Don’t see much of this in the alt-weekly world.

This past Wednesday, the San Diego city council officially named February 13th “Dave Maass Day,” in honor of the departing San Diego CityBeat journo, who just took a new gig with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco .

Maass tells us three council members read the proclamation out loud at his going away party. “So funny,” he says. “It’s not every day that a city names a day after me. Of course, if they did, that would make it Dave Maass Year….which I guess will have to be my goal for San Francisco.”

Considering how miserable he made life for San Diego politicians of all stripes during his three-plus years at the paper, the council is undoubtedly happy to see him go.

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San Diego CityBeat hit a milestone this week, with the publication of its 500th issue. But while the paper is reading better than ever, it’s struggling mightily on the financial end.

Writes editor Dave Rolland:

As we inch toward another milestone—our big 10th anniversary in August—CityBeat is at a crossroads. We have to get our spending closer in line with our income. Not long ago, print ads were all that newsweeklies needed to thrive. It’s just not the case anymore. While it’s still the lifeblood, papers like ours across the country are forced to find new ways to pay for their news coverage…

We’re considering a wide range of options—from the traditional (selling T-shirts and other merch) to the wildly unconventional (selling “bricks” of space in our paper to individual readers, sort of like selling actual bricks of a new building to donors). The alternative to coming up with innovative fundraising ideas is to hack away at our content. San Diego needs more high-quality journalism, not less. For heaven’s sake, the daily newspaper is owned by a local developer whose stated No. 1 priority is getting a football stadium built on the waterfront…

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San Diego Republicans are livid over a recent tweet by San Diego CityBeat’s political columnist John Lamb–calling the remark above, against San Diego Republican apparatchik Tony Kravic, a Twitter “death wish.”

The conservative blog San Diego Rostra was the first to pick up on the tweet:

While [Lamb] will no doubt say that he was joking, and may at some point feign an apology, this provides an illuminating insight as to the mindset of San Diego CityBeat.

CityBeat is nothing short of a Democratic and labor union press release machine intent on pushing a liberal agenda and slamming conservatives. The effort to remain objective has long ago been abandoned and goes well beyond simply leaning left. Lamb’s latest public comment with a death wish to the chair of the Republican Party is just a string of attacks and biased reporting that Republican candidates and officials have had to endure.

CityBeat editor Dave Rolland told SD Rostra, “[D]on’t confuse alt-weekly writers with politicians. We don’t apologize every time panties are twisted.”

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