Daily Business Report-Jan. 5, 2021
New to the list is the Chase Bank building at 4650 Mission Bay Drive. (Photos © Sandé Lollis, 2020)
SOHO releases annual list
of San Diego’s most endangered historic sites
Save Our Heritage Organisation, San Diego’s only countywide historic preservation advocacy group wraps up this year with its 22nd annual Most Endangered List of 12 historic buildings, sites, and landscapes.
This year’s Most Endangered List, ranges from the seriously neglected Presidio Park in Old Town San Diego to Granger Music Hall, an acoustic gem in National City designed by renowned San Diego architect Irving J. Gill; and from Point Loma’s fabled Marine Corps Recruitment Depot to the fragile Pottery Canyon kiln hidden in a La Jolla hillside.
The 2020 list includes prominent and remote buildings and sites throughout San Diego County carried over from the 2019 list.
Among those new to the endangered list is a Chase bank building of architectural distinction. Proposed for demolition by Chase to accommodate a drive-through restaurant and new bank building, this original Home Savings and Loan branch is the only one left in San Diego. With its exquisite murals and Modernist design, the building displays scenic San Diego mosaics, a bronze seal sculpture, and an interior folk mural. SOHO staff is preparing a historical designation report to submit to City staff. Chase Bank has declined to comment on retaining the architecturally distinctive building and its interior murals by Millard Sheets, but has plans to relocate the exterior murals to the new Balboa Avenue Trolley Station.
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Antarctic ice piedmont named for Scripps scientist
Scripps Institution of Oceanography glaciologist Helen Amanda Fricker is being honored by the UK Antarctic Place-Names Committee with an Antarctic ice piedmont in her name. The Fricker Ice Piedmont is located on the eastern side of Adelaide Island, a mainly ice-covered island off the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula.
The pioneering scientist is being recognized for her work using satellites, including NASA’s ICESat-2, to study the evolution of ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland.
Antarctic place-names honor British individuals who’ve made exceptional contributions to advancing science in the polar regions. This year, 28 polar scientists were honored as part of a larger celebration to mark the 200th anniversary of the discovery of Antarctica.
Fricker is the co-leader of the Scripps Polar Center.
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Department of Financial Protection and Innovation
to exercise new powers to protect consumers
With the new California Consumer Financial Protection Law now in effect, the Department of Financial Protection and Innovation (DFPI) will exercise expanded powers to better protect consumers from unlawful, unfair, deceptive, and abusive practices. The DFPI was formerly the state Department of Business Oversight.
Beginning immediately, the DFPI will review and investigate consumer complaints against previously unregulated financial products and services, including debt collectors, credit repair and consumer credit reporting agencies, debt relief companies, rent to own contractors, private school financing, and more. The shift comes as millions of Californians turn to non-traditional financial products and services to weather job losses and other financial hardships due to the coronavirus pandemic.
This spring, the DFPI will launch a statewide campaign to educate California consumers on how the department can support and protect consumers. Offering translation services in dozens of languages, the DFPI hotline will help all Californians. DFPI representatives never ask questions about a callers’ immigration status.
The Department is also preparing to open a new Office of Financial Technology Innovation that will engage with new industries and consumer advocates to encourage consumer friendly innovation and job creation in California.
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State Employment Development
Department faces big test
Emily Hoeven | CalMatters
California’s unemployment department is ringing in the new year with a new director, (Rita Saenz) but many of its old problems remain. The backlog of claims has swelled to nearly 780,000 — up from 543,000 in mid-November — despite the state’s goal of clearing all unprocessed claims by Jan. 27. Meanwhile, the Employment Development Department announced Sunday it had suspended payment on an unspecified number of claims in its latest attempt to mitigate fraud — one likely to prevent thousands of jobless Californians from rightfully accessing their benefits.
The news comes as the department prepares to expedite payment of federal unemployment benefits — secured by December’s stimulus package — to more than 1 million Californians. Distributing the federal funds will be a massive test for EDD, which has allegedly paid out billions of dollars in fraudulent claimssince the onset of the pandemic. EDD and its payment contractor, Bank of America, are currently fighting over who will ultimately pay for the fraud.
Mason Wilder of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners: “If it turns out that California should not have approved all these claims, then regardless of what their agreement says with Bank of America about debit cards, I would think that ultimately the taxpayers are going to be on the hook for California’s errors.”
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Julie Dubick joins Pro Kids as executive director
Pro Kids – First Tee, San Diego (Pro Kids) has named Julie Dubick as the new executive director of the organization.
Dubick was the chief of staff to former Mayor Jerry Sanders, and a former partner in the law firm Seltzer Caplan McMahon Vitek. She is a partner at H.G. Consulting Group LLC and an adjunct professor of law at California Western School of Law.
“I am excited to join the Pro Kids organization which has supported underserved communities in City Heights and Oceanside with ‘golf as the hook and education as the payoff’ for over 25 years,” said Dubick.
“It’s an honor to join the dedicated staff and board who have worked to both provide over $2.1 million in scholarships and higher education financial aid primarily to first generation college students and enhance life skills and love for the game of golf. 2021 will be our opportunity to play a larger role in the community by expanding the number of students we serve, adding new academic programs in STEM and financial literacy, and promoting and diversifying the game of golf.”
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California Bank & Trust promotes Eric Ellingsen to CEO
California Bank & Trust announced the promotion of Eric Ellingsen, a banking industry leader and company veteran of over 20 years, from president and COO to CEO, effective immediately. Ellingsen will continue his role as president with new leadership responsibilities as CEO. He will continue to oversee the growth of the bank across the state, including direct oversight of its commercial banking division.
David E. Blackford will transition from his role as prior CEO to executive chairman, with continuing responsibility for the bank’s commercial real estate portfolio.
Ellingsen began his impressive career trajectory at CB&T in a four-month temporary role as a junior accountant that led to a permanent position within the company. From there, this led to more senior roles handling risk management, regulatory compliance, international banking and asset/liability management.
In 2012, he was promoted to CFO where he was responsible for the overall financial management of the company and then in 2016, rose to the position of president and COO. In this role, he oversaw business and branch banking, SBA lending, private banking, corporate services, and the bank’s finance and planning functions.
San Diego Community College District’s
annual economic impact $4.1 billion
The San Diego Community College District (SDCCD) annually generates $4.1 billion in economic activity, according to the latest report from a labor market analytics firm that lauds the SDCCD for playing a pivotal role in reducing economic inequities.
According to Idaho-based Emsi, the $4.1 billion generated by the SDCCD is enough to support nearly 42,000 jobs, or 1 out of every 52 jobs in the region.
Among other highlights of the report:
- 98 percent of SDCCD students remain in the region after graduation and their impact alone amounted to $3.5 billion in added income in fiscal year 2019-20.
- Students will see a return of $6.20 in higher future earnings for every $1 they invest in their education.
- For every dollar of public money invested in the SDCCD, taxpayers will receive $1.40 in return over the course of students’ working lives.
Surveys identify relationship
between waves, coastal cliff erosion
Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego researchers have uncovered how rain and waves act on different parts of coastal cliffs.
Following three years of cliff surveys in and near the coastal city of Del Mar, they determined that wave impacts directly affect the base, and rain mostly impacts the upper region of the cliffs.
The studyappears in the journal Geomorphology and was funded by California State Parks. California’s State Parks Oceanography program supports climate adaptationand resilience efforts through coastal and cliff erosion observations and modeling, measuring and predicting storm surge and wave variability, and establishing wave condition baselines for use in the design and operation of coastal projects.
After decades of debate over the differing roles that waves and rain play in cliff erosion, the findings provide a new opportunity to improve forecasts, which is a pressing issue both in Del Mar and across the California coast. For example, neighborhoods and a railroad line the cliff edge in Del Mar. Past episodes of cliff failures have resulted in several train derailments and landslides, which trigger temporary rail closures and emergency repairs. The consequences can be costly.
UC San Diego celebrates
25 years of wireless research leadership
The University of California San Diego Center for Wireless Communications (CWC) is celebrating 25 years of partnering with industry to push the bounds of wireless technologies while training the wireless workforce of the future.
At the UC San Diego Center for Wireless Communication’s 5G and Beyond Forum in November 2020, researchers from academia, industry and government presented on both 5G innovations and visions for 6G. The symposium also looked back at some of the Center’s impactful research and activities over the last three decades.
Looking forward, UC San Diego is engaging in national and international conversations focused on creating wireless research ecosystems and infrastructure through public-private partnerships that facilitate both innovation and workforce development. The general idea is to create scalable research ecosystems and infrastructure that can be accessed virtually and encourage development of future wireless technologies, use-case exploration for 6G and beyond, and the training of tomorrow’s wireless workforce.
Discovery boosts theory that life
on Earth arose from RNA-DNA mix
Chemists at Scripps Research have made a discovery that supports a surprising new view of how life originated on our planet.
In a study published in the chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie, they demonstrated that a simple compound called diamidophosphate (DAP), which was plausibly present on Earth before life arose, could have chemically knitted together tiny DNA building blocks called deoxynucleosides into strands of primordial DNA.
The finding is the latest in a series of discoveries, over the past several years, pointing to the possibility that DNA and its close chemical cousin RNA arose together as products of similar chemical reactions, and that the first self-replicating molecules—the first life forms on Earth—were mixes of the two.
The discovery may also lead to new practical applications in chemistry and biology, but its main significance is that it addresses the age-old question of how life on Earth first arose. In particular, it paves the way for more extensive studies of how self-replicating DNA-RNA mixes could have evolved and spread on the primordial Earth and ultimately seeded the more mature biology of modern organisms.
“This finding is an important step toward the development of a detailed chemical model of how the first life forms originated on Earth,” says study senior author Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy, PhD, associate professor of chemistry at Scripps Research.
