Daily Business Report: Wednesday, September 10, 2025
Blowing Up the Water Authority Isn’t Off the Table at LAFCO
By MacKenzie Elmer | Voice of San Diego
Dismantling San Diego’s biggest water broker could be what local boundary referees recommend later this year in the face of ever-rising water rates.
That’s just one of a menu of options that San Diego’s Local Agency Formation Commission, known as LAFCO, will analyze in what’s known as a municipal service review of the San Diego County Water Authority. Reviews like this can inspire further action by the commission, endowed with legislative powers to break up or consolidate cities and government services.
“The commission has to weigh in … on agency’s level of accountability to its constituents present and future,” said Keene Simonds, executive officer of San Diego’s LAFCO. “And, as a part of that, does LAFCO believe restructuring, whether in the form of governance or boundaries, is appropriate?”
California leaders negotiate major policy changes in secret as legislative session ends
By Yue Stella Yu | CalMatters
California’s top Democrats entered the final stretch of the legislative session with an ambitious list of priorities: Pass some of the state’s most consequential climate and energy reforms, hash out a $750 million transit loan, and dampen the impact of federal funding slashes.
But with days left, details are murky on nearly all of it.
Welcome to one of the most secretive yet commonplace practices in Sacramento, where each year, Gov. Gavin Newsom, Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas and Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire and their staff meet in private to reach last-minute agreements on major policy changes and funding allocations before the clock runs out.
Border Report: County Could Extend Legal Services to Unaccompanied Kids
By Kate Morrissey | Voice of San Diego
County Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer will be asking the board on Tuesday to expand who qualifies for a program that provides immigration legal defense to people in San Diego to include unaccompanied children.
The program currently offers free attorneys to people in immigration custody at Otay Mesa Detention Center or people in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Alternatives to Detention program, which includes people with ankle monitors and other tracking devices. Lawson-Remer hopes the board will approve adding unaccompanied migrant children, detained or not detained, to that list.
“The notion to me that anybody could think it was acceptable in any way for a kid to be by themselves and try to represent themselves in court in a complicated federal deportation immigration proceeding, that seems really callous and immoral,” Lawson-Remer told me.
