San Diego used to be one of my favorite places on earth.
San Diego is where I was (happily) stationed for 4.5 years. I lived there as a kid. The weather's awesome. The food's great. The people are pretty laid back, and, for the most part, cool with one another. There's an ocean there, complete with pretty decent waves and beautiful scenery. After years of being doormats, the Chargers are looking pretty good. The Padres have had a good past few seasons (if for some incomprehensible reason you can stomach watching baseball). Plus, if you're being chased by the cops, it's relatively easy to duck into Mexico.
Unfortunately, the place is being run into the ground. I have no idea why this is happening, but the city government there seems determined to bankrupt the place. This has been slowly happening for the past few years, but's getting really blatant now.
Here's the latest, as quoted from the
San Diego Union-Tribune:
The San Diego Workforce Partnership spent $2.6 million on an online program for job hunters that took four years to develop and is little more than a compilation of Web links that so far has attracted 199 users.
Funded with money from a $28.6 million grant awarded to the Partnership in 2001 by the U.S. Department of Labor, the online jobs program was proposed as an interactive Web portal that would offer job training and resources to military personnel heading into the civilian work force.
OK, $2.6 million didn't sound too awfully bad for a web site dedicated to helping people get jobs. That 199 users figure seems pretty crappy, though. Wait a minute, it took
four years to build this site? Must be a pretty good site. Check it out, then come back to read the rest. I'll be here.
http://www.sandiegoatwork.com/Wait a fecking minute, that site cost $2.6 million and took 4 years? And why did they name it "Sandie Goat Work"? Why did it take me 5 seconds to load the first page with Firefox, a 1 year old laptop, and a broadband connection to the internet?
When I clicked on the "Job Seekers" section, I got links to "Career Centers", "Employment and Training Informational Kiosks" , something called "Project Earn", "Individuals with Disabilities Job Searching Assistance", something called "Cabrillo", and links to
Monster and
HotJobs?
I'm pretty sure I could have had this site up in an afternoon for about three hundred bucks.
Here are more reasons (in no particular order) why it sucks to be living in San Diego.
- House prices are about to fall through the floor.
Real estate speculation became so rampant in San Diego that the median home price just fell below half a million dollars. Mortgage-calc.com tells me that a 30 year mortgage for $500K is gonna cost me almost $3000 a month. Who exactly can afford that? None of the cops or teachers I've known have that much money to spend on a house payment every month. Keep in mind, that's median price.
- Consulting fees to figure out what the problems are has cost the city over $30 million.
Um, I think they might have put a finger on the problem, but I don't think that report's going to have "quit spending money on consultants" on there.
- Policemen are taking demotions and leaving to go work in other towns.
Do you think police in Alexandria, VA make more than police in Washington, DC? Me neither. Even in the Sim City games it's a bad idea to underpay cops.
- The airport is tiny and overcrowded, yet no one can figure out where to build a new one. Since the housing boom (see above), there's not exactly a lot of space to build a new airport to replace Lindbergh Field, which is so cramped and crowded and far beyond it's capacity that it's almost less of a pain in the rear to drive from Nashville to San Diego than it is to fly.
After another one of those gazillion year long studies costing who-knows-how-much, there are two plans. 1.) Take over or share useage with a military installation or 2.) Build an airport in another county that's two a two hour drive over a 4100 foot mountain range.
The military nixed option 1 (duh) due to preparedness concerns and overall stupidity. Option 2 seems the only thing left now, but there are a few more problems. Since it would most likely take over two hours to drive from San Diego to the proposed new airport, build a "maglev train" at an estimated cost of roughly $10.6 billion. That's right, (pinky finger to corner of mouth)10.6 BILLION DOLLARS! That's just to get to the airport! Plus, since the site studied conflicts with both military and Mexican airspace, a proper approach would send jets almost all the way to Phoenix. Throw in an endangered lizard species, and this seems like kind of a bad idea also.
Here's a small graphic to represent just how far away this airport site would be from San Diego...
- The Mount Soledad cross lawsuit. This lawsuit, seemingly a fairly blatant violation of separation of church and state, has been costing San Diego in legal bills since 1989. Just recently, the land that the cross (or war memorial, depending on how much of a revisionist historian you are) sits on has been transferred to the federal government. As a citizen, this argument is debatable. As a taxpayer however, this should have been solved years ago, and for a lot less money.
- Finally, we have the whole Chargers ticket fiasco. I can't find a link for it since it's been renegotiated, but here was the jist: Basically, the Chargers were tired of not selling out their stadium. Instead of making moves toward not sucking quite so badly, they cut a deal that made the games blacked out on local television if the game wasn't sold out. In their infinite wisdom, the San Diego city government decided to buy up all remaining tickets so the games would always be shown on television. I have no idea how much this cost San Diego, but ticket prices start at $79 apiece. I can't imagine the city was getting much of a break on this (now renegotiated) deal.
Since the Chargers are kind of pricks to their fans in general, I figured I'd bring up a side point: you are often forced to buy tickets to a less popular game in order to see a more popular game. For example, if you wanted to go see the Chargers play the Broncos (should be a very popular game, give the respective teams' amounts of success this year) in December, you'll also have to buy a ticket to see another less popular game. What a bunch of assholes, man.
That's it! I guess I'm done ranting about a city I don't even live in anymore. I feel pretty bad about my friends and family that do still live there, though.
Share this post!
This post is tagged
San Diego,
sucks,
San Diego airport,
maglev,
Chargers,
police,
SandieGoatWork, and
consultants
