Voice of San Diego Monthly | May 2012

From Rising Star to Lone Wolf: After Ditching the GOP, What’s Next for Nathan Fletcher?

www.voiceofsandiego.org

MAY 2012

Vol. 1 No. 1

Why San Diego Isn’t Joining the

Teacher Evaluation

REVOLUTION School districts around the country are using cutting-edge stats to evaluate teachers.

So why isn’t San Diego?

BY WILL CARLESS

Voice of San Diego is a member-based news organization. Join our community and get a subscription to this magazine. Learn more at vosd.org/join-members ▸▸

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May 2012

Volume 1 Number 1

18 ARTS

Mothballed An old brewery in Barrio Logan once boasted bright murals and colorful ceiling beams. That art’s been sitting in storage for decades, begging for a home.

BY KELLY BENNETT

10 EDUCATION

Why San Diego Isn’t Joining the Teacher Evaluation Revolution All around the country there’s a conversation about how to best measure, nurture and hold accountable teachers. It’s one that’s not even being had at San Diego Unified. BY WILL CARLESS

Inside 2 EDITOR’S NOTE | Andrew Donohue Welcome to VOSD Monthly

4 ON THE STREET

24 POLITICS

From Rising Star to Lone Wolf: The Surprising Path of Nathan Fletcher In shedding the Republican Party, Nathan Fletcher might have found the only way to become mayor. He risks destroying the political identity he’s spent his entire life building to do so.

BY LIAM DILLON

Surfing in sewage | Rob Davis The developing brain | Kelly Bennett Filner makes a funny | Keegan Kyle The candidates’ top five flips | Scott Lewis

9 GRAPHIC | Keegan Kyle Our Crumbling Streets

32 FACT CHECK | Liam Dillon DeMaio Says Convention Center Expansion Is ‘Private’

35 COMMENTARY | Scott Lewis Mayor of Dissolving City

30 COMMUNITY

What San Diego’s Neighborhoods Want We hit the pavement to find out what San Diego residents really want from City Hall.

May 2012 VOSD MONTHLY

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Editor’s Note Welcome to VOSD Monthly

EDITOR

Andrew Donohue STAFF WRITERS

F

IRST, WE WERE A WEBSITE. That was a novel concept back in 2005 — just a website.

Then we got into television. And then radio. Now, here we are, Voice of San Diego, a print magazine.

At this rate, you’ll soon see me riding through the streets of San Diego on horseback and yelling out the results of our latest stories like some sort of gangly version of Paul Revere.

But this isn’t any kind of reversion for us. These are all calculated ways to get our stories in front of as many people as possible and build a longterm, sustainable business model. We’re constantly pushing to innovate, experiment and simply be better.

When we first started out in February 2005, and for many years afterwards, people referred to us as an “online-only” organization. Heck, even our name said it: voiceofsandiego.org.

Over the years we’ve become a lot more than just a website. Just this month we booted the “.org” from our name and went with the regular old Voice of San Diego.

Welcome to the latest iteration, Voice of San Diego Monthly. I’m thrilled to take the absolute best work this small, hard-working staff puts together over the course of a month and showcase it in one glossy magazine. Many of the stories you read here will have already appeared on our website, at least some version of them. With an “on-demand” publishing model, we’ve found a pretty inexpensive way to publish our stories in print and on an iPad. I used to be surprised at how often engaged, regular readers missed our important stories. That helped me realize the power of regularly packaging our stories together in different ways. It’s easy to miss stories in the rush of the day. You shouldn’t have to work hard to find our stories.

That’s our job.

So, here’s our latest effort to give you another way to find our stories.

I hope you enjoy them.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go see a man about a horse.

Kelly Bennett, Will Carless, Rob Davis, Liam Dillon, Keegan Kyle CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Ashley Lewis

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER

Scott Lewis

VICE PRESIDENT, ADVANCEMENT & ENGAGEMENT

Mary Walter-Brown WEB EDITOR

Dagny Salas MEMBER MANAGER

Summer Polacek FOUNDERS

Buzz Woolley & Neil Morgan BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Reid Carr, Bob Page, Bill Stensrud, Gail Stoorza-Gill

May 2012 | Volume 1 Number 1 Subscriptions and Reprints

ANDREW DONOHUE

Editor Thank you to John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for supporting innovative journalism.

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VOSD members at the Speaking Up and Loud & Clear levels receive a complimentary subscription to Voice of San Diego Monthly magazine as a thank you for their support. Individual issues and reprints may be purchased on demand for $7.99 at MagCloud.com/voiceofsandiego. Digital editions are also available for $2.99.

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We Want

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the Voice of San Diego!

DID YOU KNOW that Voice of San Diego is a member-based news organization? That means the service relies on contributions from individuals, foundations and community partners to power our award-winning journalism.

This service has been operating for seven years now, but we’re still surprised to find that many people don’t realize we’re a nonprofit. It’s my job to make sure residents know they must get involved if we’re to continue.

Last month, we launched our “Raise Your Voice” membership program. We truly believe that you are the Voice of San Diego and you are the voice we represent in our irreverent approach to uncovering the truth.

The mission of the Raise Your Voice program is two-fold – to cultivate a community of educated and informed citizens who can participate in important civic discussions while, at the same time, building a sustainable revenue source to fuel our investigative reporting.

I’m sure you can see where this is headed…we want you to join our community!

There are four different levels in the Raise Your Voice program. You determine your level based on what you can afford and how “in the loop” you want to be. Benefits include an exclusive member newsletter with editorials you won’t find anywhere else from our CEO Scott Lewis. You’ll also get “first looks” at our special investigations, invitations

to our member events, a subscription to this magazine and promotional opportunities on our website and in the magazine for you, your company or favorite organization.

You won’t get coffee mugs, pens or other tchotchkes as a VOSD member but you will receive invitations to attend our events and participate in lively discussions and debates. Our monthly member coffees provide a forum to explore the issues shaping San Diego with a diverse group of citizens from all different niches and neighborhoods.

If mornings aren’t your thing, we also host “Brews & News” happy hours at local breweries where you’ll find our reporters leading different discussions at each table. Members are also invited to attend our new conversation series with local newsmakers and the “VOSD Experience” bus tours where the stories we cover come to life – get ready to ride over some potholes!

Go to vosd.org/join-members to learn more about the benefits of membership. If you join at the “Speaking Up” level, you’ll receive this magazine every month via mail, or digitally if you prefer to go paperless. Flexible payment options even allow you to contribute by the month.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me directly: mary.brown@voiceofsandiego.org, (619) 325-0525. I’m always happy to chat and I look forward to getting to know all our members better.

Thank you for your support!

MARY WALTER-BROWN

Vice President, Advancement & Engagement

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May 2012 VOSD MONTHLY

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HAPPENINGS

On the Street

SAM HODGSON FOR VOICE OF SAN DIEGO

Where Sewage Flowed Freely IF ANYONE should have known he might be surfing in sewage, it’s Mark West.

The 44-year-old Imperial Beach resident volunteers with the Surfrider Foundation’s local chapter. He sits on an advisory committee for the federal agency responsible for intercepting and treating Mexico’s sewage as it crosses the border.

Before he paddles out during the rainy season, West goes online and checks the direction of the ocean’s current to make sure the Tijuana River, which carries Mexico’s sewage and polluted storm water runoff across the border, isn’t flowing and unfurling its trademark brown plume in his surf spot.

And so there West was Tuesday morning, surfing chest-high waves just south of the Imperial Beach pier in what he thought was clean water. It hadn’t rained in weeks. No warnings were posted. But the water smelled and tasted funny. Like detergent, an indicator of sewage.

Unbeknownst to West, the Tijuana River had been flowing into the ocean for days. Pumps that intercept the polluted river before it reaches the Pacific were shut off because of a system failure.

An estimated 6 million to 7 million gallons of sewage a day had been seeping into the ocean for almost a week.

Currents had been pushing it south toward Mexico until Tuesday, when it moved north to Imperial Beach. County health officials closed the beach there later Tuesday — after West got out of the water.

The incident is just one symptom of a major pollution problem that has plagued San Diego’s coast for decades, one that was supposed to have been fixed 15 years ago but that’s been dragged down by missed deadlines, bureaucratic bungling and local infighting. Mexico’s sewage infrastructure is inadequate for its booming population, and with nowhere else to put it, the country’s waste ends up flowing into the United States and the Pacific, where it pollutes area beaches.

Even surfers who actively try to avoid the border’s polluted waters sometimes end up unknowingly paddling into waves tainted by sewage.

“I live my life watching where the plume is

going, because I don’t want to get sick, I don’t want to surf in somebody’s sewage,” West said.

“I’m supposed to know.”

The recent problem began with a sewage spill at a treatment plant in San Ysidro, which has a long history of violating pollution standards.

County health officials were notified of the spill the day it occurred, took seawater samples and found no problems, said Mark McPherson, the county official who oversees its water quality testing program.

But sometime between Monday and Tuesday, the current switched and began pushing the river’s pollution north. The county closed Imperial Beach on Tuesday, but not before West and other surfers unwittingly paddled out into the funky-smelling water.

“Somebody from one of those agencies should’ve notified the public that there’s an active spill going on,” West said.

— Rob Davis

Posted April 11, 2012

IDEAS

This Is Your 8-Year-Old Brain on Violin and Karate A SLEW OF POPULAR BOOKS AND CDS focuses on ways humans can allegedly increase their brainpower by listening to certain music. Studies have shown encouraging results for music therapy helping victims of strokes and other mental impairments.

But a group of scientific heavy-hitters are after even more comprehensive data that would match both brain imaging (what physically changes in our brains) with cognitive and behavioral testing (what effects those changes would have).

They’re taking kids who are learning to play instruments for the first time in Chula Vista afterschool programs and following them over the course of five years.

Then they’ll compare that group’s results to kids who are learning karate or other martial arts for the first time. Could it be that whatever impact music has, karate or another disciplined May 2012 VOSD MONTHLY

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On the Street

Behavioral and Brain Development in Kids ▸

The specialty of UC San Diego’s Center for Human Development, where researchers have been doing highly regarded research for a dozen years.

The Relationship Between Music and the Brain ▸

That’s what Aniruddh Patel and John Iversen study at the Neurosciences Institute. They’ve developed special questions and tests to add to the process the kids will go through at the UCSD center.

Teaching Kids Music for the First Time ▸

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Here’s where the San Diego Youth Symphony comes in — its Community Opus Project trains hundreds of kids in Chula Vista in after-school string and orchestra programs. The program is modeled after El Sistema in Venezuela, which produced Gustavo Dudamel, the L.A. Philharmonic’s conductor and poster child for the program’s success.

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They’ll be studying the same kids over five years to see how the brain changes with continued instruction.

The research includes both taking images of the brain to understand how the training affects its physical structure, and testing the participants’ cognitive abilities through simple tests and computerized tasks.

Participating families get a color picture of their brains and about $100 compensation.

— Kelly Bennett

Posted March 19, 2012

Number of the Month

1/3 Number of households in City Heights that own a car.

HIJINKS

Bob Filner, Comedian WHEN SAN DIEGO’S high-profile candidates for mayor debated nonprofit issues last month, Congressman Bob Filner joined the discussion by phone while his three rivals attended in person.

Filner introduced himself over the loudspeakers to hundreds in the audience, and he described why he was in Washington, D.C. and not at the event in San Diego.

“Thank you for allowing me to participate by phone,” Filner said. “I was voting today to make sure there

were — to keep tax deductions for charitable organizations.”

A few people snickered at first, but then the audience filled with applause and cheers. I wrote the statement down in my notebook for a possible Fact Check.

I looked into it. Congress didn’t address any legislation about tax deductions for charitable organizations on March 26, so Filner couldn’t have voted on what he said he did.

Congressional records show Filner voted against two bills that day. Both amended Wall Street regulations and had nothing to do with charitable organizations. He acknowledged that in an interview.

“There is no bill,” he said. “It was a joke.”

Filner said everyone at the event knew what nonprofit-related proposals were before Congress and therefore knew that he was joking.

The statement was meant to be more symbolic of his support for nonprofits than a reflection of his actual activities, he said.

I surveyed seven people who said they attended the forum. Most work for nonprofits. One thought Filner might’ve been joking but wasn’t sure.

Six said they thought Filner was seriously explaining his absence.

If it was a joke, it didn’t land.

— Keegan Kyle

Posted April 6, 2012

POLITICS AS USUAL

The Top Five Flips by Mayoral Candidates So Far I’VE SAID IT BEFORE and I’ll say it again: I have no problem with politicians changing their minds. It shows thoughtfulness and often courage to take a radically different position than before.

But the key is you have to explain it.

You have own it.

SAM HODGSON FOR VOICE OF SAN DIEGO

practice has the same brain impact?

And then they’ll compare to yet another group of kids the same age who aren’t in either program.

The work of science demands researchers approach the outcome with open minds. But the team knows that if they discover new evidence that music or martial arts or both have a positive influence on cognitive development, the findings could provide greater negotiating power when schools cut arts teaching.

The project takes advantage of the fact that we have so many leading researchers and thinkers living and working in the same county. Three San Diego institutions bring their expertise to the study:

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

“I ride the center line, just so I don’t take my dog’s face off.”

— Marc Lindshield, as he drove the rutted city roads in San Pasqual

So if they do that, no problem.

Flips, though, also help us understand the changing political power market. If someone makes a bold proposal and then backs off of it, they’re likely responding to a true exertion of power or persuasion.

Here are the top five flips so far in the mayoral contest and what they might mean.

5

Carl DeMaio Loving Arts Funding

DeMaio’s beloved Roadmap to Recovery says the city must cut the funding it sends to arts organizations by 25 percent.

Now, though, he has decided that such a cut is no longer needed.

Well, OK then. This would indicate Clockwise from top left: Congressman Bob Filner, City Councilman Carl DeMaio, District that he’s decided that a frontal assault Attorney Bonnie Dumanis and state Assemblyman Nathan Fletcher. on a funding source prized by local arts organizations and philanthropists isn’t Reform measure, differently than he to oppose it. She felt that public worth it. safety personnel deserved more solid does now. retirement benefits because of the DeMaio used to say that most Bob Filner Thinks risks they take. new employees would get an Marriage Stinks (But Then she switched. The shift reflects unprecedented choice. The city will the popularity of the initiative. But it offer employees 9 percent of their Not the Next One) continues to haunt her. salaries for retirement. DeMaio said This isn’t really a flip. I just found it Her own pension earned after the employees would get to choose hilarious and an interesting indication decades in public service has become whether to take 6 percent of that and of how far our debate about marriage a major liability. It will remain difficult send it to Social Security or invest it equality has come. The news source for her to explain why pensions are themselves.

LGBT Weekly asked Congressman Bob unaffordable except hers.

But he recently said twice in a Filner why he voted for the Defense of mini-debate that if Proposition B, the Marriage Act in 1996, which defined Nathan Fletcher Not pension reform measure, is passed, marriage as the union between a man new city employees will get Social Being a Republican and a woman.

Security — no choice.

The guy who only a few weeks ago was He basically said that, in his It would seem that DeMaio has talking about how big of a Republican experience, marriage stinks and he decided that talking about not giving he was suddenly decided he was not couldn’t understand why gays and city employees even Social Security as part of that coalition anymore. lesbians would want to do it. What’s a guaranteed retirement benefit is not We still have to wait to see what odd about that, of course, is that he just a great selling point.

Fletcher’s move shows us about the recently decided to get married again. political power market. If he found Bonnie Dumanis Hating a market for his message, wow. If DeMaio Says New City on Pensions Fletcher’s move falls flat, then perhaps Employees Will Get Social not much has changed except his This was the biggest of flips in the race Security Under His Plan future. until last week. The district attorney DeMaio used to sell Proposition B, wrestled with whether to endorse that — Scott Lewis Posted April 4, 2012 the so-called Comprehensive Pension pension reform initiative. She decided

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May 2012 VOSD MONTHLY

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GRAPHIC

Our Crumbling Streets How San Diego’s Streets, Storm Drains and Buildings Get Worse This graphic compares how much the city plans to spend on street repairs and other maintenance, and how much the city must spend to maintain current conditions, according to public works officials.

The annual figures below show cumulative spending over the period. By 2017, the city would fall about $77 million short of maintaining current conditions. $480 million $319 million $159 million $146 million FY 2013

$643 million

$729 million

$583 million

$437 million

$291 million

FY 2014

Source: City of San Diego

W

$806 million

E EXAMINED the city’s newest plan to repair roads, storm drains and buildings, and found it doesn’t include enough money to keep up with anticipated demand.

Despite spending $729 million in the next five years, public works officials say the city’s infrastructure would continue to get even worse.

Just to maintain current conditions, officials estimate the city would need to spend another

FY 2015

FY 2016

FY 2017 Graphic by Keegan Kyle / VOSD

$77 million over the period. The graphic above illustrates how that $77 million deficit would emerge.

The city plans to spend $145.8 million annually while officials say maintaining current conditions would require incrementally more money. The gap between available funding and needed funding would widen each year.

— Keegan Kyle

May 2012 VOSD MONTHLY

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Crawford High School calculus teachers Jonathan Winn and Carl Munn and their team created a grassroots data evaluation system that boosted teachers’ performance. The school district all but ignored their efforts.

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Why San Diego Isn’t Joining the

Teacher Evaluation

REVOLUTION School districts around the country are using cutting-edge stats to evaluate teachers.

So why isn’t San Diego?

BY WILL CARLESS

S

CHOOL SUPERINTENDENTS across America are talking tough.

The time has come, they say, to get rid of failing teachers, or at the very least to identify them so that weaker teachers can get help to become more effective. No longer should students suffer the ignominy of an educator who isn’t interested, willing, or able to make them learn.

For decades, schools have relied on a principal passing through a classroom once a year or every few years to eyeball how a teacher is doing. Today districts across the country say there’s another way.

They’re using reams of test score data to watch the impact each teacher has on his or her students throughout the year, learning whether students gained or lost ground under each teacher.

And they’re adding that measurement to the teacher’s evaluation.

They use it to find stars, to get help for struggling teachers and, in some cases, to dispatch failing teachers like they’ve never been able to before.

May 2012 VOSD MONTHLY

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COVER STORY

Teacher Evaluation Revolution

Data Fever

Today, teachers are evaluated in San Diego in much the same way they have been for decades.

Once every year or two, with advance notice, principals pay a perfunctory visit to each classroom. After a brief, formal observation, the principal completes a three-page evaluation form.

Teachers are rated on the form as either Effective, Requiring Improvement, or Unsatisfactory.

The vast majority of local teachers receive an evaluation that says they’re effective, which isn’t surprising to many local principals.

“I mean, come on! If you can’t pull it off for a formal evaluation once every

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Former San Diego Unified Superintendent Terry Grier is now the head of Houston Independent School District, where he’s implementing tough reforms on teacher evaluation.

couple of years, for one lesson, then you really shouldn’t be a teacher,” said E. Jay Derwae, principal of Marvin Elementary School in Allied Gardens.

“This shouldn’t be approached by the district throwing something at teachers that the teachers don’t believe in.”

The cursory evaluation system in place at San Diego Unified was the norm across the United States until fairly recently. But as education reformers began to realize that a half-century of their efforts had done little or nothing to push up student achievement, attention began to focus on the sticky topic of teacher evaluation.

Districts across the country began jumping on the reform bandwagon.

They’d been pushed there by the jarring success of the documentary

“Waiting for ‘Superman,’” which reviled school districts for doing little to weed out underperforming teachers, and pressure from the Obama administration to revamp teacher assessment tools.

As the movement picked up speed, progressive superintendents began to coalesce around an evaluation process that had long been pushed by reformers: value-added metrics.

Very few people in the education community truly understand how value-added metrics work. That opacity is a main reason evaluation systems based on value-added metrics have proven so controversial.

The basic idea is to judge teachers not on how high their students’ test scores are at the end of the year, but on how much kids’ scores have improved while they’ve been sitting in the teacher’s classroom.

The method tracks the progress of each and every student, then compares that progress to how much each student was expected to improve at the beginning of the year. By analyzing how much the students in each classroom

SAM HODGSON FOR VOICE OF SAN DIEGO

In New Haven, Connecticut, the school district pushed out about 2 percent of its teachers last year, after extensive evaluations revealed those educators either couldn’t or wouldn’t improve kids’ test scores. Those evaluations had been crafted hand-in-hand with the local teachers union, which embraced reform in exchange for increases in pay and benefits.

In Houston, former San Diego Unified School District superintendent Terry Grier has overseen a radical redesign of the teacher evaluation process. Grier says there’s no place for underachieving teachers in Houston’s schools, so educators who don’t improve have been shown the door.

And in Los Angeles, superintendent John Deasy has made redesigning teacher evaluation a cornerstone of his leadership.

Tackling California’s powerful teachers unions and navigating legislation that crimps his ability to dismiss bad teachers has been tough, Deasy acknowledged, but inaction’s not an option.

“This is both a moral and a legal imperative,” Deasy said.

The San Diego Unified School District, however, isn’t interested in this revolution.

“I mean, come on! If you can’t pull it off for a formal evaluation once every couple of years, for one lesson, then you really shouldn’t be a teacher.” have improved, districts can identify which teachers are consistently pushing kids’ scores up, which are keeping scores flat, and which are failing to improve.

In places like Los Angeles and New York, those scores have been made public, based on the argument that parents deserve the information.

But just as its popularity has boomed, there’s been an equally forceful movement against value-added metrics.

Several once-bearish proponents of value-added metrics, including Linda Darling-Hammond, a former top education advisor to President Obama, now rail against the model. They argue that the margins of error are far too high to make such analysis meaningful in even the most complex of statistical models.

Test scores are just as likely to be raised or dropped by changes in a student’s socio-economic status or health, or by economic factors that affect classrooms, like swelling class sizes or dropping budgets for materials, as they are by a teacher’s ability, those critics argue.

There are other serious concerns, too: Critics worry that putting teachers on the hook for their students’ test results inevitably leads to “teaching to the test,” sterilizing classrooms into factories for rote learning.

These concerns have added a wild swirl of controversy that has only been intensified by high-profile media reports on value-added scores. Both the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times have caused uproars by publishing teachers’ value-added scores, stories that have inevitably been spun off in clichéd headlines about each city’s “Worst Teachers.”

None of that criticism has halted the march of data.

School districts from Washington, D.C. to Tennessee have plugged valueadded metrics into their evaluation systems, filtering out teachers who aren’t pushing test scores up and, in some cases, firing them for consistently

FROM THE REPORTER

The Big Picture School leaders in cities across the country have been pushing to revolutionize how teachers are evaluated, based at least in part on test-score data that isolates student progress.

What’s Happening Here The San Diego Unified School District, however, isn’t interested in this revolution.

What it Means The cursory evaluation system in place at San Diego Unified was the norm across the United States until fairly recently. But as education reformers have begun to realize that a half-century of their efforts has done little or nothing to push up student achievement, attention is now focusing on the sticky topic of teacher evaluation.

poor results.

In February, New York state legislators inked a deal with teachers’ unions that will phase in value-added scoring until it accounts for 20 percent of teachers’ evaluations.

And in Houston, superintendent Grier said 150 teachers were asked last year to take a buyout or get the sack, after evaluations based largely on value-added scores identified them as ineffective.

Grier and others say the method is just one facet of evaluation. That data is simply used to identify if a teacher’s performance warrants further examination, he said.

“It’s like if you have a really bad fever,” Grier said. “A fever is a symptom that something’s wrong, it’s not the problem itself. If a teacher has poor valueadded scores, that’s a red flag. That’s

This story was first published April 12, 2012 at voiceofsandiego.org.

when the principal needs to be going into that classroom and doing more observations.”

Why Be Divisive When You Can Be Productive?

The San Diego Unified school board and school superintendent Bill Kowba know all about value-added metrics.

They’re just not interested in using them.

District leaders shrug off value-added as a fad, saying it’s yet to be proven to push up student achievement. Similarly, they say revamping the district’s teacher evaluation process would be a sideshow that would detract from the serious work they’re doing to improve teacher performance.

Instead of imposing an aggressive, punitive evaluation process, San Diego Unified’s leaders said they’re building a “grassroots” system to help teachers get better at their jobs.

They say principals have been encouraged to use testing data proactively to identify struggling teachers and give them the support they need to push their students’ scores up.

“This shouldn’t be approached by the district throwing something at teachers that the teachers don’t believe in,” said trustee Richard Barrera. “For the conversation to be productive, it has to be something that teachers believe in, as well as the district.”

But while some district principals have embraced the use of data to help their teachers, they appear to be the exception, not the rule. And in at least one school, district leaders have all but ignored an effort by teachers to create exactly the type of proactive, datadriven system Barrera said he’s seeking.

There’s another big problem with the district’s gradual approach to identifying struggling teachers: It does nothing to tackle a formal evaluation system that many principals say is cumbersome and woefully inadequate.

Reforming that process will require an open dialogue between the district May 2012 VOSD MONTHLY

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COVER STORY

Teacher Evaluation Revolution and its teachers union.

But the relationship between the district and the union has devolved to the point of being toxic. And even if they did begin to work together, the district is currently begging for teachers to take pay cuts to keep it afloat and avoid massive layoffs.

There’s likely little room for more concessions, even if district leaders wanted to change evaluations.

“This has been a non-starter in the district for as long as I can remember,” said Scott Himelstein, an academic and former secretary of education for the state of California.

A ‘Smokescreen For Reform’

To fully understand the power of the district’s approach to boosting teacher performance, Barrera said, you need to talk to a couple of principals who are doing amazing things with data.

He pointed at one school in particular: Edison Elementary in City Heights, whose principal, Tavga Bustani, has turned the once-struggling school around.

Bustani’s hard to get hold of.

Mornings are out. That’s because she spends several hours every morning in classrooms, observing teachers, assessing, analyzing, talking, and watching. She’s looking for gaps in her data, for signs that reinforce the stories told on the pie charts, line graphs, and scattergrams plastered on the walls of her office.

Bustani checks up on the data for her teachers every two weeks. Teachers who aren’t meeting test score and other assessment goals are given extra scaffolds and supports: They get extra training sessions, or receive more observation from Bustani. Sometimes, she pairs teachers up to learn from each other.

Using her data-driven system, Bustani’s getting excellent results: When she first came to Edison, only 21 percent of students were proficient in English language arts; now that figure’s 67 percent. In math, those figures have gone from 35 percent proficiency in 2008 to 74 percent today. Bustani’s not sure how many other principals are following her lead, but she has an idea.

“I think the level of rigor and the expectation of accountability that I have for my teachers and my students is probably not what is the norm,” Bustani said.

More than a dozen interviews with principals from around the district suggested she’s right.

Barrera and district chief of staff Bernie Rhinerson said principals have been told to revamp the way they use data to identify struggling teachers as part of a program called Professional Learning Communities.

That’s news to most of the principals interviewed for this story, who said the program is actually all about sharing teaching techniques, and has little or nothing to do with using data to identify teachers who need help.

“That’s nonsense,” said Esther Omogbehin, senior principal of Lincoln High School. “That’s not what Professional Learning Communities are about, and that’s not what we use them for.”

“This is a smokescreen, and they don’t even understand their own smokescreen,” Omogbehin added.

Barrera said some principals are further along in the effort than others, and expressed concern that some principals don’t envisage the Professional Learning Communities in the same way he does.

“We will have to talk to those principals,” he said.

At the same time the district’s having problems rolling out its vision for improving teacher performance using data, it’s also proven deaf to at least one school that’s done exactly what Barrera says the district wants.

District leaders such as school board trustee Richard Barrera say they’re encouraging principals to use data to help improve teacher performance, but principals across San Diego Unified are confused about what they’re supposed to be doing.

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14 VOSD MONTHLY May 2012

Calculus wiz Jon Winn points at a column on his laptop.

“See that, there! That was a teacher who was struggling.”

He clicks to another slide on his Excel spreadsheet.

“And look, here’s a teacher who’s

SAM HODGSON FOR VOICE OF SAN DIEGO

‘Data Tells a Story’

“I think the level of rigor and the expectation of accountability that I have for my teachers and my students is probably not what is the norm.”

Principal Tavga Bustani created a data-driven process that greatly boosted teacher performance. She appears to be the exception, not the rule, at the district.

killing it. Look at his scores!”

Winn is one of the San Diego Unified School District’s wunderkinds. Last year, he was both named a district teacher of the year and won a coveted national award for outstanding teaching.

When he’s not dressing up as a member of a marching band to teach kids calculus, Winn has a pet project: In 2010, he and fellow math teacher Carl Munn started tracking reams of data from students’ test results at their school, Crawford High.

The two data wonks plugged thousands of figures into spreadsheets and began analyzing it, looking for patterns.

“Data tells a story,” Winn likes to say.

By figuring out how many students in each class were consistently performing well, and by comparing

one class to another, Winn and Munn began identifying which teachers on the campus needed help.

One of those teachers was Ken Herschman, whose students

“It just makes you look forward to coming to work.” consistently scored lower in algebra than kids in other classes.

“Ken comes into our meeting and says, ‘I’m throwing in the towel. You guys just tell me what to do, because I can’t figure it out. I cannot figure out, on my own, how to reach these kids,’” Winn said.

The team members at Crawford galvanized to help their colleague. For a year, Herschman gave up his daily preparation periods, opting instead to spend the time being mentored by Munn. He sat in on Munn’s classes, observing the master teacher’s techniques, which he replicated in his classroom.

Herschman’s students’ algebra scores soared. In a year, he went from being ranked 27th in the district to fourth.

“It just makes you look forward to coming to work,” Herschman said. “You really feel like you’re impacting student learning and student achievement. It’s a much more positive experience.”

Winn dubbed the algebra teacher’s journey “The Herschman Model.”

Without even knowing it, Winn and the Crawford team had created exactly May 2012 VOSD MONTHLY

| 15

COVER STORY

Teacher Evaluation Revolution

A Problem of Trust

Push San Diego Unified’s leaders hard enough and they’ll admit something: Even with their efforts to boost teacher performance, they still need to revamp the district’s formal teacher evaluation process at some point, too.

But doing that is far from simple.

Districts like Washington, D.C. and Houston haven’t just changed the way teachers are assessed; they’ve also upped the consequences of getting a negative assessment. Basically, they’ve made it possible for administrators to fire teachers based on their evaluations.

In San Diego Unified, as in many other

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16 VOSD MONTHLY May 2012

The team at Crawford High is now threatened by layoffs and reorganization of the school.

districts, the process for dismissing a teacher is convoluted and complicated.

It’s been built up by years of labor negotiations, so teachers now enjoy protections that require principals to prove over at least a year that the teacher is unsatisfactory at their job before they can be fired for poor performance.

Unraveling those protections would require a lot more than simply allowing or even encouraging principals to write up more rigorous teacher evaluations.

And it could only be accomplished through negotiations with San Diego’s powerful teachers union.

That’s not a fight the school board wants to have right now.

The district’s currently too ensnared in squeezing out other concessions from its labor unions to also ask them to consider redrawing the teacher evaluation process.

“It’s just not a priority,” Rhinerson said.

The real problem here, ultimately, is one of trust.

The school district doesn’t trust the teachers union, which has become increasingly isolated and

confrontational in the last few years, to work with it to create a new evaluation system. And the union shows no sign of sitting down with the district to discuss any issue, least of all one as contentious as teacher evaluation.

Until that conversation begins, San Diego Unified will remain exactly where it is today: Outside the teacher evaluation revolution, watching other districts embrace new assessment techniques that they can only attempt to replicate with the concurrence of their principals, teachers, and unions. 

REAX Read more about this story on our website. Go to vosd.org and search teachers0512 for the follow-up:

▸ A PARENT RESPONDS:

What’s Fair in Measuring Teacher Performance?

▸ UNION SAYS CHANGES ARE NEEDED: ‘Time to Stop Looking for the Easy Answers’

CONTACT THE WRITER: will.carless@voiceofsandiego.org

SAM HODGSON FOR VOICE OF SAN DIEGO

the sort of collaborative grassroots effort district leaders say they’re looking for.Thrilled by the results of their experiment, Winn and his colleagues wrote a 10-page report on what they had found.

Last year, they sent it to superintendent Bill Kowba.

“He loved it. He sent it out to all his deputies and everything and said ‘Let’s get this ball rolling,’” Winn said.

What happened next?

Nothing.

Winn waited and waited for a champion in the district’s higher echelons to develop or expand the model he and his colleagues had pioneered.

“Honestly, the ball was dropped.

Nobody took it on,” Winn said.

A few months later, the four campuses at Crawford High were recommended for consolidation back into a standard high school.

The reason?

“They said we didn’t have a plan for student achievement,” Winn said. “I feel like I’m going to scream. That’s what causes teachers like me to get 100 kids down at the board of education stomping and shouting, ‘You’re not listening.’”

This year, Winn was one of more than 1,600 district teachers to receive a notice he might be laid off.

▸▸ Be the Office Smarty Pants San Diego Explained Putting Local News in Context

A Voice of San Diego and NBC 7 San Diego joint partnership

Wednesdays @ 6:00 p.m.

NBC 7 San Diego

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18 VOSD MONTHLY May 2012

LOST TREASURE

MOTHBALLED Vivid murals and stained glass from a post-Prohibition brewery in Barrio Logan could again see the light of day

BY KELLY BENNETT AND ANGELA CARONE

W

HEN THE LAST PINTS WERE POURED in the old brick building home to the Aztec Brewing Co., it was the only brewery left in San Diego.

Twenty years earlier, in the 1930s, the brewery bustled. Prohibition’s end allowed Aztec’s owners to bring their business over the border from Mexico. They built out a tasting room, where San Diegans sipped local brews around hand-carved tables and chairs. Stained glass windows and murals imbued the walls with color, many of them painted by a cultural emissary sent to the United States by the king of Spain. Art covered even the ceiling.

These days, breweries all over town feature tasting rooms, gardens, art and food in the beertasting experience. But this tasting room on Main Street in Barrio Logan was a destination decades before San Diego cemented its reputation as a craftbrew capital.

Now it’s a parking lot.

May 2012 VOSD MONTHLY

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Mothballed

The art would’ve been lost forever if not for an 11th-hour fight to save it from the wrecking ball in the 1980s.

The city of San Diego picked up the art and furniture for safekeeping then, promising to bring it all back to the neighborhood. Over the years, the collection has moved from place to place, a portion ending up today in crates in a storage unit in El Cajon.

Murals are iconic in Barrio Logan.

They cover the pillars of Chicano Park in the middle of the neighborhood, the park created when crisscrossing

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20 VOSD MONTHLY May 2012

freeways were built overhead in the 1960s. But those come in a long tradition. Artwork from the brewery predates the Chicano Park murals by 40-some years.

“Even then, folks were working in the canneries and the shipyards, but there were musicians strolling around and they had massive artwork that speaks to the culture that’s been here for years — even before Chicano Park,” said state Sen. Denise Ducheny, whose longtime office is half a mile from the old brewery site.

“Chicano Park was an outgrowth of that,” she said. “The rathskeller proves it.”

‘San Diego Brew Flowing Again!’

The original Aztec Brewing Co. produced A.B.C. Beer in Mexicali, established in 1921 during Prohibition in the United States. Three businessmen went in to buy an old tire company in Barrio Logan to convert it into a brewery as soon as the alcohol ban lifted. One of them, Herbert Jaffe, had

PHOTOS COURTESY OF SAN DIEGO HISTORY CENTER

A 1936 championship-winning softball team gathers in the Aztec Brewing Co. rathskeller for a celebratory drink.

“We open the door and it was like walking into a temple.” studied brewing in Czechoslovakia.

Another, James Crofton, was a major partner in the Agua Caliente Hotel and Casino in Mexico.

The brewery opened in 1933 to a triumphant headline, “San Diego Brew Flowing Again!” The owners dubbed their tasting room a “rathskeller,” invoking the German word for a basement watering hole. Aztec used technologically advanced machinery to brew beer and required so many bottles for its popular brews it was second only to Anheuser-Busch in orders from a glass bottle manufacturer.

Years earlier, in the 1920s, King Alfonso XIII of Spain sent portrait painter Jose Moya del Pino on a cultural tour to the United States with replicas he’d made of Spanish paintings, like those of Diego Velazquez. By the time he got to San Francisco, the government in Spain had collapsed, drying up the money for his tour. He began painting portraits to pay the bills. He painted murals for the Coit Tower and a brewery and post offices in San Francisco.

Moya del Pino’s work caught the eye of the Aztec brewers in San Diego, who commissioned him to paint murals in the Barrio Logan brewery’s tasting room.

The murals were vibrant and exotic, depicting themes and images from Aztec and Mayan eras, some hewing to Spanish colonial styles and others reflecting both the ‘30s-era Mexican and U.S. mural movements. One centerpiece mural behind the tiled serving bar showed the ancient Aztec ritual of human sacrifice, a priest extracting a man’s heart.

Moya del Pino also oversaw the rest of the rathskeller’s decoration, which included painted and carved tables and chairs and ceiling beams, chandeliers, tiled mahogany cabinets, stained glass windows and doors, and a 9-foot replica of the Aztec calendar.

“Those were the days of the pleasure palaces and high level of imagination and fantastic decors and Hollywood and

big blockbuster recreations,” said San Diego art appraiser Pamela Bensoussan.

“It was part of that era.”

And it drew crowds from all over town. Neighborhood folks gathered for a few “tastes” after a long day working

in the canneries or on the docks. The brewery sponsored a softball team, the players and their wives stopping in for post-game parties.

Rachael Ortiz, now director of the Barrio Station community center,

Muralist Jose Moya del Pino was said to find inspiration around the neighborhood in Barrio Logan for the faces in the murals he painted in the Aztec Brewing Co. there.

This story was first published April 16, 2012 at voiceofsandiego.org.

May 2012 VOSD MONTHLY

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Mothballed

grew up in Barrio Logan. Her mom, a Pentecostal minister, “would not dare go in there,” but she’d send young Ortiz down to the rathskeller to find her dad. While she waited for him to finish tasting, Ortiz gazed at the artwork.

“The stained glass windows were beautiful,” she said. “I would just stare, just look at all the beauty and the colors that he used were so vivid.”

A Detroit brewing company bought out Aztec Brewing in 1948, closing its doors five years later when sales slumped. The famous rathskeller — and all of its artwork inside — would sit,

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22 VOSD MONTHLY May 2012

rarely seen, for the next 35 years.

‘It Was Like Walking into a Temple’ In 1988, Salvador Torres flipped through an issue of the weekly San Diego Reader. A vintage photograph caught his eye: a 1936 softball team guzzling down some A.B.C. beer after a victory. The so-described “dapper jocks” posed in front of a mural painted

by Moya del Pino, whom the caption identified as “a one-time student of Picasso.”

The address listed in the caption,

across Harbor Drive from the Nassco shipyard, was just a few blocks from Torres’ home in Barrio Logan. A muralist himself, Torres was intrigued and grabbed his cameras. He phoned the owner and got permission to see inside.

“We open the door and it was like walking into a temple,” Torres said with a sigh. “A temple site. My God, it was so beautiful and different in that dust everywhere, paintings on the wall, full of dust, and hand-carved beams on the ceiling. I mean, it was remarkable.”

The property’s new owners had plans

DAVID HEWITT / ANNE GARRISON

The rathskeller artwork was displayed in the back room at Chuey’s restaurant in Barrio Logan in the early ‘90s.

“There is very little in San Diego that simultaneously illustrates the design and art interests of the era as well as this little building.”

to demolish the building and to divvy up some of the artwork among themselves and their families. Torres felt he’d discovered something special, a missing link connecting a Spanish artist to the Mexican mural tradition, featuring Aztec and Mayan themes in a Chicano neighborhood.

And the wrecking ball was due in a few days, poised to destroy it.

Torres scrambled.

He rallied fellow artists and took tracing paper and pencil to the rathskeller, attempting to preserve the

images and recreate them somewhere in Chicano Park. The buzz attracted newspaper and TV coverage about the long-forgotten murals.

Torres even penned a poem addressed to Moya del Pino, pledging to release the artwork from “the destruction of your mute imprisoned tomb.”

For Torres, the threatened destruction was symbolic.

God help us For if this is how San Diego can forget

Our Hispanic masters of fine art How then will we be remembered?

The San Diego Union newspaper’s art critic, Robert Pincus, found Moya del Pino’s supposed ties to Picasso and Diego Rivera overblown, but wrote the artists did know each other in Paris before World War I. And, Pincus concluded, “There is very little in San Diego that simultaneously illustrates the design and art interests of the era as well as this little building on Main Street.”

May 2012 VOSD MONTHLY

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Mothballed

Torres and his team wanted the whole rathskeller building itself relocated to or rebuilt in the nearby Chicano Park to serve as a sort of museum. After that, the building’s owners could proceed with the demolition and move on with their industrial plans.

That invoked a longstanding quandary here: How to incentivize good jobs while still preserving neighborhood culture. Those supporting the developers said the neighborhood craved the jobs that would come with new warehouses.

But others in the neighborhood, like Ducheny, felt the architecture of the brick rathskeller with built-in stained glass windows mattered as much as the art.

“And that was the tragedy, these warehouse buildings versus this gorgeous little almost-chapel-looking thing,” she said.

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24 VOSD MONTHLY May 2012

Eventually, the San Diego City Council decided to declare the art inside the rathskeller historic, but not the building itself. Torres and his friends came out in force to extract the chunks of walls and ceilings containing Moya del Pino’s artwork. And the developers donated the art to the city.

City officials pledged to preserve the artwork and to someday reinstall it in the Barrio Logan neighborhood — specifically in the Mercado del Barrio, a grocery store and retail development that was just beginning to be talked about in the late ‘80s. But that project met its own delays over the decades as city politics changed, landowners and potential developers quarreled and the real estate market slumped.

Some of the big, vibrantly colored murals went to the Balboa Art Conservation Center, which volunteered to store them for free. The city picked

up the rest of the paintings, chairs, ceiling beams and stained glass windows, moving them whenever they had a free place to keep them. For a time, some of the pieces went up in a back room at Chuey’s, a staple Mexican restaurant. But for years now, the city’s been paying for storage for a large portion of the collection, a tab of about $78,000 since 2001.

At the time, Torres opposed any plan to put it in storage. “Once it’s mothballed, that’s the end of it,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1988.

For the past 24 years, that seemed true. 

This is the first of a two-part series reported together with KPBS. Want to see how this story ends? Read the second installment online at vosd.org/ITWOAn. You can also find companion radio stories online at kpbs.org.

CONTACT THE WRITERS: kelly.bennett@voiceofsandiego.org || acarone@kpbs.org

PHOTOS COURTESY OF SAN DIEGO HISTORY CENTER

The murals of Jose Moya del Pino at the Aztec Brewing Co. depicted Mayan and Aztec themes.

TRAJECTORY

From Rising Star to Lone Wolf The Surprising Path of Nathan Fletcher

BY LIAM DILLON

N

ATHAN FLETCHER’S identity always has involved Republican politics. He had Ronald Reagan in mind when he walked door-to-door campaigning for Republicans as a teenager and registered Republican voters outside Home Depots in college. He became a professional Republican operative, even working as the state party’s political director. He married a former campaign staffer for President George W. Bush. He counts big-name Republicans — Karl Rove, Pete Wilson, Meg Whitman and Mitt Romney — among his supporters in his bid to become San Diego’s next mayor.

“I’ve lived our principles,” Fletcher told local Republican faithful at the party’s mayoral endorsement meeting three weeks ago. “I am the American dream.”

Fletcher lost that endorsement to another Republican candidate. And in a stunning choice less than three months before the June primary election, Fletcher decided to lose the Republican Party altogether and re-register as an independent.

This story was first published March 28, 2012 at voiceofsandiego.org.

May 2012 VOSD MONTHLY

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“Nothing has changed in terms of my core beliefs,” Fletcher said at a Wednesday morning press conference.

“Nothing has changed in terms of my position on the issues. The only thing that’s changed is I’m sending a commitment and a statement that the people’s interests will be my interests, not what some party insider would want me to do.”

Fletcher’s move comes off as both principled and desperate. He spoke as if he didn’t leave the party, but the party left him. The local party’s long deliberate march from consensus to conflict no longer fit his style, he said.

And even Fletcher admitted that it greatly endangered his status as a rising Republican star.

He said in the end the city’s future mattered more than his political career.

Fletcher also stands at or near the bottom of the polls, far behind the Republican-endorsed Carl DeMaio and Democrat-endorsed Bob Filner. He needs a Hail Mary to knock off either of them. The polls also show that large numbers of San Diego voters don’t know Fletcher. This is the kind of move that could bring him the attention he’s desperately seeking.

Not all of that attention will be good.

The heads of both the local Republican and Democratic parties lambasted Fletcher, calling his decision an expedient sham instead of a principled stand.

“It is impossible to trust Nathan Fletcher, because he isn’t about ideas, principles or solutions,” local GOP head Tony Krvaric said in a release.

Three weeks ago, Fletcher argued he was the most conservative candidate in the race as he tried to block the party from endorsing DeMaio. Fletcher said he was more anti-tax. He said he was stronger on family values than DeMaio and made an issue out of

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28 VOSD MONTHLY May 2012

the councilman’s sexual orientation.

Fletcher claimed DeMaio hadn’t kept his promise to leave the fact that he’s gay out of the debate.

When DeMaio won the party’s endorsement on the first ballot, Fletcher had charged far more to the right than he ever had without anything to show for it.

But the party’s decision also cemented a change that began years ago. It used to be that the party backed the kinds of coastal Republicans that Fletcher embodies. Wilson, who was San Diego’s mayor in the early 1970s and has become Fletcher’s political mentor, used his military background and social moderation to local and

“I’ve lived our principles. I am the American dream.” statewide success. San Diegans have elected Republicans in this mold as mayor almost exclusively since Wilson.

Fletcher, with his clean water, open space and bike path plans, fits the bill.

The local party, though, has started to brand those kinds of Republicans as wishy-washy. It began to deride legacy Republican business organizations, such as the local Chamber of Commerce and Economic Development Corp., as ineffective. DeMaio, a pension and outsourcing hawk, fits the party’s new outlook much better than Fletcher ever will.

Still, it appears the party didn’t know what to make of Fletcher’s announcement.

It first sent out a press release making clear Fletcher was still a conservative Republican.

“Nathan Fletcher running for office as

an independent is about as credible as Rick Santorum trying to run as a Green Party candidate,” the statement said.

Less than an hour later, Krvaric issued a new statment that shifted the message to Fletcher’s untrustworthiness and personal ambition over principle.

In Sacramento, Fletcher’s ability to cross the aisle and maintain his party bona fides made him appear like a rising star.

He was the only Republican to support a bill that mandated the teaching of gay history in textbooks.

He was one of two Republicans to back Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown’s failed jobs plan. He gave a rousing speech in favor of ending the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy that kept gays from serving openly in the military.

Party boosters touted Fletcher as a potential savior for the party in California. Bill Whalen, a former Wilson staffer, not too long ago touted Fletcher as much in a Sacramento Bee article.

But you can’t save a party you don’t belong to, Whalen said in an interview Wednesday.

“Now he’s gone,” Whalen said.

When Fletcher was seeking the local Republican endorsement three weeks ago, he explained to the party faithful why he didn’t work as hard for their endorsement as he could have.

Fletcher was torn, he said, between what was best for him and what was best for the party as a whole. It was best for him if the party endorsed him to be their standard bearer. It was best for the party if it stayed out of a race that featured himself and two other highprofile Republicans.

“At some point,” Fletcher told the crowd, “being a part of a team means you have to care more about the team than your individual ambitions.”

On Wednesday, Fletcher quit the only political team he’s ever known.

CONTACT THE WRITER: liam.dillon@voiceofsandiego.org

SAM HODGSON FOR VOICE OF SAN DIEGO

Lone Wolf

“…I’m sending a commitment and a statement that the people’s interests will be my interests, not what some party insider would want me to do.”

Mayoral candidate Nathan Fletcher on the grounds of the USS Midway Museum after announcing that he is leaving the Republican party to become an independent.

What Should He Have Done?

BY SCOTT LEWIS

T

HE REPUBLICAN PARTY went out of its way to endorse Fletcher’s rival, lock up the resources for him and then communicate to Republican voters that Fletcher’s campaign was hopeless. The party overtly was trying to sink him.

What is Fletcher supposed to do with that? Be sad? If a group did that to me, I would reconsider being a part of it too.

As I’ve described, the Republican Party has gone through a fantastically effective effort to enforce conformity around its principles. || scott.lewis@voiceofsandiego.org

That means consensus-building with sworn enemies isn’t something to champion. The activists who control the actual party are tired of existing platform principles being compromised away. At the same time, a newly rising coalition of interests, led by the local building industry and restaurants, are financing this shift.

The thing is, when a group enforces conformity, it sends off outcasts. In some species, like lobsters, those outcasts likely die. But sometimes they become leaders of their own groups. 

REAX Read more about this story on our website. Go to vosd.org and search fletcher0512 for the follow-up:

▸ BEHIND FLETCHER’S SWITCH: A Reading List

▸ WATCH THE VIDEO:

Fletcher Ditches the GOP

▸ HE MAKES NEWS FROM

COAST TO COAST: The Media Hearts the Fletcher Story

May 2012 VOSD MONTHLY

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COMMUNITY

What San Diego’s Neighborhoods Want Our journalists embedded themselves in neighborhoods across San Diego this month that are host to City Council elections to find out the issues that matter to residents and what they want from their council member. Here’s what we’ve found so far…

District 5

The Candidate in D5:

MARK KERSEY: He’s running unopposed but his pitch might sound familiar: streamlining, outsourcing and other measures he says are business-friendly.

District 7 ▸ ▸ ▸

TIERRASANTA: This canyon-filled “island in the hills” worries about wildfires rushing in.

GRANTVILLE: Planned development could turn it into the next Mission Valley. That’s something a neighbor fears and a bartender relishes.

LINDA VISTA: A neighborhood of immigrants hopes to be heard, and hopes its streets and sidewalks are safe.

Scripps Ranch resident Bob Ilko

▸ ▸

SCRIPPS RANCH: “We want our air clean, our roads black and our parks green,” says Bob Ilko. He’s got the first one, but the other two? Not so much.

RANCHO BERNARDO: It’s fascinatingly boring. Because of its gated communities, it relies little on city government. Still, the memories of the wildfires continue to haunt.

SAN PASQUAL: You can wear a blindfold and still know whether you’re on a city road or not. If it’s bumpy, you’re in San Diego. If it’s smooth, it’s another government’s.

Resident That Most Personifies D5: NANCY CANFIELD, a two-time honorary mayor of Rancho Bernardo, who moved there on the day Elvis died in 1977 and fell in love. “I feel like I’ve died and gone to heaven,” she says.

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30 VOSD MONTHLY May 2012

Tierrasanta resident Lee Campbell

Resident That Most Personifies D7: LEE CAMPBELL tirelessly pushes for adequate brush thinning in Tierrasanta’s warren of canyons. “A fire would come right through here,” Campbell says, pointing at eucalyptus trees, gesticulating towards the offending trees. “You see those crowns at the tops of the trees? Not all of those leaves would burn, but the embers would jump from tree to tree, and before long it would be in the houses.”

SAM HODGSON FOR VOICE OF SAN DIEGO

▸

“We want our air clean, our roads black and our parks green.” ▸ ▸ ▸ ▸ A brush-filled canyon in Tierrasanta

CITY HEIGHTS: Many residents don’t own cars, so crossing the street and riding a bike safely, along with longpromised public transit, dominate discussion.

KENSINGTON/TALMADGE: Kensington residents are concerned that utility-line undergrounding is replacing one eyesore with another and Talmadge worries about crime.

MT. HOPE, MOUNTAIN VIEW AND SOUTHCREST: With redevelopment’s demise, how will promised open space and street lights be delivered?

COLLEGE AREA: The perpetual mini-dorm polemic continues to swirl in the neighborhoods around San Diego State.

The Candidates in D7:

RIK HAUPTFIELD: The plucky challenger without much institutional support.

MAT KOSTRINSKY: A longtime government guy and current union worker pushing practical solutions.

SCOTT SHERMAN: A businessman who pitches Carl DeMaiolike reforms.

District 9

City Heights resident Ernestina Diaz

Resident That Most Personifies D9: ERNESTINA DIAZ has lived in the United States for 34 years but like many in City Heights can’t yet vote. She’s working hard to pass the citizenship exam so she can change that. “We want the city to be beautiful, too. We want them to pay attention to us, to our streets," she says.

The Candidates in D9:

MARTI EMERALD: The public-safety focused councilwoman has changed districts and is now pushing voter registration.

A bus stop on El Cajon Boulevard in City Heights

MATEO CAMARILLO: He worked hard to get a second Latinomajority district and jumped in the race after no other Latino did. 

May 2012 VOSD MONTHLY

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FACT CHECK

DeMaio Says Convention Expansion Is ‘Private’

B

ALLOTS ARE DUE TODAY in the election to raise hotel-room taxes by $1 billion over the next three decades to finance the majority of San Diego’s proposed Convention Center expansion. The city’s hoteliers are the ones casting the ballots and the process has attracted a good deal of scrutiny.

At a televised mayoral debate last week, KPBS reporter Katie Orr asked candidate Carl DeMaio, a city councilman, why he supported this hotelier vote for the expansion. The Convention Center’s initial construction and a previous expansion, she noted, were approved by public votes.

DeMaio replied that the prior Convention Center deals were paid for with public money through hotel-room taxes while hoteliers will finance this one. Later on in the debate, he stated this point more explicitly.

“This expansion will be done by private investment from the hoteliers,”

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32 VOSD MONTHLY May 2012

DeMaio said.

The city, however, plans to finance the project entirely with public money, through an effective increase in the same hotel-room taxes that paid for a previous expansion. No private investment is proposed. And DeMaio should know that. He’s voted for the expansion’s financing plan every step of the way so far.

Let’s quickly breakdown the current proposal. There are three sources of money for the project:

▸

This expansion will be done by private investment from the hoteliers.

Determination:

HUCKSTER PROPAGANDA

CARL DEMAIO, a San Diego mayoral candidate, on the Convention Center expansion in a televised debate April 19.

$3.5 MILLION ANNUALLY for the next 30 years from the city’s day-to-day operating budget. This is money that otherwise could pay for regular city services, such as fire and police.

But expansion supporters argue the project will generate more than enough new tax revenue to cover the city’s portion and provide a healthy profit.

This story was first published April 23, 2012 at voiceofsandiego.org.

SAM HODGSON, ASHLEY LEWIS FOR VOICE OF SAN DIEGO

BY LIAM DILLON

Fact Check

Weighing the Truth Behind the Spin ▸

$3 MILLION ANNUALLY for the next 20 years from the Unified Port of San Diego.

RATING DEFINITIONS: TRUE

The statement is accurate and there is nothing major to qualify it.

▸ $35.7 MILLION ANNUALLY, eventually,

for the next three decades from the hotel-room tax increase. This is the abnormal part of the deal. Typically, these kinds of tax-increase elections go before the public. In 2004, city voters twice rejected hotel-room tax increases for various purposes. This time, expansion backers were worried the public wouldn’t pass it again.

MOSTLY TRUE

The statement is accurate but there is an important nuance to consider.

BARELY TRUE

There is an element of truth in the statement but critical context is absent that may significantly alter the impression the statement leaves.

So instead, they developed a plan that allows the hotel industry to decide if it will tax its guests to finance the expansion. City Attorney Jan Goldsmith has said he’s not sure if this process is legal and will ask a court to sign off on it immediately after the plan is complete.

The whole financing plan would be much cleaner and definitely legal, Goldsmith said, if the public voted on it.

It’s this third part of the deal, the hotelier vote, that DeMaio was referring to at the debate. DeMaio’s campaign manager Ryan Clumpner amplified this point in a statement to us: “Privately owned hotels are voting to pay for the Convention Center expansion using funds that they will generate themselves. Those funds can only be used for the purposes of the Convention Center expansion. We can split hairs over semantics, but Carl DeMaio’s point remains that private businesses are producing funds that cannot be diverted for any other public purpose.”

However, the tax functions the same as regular hotel-room taxes collected by the city. The lodging industry has called these kinds of charges “effective”

MISLEADING

The statement takes an element of truth and badly distorts it or exaggerates it giving a deceptive impression.

FALSE

The statement is not accurate. This could be an error or misstatement but it’s simply not true and there is no element of truth to it.

HUCKSTER PROPAGANDA

The statement is not only inaccurate but it’s reasonable to expect the person or organization making it knew that and made the claim anyway to gain an advantage.

hotel-room taxes. Goldsmith used all capital letters in describing the deal for emphasis: “To be clear, this IS a tax.”

And everyone involved in the deal admits this charge will be a line item next to the city’s existing hotel-room tax

CONTACT THE WRITER: liam.dillon@voiceofsandiego.org

on visitor bills.

If hotel owners simply wanted to pool money together to build a facility, as DeMaio is suggesting, they could do that on their own without a vote involving the city. Instead, the hoteliers want to pass a tax, which would uniformly raise their fees across the board even for the hotels that don’t want it.

In short, San Diego visitors, residents and port tenants will pay for the expansion, not hotel owners.

Our definition for Huckster Propaganda is that a statement is not only inaccurate but it’s reasonable to expect the person knew it and made the claim to gain an advantage.

As a councilman, DeMaio is intimately involved with details of the expansion’s financing plan. It’s reasonable for him to expect to know its components.

Two months ago he earned a Huckster Propaganda and a False for different statements about expansion financing.

Supporting this tax hike also doesn’t fit well in DeMaio’s anti-tax narrative, an approach so well-honed he has opposed a nickel increase to fines for overdue library books.

DeMaio’s statement about private investment not only was wrong, but also played to his taxpayer watchdog narrative.  If you disagree with our determination or analysis, please express your thoughts in the comments section of this blog post at http://vosd.org/I1v8DL. Explain your reasoning.

You can also e-mail suggestions to factcheck@voiceofsandiego.org. What claim should we fact check next?

Don’t miss Fact Check TV, Fridays at 6:00 p.m. on NBC 7 San Diego.

May 2012 VOSD MONTHLY

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STEPPING UP

Mayor of Dissolving City

BY SCOTT LEWIS

A

SSEMBLYMAN Nathan Fletcher’s biggest problem is also his biggest asset.

It’s himself.

Running for mayor, he has deliberately made his campaign about his biography. His ability to bring people together. His this, his that. His motto is: Tough. Tested. Trusted.

He wants you to invest in him.

Lost in the cacophony of opinions unleashed by his decision to go independent and denounce the Republican Party was Fletcher’s earlier plea with party activists to hold off on an endorsement.

Take a look at his speech that day (you can read it on Flash Report at http://bit.ly/JsYc9m). Notice anything?

This story was first published April 3, 2012 at voiceofsandiego.org.

Nearly every single sentence starts with the word “I.” Yet Fletcher’s central selling point is that he can work with others. If so, he might consider working with mayoral candidate and City Councilman Carl DeMaio on the dissolving city.

I’ve talked about it often. “Dissolving” can seem like a negative term but it doesn’t necessarily have to be. The word means something is breaking up.

As government flounders under massive liabilities and an unwillingness of residents to send it more money, it has been relinquishing city assets and services. And it has been asking philanthropists and neighborhood councils and associations and hotel owners, and on and on, to either step up and care May 2012 VOSD MONTHLY

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for assets and services they want or let them deteriorate.

In short: If you care about something in your neighborhood, you better figure out how to pay for it.

Just last week, we ran a commentary from a friend of mine who helped her neighbors come together to fund a revitalization of a city playground in the Lake Murray area. Schools are increasingly dependent on donations from parents. An important lifeguard station near UC San Diego is now being funded by the university and not the city.

Even police patrols in Hillcrest and perhaps Pacific Beach will rely on donations of neighbors. And if a police building or firehouse is deteriorating, neighbors often have to foot the bill to rebuild it.

The city has fully admitted it cannot care for even Balboa Park itself. The Balboa Park Conservancy is rising to relieve it.

We helped host a forum recently for all the mayoral candidates to discuss issues related to the nonprofit world. As nonprofits take over more of the burden of caring for the city, the dissolving city is an important topic.

When asked how he would incorporate philanthropy and the nonprofit world into his administration, Fletcher told a story. It was meant to show how bad the city is at asking donors for money.

“I was in a meeting with a person who’s very involved in the horse community and they were complaining that the police department cut the horses — the police horses. And they said: Would you commit to bringing them back? I said, no. I said: If someone’s breaking into your house, they’re not coming to be doing it on horseback. I said, I can’t. But why don’t you pay for them, if you care so much? She said sure.

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36 VOSD MONTHLY May 2012

Nobody had asked.”

On the one hand, this highlights a major problem. There is likely support available for many of the things neighbors and the city want. But nobody is connecting those dots.

But there’s also something uncomfortable about private donors paying for police protection. How soon will it be before wealthy neighborhoods get far better protection because they can pay for it? Public safety, like water, roads, schools, trash and fire services should be equitably delivered to all parts of the city.

“If you care about something in your neighborhood, you better figure out how to pay for it.”

I asked the candidates to clarify: Where do they see the city ending and nonprofit services beginning?

Fletcher said he wanted to make clear that core city services must be delivered by a more efficient City Hall.

But DeMaio had clearly thought about the issue more. He’s got a thorough plan. DeMaio wants to appoint a chief volunteer officer — someone who would constantly recruit and manage volunteers and identify projects they can help accomplish.

He wants to create a “collaborative governance model” — basically identifying what neighborhoods want and then figuring out what combination of nonprofit, for-profit and government services will get the job done.

“Those partnerships will be breathed into every single department because that’s the culture we want,” he said

at the forum. “This sometimes means that, instead of raising money for government, your civic leaders raise money for nonprofits so that we can make those partnerships work.”

He wants the city to make available its free cable channel, CityTV 24, to nonprofits, who can use it for community service.

Finally, he’d create a community service cabinet and a corporate philanthropy council. Members of the council would commit to generating 50,000 volunteer hours each year or give $250,000 to support city volunteer efforts. His full proposal is here.

These ideas aren’t perfect. And some will lament that helping a dissolving city will only cause it to dissolve more.

Maybe. But what’s the alternative?

City leaders tried, in 2010, to raise the sales tax to stem the city’s deterioration.

DeMaio and his coalition crushed it. It became clear, again, that without this new Republican Party on board, tax hikes will be impossible.

What I think we’re beginning to realize, though, is that if North Park leaders want to invest more money into their neighborhood, they should not have to convince Rancho Bernardo residents to join them. DeMaio is actively thinking about how to help them do that.

His problem will be what Fletcher keeps hammering on: You can have all the plans in the world, but can you work with supposed foes to get them implemented?

To date, whenever this question comes up, DeMaio resorts to a promise.

If he hits a roadblock, he says, he’ll simply call on voters to do an initiative.

But voters want leaders, who don’t have to cry to them with every argument they face. DeMaio’s challenge will be to show he can pull off these big things and inspire foes to help.

It’s a big challenge. 

CONTACT THE WRITER: scott.lewis@voiceofsandiego.org

SAM HODGSON FOR VOICE OF SAN DIEGO

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