March Primary First Test Of San Diego's New Voting System And Other Local News

Speaker 1: 00:00 It's Thursday, February 27th I'm Deb Welsh and you're listening to San Diego news matters from KPBS coming up with the March primary just a few days away. San Diego new voting system is about to undergo its first test and coal plants are closing across the arid West. Speaker 2: 00:17 It's been a boom and bust town for a long time. It's time to just kind of get away from that and being just a steady growing town. Speaker 1: 00:26 That more coming up right after the break. The presidential primary is the first test for San Diego's new multimillion dollar voting system. KPBS reporter Matt Hoffman got to look at the upgrade, which includes new voting machines and software designed to be fast and secure. Speaker 3: 00:51 The last time we introduced a new voting system was 16 years ago, so this is very significant. Speaker 4: 00:55 San Diego County registrar voters, Michael WGU says the old system was slow and outdated Speaker 3: 01:00 and so what we needed to do was is scale up and add more capacity to the overall system. Speaker 4: 01:06 New technology means ballots will be counted faster and more accurately. They used to be able to process about 500 in an hour. Now they can do 10,000 that means we could see results coming in faster. On election night. The entire upgrade is costing around $16 million. Speaker 3: 01:21 We have been very methodical about how we introduce this new voting system where the impact is really minimal to voters that are out there. The only thing that they will see that may be different is going to be the ballot marking device at a polling place. Speaker 4: 01:34 The new touchscreen voting machines will print out ballots that will need to be given to poll workers. Still, most people will use those traditional fill in the bubble ballots. Matt Hoffman, KPBS news Speaker 1: 01:45 Del Mar voters are deciding the fate of a mostly undeveloped coastal bluff. In the March primary KPBS reporter Eric Anderson says, measure G is seeking to clear the way for construction of a luxury hotel complex and housing Speaker 5: 01:59 measure. G ask city of Del Mar voters to approve adoption of the Marisol specific plan. Developer Robert Green helped write the measure. Speaker 2: 02:07 That project is a 65 room luxury hotel and 27 villas and four single family residences. In addition to that, it's 22 affordable housing units and 10 affordable lodging units. Speaker 5: 02:21 The ballot argument in favor says the development would open up a plot of land that's been closed to the public for a century. Speaker 2: 02:27 The last thing we would ever do is to create something that would be a problem for our community. Speaker 5: 02:31 Brene says, developers will either build his hotel and housing complex or just over a dozen upscale States, but Del Mar, deputy mayor Terry gastro. Lynn isn't convinced the city plan should be rewritten. Speaker 6: 02:44 It's currently zoned for one house per acre. Speaker 5: 02:48 She worries about the height of the buildings in the proposed hotel complex and the impact on the sandstone bluff. Speaker 6: 02:54 What we do and how we vote will set the precedent for one the last Speaker 7: 03:00 coastal Bluffs that's natural and beautiful and enjoyed by many. Speaker 5: 03:04 A yes vote on measure. G changes the city plan to allow for construction of the hotel housing complex. A no vote on G keeps the city plan the same as it is. Eric Anderson. KPBS news. Speaker 1: 03:17 The San Diego County office of ethics and compliance is investigating racist social media posts. There are allegedly written by a County employee responsible for helping low income people get housing subsidies. KPBS reporter Prius Schreder has more. The NAACP San Diego branch brought the allegations to the attention of the County board of supervisors. They say an African American disabled woman filed a complaint to them about the County employee after she says she was harshly questioned by him regarding her section eight housing voucher. Francine Maxwell from the NAACP says their investigation found that the man had posted and shared racist memes on his personal social media accounts. One depicted Senator Kamala Harris as a prostitute, another aimed a vulgar curse at the prophet Muhammad, Speaker 7: 04:08 but we don't feel that a person with that much power should be exhibiting extremist views in his personal life nor his professional life and sometimes the two are not separate. Speaker 1: 04:18 Maxwell says the woman had notified the employee's supervisor about his behavior. A County spokesperson says they are looking into quote what we knew and when we knew it. Priya, either K PBS news. Governor Gavin Newsom has designated over 14,000 acres of land across California to be used for temporary housing for the homeless calf radios. Sarah Mises. Dan looks into how these sites were selected. The governor assigned these parcels based on state owned land that could be leased by local governments, many of which are owned by Caltrans. Though the overall amount of land is large, they're unevenly distributed across the state. For instance, Sonoma County has been given 49 sites encompassing 2300 acres of land. While San Diego has just seven sites across three acres. Homelessness advocates are concerned that the distribution of sites could isolate this population further and uproot many from the communities where they live. The state has promised strict oversight to make sure local governments are utilizing the 286 sites made available in Sacramento. I am Sarah Mises, tan, California is taking the impacts of climate change on the coast. Seriously. Cap radios. Ezra David Romero reports on a plan adopted by the California ocean protection council to protect the Pacific coastline. Speaker 2: 05:37 The state has over 1100 miles of coastline and the Marine economy is worth around $44 billion. The council says immediate action is needed and the plan lays out four goals and includes more than 40 targets like making sure the coast is resilient to three and a half feet of sea level rise by 2050 Mark gold is the executive director of the council. Speaker 8: 05:58 We could have a future where some of the state's most iconic beaches are actually at risk of disappearing because of sea level rise. Speaker 2: 06:07 There are also targets for creating a kelp forest restoration plan this year and developing a statewide microplastic strategy by 2021 they want the legislature to use the plan to create laws to protect the coastline. Gold says there's existing bond dollars that could be used for the most urgent actions in Sacramento. I'm Ezra David Romero. Speaker 1: 06:27 Coal fired power plants are closing across the country in arid Western States. These facilities use a significant amount of the region, scarce water supplies with closure dates looming. Luke Runyon reports communities are starting the contentious debate about how to use this newly freed up water after coal. Speaker 2: 06:48 Hi, you must be the guy looking for Jennifer. It's snowing in downtown Craig, Colorado when Jennifer Holloway walks into the local bookstore. I'm glad you came. No, I was thinking maybe you just didn't call me. Cause Holloway runs the city's chamber of commerce. The start of 2020 has been full of mixed emotions. She says in January the company operating the nearby coal plant, Tristate generation and transmission confirmed the rumors it will shut down by 2030. It's been hard to face the fact that okay we are needed because we've been providing electricity for millions of other people and that is a source of pride. At first people worried about the loss of jobs and the ripple effects it would have on local businesses. Then other nagging questions came up like what's going to happen to the plant's sizable water portfolio? It uses about 10 times more water than all of Craig's nearly 9,000 residents. Speaker 2: 07:45 There is some discussion on this in the community and people have different views. Um, but my personal view is that that water needs to be safeguarded for longterm environmental usage in the arid West. Water and access to it is intimately tied to local economies where water goes to a coal plant, a residential tap or down a river channel says something about a community's present and future economy. Water is become quite the commodity, if you will, and it's a very precious Ray back is a Moffett County commissioner. The coal plant is in his district and he's a longtime booster of the industry discussion over the plants. Water rights is just beginning, he says, but he'd like to see some of it set aside for agriculture. His worst case scenario that it didn't get utilized for anything and they just hung onto the water. Right so far, tri-state hasn't tipped its hand. Dwayne highly Tristate CEO said at a news conference that his company is already fielding calls from interested buyers. When you look a typical coal facility, it uses an enormous volume of water and the fact that that will be liberated and available for other reuse is going to be significant. The interest is due to scarcity. Craig's coal plant and the Yampa river, which it draws from, are both in the drought plugged Colorado river basin in the Southwest. It's unheard of for large amounts of water to be freed up all at once. Speaker 9: 09:19 This creates a big opportunity to, you know, make the Wilder decisions more wisely. Speaker 2: 09:26 [inaudible] John researched coal plants and their water rights while a grad student at the university of California. The project was commissioned by the nature Conservancy. It's one of the environmental groups interested in buying water from plants, slated for closure in Wyoming, New Mexico, and Arizona, and keeping it in rivers. Speaker 9: 09:45 It all comes down to who can negotiate with these plant owners and you know, who can make it better claim or make a better offer Speaker 2: 09:52 and to the priorities of the energy provider. If it sees water as a moneymaking asset, sell it off to the highest bidder. If it wants to do a good deed, listen to the local community. We just got the place painted. Okay. People like Megan Veenstra, she Dodges rolls of woven plastic fabric as we walk through her new storefront in Craig, she and her husband run good vibes, river gear Speaker 10: 10:18 rafts, life jackets, all kinds of stuff to just to get you out on the water and get your recreate and on our beautiful river Speaker 2: 10:25 she says, Craig is starting a transition that other communities in the West over the last century have gone through from mining to recreation based economies. Speaker 10: 10:36 It's been a boom and bust town for a long time. It's time to just kind of get away from that and be just a steady growing town Speaker 2: 10:45 and if the community is ready to double down on a new persona as a tourist destination. Veenstra says the decision is simple. Leave the water in the river. I'm Luke Runyon in Craig, Colorado. Speaker 1: 10:58 The Naval information warfare systems command or nav war is the Navy's high-tech communications hub, but it's located in a world war II era warehouse in the midway district. KPBS Metro reporter Andrew Bowen says, plans to build a new nav war headquarters could have a big impact on the neighborhood Speaker 11: 11:17 on this side. Over here behind that is actually a storage area. It was being developed and built up, uh, up until about a year ago, Greg guisane is walking me through a giant empty room at nav war, the Navy's cybersecurity division headquartered right here in San Diego. It's 32 feet to the bottom of the beams. It's about 55 feet to the top of the peak guys and describes nav war as the cyber geeks of the U S Navy. They develop secure communications technology for Navy vessels and they do it in a sprawling 70 acre campus built during world war II for manufacturing aircraft. To say the facilities are a fit for nav Wars 21st century mission is an understatement. The challenge we have is providing the security and locking that down and the efficiency and modern spaces that these world war II factories just don't have. Beyond the security challenge is buildings can get sweltering in the summer because they lack air conditioning and if guys and has a meeting on the other side of the campus, it can take a half hour just to walk there and back. Speaker 11: 12:16 So it's a lot of inefficiency in the way that we're spread out over the whole property. If I could just step into an elevator and we had a meeting like that, I'd save hours every day. The Navy planes do design and build a more compact headquarters and pay for it by leasing or selling off its excess land for private development for help with that vision. The Navy has turned to the county's regional planning agency SANDAG. It's going so well right now. It's a little scary actually. Asana Curata is SANDAG is executive director. The two agencies are now meeting weekly trying to hammer out a joint development deal. A big part of the [inaudible] vision is a new mass transit center with the rail line connecting to the airport less than two miles away. Speaker 12: 12:55 It told us what they need and we told them, if we give you that when you give us the land, that's pretty much the term and we will take about 14 acres of the land and we will build a San Diego grand central and we'll open the rest of it to private development. Speaker 11: 13:11 It Kratos says the addition of a new transit center could kickstart the revitalization of the midway district, which is plagued by blight. New housing and commercial space would fund some of the transit hubs costs, but it would also require some local taxpayer dollars. It Kratos says, finally, connecting rail to the airport would be worth it. Speaker 12: 13:30 I want to convince people in San Diego that is to their interests and to their kids and grandkids interests is to do this. The whole system of this special, this is transformational. This is going to influence what happened from the sport that in all the way to downtown, Speaker 11: 13:48 this may seem like a done deal, but the Navy insists it's not. At a recent open house meeting, the Navy presented a range of options, low or high density development with or without a transit center. Clifford Weiler of mission Hills expects whatever happens, traffic will get worse in the midway district, but he's withholding judgment until the Navy gives more details. His bottom line, the status quo for nav Wars facilities is not an option that needs to be replaced. It looks nice on the outside, the skeleton looks beautiful but the inside is, is deteriorating and needs to be replaced. So this is a modular furniture. Uh, this is what a cube looks like in a cube farm before it's assembled back at the nav war site. Greg guys and says the Navy's objective of getting a new facility comes first. But if they can help out with other regional goals like building more housing and improving public transit, even better, all the pieces fell into place. Speaker 11: 14:44 A lot of good thinking by a lot of good people put a lot of combined issues together and we might have a viable and mix sense solution, which doesn't often happen in local and federal government. That things just kind of make sense after its environmental review. The Navy says it plans to make a final decision on what to do with its land before the end of the year and nav war isn't the only big redevelopment project in the works in the midway district. Tune in tomorrow for a deep dive into how this languishing neighborhood could be on the verge of a building. Boom. Andrew Bowen. KPBS news, Speaker 13: 15:27 that's it for San Diego news matters today. Consider supporting this podcast by becoming a KPBS member today. Just go to kpbs.org/membership.