EAST COUNTY ROUNDUP: LOCAL AND STATEWIDE NEWS

May 16, 2019 (San Diego’s East County) -- East County Roundup highlights top stories of interest to East County and San Diego’s inland regions, published in other media. This week’s top “Roundup” headlines include:

LOCAL

• Can SANDAG solve traffic woes with 100 MPH commuter rail, rush-hour pricing? (San Diego Union-Tribune)
• Gov. Gavin Newsom announces wildfire technology competition at conference in La Jolla (San Diego Union-Tribune)
• San Diego homeless deaths doubled in last decade (Voice of San Diego)
• Breaking San Diego: A Meth Crisis (NBC 7)
• Family DNA Search Leads to Another Arrest: Suspect in 1995 San Diego Rapes
• (Times of San Diego)

STATE

• A Little-Known Company Is Quietly Making Massive Water Deals (Voice of San Diego)
• San Francisco is first US city to ban police use of facial recognition tech (The Guardian)
• Key conflicts roil California’s ever-evolving waterscape (CalMatters)

For excerpts and links to full stories, click “read more” or scroll down.

LOCAL

Can SANDAG solve traffic woes with 100 MPH commuter rail, rush-hour pricing? (San Diego Union-Tribune)

North and East County officials lash out at SANDAG plan that shelves long-planned freeway expansions

Gov. Gavin Newsom announces wildfire technology competition at conference in La Jolla (San Diego Union-Tribune)

On Friday Gov. Gavin Newsom visited the Near Future Conference in La Jolla and announced the state was partnering with X Prize to find technology that focuses on detecting fires in their infancy, along with suppression strategies. Newsom shared the stage with X Prize founder Peter Diamandis. X Prize will develop the prize for the program and likely launch the competition in about 100 days. The competition will be privately funded.

San Diego homeless deaths doubled in last decade (Voice of San Diego)

The number of homeless San Diegans who died last year reached 134, up from 53 in 2010. Service provider say it's time to take medical care into the streets to help save lives.

Breaking San Diego: A Meth Crisis (NBC 7)

San Diego County is in the midst of a war with a familiar foe; methamphetamine. Once known as the “meth capital of the world,” drug enforcement agents now refer to the region as “ground zero” in the nation’s fight against meth abuse.

Family DNA Search Leads to Another Arrest: Suspect in 1995 San Diego Rapes

(Times of San Diego)

STATE

A Little-Known Company Is Quietly Making Massive Water Deals (Voice of San Diego)

In the past several years, Los Angeles-based Renewable Resources Group has helped sell 33,000 acres of land to California’s most powerful water agency, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. Documents obtained by VOSD raise fresh questions about those deals. Now, Renewable may be working on another deal that could rearrange the distribution of water in California forever.

San Francisco is first US city to ban police use of facial recognition tech (The Guardian)

Supervisors vote eight to one to restrict surveillance: ‘We can have security without being a security state’

Key conflicts roil California’s ever-evolving waterscape (CalMatters)

… The fickleness of nature has been compounded by a decades-long, multi-front struggle among hundreds of water agencies and other interested parties over allocations of the precious liquid, not unlike the perpetual religious and ethnic wars that consumed medieval Europe. Adding another layer of complexity, the conflicts over California’s water supply are often proxy wars for land-use disputes.