The San Diego County budget leaped to the forefront of the race to fill a vacant South County seat on the County Board of Supervisors on Wednesday.

Chula Vista Mayor John McCann, the Republican in the race, staged an early morning press conference to decry a recent proposal by board Democrats tap up to $355 million in rainy day funds to prepare for possible federal cuts to Medicaid and other programs.

McCann said the Democrats’ proposal, which comes at time when the county already faces a $140 million budget deficit, “turns our emergency fund into a slush fund…We need to stop ignoring the real problem, which is too much spending.”

McCann and Republican Supervisor Jim Desmond, who also spoke at the press conference, identified several county programs they’d target for elimination before tapping reserves: A $7.5 million expenditure on free phone calls for jail inmates, a $5 million program providing free legal services to undocumented immigrants and the county’s recently created Office of Racial Equity and Justice.

Board Democrats Terra Lawson-Remer and Monica Montgomery Steppe have emphasized that their reserve proposal is intended only to prepare for future budget emergencies, not power new government spending.

But McCann and Desmond said the proposal shows Democrats are not being prudent with taxpayers’ money. “Instead of spending on pointless projects, we need to prioritize the county’s core services,” McCann said. “Reserves [are] meant to fight wildfires and respond to true emergencies, not for political issues.”

The Trump card: McCann’s Democratic opponent, Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre, immediately slapped back at the call for cuts with a sharply worded statement accusing McCann of “doubling down on the Republican MAGA plan to slash funding for Medi-Cal and children’s nutrition programs South County families rely on most.”

The slam echoed previous efforts Aguirre has made to tie McCann to unpopular Trump administration policies. But McCann said he has never proposed cutting either Medi-Cal or child nutrition spending and called himself a “strong advocate” for both programs. He reiterated his support for fully funding both, he said, as recently as an April 30 Head Start event in Chula Vista.

Asked to explain the Trump link, Aguirre’s campaign consultant, Dan Rottenstreich, acknowledged that, in fact, it was county budget staff who proposed reducing the number of county employees who enroll people in state healthcare and food programs, not McCann.

But Rottenstreich argued that McCann’s opposition to Democrats’ budget reserve proposal, along with a related proposal to delay the budget vote until after the Supervisor election, amounted to implicit support for the Medi-Cal staff reduction.

Divergent priorities: The clash over the reserve proposal highlighted the sharply divergent views at stake in the supervisor race.

McCann said that, under Democratic leadership, the Board of Supervisors had strayed from the county’s core mission, piling up extraneous programs and running the county into a budgetary ditch.

“Everyone wants government to do everything,” he said. “But…local government needs to focus on core services.”

McCann said he had kept Chula Vista’s budget balanced for years without staff or service cuts by “focusing on the core mission of the city and not going off on all these other issues that cost money.”

Aguirre on Wednesday framed the problem in opposite  terms. “The county doesn’t lack for resources,” she said. “It lacks the political will to take action.”

Aguirre said tapping the county’s reserves would enable long-needed investment in parts of the county that had been ignored for years. The county, she said, “has done next to nothing to end chronic neglect of our community. And it’s not putting tax dollars where they’re needed most – fixing the [Tijuana River] sewage crisis and helping people afford to live here.”

The post County Budget Muscles Into Supervisor Race appeared first on Voice of San Diego.

Seven years ago, Jerry Hobbs, a Grossmont Union High School District teacher, resigned after officials launched an investigation into allegations he’d engaged in misconduct.  

Years later, Hobbs was hired as a paralegal for a law firm that ended up doing work for the district. That work included conducting an investigation into Hobbs’ former boss, the person who launched an investigation into him. Hobbs worked on that investigation, which concluded he’d been a victim of retaliation. 

A settlement agreement he helped draft then cleared the way for his rehiring at Grossmont – and district officials wasted no time. They hired him the month after the agreement to serve in a lofty administrative role, even as the district’s deteriorating financial position led to job cuts. 

Now, in a leaked memo, the law firm at which he worked suggests he deceptively altered that settlement without their knowledge, adding potentially “illegal,” language. 

As Grossmont’s community continues to be roiled by controversial layoffs, the saga has added fuel to the fire. 

An Investigation Leads to a Settlement 

In 2018, Grossmont Union High School District began investigating Hobbs, then a teacher at the district’s REACH Academy, a special education school in El Cajon. He later resigned. 

Exactly what district officials were investigating is unclear. But he insists the allegations against him were unfounded and he said an investigation by the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing into the 2018 situation did not find any grounds to discipline him. The commission’s website shows he has not been disciplined. 

After his resignation, Hobbs went on to work as a paralegal at JW Howard Attorneys, a local law firm whose connection with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made headlines.  

In July 2024, Grossmont’s board hired JW Howard Attorneys to conduct an internal investigation into allegations that Rose Tagnesi, the district’s former director of special education – and Hobbs’ former supervisor – engaged in retaliation against Grossmont employees.  

District officials had previously launched an investigation against Tagnesi and demoted her in February 2024.  

Tagnesi, who resigned following her demotion, has denied any wrongdoing and has since sued the district, alleging she faced discrimination and harassment because she is lesbian.  

Hobbs, who had worked at JW Howard for nearly two years and once worked below Tagnesi at Grossmont, took part in the firm’s investigation. 

“His background in legal research and, especially, in education and education policy and culture, suggested that he could be particularly helpful in the conduct of the investigation,” a memo addressed to Trustee Jim Kelly and dated April 27 reads.  

Kelly did not respond to requests for comment. John Howard, the founder of JW Howard, confirmed he had authored the memo but said he could not comment on the document. 

Hobbs said participating in the investigation of his former boss was not a conflict of interest. His role was simple and limited, he insisted. 

“I was the researcher. I was the person sorting evidence and putting it in front of an attorney,” Hobbs said. “I wasn’t really involved in the case per se.” 

JW Howard’s investigation ultimately identified 24 “victims,” of Tagnesi’s retaliation. Included among them was Hobbs. According to the memo, this led employees at JW Howard to believe Hobbs should be given another chance to work for Grossmont. “As a result of our findings, we were prepared to recommend that, in light of later developments, his record at GUHSD be updated and that he be made eligible for rehire,” the memo reads.  

Based on the advice of attorney William Diedrich, a lawyer experienced with educational issues, entering into a settlement with the district was the easiest way to make Hobbs rehirable. 

JW Howard then assigned Hobbs “the task of preparing the first draft of a settlement agreement,” with Grossmont, according to the leaked memo. 

Over a week in December, Hobbs, Diedrich and Howard sent back and forth drafts of the settlement. By Dec. 16, Diedrich sent an edited copy to Howard, who forwarded it to Hobbs to finalize. 

The copy of the settlement reviewed by Diedrich contained no mention that should Hobbs be rehired by Grossmont he would receive tenure. But the version sent by Hobbs to Howard later that day and labeled “Final,” did. 

“The district agrees that, should Hobbs be reemployed, he will be granted tenure on the first day of employment,” that copy of the settlement reads. 

The memo contends that Howard did not include this language in the settlement and that it’s illegal. 

“This is the first time the illegal language referring to ‘tenure’ appears in any version of the proposed settlement,” the memo from JW Howard notes, referring to the final draft of the settlement. 

This actually wasn’t Hobbs’ first stab at including language in the settlement stipulating he’d receive tenure. In the first draft of the settlement sent to Howard, Hobbs wrote that should Grossmont rehire him, he would “automatically be restored to a position with at least similar standing and pay as was effective in February 2018 including his full benefits.” 

Additionally, he added that his level of seniority and tenure rights revert back to what they were prior to his resignation. When Howard received the draft, he asked Hobbs to send it to Diedrich. But the version Hobbs sent Diedrich did not include this language. The only other time Hobbs included mention of tenure rights came in the final draft sent to Howard. 

The memo claims Hobbs didn’t just add language into the settlement. It claims Hobbs deleted elements of Diedrich’s edits, “something that would have never been approved.” It also claims that Hobbs turned off a Microsoft Word feature called “track changes,” so as to better hide that he was making surreptitious changes. 

Diedrich did not return a request for comment. Collin McGlashen, Grossmont’s communications director, declined to comment. 

The final version of the settlement opened the door for Hobbs’ rehiring at Grossmont in “any position or assignment for which he is qualified.” It also sealed the investigation into Hobbs conducted in spring 2018 and added stipulations to the circumstances of his resignation.  

“The district acknowledges that Hobbs denies that he committed ‘immoral acts’ (defined as any acts that would make him ‘unfit to teach’) or any other acts or omissions constituting misconduct,” the settlement reads. 

Hobbs has a very different view from Howard of the whole situation. He said he was simply adding things to the document he felt were fair. The 2018 investigation into him was unfounded, he insists, and it only seemed logical that he be returned to the tenure position he’d had then. He didn’t know whether that violated California’s education code but figuring that out should have been Howard’s role as an attorney, he said.  

He also says there was no attempt to sneak the language into the settlement. He’d sent it to Howard and he assumed he’d read it. 

“I think John Howard is just trying to cover his own hiney,” Hobbs said. “He’s trying to pass his attorney responsibility to a paralegal. He’s a senior attorney. He just didn’t do his job.” 

Howard said that’s just not true. 

“When a lawyer assigns something to a paralegal to prepare in final and the paralegal says something is in final, generally the lawyer doesn’t go back through to make sure the paralegal didn’t slip something in that wasn’t authorized. And that’s what happened here,” Howard said. “I trusted him.” 

But to Bob Ottilie, a local lawyer with decades of experience in ethics litigation, whether Hobbs inserted the language wasn’t the chief concern. It was the actual arrangement, Ottilie said, wherein a former employee of a district seemed to be working on behalf of himself to craft a settlement for a law firm contracted by the district, that was “unheard of.” 

“If this is an accurate depiction of how this settlement agreement came to be, it’s really unprecedented in my 45 years of law,” Ottilie said. “It should not have happened.” 

Howard disagreed. 

“My office prepared the settlement agreement because it was going to be vetted and sent to the district’s lawyer, so it was in accordance with what the district wanted,” Howard said. “The fact is that having him work on a contract that the board was going to have an independent review of by the district’s lawyer made it not a conflict.” 

Hobbs’ New, New Gig 

Throughout the crafting of this settlement, Grossmont was still a contracted client of JW Howard. 

It wasn’t until February 2025 that the district terminated the services of JW Howard. 

“This work has been completed, and his services are no longer required,” the agenda item reads. 

The decision to terminate the contract proved to be controversial. Three of the district’s trustees approved the motion to terminate services, with Kelly and Scott Eckert dissenting and pushing back during public comment.  

Between July 1, 2023 to Dec. 31, 2024, Grossmont paid JW Howard $695,701 for legal services – specifically employee investigations. That sum is more than the district spent with any other law firm during that same period. 

After the settlement’s approval, it didn’t take long for Hobbs to find himself working for the district once again.  

At a special board meeting on Jan. 16, trustees approved the job description for a newly created position called the director of student and family engagement, learning and innovation. Later in that same meeting, the board voted to appoint Hobbs to that newly created position. Both moves were approved by all board members save for Fite.  

“I voted against his appointment because it was alarming to me that this thing came out of the blue. There was no discussion, no community input,” Fite said. 

The speed with which he was hired by the district was by design, said Hobbs. 

“I don’t think there’s any question, at least in my mind, that part of the reason to exonerate me and bring the documents in December was to make me eligible for rehiring for this position,” Hobbs said. 

Hobbs said that when he took the job, he understood it to be temporary. The district has been going through a period of significant turmoil. In March, Superintendent Mike Fowler stepped down from his position as he fights a brain tumor. Hobbs said he was told they needed someone to help steady the ship before a new superintendent came in.  

Just one month after his appointment, at the district’s Feb. 13 meeting, Hobbs was sporting an entirely new title: chief of staff. The next month, at Grossmont’s March 11 meeting, the board officially approved Hobbs’ title change.  

Hobbs said his new gig was simply a title change. Board members had thrown a grab bag of responsibilities into his first role, but when Interim Superintendent Sandra Huezo read the job description, she felt what the board members were really looking for was a chief of staff, he said. He also argues that he’s qualified for the position, having served as a teacher, the head of a company and even a trustee at the Temecula Valley Unified School District. 

‘Rushed and Totally Untransparent’ 

Hobbs’ hiring has already ruffled many feathers in the district. In February the board approved a plan to issue layoff notices to dozens of employees. The move came as district leaders say they’re struggling to close a multi-million-dollar budget deficit.  

That rationale didn’t sit well with many in the community, who have pushed back hard against the decision. For months they’ve packed board meetings, turning them into raucous affairs. Some have even gone so far as to launch a recall effort against the board’s conservative bloc. 

Fite, the sole liberal on the district’s board, shares many of the concerns raised by the community. He was also the only trustee to vote against Hobbs’ appointment. 

“I think there’s a lack of transparency in several actions that we’ve undertaken since the beginning of this year,” Fite said. “I’m concerned that there may be a conflict of interest. It seems at the very least that this process was rushed and totally untransparent.” 

James Messina is the president of the Grossmont Educators Association, the union that represents credentialed staff in the district. He’s been a fixture at recent board meetings pushing back against the district’s layoffs. He said the creation of the chief of staff position, and Hobbs hiring, was entirely inappropriate given the layoff notices the district issued. 

“I do not believe this is a time to be spending more money on the top levels of administration. Money should be spent in classrooms instead,” Messina said. 

The post Grossmont Investigated Him, He Resigned and Now He’s Chief of Staff appeared first on Voice of San Diego.

Seventeen-year-old Armando Varela stood in the middle of a crowded art gallery, working up the nerve to speak. 

It was Saturday afternoon and the halls and exhibit rooms at A Reason to Survive, a two-decade-old nonprofit youth arts program in National City, were full of eager children, harried parents and artworks ranging from wall-sized murals to a cluster of decorated wooden boxes small enough to fit in the palm of a hand. The families were there for ARTS’ (as the organization is commonly known) annual spring exhibit of student work. 

Varela stood before the cluster of wooden boxes, a project he and a handful of other students had recently completed in a sound design class taught by art teacher Pablo Dodero. The hand-built boxes were festooned with springs, pebbles, doorstops and other found objects that create musical notes when the boxes are plugged into an electric amplifier. 

Dodero briefly described the project then turned the presentation over to Varela. “Armando?” he said. 

Varela stared in alarm at a roomful of expectant faces. “I didn’t see myself as artsy when I first joined ARTS,” he said haltingly. “But that changed pretty quickly…ARTS helped me find my voice in so many ways I didn’t expect.” 

He grinned, looking more assured. “For example, I’m speaking here.” 

For nearly a quarter century, ARTS, which occupies National City’s former main library building adjacent to City Hall, has provided artistic programming and a warm embrace of encouraging community to vulnerable young people in San Diego County.

Started in 2001 by a Boston native named Matt D’Arrigo as a one-man volunteer art-making session for children with cancer in a San Diego hospital, the program has since expanded into a 20,000-square-foot regional arts teaching hub with a full-size painting studio, a sound technology lab, welding equipment for metal sculpture, power saws for woodworking and a staff of 72 teaching artists, administrators, interns and volunteers. 

Each year, 1,500 students, many of them from low-income, Spanish-speaking or bi-national families, cycle through three program sessions offered in fall, spring and summer. ARTS teaching artists fan out to after-school programs in local school districts and work with teens attending juvenile court schools. The annual budget, most of it supplied by philanthropy, is close to $2 million. 

“We’ve become an established arts and culture center for National City and South Bay youth and families,” said ARTS Executive Director Lucy Eagleson. “We’re the bridge for [families] because we have the trust and the community.” 

Or, as Armando Varelas, a senior at Sweetwater High School, put it on Saturday, “I never had a plan and a future” before enrolling in ARTS. “Now I applied to Southwestern College for a music major with an emphasis in mariachi. Then I want to go to UCSD or SDSU and become a musician and music educator…After I saw this, I knew what I wanted to do.” 

Until this year, ARTS was on an upward trajectory. It moved into the National City facility in 2012 and has won awards and been featured on NBC’s Today Show and in an Academy Award-winning documentary. 

After a budget crisis in 2017, a new executive director, James Halliday, stabilized funding and maintained programming through the Covid-19 pandemic. Eagleson took over last year and has broadened ARTS’ reach further, negotiating contracts with local school districts, recruiting teaching artists and volunteers and upgrading facilities with the help of philanthropic and local corporate support. 

The growth ground to a halt in December. ARTS has an unusual agreement with its landlord, National City. The city allows the organization to use its former library building for free and covers utilities. In return, ARTS is required to provide the city with at least $125,000 worth of art programs and public art projects annually – an amount “we far exceed every year,” Eagleson said. 

Typically, the city has renewed its agreement with ARTS every two years. This year, Eagleson said she hopes to negotiate a longer arrangement, perhaps for five years, maybe even 10. A longer time period, she said, would attract additional funding and make possible a capital campaign to refurbish studios, add equipment and broaden offerings. 

Greater stability would also help ARTS weather a period of heightened national economic uncertainty, Eagleson said. 

“We have to be creative because foundations have less to give with the stock market down, and schools have less,” she said. “I stay painfully positive, energetic and committed to the work. That’s all I can do.” 

The city temporarily extended ARTS’ lease earlier this year. Negotiations continue over terms for a longer arrangement. In the meantime, the City Council has been mired in bouts of infighting and recently parted with former City Manager Benjamin Martinez. 

Eagleson was diplomatic about the situation at City Hall, saying only that ARTS remains firmly committed to serving National City and surrounding communities, which include some of San Diego County’s most ethnically diverse and lowest-income neighborhoods. 

“There are a lot of arts organizations in [San Diego] but it’s so important to have a program in the community you’re trying to serve,” Eagleson said. Students and their families can “walk, bike or take the bus…The trust-building and connection-building are here. We’re grateful that the city of National City recognizes the importance of art and creativity and how it plays a role in building a great community.” 

Examples of trust and community could be found in every room of ARTS’ spring exhibition on Saturday. On a wall near Varela’s sound boxes, a colorful poster depicted ARTS’ latest planned public art project, a series of student-made decorative additions to a free community water spigot at National City’s El Toyon Park, currently undergoing a $7 million city-funded renovation. 

Eighteen-year-old Ada Escamilla stood beside the poster, explaining her part in the public art project. She had designed a metal globe sculpture, she said, which would be painted to show what the earth might look like in a hotter future climate. 

“Our world used to be so much more blue,” Escamilla said. “Now it’s green and yellow and drier.” 

Asked what kept her coming to ARTS, which she first encountered at age 13, Escamilla talked briefly about her love of artistic expression. Then she shared a deeper reason. 

Two years ago, she said, her younger sister was diagnosed with leukemia. “I didn’t want to do anything,” Escamilla said. “I lost interest in all my passions.” 

Escamilla told her ARTS teacher, Sheena Rae Dowling, about her sister’s diagnosis. “It allowed me to be vulnerable,” Escamilla said. With Dowling’s encouragement, Escamilla made an artwork for her sister, a photograph of the two of them together as babies painted to create the impression that “the environment was supporting her [sister],” she said. “If I didn’t have this, I might not have art at all.” 

A few rooms away, Monica Guzman, a medical assistant at Kaiser Permanente, watched her 12-year-old son Joshua decorate a hat with an intricate pattern of smiling faces. 

“He’s done better with this art program,” Guzman said of Joshua. “I went through a divorce seven years ago. He acted up in school…He went through anxiety.” 

After a Kaiser patient told her about ARTS’ after-school art programs in local elementary schools, Guzman said she signed Joshua up for the program at his school, Lincoln Acres Elementary. 

“His mood stabilized,” she said. “It gave him a way to express his feelings. He has a sketch pad at home. He’s proud of everything he does.” 

The program, free like all of ARTS’ offerings, has been a godsend, Guzman said. “I work every day, Monday to Friday, 8:30 to five…He likes to stay [at school] and do art. If I get off early, he says, ‘Pick me up at five.’” 

She flicked through her phone, showing photos of hand-sewn puppets Joshua makes when he’s not drawing. There was C4, a robot determined to “destroy the world,” Joshua said in a deadpan robot voice. Also, the Cheese Wizard, a wizard who loves cheese – but, Joshua said solemnly, “his real name is Dave.”  

“Art and baseball are his life right now,” Guzman said. 

Claudia Rodriguez-Biezunski, a textile art teacher presiding over an exhibit of student sewing projects on the other side of the room, said many, if not a majority, of her students live in Tijuana or have parents in Mexico. 

“I asked my students if their parents were going to come see the exhibit and they said, ‘My parents can’t cross [the border],” Rodriguez-Biezunksi said. “Their family drops them off at the border, they walk across and take public transit here.” 

Rodriguez-Biezunksi said art draws students to ARTS. But they stay because teachers “pour our heart and soul into them.” 

“I also come from an under-resourced community,” Rodriguez-Biezunksi said. “I’m a daughter of immigrants…I was a runaway when I was 15. At age 16, I was kicked out of high school. I dropped out of life. Eventually I graduated and became a teacher because I would have loved to have a teacher who would have cared about me.” 

Saturday’s three-hour exhibit was wrapping up and the galleries were emptying when 16-year-old Fernando Guerrero walked into an exhibit room and pointed to a six-foot-long welded metal sword hanging on the wall. 

The sword, Guerrero said, was his creation, forged in ARTS’ metalworking studio as an homage to his favorite video game, Devil May Cry. The sword was a replica of a sword wielded by the game’s protagonist, a half human, half demon who uses the sword to fuse together the two aspects of his nature. 

Guerrero, a soft-spoken sophomore at the San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts, described how he made the sword. Starting with a metal pipe, he said he welded a cross bar to the pipe then fashioned a paper model of a basketball-sized skull to decorate the handle. 

He molded the skull in ARTS’ metalworking forge and welded it to the handle. Then he cut sheets of metal into the shape of a blade and welded them together. 

“It took me 10 weeks to make,” he said proudly of the sword. “I’ll get to take it home. I’ll put the sword over my bed. I’ll hang it on the wall.” 

He pulled out his phone and showed a video of himself heaving the sword off the ground and waving it in the air. “I think it weighs 40-60 pounds,” he said. 

He put his phone away and gazed at his handiwork in the now-quiet gallery. “This place helps me see myself as an artist,” he said. 

The post Lauded Arts Program Faces Uncertain Future  appeared first on Voice of San Diego.

San Diego County’s two Democratic supervisors plan to force a vote on Tuesday on their proposal to give county officials greater leeway to tap fiscal reserves during a time of unprecedented budget uncertainty.

Supervisors Terra Lawson-Remer and Monica Montgomery Steppe, the Board’s two Democrats, know their proposal will fail. Joel Anderson and Jim Desmond, their GOP colleagues, already signaled they’re not fans of the idea (which our Lisa Halverstadt detailed here).

The Dems plan to ask anyway. They likely hope to emphasize the stakes of a July 1 special election to fill a vacant South County seat on the Board.

That election pits Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre, a Democrat, against Chula Vista Mayor John McCann, a Republican. As our Jim Hinch recently reported, Aguirre and McCann have opposing views on the budget proposal.

Anderson’s other beef: He said on Friday the reserve proposal wasn’t added to the Board’s agenda until Friday, giving residents in his East County district less time to understand the idea and make plans to attend Tuesday’s meeting.

“I couldn’t support anything that leaves my constituents out of the decision-making process,” Anderson said.

Lawson-Remer and Montgomery Steppe’s take: They argued on Friday the reserve changes are urgently needed as the county anticipates possible federal cuts.

“We can’t control what’s happening in Washington, but we can ensure San Diego County is equipped to act with urgency, compassion, and responsibility when we are faced with the impact of those decisions,” Montgomery Steppe wrote.

“This updated reserve policy ensures we can respond to real emergencies, protect core services, and stand up for the San Diegans who count on us most,” Lawson-Remer wrote.

Possible New Camping Rules in Fire-Prone Areas

Also on Tuesday, Supervisors will consider whether to modify the county’s existing camping ban to address the risk of fire in county-managed open spaces and public works facilities.

The plan calls for sheriff’s deputies to issue citations only when people refuse an offer of available shelter (though there’s an exception when there is “imminent risk of harm to public health or safety”). County staff already nixed shortening the notice requirement before clearing camps.

Politics Report and Podcast: The Water Interview

The latest Voice of San Diego podcast episode was a special interview with Daniel Denham, the general manager of the San Diego County Water Authority. Host Scott Lewis went deep in the water with Denham but hopefully in a way that anyone could follow.

Check out the podcast here.

In the Politics Report: Lewis pulled out some of the most notable things Denham said and also has a farewell message for Walt Ekard, the former chief administrative officer of the county of San Diego who died recently.

The Politics Report is for Voice donors. You can see it here.

Come see the podcast hosts Wednesday: On Wednesday, May 7, we’re recording a live podcast episode at Soda Bar with special guest Keene Simonds, executive officer of the Local Agency Formation Commission, or LAFCO. You can find more details here.

Simonds just sent a strong letter back to the mayor of San Diego after the mayor blasted LAFCO for determining that La Jolla separatists had secured enough signatures to begin the process of secession.

LAFCO is in the middle of water stuff as well and Simonds is prone to saying interesting things. If you’re reading this sentence right now, you are 100 percent the target market for this kind of party. See you there.

Sacramento Report: University Funding on the Chopping Block

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed budget would slash hundreds of millions from the UC and CSU systems, prompting concerns over hiring freezes, larger class sizes and reduced support services. 

While tuition hikes at both systems aim to offset some cuts, San Diego universities are bracing for leaner times. UC San Diego could lose up to $500 million. San Diego State University faces a $44 million shortfall and has frozen hiring and cut management positions. 

The budget cuts threaten a goal both university systems were on their way toward meeting: Admitting more in-state students. SDSU president Adela de la Torre said the school doesn’t have adequate funds to bring in more in-state students next year. 

Meanwhile…a bill to tighten California’s sanctuary state protections failed in committee. The bill, authored by State. Sen. Brian Jones, would have required local law enforcement to cooperate with ICE in cases involving serious or violent felonies. 

Read the Sacramento Report here. 

Johnny (Oak)seed Wants You to Plant an Acorn

Jim Crouch is a 73-year-old retired middle school science teacher who walks with a cane and maintains an unusual feature in his Escondido backyard: 2,500 tube-shaped pots with tiny baby oak trees growing out of them.

The pots are part of Crouch’s one-man mission to repopulate San Diego County with native oak trees.

The majestic trees once ruled the Southern California landscape but urbanization, invasive pests and a changing climate plague them.

Crouch’s solution: Raise oak seedlings and enlist a volunteer army to plant the trees around the county.

Writer Robert Krier recently spent time with Crouch and reports on growing interest in his project as well as fascinating details about the many oak species that grace San Diego’s landscape.

“Jim’s a good dude,” one volunteer said of Crouch. Said another: “This is a passion for him. And it shows.”

Read the full story here.

In Other News 

• Last week, hundreds of San Diegans joined nationwide May Day protests to call out the Trump administration’s impact on workers. (FOX 5/KUSI) Also last week, UC San Diego health workers staged a one-day strike at Hillcrest Medical Center and marched from the hospital to Balboa Park to draw attention to stalled contract negotiations. (KPBS)
• The city of San Diego has issued 4,200 tickets after San Diego’s daylighting law went into effect in January. (NBC 7)
• The former Village Grill in Balboa Park is getting a second chance at life as Panama 66 partners seek to revive it. (Union-Tribune)
• For 20 years, people have been talking about a giant resort and convention center arising in South Bay and it’s here. The Gaylord Pacific Resort & Convention Center is set to open. The Union-Tribune offers a peek.

The post Morning Report: Showdown Over County Budget Reserve appeared first on Voice of San Diego.

I’ve written and spoken about my experience 14 years ago when we had to lay off several journalists. It was a terrible management failure on my part and a lesson I wish I hadn’t had to learn.

The layoffs were big news in our little community of journalism. Twitter had become the digital town square of San Diego politics and it was pumping every day with the latest in city drama and journalist battles. CityBeat was still around and the Union Tribune was just a week away from being purchased by developer Doug Manchester. Until that week, Voice of San Diego had been hailed as a bright spot in the dark media landscape – a model for the future.

But I had let a cash-flow crisis get out of hand and we had to make a major cut.

All the local media outlets wrote about the layoffs.

The morning of the cuts, I had to go give a scheduled speech. I was numb – the speech was a welcome diversion. I returned and checked my email and there was a note from Walt Ekard, then the chief administrative officer of the county of San Diego.

“Are you OK?” it read.

Right when I read it, I crumbled. I was not.

I hadn’t eaten much in a week. The weight of what was happening had left me nauseated. I felt humiliated. But Ekard had thought of me and that meant a lot.

…

Ekard and I had gotten to know each other as any journalist and public official might. We’d argue and trade information. He invited me to speak once. We weren’t close but we were talking often.

I ended up calling him.

He said great managers always had to go through things like that. He thought I handled the media well. He offered a couple criticisms.

And then he said the thing that scared me the most: If I remained a manager, it would have to do something like that again, maybe several times. There’d be lots of moments when I would feel lost or overwhelmed and that was the job.

After that, Ekard became a mentor. We’d meet and just talk about managing people and local politics. He was so convinced that if every agency just had a great manager, the world would be a better place. His dream was to get the state of California a manager.

One of his pieces of advice I think about every week was very simple: You should write out the 5 -10 things you are most worried about. He told me that no matter how stressed you feel or how much tumult you face, if you do that, you instantly calm down.

He was right.

He died last week. Now, one of the things I am most worried about is that this community won’t find more leaders like him.

The Water Interview

I hope you take the time to listen to my interview with Daniel Denham, the general manager of the San Diego County Water Authority. Much of it will help people get up to speed about what’s at stake in the increasingly fierce rhetoric between leaders of the Water Authority and people guiding the city of San Diego.

But there were two areas where we went deeper than before.

Denham is not opposed to Pure Water: Except he kind of is. I really wanted to push Denham on the widespread concern among city of San Diego leaders and environmentalists that Denham and the Water Authority want to kill the planned Phase 2 of the giant project.

The main issue the Water Authority is struggling with is it made giant deals to secure water reliability for the next few decades. But San Diego is no longer growing and we have succeeded at conserving water which means the Water Authority is selling less water even though it has already bought an abundance.

Phase 1 of the Pure Water effort is underway. It’s why Morena Boulevard has been such a mess for so long. It’s a done deal (if it’s ever done). Phase 2 will be a major undertaking and it will allow the city to get 50 percent of its water from the water it already got.

If the city – the Water Authority’s largest customer by far — ends up getting half of its water from wastewater recycling, ratepayers will not only have to pay off the Pure Water project but all the Water Authority’s rising bills as well. Rumors were swirling that Denham was lobbying the city to stop the planning for Pure Water Phase 2 and considering some sort of legal action.

Denham said he did not oppose Pure Water, Phase 2. But he did suggest that they should reconsider it.

He pointed to the Claude “Bud” Lewis Carlsbad Desalination Plant, owned by a private company, that the Water Authority is stuck buying water from for decades. He said he’s just trying to warn them.

“We should be the canary in the coal mine when it comes to developing expensive sources of supply,” he said. “If you have to change course, if you have to evolve a different way, let’s do that together. Let’s do that collectively. We’re all in this water space together.”

I asked him if desalination was a mistake. He talked about how he was a believer in it when it was going through the approval process. But it was a different time. San Diego was growing and projected to grow.

“Not a mistake, but it is absolutely the source of supply, the project that is, uh, holding us in a position where rates are so high,” he said. He pointed out that the water from desalination costs about three times as much as the imported water they bring in.

Settlement talk: Denham hinted that a settlement was on the horizon in the long-running dispute with the Metropolitan Water District. I asked him about a proposal to settle it five years ago. I never understood why it didn’t happen.
“I think that our board was too risk adverse at the time. We were looking for sort of like this belt and suspenders approach to making sure that, you know, every ‘i’ was dotted, ‘t’ crossed,” he said.

It was not risk averse about desalination.

World Press Freedom Day

Today is World Press Freedom Day, a reminder that a free press is essential to a functioning and ethical society and is a critical force for public good. We have worked to make this an institution that will be around forever. But the future is uncertain.

I’m not asking for a donation today, however. I’m asking for you to secure the future of the free press by joining Voice of San Diego’s legacy society. Please add Voice to your will or as a beneficiary to your retirement, insurance, or donor-advised fund to support our endowment. Any pledge today provides a source of stability and sustainable funding to ensure San Diego has access to local news in perpetuity. 

All it takes is one email to let our team know that you are committed to press freedom. Email Erica Connell, Voice’s Director of Philanthropy, at erica.connell@voiceofsandiego.org to let her know about your plans to support our endowment. Thank you.  

If you have any tips or feedback for the Politics Report, send them to scott.lewis@voiceofsandiego.org.

The post Politics Report: Bye, Walt appeared first on Voice of San Diego.

Kassandra Young had never played flag football before a couple months ago. But on a crisp April morning, she was one of dozens of middle schoolers playing flag football at Hoover High School’s turf field.  

And she was killing it. 

During the Language Academy Lions’ first game against Clark Middle School, Young scored a touchdown and pulled down an interception, helping propel her team to a 22-2 victory. The Lions capped off the day with a second victory, winning 47-12 over the John Muir Language Academy. With that win, they secured the two victories they’d needed to advance to the playoffs as a ninth seed in the Western division.  

Kassandra’s parents, Chris Young and Claudia Spain, sat in the stands watching their daughter intently. Spain said Kassandra has always loved sports. She played in San Diego Unified’s middle school soccer league in previous years. 

 “But she says she likes football the best,” Spain said with a smile. 

If flag football hadn’t been offered at Kassandra’s middle school, her parents aren’t sure she would have had the opportunity to play in an organized league. But now, she plans to continue to play in high school. 

Five years ago, San Diego Unified’s middle school sports program didn’t exist. Since its creation, the program has received almost universal praise from teachers, parents and students.  

They credit the program with expanding athletic opportunities, improving student morale and parent involvement and even producing academic benefits. The program has also grown rapidly – more than 5,700 students compete yearly across seven different sports. The response has been so significant that even as district officials grapple with budget deficits and funding cuts, they aim to go in the opposite direction with middle school sports – expansion. 

‘Where Has This Been?’ 

The years after the outbreak of Covid gave rise to a slew of crises – learning loss was rampant, chronic absenteeism had skyrocketed, social-emotional issues were pervasive. But they also presented some unique opportunities, San Diego Unified Trustee Richard Barrera said. After all, federal and state officials pumped millions of dollars into schools.  

That was a boon for lots of projects, including middle school sports. 

Barrera said San Diego Unified officials had long made special attempts to prioritize the needs of middle schoolers. Students at that age often find themselves at an uncomfortable educational and developmental pivot point and often without the benefit of the extracurricular opportunities offered in high school.  

“The mental health needs of students, the physical health needs of students, the availability of funding and also just the awareness of a need to prioritize middle schoolers in our district, I think all of that came together and created the idea for middle school sports,” Barrera said. 

That’s where Lonnie Jones came in. He’s been a mainstay in San Diego Unified athletic programs for more than two decades. He’s coached everything from basketball to field hockey, but now he was taking on a new role: middle school athletics coordinator. 

When it comes to athletics, Jones said California is behind the curve of some other states. Some middle schools have after-school leagues, but they’re often for sports like kickball, which are not high school sports. San Diego Unified’s goal was to create “vertical alignment,” with high schools, Jones said.  

Exactly how this would work, or how many students would sign up, was unclear, Jones said. So, they decided to launch one sport as a test in the spring of 2022. 

“We were like, ‘Hey, let’s roll out with the biggest sport in the world. Let’s roll out with soccer,’” Jones said. “Once people saw this, they said, ‘Oh my gosh, where has this been? We’ve always needed it. This is awesome. We want more.’” he said. 

So, district officials answered. The next year, they added basketball, volleyball, flag-football and track. The year after that, they continued to expand, adding cheer and wrestling.  

There have been challenges, like finding coaches. Many of the district’s high school coaches coach the middle school teams, with their assistants fanning out across each middle school that feeds into their high school. But there aren’t enough high school coaches, so the district has turned to middle school teachers, parents and even a contracting company to fill the gaps.  

Leaders modeled the program largely after what was already happening at high schools. All the sports they’ve launched are available at the high school level. 

As the options grew, so did the number of students. During that first year, 884 students signed up to play soccer. This year, 5,764 students signed up to play. 

The Impact 

For Jen Davis, the middle school sports program has been nothing short of revelatory. Not only do both her daughters attend the Language Academy, but she also teaches English at the school. The Language Academy’s structure – which includes separate Spanish and French language tracks – can sometimes encourage a degree of disconnection among students. She said the program has had a noticeable impact on students.  

“All of the sudden, kids have new friendships, and friendship circles are expanding and in the quad they’re high fiving kids who they never would have spoken to,” Davis said. “They feel a sense of belonging. They’re all lions now,” she said. 

Davis’ daughters Amelia and Clara said they’ve also felt that change.  

“The sports are a way for all the middle school grades to be together and talk to each other and make friends instead of being separated,” Amelia said.  

Spain, Kassandra’s mother, said she’s noticed personal changes in her daughter as well. She’s become more confident and even made more friends. 

“My daughter is more on the shy side, so I think this helps her to kind of embrace who they are and the skills they have. It’s just opened up the person she really is,” Spain said.  

Cody Petterson, San Diego Unified’s board president, views middle school sports as an equity program. Private or club sports leagues can be costly and require parents to shuttle kids back and forth. For many families, that may not be a possibility. 

“Some of the kids that would most benefit from sporting activities … are the ones that are least able to participate in private alternatives. So, providing this in middle school through the public school system is a great way to pull in those kids” Petterson said 

That’s the case for Chris and Kandy Bao, whose daughter Celine plays for Language Academy’s flag football team. Their daughter had never played sports before joining her middle school teams. She started with soccer, then she decided to give flag football a try.  

“I don’t really know how it happened,” Chris Bao said with a laugh.  

Celine now plans on continuing to play during high school – though it seems like she may stick to soccer. The fact that the program is free and practices happen at school has been huge for them. 

“We have two younger kids, so I wouldn’t have been able to travel around for a sports league,” Kandy said. 

That equity angle extends to gender, Davis said. While boys may touch a football thousands of times before high school, girls may only ever be exposed to the game during PE. In Davis’ view, bringing the sport to middle schools has begun to normalize them, giving girls the opportunity to try something out they might not have. That’s evident with Language Academy’s team – about 16 of the girls had never played the sport before this season.   

“As someone who grew up loving football but did not have the chance to play flag football, my heart is spilling over because all these girls have the chance to be competitive at such a fun game,” Davis said.  

Jones said there have also been academic knock-on effects from launching the program. Like with high school sports, students need to maintain academic and citizenship eligibility to play. If a student’s grades drop below a 2.0 average, they can sign a waiver that requires them to raise their grades or be dropped from their schools’ team. That probationary waiver, however, can only be utilized once per school year.  

That added incentive seems to be making an impact, Jones said. 

“Our data is showing that our grades are going up, and we’re hearing that from the sites as well,” he said.  

He plans to release data about the impact in the coming months.   

Davis has seen that first-hand. As the program grew, it became too much for Jones to oversee by himself, so he created athletic liaison positions at each middle school to handle some of the day-to-day work, like ensuring students were academically eligible. Davis serves as the liaison at the Language Academy and said the eligibility angle has kids paying attention to their grades and citizenship marks who may not have otherwise.  

“At this young age, these kids are already getting imprinted with ‘We’re scholar-athletes, with scholar coming first,’” Davis said. 

‘It’s All About Access’ 

Over the past year, San Diego Unified officials have been grappling with a significant budget deficit. That’s led to the need to cut programs. Throughout that process, Petterson noticed a trend.  

“Almost every cluster meeting I went to, almost every time I went to a foundation meeting or did a site visit and talked to parents, they would come and say, ‘Please don’t cut middle school sports,’” Petterson said. 

Officials spare the program, which carries a $1.7 million yearly price tag. Looking forward, district leaders would like to expand it. That may mean adding additional sports like baseball and softball, or even adding additional levels, like mimicking the junior varsity and varsity split seen at high schools – maybe both. 

The latter change is especially important, Barrera said, because his goal is to create as many opportunities as possible for kids to get involved. 

“It’s all about access,” Barrera said. “It’s really, ‘how do we how do we expand the program in a way that it’s just going to get more students involved?” 

Neither move would be cheap. That’s why district officials are looking outside of traditional revenue streams to philanthropists or even local sports teams to help finance expansions, Petterson said. While those kinds of organizations can be reticent to get involved in schools’ core academic functions, they may be much more willing to get involved in extracurricular activities. 

“When you have a program that’s clearly great for social relationships, emotional, physical development and growth and really brings parents into the picture … it’s the kind of thing where the philanthropic community can clearly see an opportunity to step up,” Petterson said. 

Partnerships have already started to form, Jones said. The Chargers, of former San Diego fame, sponsor a kickoff camp for the flag football season and even ran a mid-season tournament that featured giveaways and visits from former players. The recently formed San Diego Football Club held a soccer camp at Logan Memorial Educational Campus that served around 500 students. Jones has even had meetings with representatives for the Clippers, also of former San Diego fame.  

For Jones, who grew up in southeastern San Diego and attended Lincoln High School, the human element of these partnerships is the most important piece. He said while there were a ton of great people in the community where he grew up, and a ton of talent, there weren’t as many opportunities. So, when people took the extra step to be present, it was meaningful. He still remembers how NFL All-Star and Lincoln alum Marcus Allen brought his Raiders teammates to play a celebrity basketball game for the community every year. That had a powerful impact on Jones.  

That approach extends beyond partnerships. To Jones, whose life’s work is coaching, leading this program means showing up and making sure people know he cares. That’s why he starts most Saturday’s at 5:00 a.m. and lugs camera gear to high schools across the district. He takes photos, films video and even makes highlight reels. This may just be middle school sports, but he wants students to feel seen. 

“I’m all in with this program. I just know how to do it one way, and that’s with heart and love, and to show the kids that with action, show the families with action. That’s what we’re about,” Jones said. 

The post The Progress Report: San Diego’s Middle Sports Experiment Is Sticking Around appeared first on Voice of San Diego.

California’s childhood vaccination rates have been falling in recent years. That’s not entirely surprising given the deep politicization of vaccines during the pandemic. If some people are convinced vaccinations amount to microchipping or the “mark of the beast,” it follows they’d be less likely to subject their children to it. 

The trend is, however, deeply troubling, especially against the backdrop of the resurgence of diseases once virtually extinct. A massive measles outbreak in Texas, for example, has sickened nearly 700 and led to the death of two children. 

A new EdSource project presents a fascinating overview of vaccination rates at California schools. The outlet compiled both the overall vaccination rates, and MMR (a vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella) vaccination rates at 6,580 schools and found that rates are lowest at public charters and private schools. EdSource reports that while charter schools are themselves public schools and, like traditional public schools, are subject to statewide vaccine mandates, their unique enrollment laws make it difficult for leaders to enforce said mandates. 

San Diego County schools demonstrate that trend quite clearly. All 12 of the local schools that have vaccination rates lower than 70 percent are either private schools or charters.  

At Heritage Christian School, a private school that partner with parents to homeschool their kids and requires them to “make a profession of faith in Jesus Christ,” prior to enrollment, only 5 percent of students are vaccinated. That’s tied for the third lowest vaccination rate of all schools included in EdSource’s database.  

That 5 percent vaccination rate is slightly lower than the 95 percent experts have found is required to establish herd immunity, a pattern by which enough people are vaccinated to prevent diseases from readily spreading. I reached out to Heritage Christian officials to ask why they thought their vaccination rates are so low. They did not respond. 

But there are some hints.  

Even before the pandemic, when vaccine politics took center stage at school board meeting across the country, a rising number of families opting for homeschooling did not vaccinate their children. California does not require vaccines for children who are homeschooled. After the pandemic, the number of families homeschooling rose dramatically – more than doubling. 

Data about the post-Covid homeschooling boom shows there’s been an increase in the number of liberal parents choosing to homeschool their children, complicating the traditional narrative that homeschooling is almost exclusive to conservative religious families. 

I wrote about that trend about a year and a half ago. And while some parents I spoke to had systematic frustrations about traditional public schools, like concerns they hadn’t met the needs of their children, what leapt out to me was how rooted in political beliefs many parents’ decisions were. Some said the pandemic, and their sense that public schools were liberal indoctrination machines, pushed them to pull their kids out and homeschool them. Those parents also tended to inject conspiracy theories into their reasoning. 

One conversation I had with a parent still sticks out to me: a mother told me she aims to have her children think critically about subjects that have long been presented in a one-sided way. When I asked for examples, she brought up the moon landing. 

“I told my kids ‘You know what, (the moon landing) is kind of a controversial topic. Some people think we landed on the moon, some people think we didn’t land on the moon. Why don’t you guys research it and figure it out and come to your own conclusions and let me know what you think,’” she said.   

I asked the mother what conclusion her kids came to – did we actually land on the moon? She answered my question but asked not to be quoted. 

San Diego Unified Adding 10 Additional Community Schools 

The community schools model has bubbled up here and there for years, but California’s 2022 grant program helped to thrust it fully back into the spotlight. The term describes schools that focus not just on academics but also work to provide wraparound services that meet a whole slew of student needs.  

That may mean connecting students to mental health resources, providing dental health care or even creating a food pantry at a school. The model is specifically geared toward helping remove the barriers to success for students in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities.  

Ever since that grant program launched, San Diego Unified has gone all in on community schools. District officials minted 25 community schools over the first three grant cohorts, and last week, leaders announced they’d selected an 10 additional schools for consideration – bringing the total number of schools in the pipeline up to 35. As it stands, about 23,551 San Diego Unified students attend a community school. 

(Here’s a map of all the schools.)

The schools added in the latest cohort are scattered across the district and include Penn Elementary in Paradise Hills, Kimbrough in Grant Hill and Chesterton Elementary in Linda Vista. 

Thus far, the state is set to fork over more than $51 million in implementation grants for San Diego Unified’s community schools, while the district is on the hook to match the state grants to the tune of $17 million. Should the pending cohort be approved, that would add nearly $7 million more to the state’s tab and require the district to chip in another $2 million.  

Those state funds are only around for five years, meaning the community schools programs in the district’s first cohort will shift over to being completely funded by San Diego Unified in the 2027-28 school year, followed the next year by the second cohort and so on.  

That’s a hefty price tag, especially once the district is required to foot the bill for all nearly three dozen community schools. But the programs have had some big impacts on the communities they serve. I spent some time at Chollas-Mead Elementary School in February and saw some of the changes myself. The program brought everything from after school activities to a food pantry to a community garden to the school and even yielded some transformational results for parents. 

Despite the significant investments from the district – and the state – San Diego Unified’s budget deficit has made some nervous about the program’s future. The decision to pursue more grants and district leaders’ continued endorsement of the program from district leaders like Interim Superintendent Fabiola Bagula, seems to put that worry to rest, at least for now. 

“Through feedback from those most closely associated with a particular school, we know Community Schools are already having a positive impact, and we’re committed to sustaining and expanding that progress,” Bagula wrote in a district press release.  

In an additional statement, San Diego Unified Interim Deputy Superintendent Nicole Dewitt emphasized that the program will continue beyond state funding, writing “San Diego Unified is committed to sustaining the Community Schools model after the expiration of grant funds. The intent of the grant is to build systems and structures within each Community School to provide services and supports to our students and families year-over-year through partnerships with local community organizations.” 

What We’re Writing 

At Thursday’s board meeting, trustees chose not to rescind layoff notices that have sparked outrage among community members. Those community members have responded by launching a recall effort against four of the district’s board members.  

For more than two decades, Albert Einstein Academies Charter has grown rapidly thanks to two unique offerings: a German language immersion program and an International Baccalaureate curriculum. In recent years, however, the schools’ German program has degraded, and parents aren’t happy.  The conflict underscores a deeper conflict about what exactly Einstein is for. 

Last week, Southwestern College added the most high-tech weapon yet to its AI-powered fraudster detection toolkit: AI. I spoke to the CEO of the company that created that tool to better understand what the tool does, why they designed it and what the future of education and AI looks like.  

The post The Learning Curve: Private Homeschool Tied for Third Lowest Vaccination Rate in California appeared first on Voice of San Diego.

During last week’s meeting of Southwestern College’s Governing Board, trustees unanimously approved a slate of contracts. Included among them was a contract with N2N Services to subscribe to a software program called LightLeap AI. 

Like many community colleges across the country, in recent years, Southwestern has been inundated with fraudsters who marshal legions of stolen identities to swindle financial aid funds. Much of that fraud has been made possible because new AI tools allow fraudsters to employ increasingly sophisticated methods to steal funds. The fraudsters use AI to complete assignments, take tests and even send emails to professors. 

The trend has devastated many community colleges. Students have been locked out of classes and teachers, now forced to moonlight as de facto bot detectors, have been stretched thin. Many staff members at Southwestern have been left frustrated that the college hadn’t done more from the get-go.  

But with the adoption of LightLeap AI, Southwestern has its newest – and most high-tech – weapon yet in the battle against the bots. The growth of LightLeap AI, which has now been deployed at 36 community colleges in 20 districts, also seems to signal that in a world ill-suited for the wave of upheaval brought on by AI, one of the technologies’ best uses is to hunt down rampant AI-powered fraud. 

All of this made me very curious about how exactly this software works and what those who run it have been seeing. So, I spoke to N2N Services CEO Kiran Kodithala about how LightLeap AI works. 

‘Can AI Help Solve the Problem of Fraud?’ 

When N2N was founded in 2010, the company’s goal from launch was to “connect anything to anything,” Kodithala said. Many systems, especially at places like community colleges, were siloed. N2N wanted to make it easier for everyone from students to administrators to access various sources of information more simply.  

When AI began to pop up in earnest in 2023, N2N decided to create a chat bot that would serve much the same function – connecting students to all manner of information with just a query. But when they approached some community colleges, they were confronted with an entirely different query by administrators: “Can AI help solve the problem of fraud?” 

Kodithala and his team were intrigued by this, so in partnership with Foothill-De Anza Community College, which is nestled in Silicon Valley, started to work on an AI model that could respond. But they immediately encountered a problem. 

“When we were building it, even Foothill-De Anza did not know who the fraudsters were, so we had no way of training based on their findings,” Kodithala said. 

What they ended up doing was combing through the community college’s enrollment data and create an entirely new fraud-marking system. So, they fed not only active enrollment data, but enrollment data for previous Foothill-De Anza semesters into their system so they could check their work against fraudsters previously identified by the college.  

Early on, Kodithala said they made a clear distinction between what he called a “lazy student,” who just wanted to sign up for classes and get aid funds and a fraudster engaged in “pure identity theft.” Elements of the former have happened for years, but it was the latter that was taking off. That’s exclusively what N2N wanted their software to focus on. 

So, they began to employ a clustering method, identifying groups of fraudulent applications that come from the same IP address, or use the same phone number, email address or physical address. This information remains relatively static, with fraudsters reusing them even as they cycle through identities. Kodithala said that’s because while new stolen identities are easy to find, fraudsters are less able to generate new email or IP addresses each time they try to swindle funds. 

Kodithala said that method, and other strategies he was more reticent to share for fear of tipping off fraudsters, yielded big time. LightLeap AI began to flag over 200 percent more suspected fraudsters than Foothill-De Anza’s homespun system. As it stands, the company has processed close to 3 million applications and identified about 360,000 suspected fraudsters. All of those applications, including the roughly 12 percent identified as suspected fraudsters, had already made it through the California community college system’s statewide security screenings. 

‘One in Every Other Application Is Fraud’ 

Exactly how much fraud each community college is seeing varies wildly, Kodithala said.  

“We are seeing still after the states spam checker and other tools, some institutions where there’s 60 percent fraud. At some institutions one in every other application is fraud,” Kodithala said. Some other community colleges, however, are seeing closer to 15 percent of their applications be fraudulent. 

Why that variation exists isn’t entirely clear to Kodithala. But there are actually some built-in incentives to allow fraud. The state’s funding formula for community colleges, for example, grants additional funding based on how many full-time equivalent students enroll. That incentive may have left community college administrators unsure of what exactly was happening as the fraud ramped up. 

“I’m not sure whether they knew what they were seeing, because on one hand you want to see that my enrollment is increasing,” Kodithala said. “The example is probably the frog in the boiling water where just the temperature generally increased … and they were trying to chase it, and kept hoping and that they will eventually catch it but now, now it’s come to its head and they all realize that this is a huge problem,” he said. 

Recent coverage of fraudsters has led to calls for investigation both from Republican U.S. Representatives and state-level politicians. Those calls specifically accuse community colleges of “allowing fraud to go unaddressed,” and encourages the Trump administration to “take immediate action.”  

Statewide community college leaders have pushed back on the characterizations to CalMatters. They argue that while fraud is a legitimate concern, the system has allocated more than $150 million toward cybersecurity in recent years and that the funds stolen represent a small fraction of the funds disbursed to real students. 

Nuclear Weapons 

While financial aid fraud is a huge problem for community colleges, it’s likely also a boon for companies like N2N and their products like LightLeap AI. Because even though most AI evangelists may look on the use of the technology to swindle and defraud with distaste, detecting all that swindling and defrauding may prove one of the best uses for AI – aside from the swindling and defrauding, of course. 

The sheer number of bots and the complexity of scammers’ networks has outpaced what individual humans can realistically handle. The technology can allow fraudsters to generate fake driver’s licenses or even use video software to take part in identity verification calls. Kodithala estimated it takes a human 15 hours of calling phone numbers, checking addresses on Google Maps and sending bank verification links to catch each fraudster. That may be a dubious calculation, but it doesn’t change the fact that AI platforms can do that work almost instantly. 

So, in effect, AI-powered fraudsters necessitate the need for AI-powered detectives. What’s created is a machine learning feedback loop, a literal Blade Runner situation, an ouroboros of slop (picture an algorithmic snake eating its own tail). 

Kodithala believes deeply in the transformational potential of AI. And despite the potentially disastrous consequences of its use in education settings, he’s not alone. Advocates are rushing to inject the technology into education faster than regulators can erect guardrails to protect from any negative impacts. Just last week, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing agencies to prioritize the integration of AI into K-12 schools. These decisions will impact generations of children to come.  

Technology is kind of always like this, Kodithala said. Things move fast, faster than regulations can keep up – and some people are bad, so when a new technology pops up, those people will adopt it more quickly. It becomes the responsibility of the good guys to be nimble to address it.  

“It’s not like nuclear weapons are the problem or dynamite itself is a problem. It’s how we use it,” Kodithala said. 

In other words, the only way to stop a bad guy with AI is a good guy with AI. 

The post In Battle Against AI-Powered Fraudsters, Colleges Turn to New Weapon – AI appeared first on Voice of San Diego.

This commentary was submitted by Madaffer and nine other former chairs of the San Diego County Water Authority Board of Directors.

Joni Mitchell may have said it best: “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.”

In the case of water, those lyrics couldn’t be more true.

As former San Diego County Water Authority Board Chairs, we heard and responded to demands from the region’s working families, civic and business leaders in the 1990s when our only major water source dried up.

Collectively, with our member agencies, we then spent three decades relentlessly securing new water supplies and investing in multi-billion-dollar upgrades that will last for generations.  We remained steadfast in making the necessary and difficult decisions to support the entire San Diego region.

Addressing the San Diego region’s water cost challenges requires honest, fact-based conversations and meaningful actions. Unfortunately, some recent public comments fall far short of this standard.

We all want safe and reliable water at the lowest possible cost. The water we enjoy in San Diego County comes at a higher cost – but having no water at all or having no regional decision-making body looking out for San Diegans is even more costly. That approach would truly be turning the clock back decades and jeopardizing our economy and quality of life.

San Diego gets less annual rain than Tucson, Arizona. Yet, today, our region enjoys independent, locally controlled, safe and reliable water supplies despite having few natural water supplies. That means it’s easy to forget what a drought is like because over the past two decades, our economy, businesses, families and way of life have been uninterrupted by water shortages.

Because of investments, the Water Authority has executed this strategy with the lowest possible cost in mind. But  in recent years, we have seen to slower than expected population growth in San Diego. That plus a successful water conservation program added to our financial pressures.

We may have abundance now, but we must never lose sight of potential water shortages which will continue to cycle through our region, exacerbated by a changing climate. 

For more than 80 years, the San Diego region has worked through their differences at the Water Authority to make sure high-quality water always comes out of our faucets even during California’s famously severe droughts.

Today, we must come together again without sacrificing San Diego County’s water security or hurting hardworking residents and businesses. We all deserve the truth about water rates and how the Water Authority delivers water to all of us. In the spirit of restarting the dialogue, we want to address some fact-based responses to a few of the recent false or misleading statements.

Claim 1: “It is no longer acceptable for the residents and businesses of the City to carry the burden of ever-increasing water costs imposed by the (the Water Authority),”from San Diego City Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera’s letter to the general manager of the Water Authority April 22.

FACT: This is not true. The Water Authority charges the city of San Diego, its largest customer, the same as everyone else.  Today, we are all paying for exactly what the city and other regional leaders demanded decades ago: to never again experience the crippling impacts of drought.

Claim 2: “The Water Authority has ignored calls for more realistic (water sales) projections, streamlined operations, and smarter debt management,” from the Elo-Rivera letter.

FACT: This also is not true. Water sales projections are provided directly to the Water Authority by the city of San Diego and other member agencies. The largest variations in sales are typically the result of a disconnect between what the city of San Diego predicts and what actually happens – variations that have a disruptive effect on every other agency in the region because they impact collective regional water rate calculations. As for debt management and streamlining, an array of prudent financial strategies at the Water Authority have produced $500 million in rate savings in recent years. 

Claim 3: “(E)very structural and institutional option must be on the table,” from the Elo-Rivera letter.

FACT: This echoes a small number of insiders and appears to be a call to dissolve an agency that has served the entire San Diego region successfully for more than 80 years. Dissolution of the Water Authority would simply shift the costs from the Water Authority to local agencies like the city of San Diego, which is already facing its own fiscal challenges. Dismantling the Water Authority would harm and disenfranchise all San Diegans and create enormous operational and financial risks that would only drive rates higher for the region’s 3.3 million residents who are in need of the water the Water Authority provides.

Claim 4: “For too long, the SDCWA has operated at arm’s length from the public, from the City’s customers…,” from the Elo-Rivera letter.

FACT: Again, we respectfully disagree. The strategy that has delivered water security to the region over the past 30 years was a direct response to the region’s residents, civic and business leaders demanding that the Water Authority provide greater water resilience to protect our economy and quality of life. At every step, the city of San Diego has been leading or supporting the investments which has more than 40 percent of the vote on the Water Authority Board of Directors. In any case, the Water Authority remains committed to operating in the most transparent manner to ensure the public has the most up-to-date information on our region’s water supplies, cost of service and rates.

Claim 5: “The increased operating cost is a result of the increasing costs to purchase water from SDCWA…,” wrote Matt Vespi, the city’s chief financial officer, in a letter to the Water Authority April 18.

FACT: This is partially true but omits important facts. Water Authority rates have been rising along with everything else over the past decade due to a variety of factors outside of the control of the Water Authority. That said, the agency has worked to reduce rates in a variety of ways from creating a rate stabilization fund, managing and offloading supplies, resolving litigation and reducing operational expenses. As the city of San Diego completes Phase 1 of a recycled water plant, it too will experience increased operating costs.  

Although the city’s Public Utility Department has not yet disclosed the anticipated financial impact to its ratepayers this year, it’s likely well above the cost of Water Authority supplies. If so, one would assume city residents will see increases in their water and wastewater bills. The bottom line is water security unfortunately comes at a higher cost than any of us would like, which is why it is imperative for the region to continue to work collaboratively. 

Claim 6: “If we have water that is not being used by our member agencies, then we should sell it and use that revenue to ease the burden for working San Diegans ,” from the Elo-Rivera letter.

FACT: This is true in part but avoids the reality that our region may very well need more water in the future so our planning must also encompass that possibility. The Water Authority has been leading efforts for the past two years to monetize its water supplies and share the benefits of its hard work with other water suppliers throughout the Southwest on a temporary or permanent basis to protect our future. This work is complex due to a long history of legal cases, state laws and century old federal regulations. It doesn’t happen overnight — even though we all wish it did – but it remains the highest priority of the Water Authority.

Looking forward, the Water Authority will remain focused on addressing rate stability, providing drought-proof water supplies, as well as leading the region and the industry in innovative ways to move water where it is needed for the benefit of all San Diego County ratepayers. Reassigning the responsibility for maintaining critical regional water infrastructure to multiple self-interested parties would be a true disservice to all San Diegans.

Our goal has been and continues to be safe and reliable water at the lowest cost. Dissolving the regional water agency would do nothing to achieve this. Instead, it would set us back decades and put our future at risk.

Voice of San Diego confirmed this letter was signed by the following former chairs of the San Diego County Water Authority:

• Mike Madigan – 1990-1992
• Mark Watton – 1995-1996
• Chris Frahm – 1997-1998
• Bernie Rhinerson – 2003-2004
• Michael Hogan – 2010-2012
• Mark Weston – 2014-2016
• Mark Muir – 2016-2018
• Jim Madaffer – 2018-2020
• Gary Croucher – 2020-2022
• Mel Katz – 2022-2024

The post The Truth About the Cost of Water: Dismantling the Water Authority Would Harm All San Diegans appeared first on Voice of San Diego.

As the county faces a budget deficit and potential federal cuts, Democratic Supervisors Terra Lawson-Remer and Monica Montgomery Steppe want to change the county’s reserve policy to supply an estimated $355 million windfall to preserve county services. 

The success of the Democrats’ pitch, which they expect to make at a Board of Supervisors meeting next month, is far from certain with the current politically divided board. Its fate likely rests on the outcome of the District 1 county supervisors race between Republican John McCann and Democrat Paloma Aguirre, who has called for the county to spend more of its reserves. The new South Bay supervisor is set to be seated in late July – after the Democrats’ initial planned board vote next month. 

For years, the county has built up a large bank account that as of last June, had grown to nearly $3 billion, according to the county’s latest comprehensive annual finance report. But much of that cash hasn’t been easily accessible.  

Lawson-Remer and Montgomery Steppe propose that fellow supervisors take a closer look at that big bank account as the county confronts a projected $138.5 million budget deficit and the potential for harder hits to come. 

Under the county’s current reserve policy, about $1.1 billion is considered essentially off limits or restricted by law or formal pledges to provide housing-related loans or pension payments. Another $570 million is committed to line items such as capital project and affordable housing. 

Lawson-Remer and Montgomery Steppe are zeroing in on two other accounts: the county’s nearly $692 million unassigned account which county officials have long said is essentially its available rainy-day fund and its nearly $635 million assigned fund. Lawson-Remer said the assigned fund is made of line items the county expects to cover in the future such as contracts and maintenance.  

A county windfall relies on two policy changes focused on the latter two accounts. 

Current county policy – based on guidance from the Government Finance Officers Association – calls for the county to hold at least two months of operating cash in its unassigned account to safeguard the county from major budget hits. County officials say this now equates to $973 million, more than the $692 million the county had in the bank as of last June. 

Lawson-Remer and Montgomery Steppe want to eliminate capital costs now incorporated into the county’s calculations, increasing the funding that needs to stay in the bank. Lawson-Remer says this change would reduce the county’s required rainy-day total to about $945 million.  

The two Democrats also want to combine the county’s unassigned and assigned accounts, making them a collective rainy-day fund. 

If the county had done this last June, its rainy-day fund would have grown to about $1.3 billion. 

Lawson-Remer estimates those two changes would free up about $355 million that could be used to address one-time county budget gaps.  

Lawson-Remer emphasizes that the proposal was inspired by recommended Government Finance Officers Association practices and that making more of the county’s bank account available for tough times could shield San Diegans from harsh cuts. 

“We should use our money to buffer those shocks in our community and make sure that people who are going through tough times actually continue to get the services they need and use that space created by the reserve windfall to make a plan that doesn’t leave us in three years falling off a cliff,” Lawson-Remer said. 

Montgomery Steppe struck a similar tone in a Monday statement.  

“Right now, we face the threat of people struggling with their critical needs going unmet,” Montgomery Steppe wrote. “There is no better time than this to use our resources to help those suffering the most.” 

Montgomery Steppe argued the reserves policy changes are needed to help the county respond better to ongoing budget crises.  

Lawson-Remer argues the next step should be a county revenue measure that could come in the form of a new real estate transfer tax on the top 1 percent of transactions or another yet-to-be-detailed possibility to secure county programs and priorities over the long haul. 

Republican Supervisors Joel Anderson and Jim Desmond are unlikely to support tax hikes. 

Desmond has already criticized Lawson-Remer’s revenue increasing proposal and signaled in a statement he’s shared with Voice of San Diego and the Union-Tribune that he’ll be hostile to Lawson-Remer and Montgomery Steppe’s pitch to change the reserve policy. 

“Over the past few years, the county workforce has grown by 2,500 new positions, and several new departments have been created — departments we simply cannot afford,” he wrote. “Just like any family tightening their belt during tough times, the government must rein in spending and stop funding programs that don’t directly serve our residents, not spend more money.” 

Anderson’s office didn’t immediately comment on Monday, but he recently expressed concerns about the impact of increased county spending in an April 15 post on X. 

“This deficit crisis stems from rising costs for existing programs and new funding requests,” Anderson wrote. 

The county’s largest labor union, however, has been clamoring for changes to the county’s reserve policy for years – and more so recently. 

SEIU 221 members now negotiating a new contract recently held a rally urging county leaders to dip into their reserves and approached Desmond, Lawson-Remer and Montgomery Steppe with large keys with large “reserve” key chains to symbolize their push to unlock county reserves. 

“At this uncertain moment, it is time for the county to right-size its budgeting and change its reserves policy to maintain and strategically invest in the critical services that San Diegans rely on,” SEIU 221 President Crystal Irving wrote in a statement this week. 

In a Monday interview, Lawson-Remer told Voice she’d caution against the county raiding its reserves to pay for ongoing employee salaries and raises but believes it would be fiscally prudent to use them to temporarily prevent layoffs if the county loses crucial federal grants or revenues. 

Debates about the county’s reserve account – and how to use it – are far from new. Progressives and labor leaders have long argued the county should change its policies. 

The board has also increasingly dipped into its rainy-day fund in recent years. 

In recent history, county spokesperson Tammy Glenn said four supervisors voted to pull $125.9 million from the unassigned pot to back what the county deemed crucial capital and maintenance projects. The county expects to receive reimbursements from the Federal Emergency Management Administration tied to the pandemic and last January’s floods to help refill the county. 

The county has also repeatedly dipped into its reserve account to fund affordable housing, money that now resides in the county’s committed account as developers prepare to move forward with their projects. 

The post Democratic Supes Want to Unleash County Reserves appeared first on Voice of San Diego.