Roundtable: 2016 Was Quite A Year In San Diego

2016 was the year in which some more narrow political victories in crushing the point went for others. 2016 was a year of anticipation for marijuana users. For immigrants, 2016 is ending with new worries and fears and feelings no doubt shared by climate scientists and environmentalists. A special look back at the ups and downs of 2016 in San Diego. Welcome to our discussion of some of the top stories of 2016 with the KPBS reporters who cover them. Joining me our investigative reporter Amita Charman. Andrew Bolin, Derek Anderson who covers business and the environment, and Jean Guerrero. We've got lots to cover today on this look back at 2016. Let's start with the election in two of the tightest races in a long time. It took weeks to determine that Darrell ISA barely hung onto his seat in California's once a see. 49 district. Versus Democrat who gave him such a run this year The neophyte Democrat was dug out -- appliqué. What you said about the 49th this are being safe, it has always been considered a safe Republican that He cruised for years fixed wing absolutely. He thought he was going to cruised to a knife congressional term but this district which straddles the northern coastal cities in San Diego County and a portion of southern Orange County has changed a little bit. Even though Democratic registration has been steadily rising, it is still a safe Republican district. I think they are 655 percentage points. But what changed the selection was the presidential race. Even though ISA had endorsed Senator the Senator Marco Rubio, he eventually got around to backing Trump. And he really encouraged his Republican colleagues to do the same. Arguing that Trump was more probable to what he considered was Hillary Clinton's corruption. Applegate try to hang him with Trump. Applegate did but also remember that ISA was the strong critic of the Obama met administration. He shocked a lot of people. He came within five percentage point it's -- percentage points. Everyone started taking notice. Democrats started raising money for him and eventually they raise something like $5 million in independent expenditures for Applegate. Obama himself raise money for Applegate. So he came within 1600 votes in the end. there was another very tight race. That and victory belonged to christen gas-fired. That's an interesting one. Voter registration was high in San Diego County. It was about 77%. Democrats have like a seven percentage point lead over all in the County. You have to think it was a big scandal in which Democrats he was accused of the spinning and behaving inappropriately with his staffers and eventually the county had to pay out something like $310,000 in civil litigation. That really hurt him. He was unrelenting on that. Again, that was very close. Just 1200 votes separated those two in the end. It is so unusual because a couple of decades let's shift to another boat that was it really close here. California said let's legalize pot. You wrote a story here recently and there were some rejoicing by a certain segment of the population. It not only pass widely in California but also in San Diego by 57%. One of the things the prop 64 dead at legalize possession and cultivation and transporting a small amount of marijuana. It also change the lot of the laws, the criminal laws that are behind our marijuana drug policy. Downgrading a lot of felonies to misdemeanors. That applies not just to people who are currently charged with crimes are who would be charged with crimes today if it weren't for the changing of the laws, it also applies retroactively going all the way back to the harshest years of the drug wars. People who got caught up in that and felony convictions and they been living with those on their records now have a chance to actually go back and apply for retro active resentencing in clearing their names to get their lives back on track. People have gotten out of jail. The last I checked when I spoke with the District Attorney and the public defender's office which was a few weeks ago they said that about 20 people have been released so far. Dozens of others have reduced sentences. Decriminalization has been happening for a long time in California. Small amounts are just infractions and not even missed -- misdemeanors. But there are some people who have been charged with harsher marijuana crimes who actually have seen the benefits of the criminal justice provisions and prop 64. Lots of stuff to report on. The city is discussing how they are going to license recreational marijuana sales or shops that sell recreational marijuana. I think that the wide margin of victory for prop 64 in San Diego is really going to inform the way that the city Council craft those things. They can't say anymore. San Diego doesn't want legal marijuana. It is clear that this is popular and people are not interested. Let's move onto another story that dominated again. Eric are they going to announce next month? There has been a lot of speculation in the media on sources talking about what the charges are going to do. They are probably going to be moving up to Los Angeles. We will find out in the middle of next month when they make that announcement. They have a deadline for the 15th of They have a deadline for 15 January. For council members did offer this 99 the -- your lease. That's not really a new idea. It's been offered before. Some of the details of the lease that he will be giving up in Inglewood if he decides to go and become a tenant for the Inglewood Palace, NFL Palis have been coming out. He is not paying a lot for rent there. He's going to get a small slice of the seat license money. There's going to be an opportunity to make some money the NFL made it easy for him to move by changing the amount of money that they're going to pay is a relocation fee. They gave him a longer scheduled to pay that back. And so if you were to look at it as a senator, you could say that this is the kind of thing that Dean wanted last year. He has been biding his time and has spent a small amount of money by his measurement. $8 million on the election. The measure the field at the polls, didn't get it so a Seneca look at this and say he's been biding his time a day when he had to do to appease the NFL and now he's going to be exercising that right to move. What the city Council offered is something they've offered before. Why did they offer it again? It's a question that you can ask them. I think they wanted to show the public, politics is a public game, you play behind closed doors and when you're making deals and when you have to appease your audience. They have a willingness to keep the Chargers here. It is not about pushing the Chargers out of town. There has always been among the opponents a plan and a desire to have a stadium project in the mission Valley area which is something that the Chargers have rejected repeatedly. I think that was a public face in a move to say we've done what we can. You get the same thing from the mayor. Talking to the NFL and they are doing due diligence. In the end it is Dean Spanos loose ball and he's going to decide to play with that where he wants to play with it. We'll find out the middle of next month and all the speculation. All sorts of fun possibilities. We're going to move on. The issue of immigration reform is a big part of the news in 2016. A story focused on one consequence of our current immigration policy. Start by telling us who wear the Eagles and what is the story quick The Eagles are a group of volunteers who go out to search for missing migrants. Say people who are dying of dehydration are more offering -- more often recovering remains in to help their families closure. You went along with them on a hot time in September. It was over 100 degrees away hard for about eight hours. Any stats on how many folks try to go across and don't make a quick @Fluctuates a lot per month and per season. According to the customs and border protection numbers hundreds between 300 and 500 per year. The track you took, you were looking for particular person. What happened in the search that they quick He was a Mexican man who just had a baby and he wanted to send US dollars to his family in Mexico. He had been missing for a couple of months. A technical call the family and said he ran across his body in this location. The body had a phone on it and so he called the family. So that's the information we were using. We ended up finding remains that that the description in the location we were pretty sure that this was Garcia. After it was transmitted to the corner, they found the same card on the remains that led us to a missing Guatemalan man. We do not know if these remains belonged to the Guatemalan man or Garcia. Sometimes these migrants carry false IDs in other people's identifications. They don't want to have a record if they get stopped. It's very grim work. Let's talk about what happened nationally in the selection. Donald Trump is going to build this wall and he's going to block immigrants. What is a practical matter when a wall does get extended? We do have partial wall someplace around cities. What we have seen is the longer the fences, the more that these migrants are funneled into remote desert areas like the ones I was searching it. It hasn't been proven to stop the flow of migrants. It just reroutes the migrant traffic into the desert. The logic behind that was initially it will deter people from coming. We haven't actually seen that to be the case. It has simply led to massive amounts of death. They are fleeing violence. For them it's already a matter of life and death. They take the risk anyway. At this wall proposal, either places that this wall would go that was simply provide anyone from crossing quick When I first started reporting this story, I wanted to explore that. If Trump does manage to build this wall, ceiling off the entire border, we won't see any more just because there will be places for them to cross. With the group believes is that first of all, border patrol themselves and engineers have said it is impossible to seal off the entire border because of the mountains in the floodplains. The most dangerous places across the going to have to remain open. Let's say he was able to seal off the land border. I spoke to researchers who said they would just build that Olson taller laterals -- taller letters. People will find a way to get a round that physical obstacle. He's not even talking much more about the wall. That was is something to get elected and let's forget about that. He will make the fans longer and taller and stronger we don't know exactly what that is going to do. People are nervous about the deaths. Before I leave this topic, what was the reaction to transfer to hear along the border region. A lot of immigrants and their families are worried especially because we have almost 30,000 people, young people who benefited from backup which is the program that gives to the for deportation and work permits to immigrants who arrived here when they were children prior to the age of 16. Trump has promised to revoke DACA as well as many other executive actions that Obama press through. A lot of these immigrants are worried about what that means. Will that mean I'm going to get my work permit taken away or worse yet will I be supported? About a lot of them don't even speak Spanish. We're going to move on. The cost of by of house is continuing to soar. You wrote about an unlikely alliance of developers and environmentalists. What are they agreeing on quick This new allowance is called Housing You Matters. It to get attention from the New York Times recently. It is basically a coalition of a number of different groups. Environmental groups, developers, affordable housing advocates coming up around this idea that housing in San Diego is expensive and much of the reason why is because we're not building enough of it. We have arrested -- restricted supply of housing and a growing population. The rent collectors and property owners are making more and more money off of that restricted supply because people are getting desperate to find a place to live. So the idea is density. We got sprawl and some people, so density is a topic for a lot of people. Developer supported because they can make more money off of single parcel land. If you're collecting rent on 20 apartments as opposed to a single family home, you are making more money. But it faces a lot of barriers. Regulatory restrictions, the cities can say you can only build a certain number of housing units, there are residents who will post it. They say it doesn't fit in with the character of a neighborhood and will increase traffic. With the example you mention of how way, in the early stages, before the residence new that it was eventually going to be intended for veterans, a lot of them were saying we don't want more crime in our neighborhood. Low income housing will bring in crime. Affordable housing both subsidize and Smalley affordable housing faces a lot of barriers in San Diego. This new alliance is part of a growing consensus that the problem is we're not building enough of it, not building it in the right places and were really far behind. Estimates are about 12,000 units per year are needed just to keep up with population growth. Does not even lowering the prices we have now. And we have and close the gap. I've been here for 20 years and this is a problem that we've had back then. They said we were 300,000, there was a 300,000 home deficit in 1996 and that has continued to whiten Is like the national debt. I think that there are, with this growing consensus, I can't quite tell yet if it's really going to take hold in a lot of people's minds and people will realize that the suburban neighborhoods in urban San Diego are unsustainable. We can have these homes existing. Some of them are right next to public transit lines. You can't sustain that very small-scale housing in a city that has such great housing these DUI end up being a more exclusive area quick -- Do we end up being a more exclusive area? It is over $500,000 for a median home. The difference between now and 2007 when the prices were at this level is that it was a bubble in this frenzy of homebuying crashed in the values dropped another backup. You don't get the sense that this is a frenzy. This is the market balancing the demands and the need for housing. Homeowners are very happy about it I must say. Is their home value in their wealth is been increasing I think we're going to start seeing more attention paid to the economic consequences of this crisis. Younger people not able to afford to live in San Diego, that limits the supply of your young workforce of young creative people filling those jobs. And people are spending more of their income on housing and that will restrict their disposable income this is reaching crisis level both here and in San Diego and in California. I did want to shift to mention the climate aspect in the sprawl in the transportation. Local environment see a huge threat from Trump and his cabinet of climate change deniers. What can we do here in California and in cities such as San Diego and others in the County that have their own action points quick You had much more movement in this direction than ever before. San Diego passed a plan that is unprecedented in its scope and what it promises to do. That said, the folks who have been pushing for action on this climate change issue in measuring where we are don't think we're anywhere in where we need to be. Only seven have made progress toward climate action plan. Only San Diego is considered to have met the gold standard and that all the different things like legally binding plans and something that addresses greenhouse gas dimensions, density and meets all of those standards. The next group of communities, I think there are three of them they consider San Diego to gold standard. The other two that have plans, one of them is not legally binding and another is an advisory. A long way to go for the communities in San Diego County. The next thing for San Diego is will this plan be implemented so it meets the goals and I think that's a big question. I am just wondering, we're watching what's happening on a national level. President-elect Trump has appointed quite a few people. They await Senate confirmation but quite a few people who are climate deniers. These climate action plans at the local level, how much value will they have if they are confirmed quick I think a lot of the energy this driving the adoption of these plans is the state of California has set goals for communities to do that. The quite adamant The state legislature has also been forward thinking. I think it will be interesting to watch and see how much influence the federal level will have here in California. Not just influence power and dollars. The federal government can do a lot of different things. Some of what we end up doing will be determined by what they decide. And also we have a few seconds left before we wrap up, I wanted to talk about what can the Fed Studer punish California if they disagreed and try to embarrass the federal government quick I think that's a pursestrings question. If the federal government wants to be punitive it certainly is their option. I'm not sure what we can do to stop that from happening. It is a political arena in a political question in many ways. I think we have to see how that discussion plays out. One thing, if you think that these climate action plans are the way to California should be moving, you can be encouraged to Governor Brown also supports that. It will be interesting to talk about in the new year. That does wrap up our week of stories at the roundtable. I would like to thank my guests. These folks are often KPBS. The stories that we discussed today are available on our website. Thank you for joining us today on the roundtable.