["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published August 18, 2025] 2025
OK, I admit it. I m suffering from protest fatigue. How is it possible that there are so many things to protest on every level these days, from local to national to international?
But let's start with local. I'm a
lifelong Democrat and I voted for these idiots folks. Frankly, I
expected better. I've covered my political leanings in this column before so I
will just mention that I am married to a lifelong Republican, although we have
both voted across party lines on many occasions. Olof still hopes that the
Republican Party will return to what he refers to as its former glory. And I can
never help querying, "Did it actually have any?" There s a lot of spirited
debate in our household.
Ironically, Olof and I have never been more politically aligned than in recent years. One of the (many) reasons is that we're both totally fed up with the parties that we have supported all of our lives.
Locally, the Democratic leadership, in my view, seems to be making one bad decision after another. Nationally, they've completely evaporated.
The Republicans? When even my Republican husband wants to vote every last one of the Republican incumbents out of office, they should be concerned. He has always been a staunch defender of civil liberties, and is appalled on every level. As a former Air Force pilot, the idea that the military would be inflicted upon the citizenry in any but the most dire circumstances is anathema to him.
Are we turning into irascible curmudgeons? Probably. But we don't seem to be alone. Our national leadership seems to have become a culture of cruelty and hate, and the local one just plain non-sensical
I will be the first to say that our local leadership isn't responsible for all the ills that seem to be befalling this city. But I did have expectations that they would be working hard to make sure that the citizenry didn t have to fight them. Why are we having to protest a 23-story utterly-useless building on Turquoise Street that has, in my view, not a single redeeming feature, is blatantly in violation of 1972's Proposition D 30-foot height limit, and will bankrupt all the small heavily-utilized neighborhood businesses on that street. 139 market rate apartments/hotel rooms do not provide any "affordable housing."
Ditto the Chalcifica project in Pacific Beach which will include 136 ADU s (Accessory Dwelling Units) of 450 square feet each which will be marketed at $3,000 a month each. Not affordable. Livable only by munchkins. Woefully lacking in parking. And there is nothing "accessory" about this. It's an apartment building. How was this project ever approved? Once again, why is the citizenry having to fight this idiocy?
Now let's talk parking. I've written about this before, but I wish that every single person on the City Council and their families were required to use only public transit for an entire month. That means going to work, getting the kids to school and sport practices, making medical appointments on time etc. etc. I m a huge fan of public transit (we never had a car when we lived in Sweden) but this city isn t set up for it. Not requiring parking on new builds is ridiculous. Taking out parking to put in bike lanes that are extremely underutilized was senseless. Proposing expensive paid parking in Balboa Park removes a long-cherished free outing for local families.
Meanwhile, the new "daylighting" law that went into effect January 1 prohibits parking within twenty feet of an intersection with the aim of boosting visibility for drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists. This applies even if the curb is not marked or in the absence of No Parking signs. The tickets are a whopping $117. The law defacto removed hundreds of parking places in hard-to-park areas. Only 400 of the city's affected 16,000 intersections have had the curbs painted red. Which is how the city managed to issue 6,133 tickets and generate over $660,000 in revenue just between March 1 (when the new law became enforced) and the end of May. The city, of course, is gleefully happy at this fortuitous windfall which is a testament to how truly unclear the law is and how difficult it is on many blocks to estimate the exact twenty feet. Meanwhile some 6,133 people returned to their cars from an eight-hour work shift or a nice lunch to find themselves $117 poorer.
I recently watched the meter guy ticket all four vehicles parked closest to the intersection at the other end of my block, an area where parking is at a premium for both residents and nearby local businesses. The city made $468 in about ten minutes.
This spring, the city decided to assess 226,000 single family home owners with trash fees in a plan so convoluted it would make your head explode. Despite a serious grass roots effort to fight this, the protest mechanism was doomed to failure from the start, on multiple levels.
Now we're fighting a proposed whopping 62% water and sewer rate increase over the next four years. Another grass roots effort seems to be forming. But the protest form on the back of the flier sent to single family home owners clearly states: This form may be used to submit protests only, not objections. I don't even know what that means, other than this protest is just as doomed as the trash fees.
Just when you think the city powers-that-be can t make any worse decisions, back in 2023, the city proposed a law shifting a backlog of 37,000 sidewalk repairs (and the estimated $183 million to fix them) onto San Diego property owners. Are we seeing a pattern here? This just seems to be the city's new motto toward the citizenry (with apologies to Marie Antoinette): "Let them eat it."
Homelessness? OK, this is one I'm glad I don t have to personally solve. I get that it's a huge and complicated problem but we just seem to keep spinning our wheels on any solutions. It leads the local news almost every single night, like a repetition of the movie Groundhog Day.
I went to college in the late 1960s when Vietnam War protests were constant, and I remember it well. I went to a lot of those protests. But we were all protesting the same thing.
Lately, it seems like there s the Protest of the Day, whether it s over ill-conceived local buildings, immigration abuses, national mis-use of power, or international atrocities. I'm really glad people are stepping up, since the folks we actually elected aren't doing so. There are so many truly important issues to be standing up for right now.
I just wish that with all that is going on nationally and internationally that we didn't have to be fighting genuinely bad (in my view) decisions from our own local government, decisions that will not only not solve problems (affordable housing, homelessness) but in the case of the Turquoise Tower, start a domino effect of high rise buildings that will negatively impact the quality of life for people who live here and permanently change the character of the area. Even when the concept isn't bad (the daylighting law), implementation seems universally, profoundly abysmal.
Come on, City Council. Come on, Mayor Gloria. You know you can do better.
No comments:
Post a Comment