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Reservoirs filling up


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inland] homes,” he says. So they are buying more second homes in Borrego. Through recent decades,


Borrego has been a victim of asset flippers trying to make the town into Palm Springs. Projects have lain barren. Bankruptcies have abounded. Jack Giacomini, president of San Diego’s HMG Hospitality, was in a group that bought La Casa del Zorro, the resort that drained Copley Newspa- pers and subsequent owners. When new partners came in, they bought Giacomini out, “Thank God,” he says. He had told them what they didn’t want to hear: they were trying to appeal to “the upscale, the elite.” But Bor- rego is not near a freeway, does not have “accessibility to feeder markets, and has a remote location.” And with its water problem, it will never be a Palm Springs, and enlightened citizens don’t want it to be.


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Contact Don Bauder at 719-539-7831 dbauder@sandiegoreader.com


Under the radar


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rent clients of the younger Clay include the City of Encinitas, which seeks to “prohibit local agencies from enforcing laws and ordinances, or otherwise subject to civil or criminal pen- alties, the act of people sleeping or resting in a lawfully parked motor vehicle. While a vehicle may be ‘lawfully parked’ in a residential neighborhood or in the parking lot of a business, that does not mean that it is acceptable to have people live there. The issues raised...are less about parking, and more about the use of vehicles for human habitation, including sleeping and ‘resting’ in front of exist- ing homes and businesses.” … H.G. Fenton, the giant Mission Valley land owner battling the efforts of transplanted Man- hattan hedge-fund magnate


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Mike Stone to grab control of the 165-acre site of Qualcomm Stadium for a soccer-themed commercial and residential development, has so far laid out $62,427 worth of in-kind expenses on behalf of Public Land, Public Vote, a political committee opposing Stone’s current big-money signature drive, according to a March 17 filing. … The Deputy Sheriff’s Association kicked in $2500 to the local Democratic Party on March 15 to cover some of next year’s June primary expenses. — Matt Potter (@sdmattpotter)


The Reader offers $25 for news tips published in this column. Call our voice mail at 619-235- 3000, ext. 440, or sandiegore- ader.com/staff/matt-potter/ contact/.


NEWS TICKER continued from page 2


million. In 2001, he won a $100 million suit against the city, but former city attorney Mike Aguirre got the judgment reversed. In 1998, the Federal


Deposit Insurance Corpora- tion held a 20-day hearing in San Diego. The agency criti- cized Rocky for “personal dishonesty” and showed a diagram of De La Fuente’s businesses — a virtual mare’s nest of cross-owned businesses with family mem- bers. De La Fuente said the agency, which was trying to get him banned from banking, was “worse than the Gestapo.” An administrative law


judge agreed with the pro- posed ban. De La Fuente sued. A federal judge ruled that his constitutional rights had not been violated but said the ban might have been “extraordinary.” De La Fuente has busi- nesses in San Diego and Latin America.


Don Bauder


To L.A. for Olango justice


Activists angered by D.A. Dumanis’s ruling Community leaders in San Diego are continuing their


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quest to have a special prosecutor review the fatal September 2016 police shooting of 38-year-old El Cajon resident Alfred Olango. On March 24 activist


Shane Harris, president of San Diego’s branch of the National Action Network, met with California attor- ney general Xavier Becerra at Becerra’s Los Angeles office to request that he appoint a special prosecu- tor in the case. “It has been our belief


at National Action Network all along that local district attorneys investigating local police is a conflict of inter- est and that these types of investigations must happen independent so it builds pub- lic trust,” reads a statement from Harris released after the meeting. Earlier this year San


Diego County district attorney Bonnie Dumanis ruled that El Cajon police officer Richard Gonsalves was justified in his shoot- ing of the unarmed Olango, who was shot in the park- ing lot of an El Cajon taco shop in daylight hours. Shortly after the shooting Gonsalves said he believed Olango was armed because he had been tugging at his pocket; officers, however, did not find a gun but an e-cigarette that Olango had been trying to remove from his pocket. Dumanis’s ruling angered


activists and community members. They believe an independent investigator would find that Gonsalves did not have reason to fire the shots. Olango’s sister, who had called authori- ties because her brother was acting strange, was telling Gonsalves and the other officer at the scene that Olango did not have any weapons. And while Harris’s meet-


ing did not result in a call for a special prosecutor, Harris says it is the first step in the right direction. Harris says Becerra vowed to work closely with civil rights lead- ers on police accountability


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and promised to meet with Olango’s family to discuss the shooting. “Although I do not know


what the outcomes will be,” says Harris. “I am confident the families we are working for will get some kind of clo- sure and justice. We are one step closer than before and that is what is important.” As Harris and others


plead for a special prosecu- tor to investigate Olango’s death, Olango’s family will continue with their civil lawsuit they filed against Gonsalves and the El Cajon Police Department in Febru- ary of this year. Dorian Hargrove


Fat City is elsewhere San Diego’s lesser amount of obese people Residents of the San Diego metro area are among the least obese persons in the country, according to a study by WalletHub, a statisti- cal aggregator. In a list of metro areas


with the most corpulent persons, San Diego comes in 88th among the top 100 cities. The study measures percentage of obese per- sons, percentage of those with obesity-related health problems, and existence of a healthy environment (access to parks and facilities, and health foods, etc.). The top 20 overall fat-


test metro areas are in the South: the worst are Jack- son, Mississippi; Memphis, Tennessee; and Little Rock, Arkansas. The three metro areas with the skinniest/ healthiest residents are Min- neapolis, Portland (Oregon), and Seattle. The Bay Area shines: San Francisco has the lowest percentage of obese adults, and San Jose has the lowest percent- age of physically inactive persons and the lowest share of those with high blood pressure. San Diego has one of the


lowest percentages of physi- cally inactive adults — tied for 95th with Denver. Don Bauder


Book Ends continued from page 12


I returned to 5th


Avenue on $5 a bag day. The quiet but exhilarated snatch-and-grab frenzy of 80 percent day had given way to a grimmer shovel- ing up of goods en masse by a smaller, more determined contingent. (Smaller, but also louder — as the shelves emptied, they began to echo the conversations of those scouring them.)


and his love for brick-and- mortar (just like the stuff that adorns the storefront of the Amazon Bookstore at University Towne Cen- tre) when I visited during 5th Avenue’s demolition days and watched a tall, friendly musician/bouncer/ bookseller named Seth pack up and cart away a couple dozen three-by-three boxes full of unsold books. (“I told him he could have what’s left if he took it all,” said


“Philosophy went first, and then mathematics. Literature got scraped really fast. And the New Age and humor sections sat there.”


“Philosophy went first,”


said Schrader of his liquida- tion, “and then mathemat- ics. Literature got scraped really fast. And the new age and humor sections sat there. So in some ways, I have hope for society now. History is going very slowly, which surprised me. And you see that big chunk of blue books over there? It’s the encyclopedia of art, one of those standard works. It should be selling for hun- dreds of dollars, and at five bucks a bag, you could prob- ably get the whole thing out of here for $20. But nobody’s bought it. What’s really sur- prised me is nobody wants the bookshelves” — mostly high, simple, solid things that Schrader built himself when he opened in this, his fourth and biggest location. He supposed that “very few people have enough books anymore to need them. Oddly enough, my own collection has gotten kind of small through the years. I had stuff that I thought was rare and that I had to save, but after a while I real- ized that there are very few things I wouldn’t be able to find again.” I thought of Maxwell


Schrader.) Seth sells used books through Amazon; his storefront is SI Books. “My brother has epi-


lepsy, and he needed a job that wasn’t stressful in an at-home environment. My parents did a little research and found this was a nice way for him to make a profit.” Usually, Seth finds underpriced titles at places like Goodwill and Friends of the Library. But for this, his biggest haul, he asked politely. “Trade secret,” he said, winking. “Don’t tell anybody.” “I think books are an


old, outdated technology,” said Seth, “but there’s an undeniable following. You can find books where you make 200–300 percent, which may be only $5–$6 per book, but it pays the bills. I once paid 50 cents for a Japanese art book that sold for $115. You can never tell; it’s always the most obscure thing. You just need to have the reach that Amazon has. It takes effort to clean the book, process it, and get it off to Amazon according to their infrastructure, and you do pay them a hefty chunk to them, but it’s the cost of doing business.”


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28 San Diego Reader March 30, 2017


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