City Council President Georgette Gómez is in charge, and she’s hoping the City Council will follow her lead and change city rules aimed at making developers build more affordable housing.

End. Of. Story.

She has listened to the building industry’s vociferous opposition to her signature policy initiative, which requires developers to either build more affordable houses when they do projects to pay more to the city so it can build more affordable housing. She settled on a simple response.

She’s not changing anything, report Andrew Keatts and Lisa Halverstadt.

Gómez says the time for negotiating is over, and she’s ready for a vote.

“We’re moving forward,” she said. “I think it’s fair.”

Obviously, builders disagree.

Running Tab for Sidewalk Repairs

The city has budgeted $600,000 this year to repair crumbling sidewalks. At that pace, it’ll take decades before sidewalks are smooth.

Over the past five years, the cash needed to repair sidewalks has jumped to as much as $100 million, up from a 2015 estimate of $57 million in needed repairs, reports Megan Wood.

“We’ve got 80,000 requests, or locations, that need to be repaired,” said Councilman Mark Kersey, who leads the City Council’s infrastructure committee. “We need to be figuring out every possible way that we can to get those fixed.”

For years, officials have talked about revamping the city’s illogical sidewalk repair policy, which we’ve reported on extensively in the past.

During the city’s assessment of sidewalks from 2014 to 2015, more than 85,000 locations were identified as needing repair. Since then, the city has repaired or replaced about 27,000 of those broken sidewalks, but at the same time found an additional 23,000 locations in need of repair.

What We Know About Who’s Going to College

New state data has a story to tell about who gets to go to college and what student groups our public school system is failing to serve.

In his column The Learning Curve, VOSD’s Will Huntsberry pulls out some of the most interesting pieces of data on who’s attending and completing college from San Diego County schools.

San Diego Unified performs very well as a whole when it comes to college attendance rates. But not all students fare equally.

“Latino students represent roughly 57 percent of the San Diego Unified population. And yet the district is failing to help them achieve graduation rates in line with their peers,” Huntsberry writes.

In Other News

Disclosure: Mitch Mitchell, SDG&E’s vice president for government affairs, sits on Voice of San Diego’s board of directors.

The Morning Report was written by Ry Rivard, and edited by Sara Libby.