The Group Chat

On Tuesday the San Diego City Council is set to approve a settlement with Alia Khouri, a former deputy chief operating officer for the city who lost her job when Mayor Todd Gloria restructured his executive team in December 2025. The city will pay Khouri $269,000 to resolve what the formal council resolution describes as a settlement demand... Read more

It’s rare that we get a journalism conference in San Diego, but so was the case last week with the 2026 Local Independent Online News Publishers Independent News Sustainability Summit. For three days, I joined dozens of news publishers, vendors and people from support organizations to work through some of the most challenging industry issues... Read more

Bacteria levels that are at times too high for the lab to measure, and a melange of industrial chemicals, viruses, pesticides, PFAS and volatile organic compounds — San Diego Coastkeeper just released its 2025 Tijuana River Valley Water Quality Monitoring Report, and those are among its findings. San Diego Coastkeeper has also come out with a... Read more

In June, former San Diego City Council member Jim Madaffer (2000-2008) was tooling up Sorrento Valley Road in his 2024 Tesla Model X when he struck a pothole in the northbound lane. Two of his tires blew out. He got a tow, rented a car, replaced the tires, missed work. It cost him $3,422.77 all told, according to a claim he submitted to the... Read more

Environment and Energy reporter Philip Salata and I stopped by Market Creek Plaza where the Jacobs Center of Neighborhood Innovation hosted an open house for residents informing them about the cancer-causing chemicals on the property. The event was attended by a handful of community members as well as city staff and Councilmember Henry Foster... Read more

We just dropped the latest news on a yearslong saga about illegal rent increases in San Diego. This all started in 2023, when our investigation revealed the San Diego Housing Commission was approving rent increases for Section 8 tenants without first ensuring those increases were lawful. Three years later, the Housing Commission maintains the... Read more

Check out our recent reporting on Instagram. A primer: Chemicals are seeping up from the earth in homes and one of San Diego’s few and highly-frequented grocery stores in an underserved neighborhood.

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Chula Vista officials are considering adding a senior center on the city’s east side. Carolina Chavez, the District 1 councilmember running for re-election, proposed the idea and is now asking the public to give input on what they’d like to see in such as center. You can fill out the survey here. Given my past attendance at council meetings,... Read more

The San Ysidro Public Library is closed due to flooding, affecting thousands of monthly visitors in the area. City spokesperson Caleb Olsen said the library first closed down on Aug. 7 due to a “malfunctioning unit in the men’s restroom.” “The flooding originated in the restroom, then spread into the lobby, the main entrance and community... Read more

Reaction to our Chollas Creek contamination story is coming in, and soon we will be following up. We also got clarification from the county and the state about their roles in the 1990s and just updated our post to reflect that. Please take a look.