Soiled Past: The Garbage Dump Hiding in Balboa Park
www.voiceofsandiego.org
SEPTEMBER 2012
Vol. 1 No. 5
Where Borrowing $105 Million Will Cost $1 Billion How the Poway Unified School District became California’s poster child for a form of exotic financing. BY WILL CARLESS Voice of San Diego is a member-based news organization. Join our community and get a subscription to this magazine. Learn more at vosd.org/join-members ▸▸
September 2012 Volume 1 Number 5
16 THE RACE FOR MAYOR
The Politics of Bob Filner’s Personality He says you’ll see a different Bob Filner if you elect him mayor. BY LIAM DILLON
10 SCHOOL FINANCING
Where Borrowing $105 Million Will Cost $1 Billion Poway has become the poster child for a form of exotic financing being used across California school districts that pushes today’s debts onto tomorrow’s taxpayers. BY WILL CARLESS
Inside 2 EDITOR’S NOTE | Andrew Donohue Changes for Me and VOSD
22 PUBLIC SPACES
The Garbage Dump Hiding in Balboa Park The most vexing of the many incursions and controversies in the park’s 143-year history. BY KELLY BENNETT
4 ON THE STREET
A Chief’s Flawed Warning | Keegan Kyle Filner Still Loves His Old Plan | Liam Dillon A Mindboggling Life | Kelly Bennett Big Hotels, Big Power | Liam Dillon
9 GRAPHIC | Keegan Kyle The Casualties of Wildlife Killers
33 FACT CHECK | Liam Dillon Filner Claims DeMaio Was Subpoenaed
35 COMMENTARY | Scott Lewis
Want Housing? Stadium? Maybe Bribe Neighborhoods
28 ENVIRONMENT
Shooting a Mountain Lion With a Name The secretive Wildlife Services has killed more than 18,700 animals in San Diego County since 2005. None has attracted as much attention as the mountain lion named M56. BY ROB DAVIS September 2012 VOSD MONTHLY
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Editor’s Note EDITOR
MOVING ON
Changes for Me and VOSD
M
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ORE THAN ONCE as a young journalist I got warned about trying to make a career of it in San Diego. The last, and most memorable, came in a smoky old casino bar in the heart of Costa Rica’s capital city, San Jose, in 2004. There I sat in that casino, sipping a beer with a reporter from one of the big American newspapers. I’d helped him on a story about presidential corruption erupting in Costa Rica. He picked my brain on what was next for me. After nearly a year working at a Spanish school in Costa Rica, I told him, I was ready to move back to the United States and get back into journalism. I told him I wanted to go back to San Diego. He half-laughed at me. If you want to do the kind of investigative reporting you’re telling me you want to do, you won’t be able to do it in San Diego, he said. “Well, you never know,” I said, “some group of smart people with money could get together and start a new publication.” The reporter set down his beer and full-laughed at me, the way a veteran reporter laughs at a naïve one. Then weeks later I got an email: Some group of smart people with money were getting together and starting a new publication. It would be called Voice of San Diego. It would be nonprofit. Online. And strive for meaningful investigative reporting and analysis. My naïve optimism had finally done me some good. I could do the kind of journalism I wanted to, and I could come to San Diego. As a young, single guy used to picking up and moving, it was a simple decision. I could take a risk on a new venture. I had no idea what awaited me. The idea of a local news startup, one that was nonprofit and webbased, was foreign. There was no YouTube, Facebook or Twitter. The main discussion around online news seemed to be simply whether you could trust it. Not too many people got what we were up to. We didn’t necessarily either. There was no high-minded talk of creating a whole new model of journalism. We just thought San Diego needed more journalism and better journalism. While I’d love to tell the whole story from there, and perhaps I will someday, the editor in me says it’s time to get to the point. Here’s the condensed version: Voice of San Diego had some early success breaking good stories. Then, newspapers’ economic models collapsed and suddenly we were thrust into the international eye as a potential future model for journalism. A wave of outlets like us followed. We continued to evolve, and we now push our content out through the web, print, television, radio, social media and live events. Now, it’s time for me to evolve. I’ve spent the last seven and a half years of my life in what’s felt like a marathon sprint covering San Diego and building this organization. I’m itching for a new challenge and have an idea I want to pursue.
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Andrew Donohue STAFF WRITERS
Kelly Bennett, Will Carless, Rob Davis, Liam Dillon, Keegan Kyle CREATIVE DIRECTOR
Ashley Lewis
CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER
Scott Lewis
VICE PRESIDENT, ADVANCEMENT & ENGAGEMENT
Mary Walter-Brown WEB EDITOR
Dagny Salas MEMBER MANAGER
Summer Polacek FOUNDERS
Buzz Woolley & Neil Morgan BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Blair Blum, Reid Carr, Bob Page, Bill Stensrud, Gail Stoorza-Gill
September 2012 | Volume 1 Number 5 Subscriptions and Reprints
VOSD members at the Speaking Up and Loud & Clear levels receive a complimentary subscription to Voice of San Diego Monthly magazine as a thank you for their support. Individual issues and reprints may be purchased on demand for $7.99 at vosd.org/vosd-mag. Digital editions are also available for $2.99.
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Thank you to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for supporting innovative journalism.
SAM HODGSON FOR VOSD
Editor’s Note Come September, I’ll move my young family up to Stanford University and spend the year in the John S. Knight fellowship program, which focuses on innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership in journalism. There, I’m going to be developing a model for producing investigative reporting projects that are open to the public from the start. We’ll also be enrolling in classes, taking advantage of what the university has to offer and tapping the vast intellectual capital in the Bay Area. At the end of it, I hope to emerge with a funded, functioning model in place and execute it either on my own or within an existing news organization. To do this, I’ve had to step down from my position as editor. It was as difficult of a decision as I’ve had to make in my life. We absolutely adore San Diego. VOSD has been my life’s work. I spend every day doing what I love with some of my best friends on earth. Two facts keep me from breaking down as I write this. First, I’ll continue to be involved with VOSD. As contributing editor, I’ll edit our major projects, provide big-picture guidance, put together this magazine and write a monthly piece of my own. Second, we hope and plan to end up back in San Diego. I always said I wouldn’t leave VOSD until it was an enduring institution. I believe it’s reached that point. The institutional fundraising structure that Scott Lewis and Mary Walter-Brown have built up over the last year gives us the sophisticated engine we need. Scott, aside from being a great friend, is an inspiring leader with a vision to keep taking VOSD to new heights. Their task is simple: build a community of paying members to sustain this public service over the long-haul. It’s not easy. We’re nearly eight years in and still experimenting with how to get it all figured out. But it is happening. And I believe it will continue to do so.
Andrew Donohue has been Voice of San Diego’s editor since 2005.
I grew up at VOSD. When we started, I was a kid. Now, I’m a husband and a father. We used to play football for an afternoon break. Now, our offices have walls and partitions. We still probably curse a bit too much. The most important thing I’ve gained from the first day of this operation is a faith in San Diegans. People dismissively warned that all the public wanted online was photos of Britney Spears (yes, that shows how long we’ve been at this) or surf reports. They thought San Diegans were too sun-soaked to invest in something like this. But VOSD readers have proven that San Diegans crave and value smart and creative coverage of quality of life issues. For that I thank you. Through your support, you’ve given a city a whole new voice. You’ve given the nation a new model for meaningful journalism. And you’ve given a group of journalists faith in their profession. San Diego’s media landscape as a whole looks a lot different than it did back in 2004. The Union-Tribune now has a new name and is on its third owner in that time. Yes, it’s lost talent
CONTACT THE EDITOR: andrew.donohue@voiceofsandiego.org
and numbers, but it’s got a dedicated Watchdog team. San Diego CityBeat is a must-read. NBC 7 San Diego has an investigative team. There’s real competition and that’s good for this city. Now, just as I did in 2003 when I left for Costa Rica, I’m well aware of what I’m leaving behind to pursue this new challenge. Now, just as then, I’m counting on my naïve optimism in what the future holds for me, for journalism and for my adopted hometown. And remember: we got jump-started by a small group of smart people with some money. But to continue to thrive, VOSD will need to be sustained by a large group of smart people who can pitch in even just a little.
ANDREW DONOHUE
Editor
September 2012 VOSD MONTHLY
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On the Street
MEETING OF THE MINDS A large crowd gathered for the latest installment of Voice of San Diego’s Meeting of the Minds arts and culture series atop the Westfield Horton Plaza parking structure.
HAPPENINGS
On the Street CRIME STATS
FOR YEARS, SAN DIEGO POLICE have been touting falling crime rates alongside their efforts to become a more efficient agency. But now, after a few months of rising crime, police say they need more money or crime will spike. It’s no small request from the cashstrapped city of San Diego. Police want an additional $66 million over the next five years to hire more officers and other staff, upgrade their equipment and repair facilities. And to support the need for this expense, police have been citing a recent shift in violent crime (murders, rapes, robberies and assaults). Between January and May this year, police reported 12.6 percent more crimes than the same period the previous year.
“It’s my professional belief that the crime rate will continue to rise.”
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“It’s starting to get away from us a little bit,” Police Chief Bill Lansdowne told a City Council committee in July. “It’s my professional belief that the crime rate will continue to rise.” While the department’s statistic accurately reflects its crime reports, the figure distorts broader crime trends in San Diego. In its push for more funding, police compared current crime levels against one of the most unusual periods in city history. The graphic above illustrates the number of violent crimes per month since January 2008. The areas shaded in blue represent the scope of the Police Department’s comparison, and
6 VOSD MONTHLY September 2012
700
450
200 2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
Source: Sandag
the areas shaded in gray represent the same five-month period in three previous years. The big takeaway: The five-month period in 2011 that police are comparing this year’s numbers to marked one of the lowest periods of violent crime in years. If you compare the current year to 2008 or 2009, crime has gone down. If you compare it to 2010, crime is nearly the same. Criminologists generally discourage comparing crime over short periods like the Police Department did. They put more weight behind annual totals since crime can fluctuate radically in a matter of months. If you compare violent crime over the past year like criminologists often do, the Police Department’s warning to the City Council evaporates. In the past 12 months, police reported 5,359 violent crimes. In the 12 months before that, they reported 5,392 crimes. So between the two years, crime decreased slightly. It didn’t go up.
— Keegan Kyle
FLIP FLOP
Filner Still Loves His Old Plan BOB FILNER JUST CAN’T GIVE UP on his pension plan. “I propose refinancing our debt,” Filner said at a downtown Kiwanis Club of San Diego meeting in early August. “I save $500 million in 10 years. No new taxes. Five hundred million dollars. That’s a lot of money. Why don’t we do it?” Filner’s comments are curious because, as of the week before that, he wasn’t supposed to say things like this anymore. In the primary, Filner made a big deal out of his idea to borrow money
“I’m refinancing a $1 billion debt at 3 percent lower interest rates. I think we’d be silly not to do it.”
SAM HODGSON, KEEGAN KYLE FOR VOSD
A Chief’s Flawed Warning
Number of Violent Crimes in San Diego Per Month
QUOTE OF THE MONTH
“Yes, San Diego got a park in 1868, but from that day forward the question of whether or not we can keep it has been on the table.” — University of San Diego law professor Nancy Carol Carter, speaking about Balboa Park.
from Wall Street to finance the city’s pension debt and ostensibly save money. The financing is known as pension obligation bonds. But after he advanced to the general election, Filner embraced Proposition B, the voter-approved pension initiative, which among other things, gives most new city workers 401(k)s instead of guaranteed pensions. In a strange turn of events on July 30, Filner reaffirmed his support for pension bonds in an interview, only to have his campaign dismiss the plan hours later as “no longer relevant” given his support for Prop. B. So if you’re keeping score, in the space of eight days, Filner was for pension bonds, against pension bonds and for them again. “I’m refinancing a $1 billion debt at 3 percent lower interest rates,” Filner said at that Kiwanis event. “I think we’d be silly not to do it.”
— Liam Dillon
FROM THE VAULT
A Mindboggling Life HE THOUGHT he may have been poisoned when furtively working for Boris Yeltsin in Russia. He found spiritual enlightenment on the site of ancient Mayan ruins in Mexico. And now he’s working to defeat Bob Filner’s bid for mayor. Political operative George Gorton is returning to San Diego mayoral politics for the November campaign. The news caught our attention, because Andrew Donohue and I spent a fascinating few months in 2008 unraveling Gorton’s outrageous life story. Here’s a snippet: He’d clawed back from Watergate and plotted the triumphs of San Diego’s most famous politician, a man who’d
Number of the Month
248 Acres of Balboa Park land, of the original 1,400, taken over by private uses or roads by 1963.
be mayor, senator, governor and even presidential candidate, Pete Wilson. He’d become the international political consultant extraordinaire, very secretly pulling the strings in some of the world’s youngest democracies, invisibly sweeping Russian President Boris Yeltsin across the finish line and quietly greeting Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega to plot the Central American nation’s future. He’d authored the real-life story that transformed Arnold Schwarzenegger from a movie star into a political force. Along the way, he helped orchestrate some of politics’ most divisive campaigns: Richard Nixon’s 1972 reelection bid and the 1994 passage of Proposition 187, which denied social services to illegal immigrants. And when he wasn’t hoisting others into positions of extreme power, he was off in some hidden corner of the world, learning Toltec traditions in Teotihuacan or Buddhism in Thailand. … He wonders, too, if he even has traditional Parkinson’s. He’s had creeping suspicions that he was poisoned in Russia. For the full story, read “From San Diego to Moscow: George Gorton’s
Strange and Wild Assignments” at http://vosd.org/NmTVtA.
— Kelly Bennett
AVOIDING A VOTE
Big Hotels, Big Power Big hotels have a lot of power in San Diego. In the spring, just three giant hotel companies, including two based in Maryland, likely controlled the fate of the Convention Center expansion vote even though guests staying at every hotel in the city will pay higher taxes to finance it. The plan will raise about $35 million a year. Now the 183 hotels with 70 rooms or more are planning to force visitors staying at the 600-700 other visitor properties in San Diego, down to oneroom vacation rentals, to pay higher fees. And just like the Convention Center expansion, the hotels are going to try to implement the new fee through a secret election. All together, the proposals would send more than $2 billion toward convention and marketing efforts over the next four decades. The money, supporters say, will fuel San Diego tourism, which benefits the city’s bottom line generally. The entire process springs from the city’s attempt to figure out a way to raise taxes and fees on visitors without a vote of the people through what’s known as the Tourism Marketing District. The district, created in 2008, charges an extra 2 percent on guests’ bills for those staying at large hotels. The money from this fee goes toward marketing the city and helping finance tourist-targeted events, such as college football bowl games and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon. Supporters want to renew it for another 40 years. September 2012 VOSD MONTHLY
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HAPPENINGS
On the Street
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The deal faces a higher hurdle than it did when it was first created since California voters have since made it more difficult to raise taxes. In order to make it comply with that law, supporters say, anyone who might get a customer through the district’s marketing efforts has to help pay for it. That would make it an assessment, not a tax. The decision will add 600 to 700 properties to the district’s assessment rolls, dwarfing the 183 that now are part of the district. All these new properties don’t have much of a say about their inclusion. The election rules don’t give them much power. It’s not one vote per hotel. Instead, properties will receive votes based on
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Just like the Convention Center expansion, the hotels are going to try to implement the new fee through a secret election. how much their guests would pay to the district. So votes controlled by the large hotels dwarf the smaller ones. The two mayoral candidates vying to replace Mayor Jerry Sanders have pledged not to authorize any secret votes, like this one, while in office. Congressman Bob Filner said in an interview that he was opposed to the secret vote and the whole concept of
the district. “This is disgraceful,” Filner said. “This would never happen if I’m mayor. One, you don’t have a secret vote. But two, you have to go to the vote of the people on a tax.” Carl DeMaio strongly supports the district as proposed. Still, he said in an interview that the vote allocation should be made public. But DeMaio did not commit to voting against the district if the election remains secret. Instead, he said he’d push for a transparent vote. “I will be continuing our discussions with the industry and letting them know that that’s the outcome I desire,” DeMaio said.
— Liam Dillon
SAM HODGSON, KEEGAN KYLE FOR VOSD
The San Diego Convention Center
GRAPHIC
The Hunted
A
SECRETIVE federal agency has killed about 18,700 animals in San Diego County since 2005 but won’t answer basic questions about its activities. Our Rob Davis has been pushing the agency for more information as part of a rolling investigation. In the meantime, I wanted to illustrate what kinds of animals the agency has killed here.
— Keegan Kyle
THE CASUALTIES OF WILDLIFE KILLERS
4,946 SQUIRRELS
ABOUT THIS GRAPHIC: The area of each circle below is scaled to illustrate the number of animals killed in San Diego County by Wildlife Services since 2005. 251 MICE
290 BIRDS OF PREY
175 PIGEONS, MOURNING DOVES
346 CATS 3,342 CROWS, RAVENS
112 HERONS 55 RABBITS
414 SONGBIRDS
55 SNAKES 54 BEAVERS
466 RACCOONS
3,246 WATERBIRDS
43 DOGS 34 FOXES
659 SHOREBIRDS
26 WEASELS
1,464 COYOTES
26 BOBCATS 15 HOGS
693 SKUNKS
14 TURKEYS 7 MOUNTAIN LIONS 6 MULE DEER 2 FLAMINGOS
838 OPOSSUMS
1,133 RATS
1 ALLIGATOR Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture
September 2012 VOSD MONTHLY
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“This is a perfect example of how something that’s done today can adversely affect the next generation and the generation after that.” — Dan McAllister, San Diego County treasurer and tax collector.
BIG SPENDER
Where Borrowing $105 Million Will Cost $1 Billion Poway has become the poster child for a form of exotic financing being used across California school districts that pushes today’s debts onto tomorrow’s taxpayers. BY WILL CARLESS
L
AST YEAR THE POWAY UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT made a deal: It borrowed $105 million from investors to fund a final push in its decade-long effort to revamp aging schools. In many ways, the deal was unspectacular. Some of the money was used to pay off previous debts from delayed and over-budget construction projects. The rest went towards finishing upgrades that Poway taxpayers had been promised as far back as 2002. To a casual observer, it was just another school bond. But Poway Unified’s deal was far from normal. In 2008, voters had given the district permission to borrow more money to finish its modernization, and they had received a big promise from the elected school board in return: No tax increases. Without increasing taxes, the district couldn’t afford to borrow money in the conventional way. So, instead of borrowing from investors over 20 or 30 years and paying the debt down each year, like a mortgage, the district got creative. With advice from an Orange County financial consultant, the district borrowed the money over 40 years in a controversial loan called a capital appreciation bond. The key point for the district: It won’t make any payments on the debt for 20 years. And that means the district’s debt will keep getting bigger and bigger as interest on the loan piles up.