Daily Business Report-Nov. 12, 2020
Rendering of the East Village Quarter development. (Courtesy of MLB)
City Council moves forward on plan to
redevelop Tailgate Park into mixed-use district
The San Diego City Council unanimously approved entering into an exclusive negotiating agreement with the Padres Development Team to negotiate terms for the acquisition and redevelopment of Tailgate Park to become East Village Quarter.
The Padres Development Team’s initial vision is for the redevelopment of Tailgate Park to become a mixed-use district called East Village Quarter. The team’s vision includes housing, neighborhood-serving retail, public spaces and office buildings that aim to attract technology and biotechnology companies. Plans also include parking that supports onsite uses, Padres games and ballpark events consistent with the Padres long-term parking lease on the site.
“We are excited to take another step forward to revitalize Tailgate Park and further transform the Ballpark District and downtown San Diego,” said Erik Greupner, President of Business Operations for the San Diego Padres. “We look forward to finalizing a deal with the City of San Diego that will result in the creation of a vibrant, inclusive, mixed-use district in East Village.”
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8 San Diego PR firms make it to
Forbes’ Best PR Agencies 2021 list
Eight San Diego public relations firms have been named to America’s Best PR Agencies list by Forbes.
Forbes partnered with market research firm Statista for its inaugural ranking of America’s Best PR Agencies 2021. To develop the list, Statista surveyed more than 12,700 experts and 20,500 customers who nominated more than 5,000 firms. Participants were asked to indicate how likely they were to nominate a particular agency on a scale of zero (very unlikely) to 10 (very likely). Statista then narrowed the list to the top 200 and gave those that received at least the median score a four-star rating and those that exceeded the median score a five-star rating.
The eight San Diego firms and their CEOs are:
- Covet PR —CEO Sara Brooks
- Havas Formula — CEO Michael Olguin
- KCD PR — CEO Kevin Dinino
- (W)right On Communications — CEO Julie Wright
- BAM — CEO Beck Bamberger
- Bay Bird — CEO Peyton Robertson
- Chemistry PR — CEO Audrey Doherty
- J. Walcher Communications— CEO Jean Walcher
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Election proves Proposition 13 tax
revolt is alive and well in California
CalMatters
With the failure of Proposition 15, the $140 million campaign to hike property taxes on businesses across the state finally comes to a close.
Now begins a new statewide competition to explain what the results really mean.
For opponents, which include large business groups, commercial landlords and low-tax advocates, the lesson is clear: Forty years after California voters passed Proposition 13 — capping property taxes and hamstringing state and local governments’ ability to raise new revenue — the “tax revolt” is live and well.
The state’s voters may routinely elect and then re-elect Democrats, said Rob Lapsley, president of the California Business Roundtable, a coalition of large businesses that opposed the measure. But that doesn’t mean they want to weaken what he called the state’s “last remaining tax protection.”
“This was the most favorable political climate they could have asked for,” he said. “An anti-Trump climate driving a high-turnout election, a pandemic with deficits at cities and school districts across the state.”
That the measure failed despite all that “sends very clear signals that we are not going to see this again.”
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General Atomics awarded contract to
develop key component for ITER
General Atomics (GA) has been awarded a contract by US ITER, based at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, to develop the manufacturing process for components for the system that will transmit microwave heating into the heart of the ITER international fusion experiment in France.
These components, known as waveguide assemblies, are composed of precision-machined, ultra-straight metal tubes up to three meters in length. The assemblies will carry high-frequency, high-power microwaves as part of ITER’s electron-cyclotron heating (ECH) system, which is used to heat the plasma to fusion conditions.
The contract covers development of manufacturing procedures that will be qualified by fabrication of ten ECH transmission line waveguide assemblies at GA’s Magnet Technologies Center (MTC) in San Diego. Production of the approximately 1,700 waveguide assemblies that will be installed in ITER will be the subject of future US ITER contracts not yet awarded.
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Palomar Specialty Insurance Co. taking over Hawaii
residential business from GeoVera Holdings
La Jolla-based Palomar Specialty Insurance Co. will be taking over all residential hurricane insurance policies in Hawaii from GeoVera Holdings Inc. Palomar has been providing catastrophic insurance coverage in Hawaii for five years.
Through an ongoing partnership between Palomar and GeoVera, Palomar Specialty Insurance Co. will issue replacement offers at the time of policy renewal to all policyholders of residential hurricane coverage issued by GeoVera Insurance Co. and Coastal Select Insurance Co., which are both exiting the Hawaii market.
“Palomar has proudly served the Hawaii community for several years. This transaction enables us to expand and solidify our commitment to the market by providing flexible, affordable hurricane coverage to homeowners across the state,” said Mac Armstrong, Palomar’s chairman and CEO.
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COVID-19 testing site opens in Vista
The County of San Diego is partnering with the Vista Unified School District and the City of Vista to open a COVID-19 testing site for students, teachers and the general public. The free, no-appointment site opened Wednesday and will offer testing from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. seven days per week. The site will be located at Linda Rhoades Community Center, 600 N. Santa Fe in Vista.
The new site, which is jointly used by the school district and city residents, will have the capacity to test 500 people daily. The COVID-19 tests take about 5-10 minutes and the results generally come back in less than three days.
People with and without symptoms who are at higher risk for COVID-19 should be tested. Health care and essential workers should also get a test, as well as people who had close contact to a positive case or live in communities that are being highly impacted.
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Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. acquires
San Diego-based AWIS Group
Illinois-based Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. announced the acquisition of San Diego-based AWIS Group. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Founded in 2005, AWIS is a wholesale insurance broker offering a range of commercial coverages as well as high-net-worth personal lines, primarily through California-based insurance agencies.
The AWIS team will continue to operate from its current location under the direction of Adam Mazan, head of the Pacific West Region for Risk Placement Services Inc., Gallagher’s U.S. wholesale brokerage operation.
Arthur J. Gallagher & Co., a global insurance brokerage, risk management and consulting services firm, is headquartered in Rolling Meadows, Ill. The company has operations in 49 countries and offers client-service capabilities in more than 150 countries around the world through a network of correspondent brokers and consultants.
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Tackling COVID-19 in San Diego:
SDSU projects address vulnerable communities
As the coronavirus pandemic ushered the U.S. into a health crisis the likes of which the country had not seen in over a century, San Diego State University quickly leveraged faculty expertise and deep-rooted local connections to help the San Diego region weather the virus.
Faculty worked with local government and health agencies, nonprofits and health care providers to build large-scale programs that promote testing, contact tracing and vaccine uptake among hard-to-reach groups. Meanwhile, several projects seek to understand COVID-19’s impact on San Diego’s vulnerable communities and to map critical information necessary to address COVID-19 head-on.
“Our work locally helps mitigate the pandemic in San Diego, significantly reduce health disparities, improve health outcomes, and provide insight into how our community is dealing with this crisis,” said Interim Vice President for Research and Innovation Hala Madanat. “I am so proud of how many SDSU faculty have risen to the occasion during this difficult time.”
This is the third in a five-part series highlighting dozens of COVID-related projects taking place at SDSU. The work spans all seven of the SDSU’s academic colleges as well as the university’s Imperial Valley campus.
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Education course pivots to
continue helping students in STEM
For Sinem Siyahhan, change is an opportunity to challenge ourselves to reach new heights. When the associate professor of educational technology and learning sciences came to Cal State San Marcos in 2014, she set out to change the way her students approached technology as well as teaching science and math to their future primary and secondary students.
When she took over the Education 422 course (Technology Tools for Teaching and Learning), she changed the curriculum and developed a service-learning component where students are actually learning technological tools and creative techniques for teaching STEM topics to children.
And when that learning component – a maker-based STEM afterschool program that relies on hands-on collaborative learning experiences as a method for solving real problems – was in danger because the local school districts it serves began the fall semester with distance learning, she simply created a way to execute the program remotely.
“Oceanside and Escondido (school districts) wanted to continue the program, so we were able to run a virtual maker-based STEM afterschool program across 25 schools serving grades fourth through eighth,” said Siyahhan. “We have Zoom meetings, Education 422 students work in groups of three to five people, and then they’re assigned to a school site where they work with kids during an assigned date and time.”
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IROS 2020: Autonomous mail delivery,
robots practicing bartending, and more
From autonomous vehicles to robots practicing bartending and insect-like robots, engineers at the University of California San Diego are showcasing a broad range of pacers at IROS 2020, which is being held virtually from Oct. 25 to Nov. 25.
The Contextual Robotics Institute at UC San Diego is a full stack research enterprise, from autonomy, to robots in medicine, to human robot interaction, said institute director Henrik Christensen, who is also a professor in the UC SanDiego Department of Computer Science.
“The conference is a unique opportunity for the Contextual Robotics Institute to showcase our diverse research portfolio and to engage with the broader audience to demonstrate how robots are changing the world from manufacturing to e-commerce to helping in everyday life,” Christensen said. “IROS is also for the first time putting a significant emphasis on diversity equity and inclusion, which is a great new direction.”
For the first time, the conference is available for free after registration. This year’s theme is Consumer Robotics and Our Future.
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Brixton Capital acquires Dow Texas Innovation Center
In a transaction that closed Wednesday, Brixton Capital, a Solana Beach investment management firm and affiliate of Brutten Global, purchased Dow Texas Innovation Center in Lake Jackson, Texas. Both the seller and the purchase price are undisclosed. The 34.14-acre research and development (R&D) campus, located at 270 Abner Jackson Parkway, is fully leased to Dow Chemical Company.
Dow has a long history in Lake Jackson, a town in the greater Houston metropolitan area. Dow Chemical Company originally built the town in the early 1940s for company workers servicing the nearby Freeport Plant. The city was designed by Alden B. Dow, a renowned architect and son of Herbert Henry Dow, founder of Dow Chemical Company. The City of Lake Jackson was incorporated in 1944. Today, the Lake Jackson/Freeport region is a petrochemical industry hub.
