Daily Business Report-Oct. 29, 2019
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California just pushed back school start
times to let adolescents get needed shuteye
Ricardo Cano | CALmatters
Of the dozens of education bills that Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law this year, few will have a more practical impact on everyday lives than the new, later start times for California’s high schools and middle schools.
The signing of Senate Bill 328 by Democratic Sen. Anthony Portantino marked a milestone for the decades-long public health movement to awaken public schools to the detrimental effects of adolescent sleep deprivation. But it also brought to a head a charged debate among school boards, administrators and parents over who gets to decide when to start a community’s school day.
For some California high-school students, the new law will make little or no difference; for others, it will push back school start times by 90 minutes or more.
School districts in the state will have a three-year window — until the start of the 2022-23 school year — to implement schedules that ring the first-period bell no earlier than 8:30 a.m. for high schools and 8 a.m. for middle schools.
The new law does not mandate that middle and high schools adhere to a specific bell schedule, nor does it change the instructional minutes required of schools, so lost class time may have to be made up during the middle or at the end of the day to meet the state’s instructional time requirements.
The push for later start times has already started in San Diego. For example, San Diego Unified School District, California’s second-largest district, had already decided prior to this law to push back start times for their high schools to 8:30 a.m. by the 2020-21 school year.
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MiraCosta College launches new study
abroad program with trip to Italy in 2020
MiraCosta College is launching a new, independently operated, study abroad program with an inaugural trip to Italy in July 2020 that administrators hope will be the first in a series of educational visits around the globe.
Until now, MiraCosta College students wishing to study abroad had their options limited to England in the fall and Spain in the spring through a Citrus College-led consortium involving several community colleges in Southern California. Those semester-long trips are organized by the American Institute for Foreign Study, a privately-owned travel company that has been managing study abroad programs for more than half a century.
The trip to Italy is part of a new MiraCosta College-led program open to other colleges and universities in the area.
“We’re really excited,” said Jonathan Fohrman, dean of the Arts & International Languages Department. “We’ve been working toward this for a number of years.”
The July 1–29 trip includes four weeks in Florence, an overnight stay in Rome, and day trips to Venice, Siena, Bologna, and Ravenna. The courses taught will be History of Western Architecture and Introduction to Italian Culture. Both courses, six units in all, meet MiraCosta College general education requirements and are transferrable to University of California and California State University campuses.
The cost of the program is $3,675, which includes lodging. Not included in the cost is airfare and the $46 per unit fee—or $276 for the total of six units. Financial aid is available.
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Asian Business Association expands business
services with $200,000 in grant funding
Through a renewed commitment of a $50,000 grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation, Asian Business Association San Diego (ABASD) has leveraged an additional $50,000 match from the US Small Business Administration, and an additional $100,000 match from the California Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development Small Business Technical Assistance Expansion Program.
With the support of Small Business Development Center San Diego and Imperial Network (SBDC), the new funding allows Asian Business Association to be a full service center, joining the likes of The Brink at University of San Diego, CONNECT w/ San Diego Venture Group, East County Economic Development Council, among others.
Asian Business Association’s added full-time business advisors and support staff will be dedicated to one-on-one, no-cost consulting, technical assistance, business mentorship, educational workshops and access-to-capital for the region’s small and disadvantaged businesses, startups, and entrepreneurs.
The Asian Business Association has hired Wesley Quach as its full-time business adviser and is in the process of hiring additional support staff. Quach most recently was Convoy District’s business manager, overseeing the development of the heart of San Diego’s Asian community in Kearny Mesa.
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22-acre San Diego site entitled
for nearly 1,000 new housing units
Palmer Mission Gorge Properties LP, an affiliate of GH Palmer Associates of Beverly Hills, has acquired 22.7 acres of land in Mission Gorge for the development of 996 residential units. Entitlements also call for 37,500 square feet of commercial/office/retail space and 5.3 acres of neighborhood parks. The property is currently utilized for light industrial businesses.
The sellers were two private families with long-time ties to the area, represented in the transaction by Kevin Nolen, Tim Winslow and Jason Kimmel, a team of local land and multifamily specialists with Cushman & Wakefield, together with Mark Marquez of Pacific Sotheby’s International Realty.
The four parcels of land in question are near the junction of Interstate 15 and 8 and Interstate 805.
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San Diego County to pay nearly $100,000
to settle sexual harassment lawsuit
PRNewswire
San Diego County has agreed to pay $97,500 in a settlement after the District Attorney’s Office refused to turn over records of sexual harassment and misconduct by its employees.
The records were discovered when The First Amendment Coalition (FAC), a San Rafael-based nonprofit that focuses on government accountability and open records, sued the county for the records in July 2018. The suit was to test the state’s compliance with the state’s public records law.
The San Diego County DA’s office declined to provide certain records, citing that employees did not “occupy positions of such public trust and responsibility,” and provided detailed summaries of the records instead.
While other DA offices refused to provide records as well, none provided the excuses that San Diego did. The FAC disagreed with San Diego and took them to court, and a San Diego Superior Court judge sided with the coalition ordering the DA’s office to turn over the documents. The county Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to settle the coalition’s claims.
The documents indicated that on five separate occasions between July 2013 and May 2017, there were incidents ranging from sexual comments and unwelcome physical contact taking place to taking nude photos in the workplace. The original summaries included six incidents; one is missing from the newly released documents.
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Report: Rents in San Diego County to
jump by $209 a month over next two years
The 2019 University of Southern California Casden Economics Forecast predicts that the average Southern California apartment dweller will pay at least $100 more per month by 2021.
While salaries increased slightly more than rents across Southern California in 2019 – indicating a slight uptick in affordability – housing costs and below-average construction of units are forcing workers to seek employment elsewhere.
“Rents are continuing to rise, and at a slower pace. And rents in the past year rose a little bit less than renter incomes,” said Richard Green, director of the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate, which authors the forecast each year. “Still, an ongoing lack of affordability is causing skilled workers to flee the region and seek employment and housing elsewhere.”
The annual forecast predicts that over the next two years, rents will increase over their 2019 levels by $139 in Los Angeles County, $106 in Orange County, $209 in San Diego County, $110 in Ventura County and $100 in the Inland Empire, which includes San Bernardino and Riverside counties.
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Scripps scientists awarded nearly $5 million
to study triggers of deadly, toxic algal blooms
Researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego want to know what causes an oceanic algal bloom to turn deadly.
To find out, researchers are gearing up to hunt for blooms along California’s coast using a suite of technologies that can target and sample ocean microbes and sift through genetic code in real time. All of this is made possible by a new $4.9 million grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The multidimensional effort will build upon recent discoveries about these temperamental microscopic algae under a project funded by NOAA’s Ecology and Oceanography of Harmful Algal Blooms (ECOHAB), a nationally competitive research funding program.
In 2015, the U.S. western coastal economy took a huge hit after the largest toxic algae bloom ever recorded caused massive marine die-offs from central California to the Alaskan peninsula. Entire fishing industries, like the razor clam and Dungeness crab, were temporarily closed and lost millions of dollars.
Scripps Oceanography researchers uncovered the genetic basis of domoic acid production in toxic algal blooms and the findings were published in Science last year. Domoic acid can accumulate in tissues of shellfish and fish. When consumed by larger mammals, like sea lions or even humans, domoic acid can cause memory loss, seizures, and even death. The toxin is produced by a specific type of phytoplankton (the microscopic plants that support the marine food chain and produce over 50 percent of the earth’s oxygen) known as the diatom Pseudo-nitzschia. But so far, scientists don’t know why some blooms of algae, which occur all the time in every part of the world, suddenly turn deadly.
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