Friends and Colleagues Come Out for Big Birthday Celebration
Thank you to everyone who joined my family, friends and colleagues for my giant 50th birthday celebration in Rancho Bernardo, with a special thanks to host and emcee Garett Michaels, DJ Drew Harlander, my wife Cory Hough and sister Jocelyn Hough, and presentations from John Biondolillo and Gary Meade, Jose Caballero and Steve Rivera, and Mike Hansen and Jeremy Pritchard. Additional thanks to Kelsey Cast and everyone at the Country Club at Rancho Bernardo, as well as photographers Deborah Gostin (who took the photo here), Perla Rosales, Javier Pastrana, and everyone who shared photos from this special night.
Union-Tribune Runs Del Mar Mesa Preserve Opinion Piece
My opinion piece on zoning changes to facilitate the construction of a multi-story, multi-structure office complex on an 11-acre parcel of land surrounded on three sides by the city-owned Del Mar Mesa Preserve appeared in the Oct. 2 edition of the San Diego Union-Tribune. Located far from transit, this needless project will result in a loss of habitat that will affect the preserve and its role as a wildlife corridor, enable an increase in invasive species, and further bite into our city's vanishing wildlands while doing nothing to advance our Climate Action Plan. Read more about this regrettable, unwelcome monument.
Revisiting My Grandfather's Labor Legacy
Last Labor Day, in the midst of my San Diego City Council campaign, I posted this essay about my grandfather's labor legacy with the United Steelworkers. A year later, I'm sharing it again, in part because my family found long lost photos of my grandfather following my dad's death in December. Plus, it serves as a nice reminder that weekends, child labor laws, health care, collective bargaining, paid sick leave, overtime, and so much more came about in the American workplace because workers demanded it as part of the labor movement. Good to remember on Labor Day or any day.
ReWild Mission Bay Coalition and Campaign
Thanks to San Diego media for covering the ReWild Mission Bay campaign and our ongoing effort to improve water quality, increase climate resiliency, preserve habitat, and enable greater public access to our bayfront as our coalition continues to demonstrate strong neighborhood support for our feasibility study and park revitalization proposals. Thanks to Times of San Diego, Fox 5 San Diego (KSWB), CBS 8 (KFMB), ABC 10 (KGTV) NBC 7 (KNSD) and KUSI, with special thanks to Council President Gómez, Council President Pro Tem Bry and Councilmember Moreno for their votes.
Thank You for Your Supporting Our 2018 San Diego City Council Race
I can't begin to express how proud I am of our 2018 campaign team, and how grateful I am to everyone who hoisted a sign, knocked on a door, made a call, told a friend about our effort or made a contribution. We were outspent 8 to 1, yet we won over 21,500 votes in a record showing for a Democrat in a D-6 race, and forced an entrenched GOP incumbent to spend more to defeat us than he spent to first win office. My final vote total exceeded even that of the winning council candidates in the D-4 and D-8 races. We may have come up short, but we kept it close – and that's because of you. I am not discouraged.
Broken Streets and Broken Promises in Mira Mesa
Thanks to Times of San Diego for running my piece on the disgraceful state of Gold Coast Drive in Mira Mesa in the wake of last winter's rains, which laid bare the city's legacy of infrastructure neglect. We've been told again and again plans are underway to rebuild Gold Coast Dr., in part due to my campaign making it an issue in 2018, but the emergency is now. The city should declare Gold Coast and other broken Mira Mesa streets like Parkdale, Port Royale and Carroll Rd. emergencies now that they've been further reduced to shock-breaking holes and soupy gravel unsafe for cars, transit or bicycles.
