SAN DIEGO
Just days after a poll showed he could be a strong candidate in the race for the state’s 79th Assembly District, Ammar Campa-Najjar announced Tuesday that he will not seek the seat.
Campa-Najjar has political name recognition after twice running for Congress in recent years, and he had formed an exploratory committee for the 79th race.
He said Tuesday he is backing out because the district should be represented by a woman of color, as it has been for much of the past decade with Assemblywoman Shirley Weber.
“If I did this, I wouldn’t recognize myself,” Campa-Najjar said. “I don’t want to be the person in office who marginalized the Black community.”
As COVID-19 spreads unchecked across the region and state, San Diego County officials are leaving vacant hundreds of hotel rooms they had reserved for sick or at-risk people, even though much of the cost is being subsidized by state and federal relief funds.
The county’s level of participation in one hotel shelter program was so minimal that just 6 percent of the available rooms were occupied last month.
Last week, after a major outbreak recently infected at least 170 people at the San Diego Convention Center’s temporary homeless shelter, the occupancy rate of hotels in the program rose to 26 percent.
New questions over cost of convention center shelter
The city has budgeted more than $40 million since April to convert the Convention Center into a shelter for the homeless amid the Coronavirus outbreak
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SAN DIEGO â When the pandemic hit, hundreds of people living in San Diego s bridge shelters moved into the convention center, where they could spread out.
More than six months later, they re still there. And it s the site of a Coronavirus outbreak.
This month, 115 people living in the convention center tested positive for the the virus, and have moved to county-supplied hotel rooms for isolation.