Daily Business Report: Friday, October 10, 2025
San Diego will feel the government shutdown more than any other city.
By Deborah Brennan | CalMatters
As soon as the federal government shutdown kicked in last week, the San Diego Food Bank jumped into action, planning food drives and ordering extra supplies. Feeding San Diego noticed an immediate surge in food demand as government agencies closed.
With the largest military population in California, and one of the highest costs of living in the country, San Diego County is bracing for missed paychecks and runs on food banks from the shutdown, now in its second week.
Last week armed service members and federal employees were furloughed or notified that they’ll have to work without pay after Senate Democrats and Republicans faced off over health care spending and other issues.
Saving Catalina’s Deer: Why the Conservancy’s New Eradication Plan Must Be Stopped
By Rick Travis| California Globe
In the sun-drenched hills of Santa Catalina Island, a controversial shadow looms once again over the island’s iconic mule deer population. Just months after scrapping a widely condemned helicopter-based culling plan, the Catalina Island Conservancy has unveiled a revised proposal: ground-based sharpshooting to eradicate up to 1,500 non-native mule deer. Proponents argue it’s essential for ecosystem restoration, but this “kinder” approach is anything but. It’s a drastic, inhumane overreach that ignores scientific nuance, local expertise, and the will of the community. As Los Angeles County officials rally against it, it’s time to demand better solutions for Catalina’s wildlife.
Gone are the helicopters that sparked outrage for their cruelty and inefficiency, but the end goal remains the same: total elimination of a species that’s roamed Catalina for over a century. Deer, introduced in the early 1900s, have indeed altered native vegetation through browsing and trampling. Yet, painting them as ecological villains overlooks the island’s complex history of human impacts—from invasive plants to overgrazing by other species long before the deer arrived.
California’s two-tier economy mirrors Great Britain’s ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ past
By Dan Walters | CalMatters
Forty years ago this month, I began a 9,000-mile tour of California, gathering data, conversations and observations about megatrends propelling the state into the next century. The result was a 14-part series in the Sacramento Bee, later published as a book titled “The New California: Facing the 21st Century.”
Its overall theme was that massive changes in the state’s economy — shifting from manufacturing to services and technology, coupled with equally massive cultural and ethnic changes, along with rapid population growth — were reshaping the state’s future.
I quoted two researchers, Leon Bouvier and Philip Martin, who projected California’s future as “the possible emerging of a two-tier economy with Asians and non-Hispanic whites competing for high-status positions while Hispanics and blacks struggle to get the low-paying service jobs.”
