Newsy Bits

Redefining downtown?

The Centre City Development Corporation (CCDC) Board of Directors has generally been a traditional, buttoned-down bunch: well-heeled bankers, architects and attorneys who seemed just a little detached from downtown's economic realities. Last week, Mayor Jerry Sanders nominated Teddy Cruz, a local architect and UCSD visual-arts professor whose progressive urban-planning ideas have earned him an almost cult-like following, to take the place of Hal Sadler. Sadler resigned from the board shortly before taking a job as architect for developer Doug Manchester on the controversial Navy Broadway redevelopment project. The nomination is pending City Council approval.

Cruz is relatively young-43 years old-and Latino. His projects include Casa Familiar in San Ysidro and the nonprofit La Maestra Family Clinic in City Heights. He also designed the information center for the in_Site 05 cross-border art exhibition.

Cruz says he hopes to use his new role to look at issues that usually don't get much attention, like redefining the relationship between downtown and its surrounding communities and reevaluating downtown zoning regulations to allow for smarter mixed-use projects and affordable housing.

Cruz also wants to address downtown San Diego's failure to incorporate useful public space.

“Public space in our time has less to do with a little square that is nice and comfortable,” he said. “It has more to do with a very committed collaboration, an idea of collaboration between public and private.”

When asked about the Navy Broadway Complex, Cruz said the city has already made mistakes when it comes to redeveloping the waterfront, pointing out that buildings along Harbor Drive have created a wall between the Gaslamp Quarter and the bay.

Former CCDC chairman Peter Q. Davis says Cruz's appointment comes at the right time. Davis said the mission of CCDC has changed “from cleaning up blight and reducing crime to one of design and use, integrity.”

-Kinsee Morlan

Ewell's other nut job

Not sure how we missed this one, but it's still fun.

In his new job as City Manager of Santa Monica, former San Diego City Manager Lamont Ewell-once famous for his very public dust-ups with squirrelly City Attorney Mike Aguirre-has had to battle a different type of nutcracker.

Shortly after taking office in early January, Ewell-who CityBeat always suspected had a mean streak-ordered Santa Monica city staff to gas hundreds of fuzzy little ground squirrels that had built burrows within the city's Palisades Park.

The Los Angeles County Health Department had previously ordered the city to reduce the number of ground squirrels there and, in a written statement, Ewell cited potential health concerns and liability claims if the city didn't take immediate action to reduce the population.

“This application is highly effective at reducing the number of squirrels quickly and, more importantly, with minimal suffering,” Ewell said in a prepared statement issued after handing the squirrels the death penalty. “As a person who loves animals, my goal is to avoid ever having to reduce the populations of squirrels in this manner again.”

Ewell's order drew a backlash from PETA and other animal-rights groups, but relations improved this spring when the city agreed to begin feeding the squirrels a drug that would sterilize them.

-Daniel Strumpf