C I T Y L I G H T S NEWS TICKER
Will tronc rift end badly for U-T?
Boardroom battle reported at Chicago- based chain San Diego’s Union-Tribune appears in for another downhill slide, judging by a March 17 report in Crain’s Chicago Business. The publication says a “major rift” has opened in the boardroom of tronc, the company then called Tribune Publishing that acquired the U-T less than two years ago in an $85 million deal with local Republican kingpin Douglas Manchester. Last year’s arrival of
Michael Ferro
Chicago’s Michael Ferro, whose Merrick Ventures bought a big chunk of Tri- bune Publishing stock, led to the ousting of Tribune’s previous management and a name change to tronc. Next emerged contro-
Patrick Soon-Shiong
versial biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, one of the richest men in Los Angeles, recruited by Ferro last year as an inves- tor and vice-chairman of
tronc’s board to ward off an ultimately failed takeover attempt by giant newspa- per chain Gannett. In addition to his cash, Soon-Shiong was
also supposed to bring robots and artificial intelligence to the newsrooms of the tronc chain, including the L.A. Times and the U-T, to “attrit” the company’s already-shrinking ranks of human workers. But tronc, which had promised to develop
a bevy of news gathering and distribution gizmos in an infamous promotional video, announced recently that it had done a deal with the Washington Post, owned by Seat- tle billionaire Jeff Bezos, for a set of online publishing tools to be hosted by Bezos- run Amazon. “Thanks LA Times for choosing WaPo’s
Arc Publishing for your digital platform, and kudos to tech team at The Post!” Bezos posted on Twitter after the deal was announced. Now, according to Crain’s, Ferro is
pushing Soon-Shiong out of his board vice- chairmanship in a murky fight for corpo- rate control. In addition, another Angeleno, Donald Tang, whose Tang Media Partners “focuses on the global entertainment and media business with particular emphasis on transactions between China and the United States,” says its website, is also exiting the board. The mixed messages from the company
C I T Y L I G H T S By Reader staff writers
have continued, with a putative $100 mil- lion deal for Us magazine collapsing in mys- tery last week before owner Wenner Media unloaded the title to the National Enquirer. Meanwhile, Soon-Shiong and his health
technology company NantHealth have come under fire following an exposé by the medi- cal industry reporting site STAT, alleging that much of a $12 million contribution by Soon-Shiong’s nonprofit foundations to the University of Utah made a round-trip back to his company in the form of contracts for genetic sequencing.
Matt Potter
Rocky ultimately aims for presidency De La Fuente runs for NYC mayoral seat San Diego real estate developer Roque (Rocky) De La Fuente is running for mayor of New York City, according to a March 23 article in the New York Times. In 2015, the Reader reported that he
was running for president of the United States as a conservative Democrat. He got on the ballot in at least 20 states. He claimed he qualified in more than that. Last year, he filed to run for the United States Senate in Florida. He did not succeed. In r evealing h is
Roque De La Fuente
attempt to run in New York City, the Times says
De La Fuente may be switching parties and running as a Republican. The Times asked De La Fuente’s campaign manager why Rocky is running for New York’s mayor. “He wants to be president of the United States,” replied the manager, Ray Olsen, who said that, arguably, the New York City mayoralty is the “the next best job in politics.” Rocky’s “first problem is that he does
not live here,” said the Times. Rocky’s cam- paign claims that he was rejected by “an upscale Fifth Avenue hotel and apartment building, the Sherry-Netherland, after he tried to buy an apartment there.” If he gets elected in New York City he will have to establish residency there before election day, says the Times. Commented the Times, “The prospect of
a well-heeled new candidate entering the Republican race could further complicate efforts by party leaders to avoid a primary and focus attention on [current mayor] Bill de Blasio.” San Diego has found that De La Fuente
is litigious. In 1993, he won a $56 million suit against the county and settled for $38 continued on page 28
Font’s Point in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, the largest in California Yay! San Diego By Don Bauder O
n January 26, San Diego County’s water authority
exulted that the drought was over. On March 22, the New York Times wrote, “We have some good news on the California drought.” The huge snowpack in the Sierras portends more water. Countywide, San Diego’s reservoirs are filling up. People are cheering. But there’s little joy in
tiny Borrego Springs, in the northeast portion of the county. It doesn’t have reservoirs. It gets its water from an aquifer, or perme- able rock that can transmit groundwater. It once con- sidered buying water stored in county reservoirs, trans- porting it via a long pipe- line, but that would have been too expensive. In recent months, Bor-
rego rainfall has been run- ning 137 percent of the aver- age, but how much of that water gets into the aqui- fer “is hard to quantify. It’s still a mystery,” says Geoff Poole, general manager of the Borrego Water District. Borrego is working with
the United States Geologi- cal Survey to come up with a model that can estimate how much rainwater winds up in the aquifer. Some Borregans are cel-
ebrating the rains, but sci- entists aren’t: “A few people have their heads buried in the sand, thinking every- thing is fine,” says James Dice, reserve manager for the Steele/Burnand Anza- Borrego Desert Research Center, run by the Univer- sity of California Irvine. “At least half [realistically favor] cutting back on water use.” The author of the Borrego
Water Underground, a publi- cation that has been warning the town of its water prob- lem for a long time, flays the “overweening, hedonistic, self-interest” of a citizenry whose motivation is making a buck instead of protect- ing the environment. The purpose of the unsigned publication is to warn resi- dents and potential residents and businesses “of the dire and rapidly deteriorating groundwater situation in the Borrego Valley.” Some politicians repre-
reservoirs filling up Aquifer-dependent Borrego Springs doesn’t have much to cheer about
senting Borrego aren’t help- ing: “Fifth District County Supervisor ‘Bulldozer Bill’ Horn is radically pro-devel- opment and openly and ada- mantly opposed to county involvement in manag- ing groundwater.” For a long time, Borrego
has been drawing 19,100 acre-feet a year from its aquifer, and the inflow is only 5700 acre-feet. (One acre-foot equals 326,000 gal- lons, or enough to cover an acre with one foot of water.) To comply with state laws, by 2020 Borrego has to come up with a plan to match out- flow and inflow. Then it will have 20 years to put the plan into action. Borrego has about
3500 people, half of whom vamoose in the summer, when the temperature reaches 107 degrees or higher. (It hit 122 on June 25, 1990, and 122 on June 20 of last year.) It is a tourist town sur-
rounded by Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, the largest state park in California. Hik- ers, bikers, birders, golfers, and lovers of deserts, moun- tains, and wildflowers flock to Borrego. There are more than 100 large sculptures of animals that once lived in the area and some that still do. But some tourists and
part-time residents are los- ing enthusiasm, and water is a major reason. San Die- gans tell me of their disap-
C I T Y L I G H T S
PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID CORBY
2 San Diego Reader March 30, 2017
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