Why some January flood survivors don’t qualify for help

Good Morning, I’m Debbie Cruz….it’s Tuesday, September 3rd.>>>>

Not all January flood survivors have qualified for assistance from the San Diego Housing Commission.We hear why, next. But first... let’s do the headlines….######

As the new school week starts, Deputy Superintendent Fabiola Bagula is now acting superintendent of the San Diego Unified School District.

The district’s Board of Education and Superintendent Lamont Jackson agreed on Jackson leaving the district.

Following an investigation that found allegations made by two former employees were credible.

The employees alleged that Jackson made sexual advances that they refused.

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The San Diego County Board of Supervisors last week postponed a decision on affordable housing in unincorporated areas.

They’re considering passing an inclusionary housing ordinance, which would require certain new developments to include some affordable units.

State law requires giving developers a way to comply, without providing affordable housing on site.

Supervisor Monica Montgomery Steppe [“Step”] says she wants to make sure the policy creates economically balanced communities.

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“To me, it’s not inclusionary to say, ‘If you don’t want to include lower income in this project, then you can just pay a fee.’ How does that promote inclusionary housing?”

The board directed staff to bring options back to them this winter.

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There’s just a couple more weeks of the summer season left, before fall is officially here.

But we still have summer weather this week, when temperatures are expected to rise slightly throughout the county.

Today (Tuesday) temps in the inland areas will be in the low 90s, by the coast and in the mountains, temps will be in the low 80s, and in the deserts, it’s expected to reach 109 degrees.

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From KPBS, you’re listening to San Diego News Now.Stay with me for more of the local news you need.

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The San Diego Housing Commission was given more than 7 million dollars to assist January flood survivors.

But only about one in four of those displaced qualifies for it.

Reporter Katie Hyson visited one survivor who thinks that should change.

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The funds are restricted to the few hundred families who were still using the county’s hotel vouchers on May 23rd. Jessica Calix says that’s not a good measure of need. Nobody left the hotels because they were secure and recovered. Nobody's secure and recovered. People just ended up in their cars, in tents. She moved out of the hotels in March. Her grandfather gave her an old travel trailer. She says it was more stable for her son Chago, who turned eight the day their home flooded. When she pulled into the RV lot in Morena, she was gut punched. It backs onto a storm water channel. We had a storm in like March and it filled up almost all the way. But the water flowed through. It wasn’t like the channel in Southcrest, where she used to live. Which residents say the city didn’t properly maintain. If you go back to the one by my house at my old place, I thought it was a nature preserve. That's how many plants and trees were back there. Calix and others are advocating for the housing commission’s recovery funds to be made available to all survivors. A commission spokesperson says the amount was based on those few hundred families still in the hotels. And will likely all be spent helping them. Katie Hyson, KPBS News.

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About 80-percent of overdose deaths in the U-S are from opioids, primarily illegal fentanyl.

That's according to a new C-D-C report.

Health reporter Heidi De Marco says the study coincides with International Overdose Awareness Day which was observed over the weekend (Saturday).

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Two 6-foot tall empty chairs displayed on either side of the border represent loss from overdoses. One sits at Waterfront Park in San Diego and the other at the Monumental Arch in Tijuana. CECILIA FARFÁN So what we want to do is take the empty chair, which is a symbol that, you know, different groups both in the US and Mexico, have used to symbolize the missing loved ones precisely on this day. Cecilia Farfán is a researcher at UC Institute On Global Conflict And Cooperation. She says suffering on both sides of the border is connected. CECILIA FARFÁN It's a call to action also from the border to work in a joint manner to address, you know, the health and safety of our communities. She says there is only one methadone clinic in Tijuana. In the U.S., the overdose-reversal drug naloxone is available without a prescription. In Mexico, it’s strictly controlled. Farfán believes overdoses are a shared crisis requiring binational solutions not limited by borders. Heidi de Marco, KPBS News.

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The modern electrical grid is part of a careful dance with generation and consumer demand.

And in the state, generation is moving toward renewable energy.

Sci-tech reporter Thomas Fudge tells us how the state’s grid is balancing supply, and how an electrical test bed at UC-SD wants to change the way we consume energy.

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It looks like a duck. And grid operators call it the duck curve. If you trace the net daily demand for energy in California it starts at midnight with the tail. That’s pretty low. Then it follows the belly of the duck down to nearly zero at midday, when solar energy production is at its peak. But then demand zooms up to form the head of the duck in the early evening. When demand for energy is highest and the sun is setting. “So in the belly of the day. You know that noon to 3 pm is the deepest part of the belly. Where our net load is at its lowest because of our output from renewable resources.” Brian Murray is Director of Real Time Operations at CALISO, the state’s electrical grid. And he says that duck curve represents the challenge of meeting demand in a world of renewable energy, which is variable and can’t be produced just by throwing a switch. When he talks about renewables, he mostly means solar power, which provides most of California’s electricity during daytime in summer. He says while the state maintains 20 thousand megawatts in solar capacity, there’s only 85 hundred megawatts of wind energy. But as technology and construction move ahead, things will change. “Off-shore wind. That’s going to become… You know, that’s in the planning horizon for us.” And then there are battery farms. Murray calls the growth of that energy source exponential. “So batteries have been a major player for us in terms of their flexibility. Right? It’s not like a steam plant that needs ten hours to turn on. Batteries are essentially always on. They can be discharging and providing energy to the grid, or they can be consuming energy while they’re charging. They are beneficial in multiple areas of the duck curve.”  Flexibility is the key to running a modern energy supply operation that's moving to renewables. When one source is not producing you have to switch to another. When you have more energy production than you can use, you export it to another state or use it to charge the battery farms. And flexibility in demand, called energy load, is also important. In a low-slung building just below the trolley tracks at UC San Diego, engineering researchers show us two rooms filled with computers, breakers and nodes. The nodes are small boxes that communicate with electric devices on campus. The new building is the hub of an energy test bed that will study a big chunk of the campus to learn how devices can be turned off and on to make the most of energy supply. Professor Jan Kleissl is Principal Investigator for what they call DERConnect. “You have water heaters. You have electric vehicles. You have air conditioning system. You have a small printer, that’s something in use. So we are looking at thousands of devices that are spread throughout the campus. And we picked those that are ready to reduce load or increase load and then communicate with them and make them run faster or slower, depending on what we need.” Testbed project manager Keaton Chia says the energy demand side is constantly in flux. “So how do we manage the coordination? How do we make these distributor devices smart enough to actually talk back and communicate essential information back to each other so we can maintain that balance between generation and load across the whole grid.” One example of a smart device is a building sensor, that can tell the grid there’s nobody on the floor of an office or classroom building. The building can be programmed to turn off the lights and the air circulation to that floor. The UCSD testbed, like the California grid, also has batteries that can store energy and, if you want, generate energy to simulate a wind power station. “Because of that variability we need to look for flexibility and variation on the load side as well. And that way we can work together, customer and generator/provider to maintain that balance.” A primary goal at UCSD is to create a set of algorithms to program the grid to supply power where demand actually exists. The political force that’s driving changes to California’s electrical grid are state  laws that demand greater use of renewable energy. Murray, with Cal ISO, says the state’s power supply has to be 60 percent renewable energy by 2030 and 100 percent by 2045. Can we meet those goals? Murray says yes we can. “We’ve got statistics that show that we’ve got a number of days where we’ve produced 100 percent of our load by renewable. So to say can we produce 60 percent by 2030? Absolutely. We’re pretty close to that already.” Nuclear energy is also clean energy since it doesn’t emit greenhouse gasses, But Murray says nuclear’s production is very inflexible since you cannot easily reduce ir or shut it off. So with the growth we’re seeing in other clean energies, he doesn’t think nuclear will be needed in California’s future. SOQ.  

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That’s it for the podcast today. As always you can find more San Diego news online at KPBS dot org. Join us again tomorrow for the day’s top stories. I’m Debbie Cruz. Thanks for listening and have a great Tuesday.