Daily Business Report: Wednesday, July 14, 2021
NASA retires a research workhorse
to San Diego Air and Space Museum
When the U.S. Navy retired its fleet of S-3B Vikings from active duty in 2009, not all of them were grounded. At NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, one S-3B was being used almost daily as a flight research aircraft.
Acquired in 2004 and flown for the next 16 years on a variety of research missions, this S-3B Viking is about to fly off into the sunset and retire at the San Diego Air and Space Museum where it will be used to educate the public about its important role in the U.S. Navy and at NASA.
“This is the last S-3B flying today anywhere in the world,” says Jim Demers, Glenn’s Flight Operations Manager. “It’s been a workhorse for NASA, but we just can’t source its unique parts anymore.”
Originally designed by Lockheed Martin as an anti-submarine warfare aircraft, NASA’s S-3B Viking was completely reconfigured in 2006 for flight research purposes. All weapons systems were removed and replaced with civilian avionics, GPS, and satellite communications systems to conduct flight communications research.
One of its major contributions was helping NASA’s aeronautical innovators define communications standards that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) can apply to the unmanned aircraft systems for safe operation in U.S. airspace.
PHOTO: S-3B Viking
First all-electric tugboat to operate
around San Diego Bay in 2023
By mid-2023, an all-electric ship-assist tugboat built and operated by Crowley Maritime Corporation will navigate San Diego Bay.
The eWolf is the result of a partnership among Crowley, the San Diego County Air Pollution Control District, the California Air Resources Board, the Port of San Diego, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Maritime Administration, which all provided financial support and other resources.
Over the first 10 years of its use, the operation of the new eTug will reduce 178 tons of nitrogen oxide (NOx), 2.5 tons of diesel particulate matter, and 3,100 metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) versus a conventional tug. The electric tug will replace one that consumes more than 30,000 gallons of diesel per year.
The eTug will operate at the Port of San Diego’s Tenth Avenue Marine Terminal.
“Crowley’s first-of-its-kind electric tugboat is a game changer. It checks all the boxes by providing environmental, economic, and operational benefits for our communities and maritime industry,” said Chairman Michael Zucchet of the Port of San Diego Board of Port Commissioners. “We are proud to work with Crowley and couldn’t be more pleased the eWolf will operate exclusively on San Diego Bay.”
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Registrar of Voters needs site managers for
Sept. 14 California Gubernatorial Recall Election
The Registrar of Voters is seeking temporary site managers to operate an assigned in-person voting location for the Sept. 14 California Gubernatorial Recall Election. Site managers earn $20 per hour and work approximately 125 hours over a five-week period.
For the upcoming election, in-person voting locations will be open for four days instead of one. The Registrar’s office will hire election workers rather than use volunteer poll workers because training is more extensive for the expanded time period.
Site managers will be required to train and lead election workers while representing the Registrar of Voters in a professional, nonpartisan manner.
Site managers work up to three days a week during the pre-election weeks, attend training to learn procedures, tasks, and responsibilities, and train their election workers.
Site managers must be available to work from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on assigned workdays but may be required to work more than eight hours a day and will work some weekends.
On Election Day, Sept. 14, site managers must work from 5:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Site manager applications are available online.
Restaurant Row in San Marcos sold;
plans for site remain unclear
The future of Restaurant Row in San Marcos appears uncertain following its sale in December. A grant deed filed Dec. 31 at the San Diego County Recorder shows the property was purchased by San Marcos Row, a limited liability company. The property had been owned by the Eubank family since the 1970s. For more on the sale
Casero Taqueria and Urban Plates
founders to open Pure Taco in Carlsbad
The co-founders of Casero Taqueria, Clayton Wheeler and Craig Applegate, and Urban Plates co-founder, John Zagara have partnered on a new concept called Pure Taco. Located in Carlsbad Village (2742 State St., Carlsbad), across the street from Campfire Restaurant, Pure Taco will open late July 2021.
Pure Taco is a fast-casual, modern American taqueria with a globally flavored menu, hand-pressed tortillas, specialty margaritas, and local beers on tap.
Influenced by the vibrant multicultural fabric that makes up America today, the menu features traditional tacos, such as chili-rubbed pastor, grilled steak and fish, as well as unique combinations that draw inspiration from global flavors and use Pure Taco’s hand-pressed tortillas as a canvas, including Korean Pork Bo Ssam Tacos, Pho Beef Tacos and Ahi Poke nachos.
State budget allocates $1 million for
Gun Violence Restraining Orders training
The state budget signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom provides $1 million for City Attorney Mara W. Elliott’s program to train other law enforcement agencies on the use of Gun Violence Restraining Orders. The funding will allow Elliott’s Gun Violence Response Unit, which has already trained more than 400 agencies throughout California, to continue its work into 2023.
In 2017, Elliott was the first public official in the state to launch a comprehensive GVRO program that uses California’s “red flag” law to temporarily remove access to firearms from individuals who pose a serious risk of harm to themselves or others. Working with police and the courts, Elliott created a model GVRO program that can be replicated in other jurisdictions, and in 2018 the Legislature asked her office to train other jurisdictions.
Since the program’s inception, the City Attorney’s Office has intervened with a GVRO in more than 550 crisis situations and has removed more than 1,000 guns from individuals who presented a danger to themselves, their partners, their families, their co-workers, their classmates, or the general public.
Senior forensic chemist joins EnSafe as
senior project manager/chief chemist
Ioana Petrisor, an environmental forensics expert, has joined the EnSafe team as a senior project manager/chief chemist, leading scientific efforts on perfluorinated compounds and their prevalence in the environment. She will work from the company’s San Diego office.
Petrisor has 28 years of environmental forensics experience, applying a wide variety of fingerprinting techniques to identify and track sources and age-date contaminants.
Perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) have rapidly emerged as constituents of concern since being added to the EPA’s Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule list in 2012. Petrisor’s primary focus is on understanding PFAS’s myriad of uses, fate and transport, and complex environmental transformations.
Petrisor has a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the Romanian Academy of Sciences and a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from the Bucharest University, Romania. She has published numerous scientific articles, is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the Environmental Forensics Journal, and author of the book Environmental Forensics Fundamentals – A Practical Guide.
Landscape architect Vicki Estrada
appointed to California Arts Council
Vicki Estrada, president and founder of Estrada Land Planning, has been appointed to the California Arts Council for a four-year term. The appointment was made by the state Senate Rules Committee chaired by Senate President pro Tempore Toni Atkins.
Estrada is the president and founder of Estrada Land Planning. She is a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA). In 1981, she was San Diego ASLA chapter president and has served as a San Diego chapter of ASLA National Trustee and National ASLA vice president of communication.
Estrada is a member of the national American Planning Association and is a founding member of the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo Technical Advisory Committee.
Locally, she serves as a member of the board of the Maritime Museum of San Diego, Groundwork San Diego, San Diego Canyonlands and she previously served as a member of the City of San Diego Commission of Arts and Culture. She also previously served as the Chair of the San Diego Public Arts Committee and the San Diego Airport Public Art Committee.
Registration opens Monday for fall semester
at San Diego Community College District
Open registration for the fall 2021 semester at the San Diego Community College District (SDCCD) begins Monday, July 19, 2021. This fall, the district’s four colleges, San Diego City, Mesa, Miramar, and the San Diego College of Continuing Education, will continue to provide online learning while offering more in-person classes with COVID-related health and safety measures required for all participants. Fall semester classes begin Aug. 23.
Recent national and local job growth trends show a variety of employment opportunities are opening up as many businesses resume regular operations. Students and employees looking for new skills and upward mobility can prepare for good-paying jobs through the hundreds of affordable degree and certificate programs at SDCCD colleges, including public administration, fire protection technology, and nursing, or opt for free workforce training at the College of Continuing Education. Many of the district’s job training programs can be completed online and/or in less than a year.
Students can begin the open registration process on July 19. Look for the printed class schedule in the mail or go to classschedule.sdccd.edu
City’s oldest community garden adding pollinator garden
Gardeners at the Juniper-Front Community Garden participated in a groundbreaking event on July 10 to prepare the soil for a new pollinator garden. Essential components of the agricultural growing cycle, the new pollinator plants will attract more bees, butterflies, birds, and other pollinators, ensuring a vibrant, healthy environment for the garden’s year-round crops of vegetables, fruit, and flowers.
The Garden, which will be 40 years old this year, is one of 105 community gardens in the county and 27 in the City of San Diego. It is the oldest community garden in the city, providing a green belt in the culturally and economically diverse urban neighborhood of Bankers Hill.
Covering 20,000 square feet, the garden currently has 50 plots for individual gardeners, a community meeting space, and more than 12 shared community fruit trees. There are more than 75 people on their waitlist for plots. The pollinator garden will be about 3000 square feet.
First patients in San Diego County
to receive lungs with heart-stopping approach
The lung transplant team at UC San Diego Health performed San Diego County’s first transplant surgery with lungs donated after cardiac death, an approach that could mean more opportunities to save the lives of those in critical need of new lungs.
“We have successfully performed two lung transplants using lungs from donors whose hearts had stopped functioning prior to organ removal. The recipients of those donated lungs are recovering well, and both have good prognoses,” said Eugene Golts, M.D., surgical director of the lung transplant program at UC San Diego Health. “Organ donation after cardiac death is one possible solution to the current organ shortage we face because it could expand the pool of potential donors.”
Professor Karl Barry Sharpless and team named
winners of 2021 Royal Society of Chemistry prize
Professor Karl Barry Sharpless and his Scripps Research team, part of a collaborative international group of investigators, are being honored by the Royal Society of Chemistry for their development of a technology called “multidimensional click chemistry” that’s opening up new possibilities in biomedicine, materials science and beyond.
The team—which also includes scientists from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and University of California, San Francisco—has won the society’s 2021Organic Division Horizon Prize, known as the Robert Robinson Award in Synthetic Organic Chemistry.
Click chemistry is a method of synthesizing larger molecules by combining smaller “modular” chemicals together, similar to how LEGO bricks click together, using very reliable reaction chemistry. The click reaction occurs quickly and irreversibly with minimal byproducts in the context of complex biological environments, allowing these reactions to occur in the context of a living cell.
