There's A New Cowboy, I Mean - Cowgirl - In Town! New LA Planning Director Gail Goldberg Corrects LA Times Before LA Cowboy Can!

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-planning8jan08,1,6230928.story?coll=la-headlines-pe-california

In his Sunday piece on the Mayor's choice of San Diego Planning Director, Gail Goldberg, as his proposed new LA City Planning Director - usually reliable boy wonder - Steve Hymon has the following to say:

San Diego covers about 73 square miles, compared with 465 in Los Angeles.

And this poor cowboy had (alas!) missed that error - due doubless to his tears of joy at seeing whom the Mayor had selected - when reading the article on-line. But Gail Goldberg promptly cowgirl'ed up and this morning brought the error to Mr. Hymon's very personal attention before a quite amused crowd at the Mayor's press conferrrence in his jam packed press room.

My first thought was that Steve needs to have the prescription of his glasses updated due to his clearly rapidly failing eyesight since the City of San Diego is clearly much, much larger than... 73 square miles. However, when I went online to the City of San Diego's website and after considerable surfing.... I could find nothing. So I then checked on the next highest rated GOOGLE link and got the below official sounding web site:

http://www.sandiego-online.com/metro/cityinfo/

And this is what that website had to say:

The city of San Diego encompasses 72.7 square miles

So that (possibly) explains the error; there appears to exist an alternative universe in which the City of San Diego has another size than it has in the universe the rest of us live in.

And this very official looking website, BTW, turns out to be the home of... San Diego Magazine which - evidently - doesn't know diddly squat about... San Diego. Or at least, about as much as the LA Times all too often knows about... LA.

Lastly, no matter what key words I used - Hymon's Sunday story can NOT be found using the LAT's website search engine - an increasingly frequent problem on the LAT's website.

PS - For those who care - the City of San Diego has 342.4 square miles as of 2002.