Taxpayers spent more than $8,000 for two San Diego Police Department employees to accompany Mayor Todd Gloria to the Philippines earlier this month, newly released records show.
The mayor’s office said the men were part of Gloria’s security detail. A third public employee also was part of the San Diego-Filipino community delegation that made the trip, although that person’s expenses were paid by a local nonprofit school, city officials said.
The same documents indicate that Gloria used a personal credit card to charge $2,218 in airplane travel and wrote a check for $1,561 to a Philippines-based tour company to pay his share of the costs for the eight-day trip.
The airline tickets were booked early last month, according to the heavily redacted statement; the personal check was dated Feb. 1, the day Gloria left San Diego on the unannounced trip.
The mayor’s office released the documents in two phases late last week in response to a records request from The San Diego Union-Tribune, which reported last Tuesday that Gloria returned the prior weekend from the Philippines despite a ban on nonessential city travel.
Mayoral spokesperson Rachel Laing said that even though the visit was official city business, Gloria decided to pay his portion of the travel expenses due to a budget crisis that shows a $258 million deficit for the year beginning July 1.
San Diego also is confronting more than $1 billion in deficits over the following four years, according to city projections. Its annual pension contribution has soared to more than $500 million – another obligation that is adding to the city’s fiscal woes.
Even so, San Diego officials said the mayor’s trip was productive and worthwhile.
“The mayor’s trip to the Philippines delivered on a longstanding promise to San Diego’s Filipino-American population to travel to the Philippines to promote San Diego and strengthen our economic and cultural ties with the country,” Laing said in a statement.
“Despite the trip being official business, Mayor Gloria covered the entirety of his expenses from personal funds because of the city’s budget situation,” she added.
Unlike Gloria’s trip to China last June, the mayor’s office did not publicly announce that the mayor was planning to travel to Manila, and to Cebu Province. Laing only confirmed the trip last week – after being pressed for details by the Union-Tribune.
During the China trip early last summer, Gloria participated in a “farewell ceremony” for two giant pandas making their way to San Diego. That journey was paid for by the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, which leases property from the city and collects a portion of property taxes.
The four-day China trip cost $13,069, according to a state-required disclosure that Gloria filed last month. The expense was reported as a gift to the mayor from the alliance, which operates the San Diego Zoo in Balboa Park and the Safari Park in San Pascual Valley.
Other records show the mayor was accompanied to the Philippines by his foreign affairs adviser – a city employee on loan from the U.S. State Department. The adviser’s expenses were paid by a San Diego nonprofit called The Filipino School, Laing said.
The state attorney general’s office, which regulates tax-exempt organizations in California, lists the school as delinquent, meaning it cannot legally transact business. The Filipino School did not respond to requests for comment about its spending on the adviser’s travel expenses.
While Gloria, who is part Filipino, said he paid his own way to Manila and back, his office acknowledged that two members of the mayor’s security detail joined the delegation.
Travel receipts released by the mayor’s office show the city spent $8,405 for the San Diego police detective and an officer to make the trip. The records show the detective left for the Philippines on Jan. 30 – two days before Gloria – and stayed for a total of nine nights.
It was not immediately clear why the detective traveled ahead of the mayor. Gloria stayed at a five-star hotel in Manila for five nights, then spent the last two nights at a luxury resort on nearby Mactan Island, his office said.
Gloria imposed a series of belt-tightening measures in November, weeks after voters rejected a sales-tax measure that would have raised $400 million a year in new revenue.
The “initial steps,” the mayor said, would include freezing all but the most essential hiring, suspending all nonessential overtime, pausing all nonessential spending on travel and training, reviewing all capital projects and re-evaluating city leases.
“Next year’s budget process will be difficult, but we’ll use this as an opportunity to reimagine how the city operates, with a focus on delivering core services,” the mayor said at the time.
The Philippine travel expenses represent only a small fraction of the city’s $5.8 billion current spending plan.
Carl Luna, a longtime political science professor at Mesa College, said the public expense could prove worthwhile if the trip ends up generating new business or revenue for San Diego and its economy.
But “from a public relations perspective, it’s probably not the best optics, ” he said. “Ultimately though, since he’s a lame duck, there probably won’t be too much of a political cost to pay. It could come (back) to haunt him should he be running for some other office in 2028.”
The mayor posted a summary of his meetings and visits on the city’s news website, InsideSanDiego.org.
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