Daily Business Report: March 19, 2026
Opinion: New Balboa Park parking policy still needlessly divides us
by Antonio Avalos | Times of San Diego
Heading south on Interstate 5, somewhere around the Route 54 intersection, there’s a view where you can see all the way into Tijuana. At night it looks like a sea of lights stretching to the southern horizon. It doesn’t look like two different worlds. It looks like one region.
But if you keep driving, you eventually reach a line that changes who belongs and who has access.
That’s why the updated parking policy in Balboa Park gives me pause.
The True Victim of the Petco Scam Is Youth Sports
by Scott Lewis | Voice of San Diego
One of the ironies of the fraud that Martin Rebollo and Noly Ilarde pleaded guilty to running at Petco Park and Snapdragon Stadium is that technically the victims are the companies that paid them, Delaware North and Aztec Shops, respectively.
Rebollo and Ilarde admitted that they took advantage of a program that allows nonprofits to bring their volunteers to work concession stands in exchange for roughly 10 percent of the money those stands bring in during an event.
Delaware North, the company that runs concessions for the Padres at Petco Park, paid Rebollo and Ilarde’s fake nonprofit Chula Vista Fast Pitch $3,489,231 over seven years until August 2023, when we revealed that Chula Vista Fast Pitch didn’t exist. Aztec Shops, at Snapdragon Stadium, paid Chula Vista Fast Pitch $262,248.47 from October 2022 to August 2023.
She was Dolores Huerta’s strategist, then her friend. Now she calls César Chávez a monster
By Alejandro Macie| Times of San Diego
For 11 years, Patricia Portillo worked as a communications strategist for Dolores Huerta — a role that allowed her to build a close personal bond with the farmworker leader. That relationship took on new weight after Huerta revealed in a New York Times article that she had been sexually abused by César Chávez while both were leading the farmworker movement in the 1960s.
We spoke with Patricia Portillo to hear her reaction, given her long relationship with the 96‑year‑old activist, with whom she last spoke just two weeks ago.
