Mayor Todd Gloria is running for a second term leading the city of San Diego. Before his election to the city’s top job in 2020, the Democrat served on the City Council and in the state Assembly.
To help inform voters, the San Diego Union-Tribune asked all the candidates a series of the same questions about their priorities, positions and campaigns. Their emailed answers have been lightly edited for clarity.
Why are you running, and what makes you the best candidate?
My parents raised me to believe that if you care about something, you must leave it better than you found it. I love my hometown, and I have spent my career in public service working to make it a better place for all of us to live. My time as a council member, council president, state Assembly member and now as mayor gives me the experience to lead our city and tackle the challenges we face.
What are the top 3 issues facing the city?
Three of the top issues facing San Diego are affordability, homelessness and public safety.
We need to create more economic opportunity and financial security for all San Diegans. Under my leadership, we pushed for higher wages and eliminated barriers to building homes with the aim of driving down prices for middle-class and working people.
There’s more work to do to reduce homelessness, but we are finally moving in the right direction. I have increased shelter capacity by over 70%, expanded substance abuse and mental health services and passed a law banning tent encampments near parks and schools.
Finally, San Diego is one of the safest big cities in America, and we must keep it that way. That’s why we need to support our police and fire departments.
What are the first 3 things you would do in office if re-elected?
I want to finish the work I started during my first term as mayor. If I am reelected, I will continue to renounce extreme policies that divide us and focus on what’s best for San Diego, like building more housing, helping the homeless and keeping crime rates low.
Do you support a 1-cent general city sales tax increase, and/or a half-cent county sales tax increase that would fund transportation? Why or why not?
Yes. San Diegans see with their own eyes what years of not investing enough in our roads, storm channels and public facilities has done. It will take billions to fix potholed streets, 100-year-old dams and iconic structures like the Ocean Beach Pier. Our needs far exceed what the city’s existing revenues can support. With liabilities for taxpayers growing, we can’t afford to kick the can down the crumbling road. A penny for progress on infrastructure will solve this problem and allow us to rebuild our neighborhoods.
What should the city do to combat its housing crisis?
The solution to homelessness and housing affordability is to build more housing. It’s why I strongly support medium- to high-density housing near job centers and along transit corridors.
The two housing action packages I proposed and the City Council approved — combined with other programs like affordable housing density bonus, accessory dwelling unit, Bridge to Home and community plan updates — have achieved a 50 percent increase in the number of homes permitted in San Diego between 2022 and 2023.
This is a good start, but a lot more must be done to make up for decades of failing to produce enough homes in our region. I am committed to continuing to push to do that with a focus on new homes for the working and middle class of our city.
How should public safety and civil liberties be balanced when it comes to homelessness enforcement, behavioral health policy and police surveillance?
We can keep San Diego one of America’s safest big cities while also safeguarding individual rights and privacy. Our police officers follow a progressive enforcement model where education and shelter must be offered multiple times to the homeless before a citation or arrest can be made. My administration has also mandated that use policies shall be adopted before surveillance technology is placed in communities. This allows us to balance the privacy of law-abiding residents with our need to hold criminals accountable and protect our neighborhoods.
Recent flooding has brought new attention to failures of city infrastructure, and how the effects of climate change can disproportionately impact poorer neighborhoods and communities of color. How should the city combat this?
Climate change is real, and we are seeing its impacts right now in San Diego. That’s why I authored the city’s landmark Climate Action Plan to set ambitious targets to prevent and mitigate the harmful effects of our changing climate. Additionally, I revised our infrastructure priorities to take into account the systemic disparities that have disadvantaged many of our older neighborhoods and created a Climate Equity Fund to pay for capital projects needed in those communities.
San Diego faces a big budget crunch, along with a nearly $5 billion infrastructure funding shortfall. Where would you propose cutting, where should more revenue be sought, and what else should the city do?
Municipalities all over the country are facing big deficits, and San Diego is no exception. The city’s projected deficit is a result of the rising costs experienced by all San Diegans combined with lower-than-expected revenues.
I have asked all departments to reduce expenses by 2 percent to help close our budget gap. This action combined with rejecting new spending outside of the priority areas listed above should balance the budget until our revenues rebound. Our infrastructure shortfall is a result of decades of underfunding, a problem that can only be solved by additional revenue.
