, but not before he noted that most of the seven board members who requested an investigation were newly appointed to SANDAG's board. It's true: Many of them are newly elected. Yet Morrison ignored the flip side of his observation: Most of the board members who had stayed silent on the issue were on the board when the scandal took place.

The term "sanctuary city" is a dangerous misnomer. Living in a city that's named itself a sanctuary city does not, in fact, mean undocumented people are safe from deportation. On this week's episode, hosts Scott Lewis and Andrew Keatts explore what elected officials in California are saying about sanctuary cities and what's actually happening in the places where it sounds like undocumented people are shielded and protected. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's San Diego Field Office, for example, deported 23,729 people last year. Of those, just 10,872 had criminal convictions. San Diego's been called a sanctuary city, yet clearly the term is quite misleading for those who actually have to worry about being deported. Six Degrees of Fake News Lewis offers his hot take on the whole fake news thing, breaking down six different categories of fake news. There's real fake news that's actually been purposely fabricated, then there's real news stories that people are simply labeling fake, but there are a few stories that fall somewhere in between. Journalists make mistakes, for example, but those stories, which are later corrected or retracted by the original source, can quickly spread across the internet like wildfire, taking the falsehoods along for the ride. Trickling Down From Trump President Donald Trump tapped Alexander Acosta as his new pick to head the Department of Labor. The announcement came just a day after Andy Puzder withdrew from consideration. Clare Crawford, the executive director of the Center on Policy Initiatives, and Peter Callstrom, the CEO and president of the San Diego Workforce Partnership, also joined Lewis and Keatts this week to talk about the ways in which San Diegans could feel the impact of major idealogical and philosophical changes at the Department of Labor, a federal organization meant to protect workers. "It's a new day," Callstrom said. "We'll see what the new nominee brings, but we need people who are fighting for workers ... to help people go from where they are to where they can be." Also in the podcast, Lewis talks about the joy and hilarity of coaching tee-ball and the city gets a big thumbs up for its drop in crime rate. Hero of the Week Jamie Wilson, the parent of a teenage boy who had DNA samples taken by San Diego Police Department officers, is speaking out against the SDPD policy that seemingly skirts a state law meant to prevent officers from doing DNA swabs of juveniles without parent permission. Goat of the Week San Diego County Supervisor Bill Horn gets a big ol' goat for this whopper of a quote in a KPBS story this week: "If climate change is bringing us all this rain, I'm all for it."

The San Diego Association of Governments knowingly misled voters with its Measure A ballot proposal. Earlier this week, Andrew Keatts uncovered revealing emails from SANDAG's chief economist that showed the agency's executives knew about a problem with their forecasting model almost a year before they put Measure A, a sales tax hike to fund transportation projects, on the November ballot. Rather than taking the problem to SANDAG's board, the agency's management kept using the $18 billion number they now admit was way off. That $18 billion number is important, by the way, because SANDAG used it to come up with the long list of transportation and open space projects it dangled in front of voters in November. Keatts gets super fired up in this week's podcast as he and cohost Scott Lewis distill the big SANDAG news. Nonprofit Exec: San Diego Leaders Aren't Doing Enough for Refugees There's a lot of new energy and interest related to San Diego's refugee population since President Donald Trump's controversial travel ban. But Ramla Sahid, executive director of the nonprofit Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans, said San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer and other elected local leaders have yet to react to the refugee ban as passionately as other people in the community. "We don't see folks like Kevin Faulconer stepping up to the plate and saying, 'These are our neighbors, these are our community members,'" Sahid said. "As a city we [should make a] commitment to protect and ensure that they feel welcome. I think that's a missed opportunity and we just need to call that out." PANA is a relatively new nonprofit that serves refugees through research, public policy and community organizing. Sahid joined Lewis and Keatts this week to talk about the issues facing the estimated 82,000 refugees who've resettled in San Diego since 1975. Also on the podcast, Lewis has become the go-to "cannabis forum moderator guy." He said his jaw drops when he looks out in the crowd at these forums and sees the economic mania surrounding the budding industry as potential investors try to ensure they get their piece of the pot pie. Hero of the Week On Monday, Faulconer and Tijuana’s new mayor Juan Manuel Gastélum stood side by side at a press conference to tout the benefits of binational collaboration. It's a good start, but the pair will likely have to do a lot more than hold a press conference in the future if they want to ensure that the region's binational economy doesn't get disrupted. Goat of the Week The impending budget cuts at San Diego Unified are getting real as local schools and district staff are making moves to start slashing costs.  The district gets the goat this week for not leaning into the problem earlier on, and instead pretty much doing the opposite.

The dust the Chargers kicked up on their way out of town has barely begun to settle, but San Diego has already moved on to the next big thing: soccer. The new pitch for the future of the Qualcomm Stadium site has something for everyone – a joint-use soccer and San Diego State football stadium, an entertainment district, housing and a huge new riverfront park. What's not to like? On this week's podcast, hosts Scott Lewis and Andrew Keatts come up with a few things folks should consider before the city green-lights selling a giant swath of city land to a group of private investors. They also play some clips from a talk they had with Mike Stone, one of the principals of the investment group behind the pitch. Stone explained the role his investment group will play. Part of what they'll be doing, he said, is leasing parts of the land to other developers. "We'll serve as the very high-level master developer," he said. "But there are a lot of guys out there who want to develop parcels on this, so we're going to entitle them and allow people to compete for that." Also on the podcast, Lewis attempts to defend his controversial take on tomato-less sandwiches, and the duo discusses their rationale behind giving goats a bad name. Hero of the Week Fifth Avenue Books in Hillcrest gets the honor this week for hanging in as long as it did. The bookstore has been in business for 30 years, but it's closing its doors at the end of the month. Goat of the Week San Diego Unified gets the goat yet again, this time for missing local hiring targets.

VOSD Managing Editor Sara Libby and Annie Heilbrunn of the Union-Tribune discuss the Super Bowl and the plight of the lady football fan.