Daily Business Report-Oct. 26, 2020
Rendering of Riverwalk Park in Mission Valley.
San Diego Planning Commission
recommends approval
of 200-acre Riverwalk project in Mission Valley
The San Diego Planning Commission has recommended approval of Riverwalk San Diego, a project that would transform the existing Riverwalk golf course in western Mission Valley into a 200-acre live-work-play, transit-oriented neighborhood. Hines, the proposed developer, would restore the stretch of the San Diego River that runs through Riverwalk.
Planning commissioners spoke favorably of Riverwalk’s transit-oriented design; attention to park space and river restoration; consideration for alternative modes of transportation; and provision of housing. “I think it could be something to set the standard for what transit-oriented development can look like,” said Commissioner Vicki Granowitz.
Riverwalk would include:
- 4,300 home, 10 percent of which would be income-qualified affordable housing.
- A new MTS Green Line trolley stop at the center of the development.
- 1 million square feet of office space.
- 152,000 square feet of retail.
- 100 acres of parks and open space.
The project will advance to the San Diego City Council for approval on Nov. 17. If approved, Hines expects to break ground during the second half of 2021.
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Karla Ruiz becomes Tijuana’s first female mayor
Karla Ruiz, formerly Tijuana’s Secretary of Education, was sworn in as Mayor of Tijuana in place of Arturo Gonzalez who has taken a leave of office to focus on his campaign for Governor. Ruiz is the first female mayor in the city’s history.
She joins three other female mayors leading Baja municipalities: Mayor of Tecate Zulema Adams, Mayor of Rosarito Araceli Brown, and Mayor of Mexicali Marina del Pilar Avila, making four of the five Baja municipalities under female leadership.
The San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce welcomed Ruiz and said it “looks forward to working with her and supporting her administration as we continue our work to facilitate and strengthen cross-border commerce and reactivate our binational economy.”
Upcoming elections for governor and local offices across Baja will take place in June 2021.
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San Diego ranked sixth nationally for climate action
Five years following the adoption of a landmark Climate Action Plan, the City of San Diego has been ranked sixth in the country for reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) in a national scientific study by The Brookings Institution.
Examining climate action progress in the 100 largest U.S. cities, the “Pledges and Progress” report provides a thorough analysis of climate policy and actions at the city level, taking into account the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In order to create the ranking, The Brookings Institution looked closely at the most recent GHG inventory and baseline emissions levels for each city. In San Diego, the comparison was between 2010 and 2017 with a 21 percent reduction. Using more recent data from 2018, the City of San Diego has recorded a 24 percent decrease in GHG emissions since 2010.
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FDA approves first COVID-19 drug
from Oceanside’s Gilead Sciences
The FDA approved the first drug to treat COVID-19 from Gilead Sciences, which has a significant presence in Oceanside. Its drug remdesivir, which the company calls Veklury, cut the time to recovery by five days in a large study led by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
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Cue Health to open new campus,
bring 500 jobs to Vista
Local biotech Cue Health, which develops rapid, accurate molecular testing for COVID-19 and influenza, will soon bring a campus and 500 new jobs to Vista. Cue Health recently secured $481 million from the Department of Defense to produce six million fast, portable COVID-19 tests by March 2021.
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San Diego startups rake in $933 million
in venture capital despite pandemic
San Diego startups pulled in a hefty amount of venture capital in the third quarter, thanks to the region’s cluster of biotech/life sciences companies that continue to thrive during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sixty-three young local companies raised $933 million in the quarter, according to the PitchBook-National Venture Capital Association Venture Monitor report. While that’s below the $1 billion corralled by 73 startups during the same quarter last year, it’s still better than some industry observers expected given the state of the economy.
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City Attorney cracks down
on La Jolla COVID party mansion
San Diego City Attorney Mara W. Elliott on Oct. 23 filed a civil enforcement action to shut down a La Jolla Farms short-term vacation rental property located at 9660 Black Gold Road. The complaint alleges that Defendants are maintaining a public nuisance and engaging in unfair competition, including false advertising. The rental continues to operate in violation of state and county COVID-19 public health orders.
Citing extensive violations of state and local laws, Elliott is seeking civil penalties and a permanent injunction against property owners Mousa Hussain Mushkor and Zahra Ali Kasim, property manager Nital Meshkoor, and Steven S. Barbarich, who leased the property from Mushkor and subleased it as a short-term rental.
The oceanfront mansion has been the subject of at least thirty calls to the San Diego Police Department, causing officers to expend more than 173 hours at the property to investigate nuisance activity. Most of the incidents involved raucous parties, some of which had up to 300 attendees.
About a dozen of the party complaints came during the COVID-19 pandemic, while public health orders prohibit large gatherings.
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DrugCell: New experimental AI platform
matches tumor to best drug combo
Only 4 percent of all cancer therapeutic drugs under development earn final approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
“That’s because right now we can’t match the right combination of drugs to the right patients in a smart way,” said Trey Ideker, professor at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and Moores Cancer Center. “And especially for cancer, where we can’t always predict which drugs will work best given the unique, complex inner workings of a person’s tumor cells.”
In a paper published Oct. 20, 2020 in Cancer Cell, Ideker and Brent Kuenzi, and Jisoo Park, postdoctoral researchers in his lab, describe DrugCell, a new artificial intelligence (AI) system they created that not only matches tumors to the best drug combinations, but does so in a way that makes sense to humans.
“Most AI systems are ‘black boxes’ — they can be very predictive, but we don’t actually know all that much about how they work,” said Ideker, who is also co-director of the Cancer Cell Map Initiative and the National Resource for Network Biology.
He gave the example of the way an internet image search for “cat” works. AI systems working behind the scenes are trained on existing cat images, but how they actually label a new image as “cat” and not “rat” or something else is unknown.
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Signup Nov. 20 for competition for teenagers
to create solutions to local and global problems
The Jacobs Teen Innovation Challenge supports middle- and high-school student teams around the world to create solutions to local and global problems and compete in an international challenge to earn up to $1,000 for charity. The priority signup deadline for teachers and homeschooling parents is Nov. 20.
Hosted by The Jacobs Institute for Innovation in Education at the University of San Diego, the global competition helps students develop an innovator’s mindset and skills that cut across STEAM-sector jobs by using design thinking to engage in social good innovation. Using Pactful, students learn essential skills such as empathy, critical thinking, community engagement, design, prototyping, and storytelling that benefit them in future-focused careers. Pactful is a free, patent-pending virtual tool and curriculum that helps educators guide students to develop a project that provides a solution to real-world problems in their community.
From January through April 2021, students will work through three stages of design thinking to develop their social good solution. The challenge will conclude on May 1, 2021 with students submitting their pitches.
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SDSU student chosen for
social justice reporting project
Savannah Cadet-Haynes, a student in San Diego State University’s School of Journalism and Media Studies (JMS), is among six San Diego County journalists selected for a new civic engagement program that aims to amplify the unheard voices in San Diego through social justice.
The digital journalism project was launched by The San Diego Union-Tribune.
The goal of the Social Justice Reporting Project is to bring awareness to communities in San Diego County and the Tijuana region through authentic voices and faces of the racial and social justice movements. The six recipients were selected from more than 130 applicants.
The project was funded by a $30,000 grant from Google, and members of the San Diego Association of Black Journalists, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the Asian American Journalists Association San Diego Chapter and the San Diego Society of Professional Journalists will serve as mentors.
