Two Cathedrals

Post via the Center on Policy Initiatives, who held a press conference earlier today discussing the foreclosure crisis in San Diego.

Poll shows overwhelming support for proposed ordinance

San Diego voters – across the city and across the political spectrum – favor fining banks to cover cleanup costs for foreclosed properties that are not maintained.

In a poll conducted last month, 70% of voters who expect to vote in November said they support $1,000-a-day fines for banks that let foreclosed homes become rundown. The opinion research firm Grove Insight surveyed 600 voters in the city by telephone, and found only 14% opposed the idea.

“San Diegans are fed up with the blight in their neighborhoods, the hazards to their children and the damage to their property values,” said Clare Crawford, executive director of the Center on Policy Initiatives, which commissioned the poll. “And as taxpayers they’re footing the bill for police and fire calls, inspections, maintenance and other services the city must provide bank-owned homes.”

The Property Value Protection Ordinance, proposed by CPI and the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), would require banks to register foreclosed properties and pay fines of $1,000 a day when they don’t maintain a home after complaints are received. The money would recover city costs.

The poll found more than 60% support the idea in every geographic region of the city, with 78% support among Democrats and 66% among Republicans and Independents. Overall, 70% of voters support the proposal, including 42% who “strongly” support it. Only 14% were opposed and 16% undecided.

“Foreclosure blight continues to be a serious problem in neighborhoods across our city,” said Councilmember David Alvarez, who is introducing the ordinance. “It’s time San Diego takes action, as many other cities have done, to recover the costs created by foreclosures and force banks to clean up their mess.”

Chula Vista and more than 70 other cities throughout California already have adopted similar ordinances.

ACCE member Rafael Bautista sent letters today to all candidates for San Diego Mayor and Council, asking them to take a stand on the issue publicly before the June 5 election.

CPI and ACCE issued a report last year that estimated foreclosures since 2008 have caused a combined home value loss of $19 billion for homeowners in the City of San Diego and cost taxpayers between $134 million and $855 million.

At today’s Land Use and Housing hearing, San Diego Councilmember Lorie Zapf, who chairs the Land Use and Housing Committee, announced that she has scheduled the first hearing of the proposed ordinance for July 11th, at 2pm. The public is invited to attend this hearing to ensure that the ordinance continues to move forward. Please contact Norma Rodriguez, nrodriguez@onlinecpi.org, 619-584-5744 ext. 62 for any further questions.

Over at Rostra today, Tony Manolatos levels a pretty serious accusation at District Attorney and mayoral hopeful Bonnie Dumanis:

Nathan Fletcher would benefit the most from a Dumanis exit but I don’t see it happening. Way back when there were no official candidates neither her nor Fletcher had any luck getting the other to bow out. I heard Dumanis offered Fletcher a deal back then: Serve as her chief of staff and she would step down after one term and support him for mayor.

First and foremost, if this is true it would likely be illegal under Section 599 of the U.S. Code on Elections and Political Activities:

Whoever, being a candidate, directly or indirectly promises or pledges the appointment, or the use of his influence or support for the appointment of any person to any public or private position or employment, for the purpose of procuring support in his candidacy shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both; and if the violation was willful, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.

That’s pretty straightforward if it went down in the manner Manolatos describes. Certainly he describes a scenario that flagrantly violates the purpose of the law even if there’s a technicality involved. It’s not as though it’s news that a high volume of the politics in San Diego goes on behind closed doors, and that horse trading of this general sort is where most of the bloodsport happens so that the GOP can present a relatively united public face.

Sometimes it bubbles over, as with Carl DeMaio unapologetically announcing his plans to reward donors from office or trying to force a council candidate out of their race. Or in this case with Manolatos accusing the District Attorney of a significant crime without appearing to bat an eye. It may be business as usual, and folks just forget sometimes that it isn’t for public consumption.

Or, exactly the opposite. Now that the party has closed ranks around extreme conservative Carl DeMaio, Manolatos got the job of tossing out some of the dirty laundry on the other candidates to help plow the road. Perhaps the SDGOP has enough confidence in the impotence of San Diego’s watchdog infrastructure that they feel confident they can get away with throwing a few crimes out into the public without fear of the whole operation getting rolled up to Tony Krvaric’s door. Certainly the press has its chance here to live up or down to expectations.

Because this is a serious and public accusation that’s been leveled at the District Attorney, one that challenges not only the legitimacy of her campaign, but her capacity to appropriately continue as District Attorney. It isn’t exactly an illogical notion if one sticks to the realpolitik of the situation, so if it isn’t true, we’d better get a good explanation soon from some combination of Dumanis and Fletcher and I’d forgive Team Dumanis if they double-checked the legal standard for libel.

If it is true, then it merits a thorough investigation — not just of Dumanis, but of anyone including Fletcher who failed to report the crime. And it would merit further reflection on just what passes for standard operating procedure these days in San Diego, and just who is dictating what passes for ‘appropriate’ behavior.

by Lucas O’Connor

Don Bauder has a takedown this week of the continuing efforts to spend billions on redevelopment after the death of redevelopment. Developers still want those projects, and politicians are doing backflips to deliver the money any way they can.

Redevelopment as a concept remains sound — cities have a vested interest in creating an incentive for the market to venture into affordable housing and other areas that don’t otherwise maximize profit. But there’s wide, understandable consensus that the system had rotted into a good old boys network where politicians and developers rewarded each other, using CCDC as a pass-through. It distracted from the goal and the mission of redevelopment, and was ultimately its undoing.

But Bauder leaves out the most obvious example of business-as-usual downtown. With the end of redevelopment programs, developers are facing the prospect of facing city oversight, permitting, and fees. That is, the public would have oversight and set the standards for their projects. In response, developers have collaborated with the not-quite-ghost of CCDC to opt out of public oversight and instead hire its own oversight staff.

Instead of paying the city’s fees or being subject to the city’s oversight, developers came up with a plan to fund an oversight department at CCDC. It costs much less than city fees, and provides them with the ability to self-regulate since they’re paying to hire their regulators through a quasi-public entity.

Not only does it privatize the process, it’s apparently the Mayor’s model for how business should be conducted throughout the entire city. The Mayor thinks that a public service, which exists specifically to mitigate the extremes of the private market, should be privatized. It should cease to do the specific thing it was created to do.

Predictably, coverage (where it exists) has painted this as new fees for developers instead of the opportunity for yet another power grab. The developer hand out isn’t new — it’s another in a long line of government handouts to private enterprise. Most recently, Mayor Sanders and Carl DeMaio orchestrated privatizing control of the Convention Center, ensuring that it first goes to profit private hotels and serves the public last. Same principle, same give away, and anyone who isn’t a well-connected downtown developer loses out thanks to the big money power play.

The whole reason that redevelopment got tagged in the first place is that it’d been transformed into a public tool serving private interests first. Actions of the Mayor, CCDC and developers have proven that’s exactly the only reason they’re interested. Rhetoric about affordable housing or the public good is just a smokescreen; the process was just a way to funnel public resources to private companies, and now that push has come to shove, that’s the part that everyone is lining up to save here.

Who knows, at this rate maybe by the time the next mayor is decided there won’t be any city left to run. And we’ll have spent all the time, money, and effort for nothing while the city disappeared from under our noses.

by Lucas O’Connor

As expected, the City Council earlier this week gave away control of the Convention Center to the private consortium ConVis, “approving a contract that is basically blank” as Councilman Alvarez put it. In the course of a meeting, councilmembers openly negotiated a contract with representatives of ConVis to outsource control of a public asset without any competitive bidding or even any data that would suggest the move would save or make money (for the city at least). We know it’ll be great for the private profits of hotels though, and it’ll come at the expense of the Convention Center. In fact, we have a great deal of data to demonstrate exactly that.

ConVis already had this specific responsibility until 2004. It was taken away because they got “boozy schmoozy” chasing potential clients for hotels and didn’t get around to actually booking the Convention Center. That’s specifically why the Convention Center Corporation was given the job:

Because the corporation, wholly owned by the city, derives 90 percent of its funding from events at the convention center, the move focuses responsibility for raising revenue and, as important, accounting for it.

ConVis’ lack of accountability and wasteful spending of tax dollars played no small part in City Manager Lamont Ewell’s recommendation to make this shift.

So we know exactly what they do with this power, because there’s still no accountability. Nowhere in the private sector, or even in the realm of still-functioning government, would you find a contractor being hired without terms, without multiple bids, or after having the job, failing catastrophically, and being successfully replaced.

But for the most part, the council didn’t care about any of this. As Liam Dillon pointed out, “No council members save David Alvarez, who voted against the deal, questioned the underlying motivations.”

That should be stunning all on its own, because that either means their support was negotiated in advance or that they’re incredibly negligent. But there’s also the remarkable two faces of ConVis president Joe Terzi. Here’s Terzi less than a year ago:

For his part, ConVis CEO Joe Terzi told me two weeks ago that nothing of the sort was being planned.

He said then that the Convention Center should keep its sales and marketing functions.

“They’re doing a good job and we believe it should stay where it’s at,” Terzi told me.

And here was Terzi this week at council:

But frankly if you look at the booking patterns and what the center has been able to achieve, the booking patterns have been stagnating over the last number of years.

In both cases, Terzi is talking about performance over the same period of time. So either he was lying then or he’s lying now, but no matter which it is maybe somebody on the council should have asked? But it didn’t really matter what Terzi or anyone else said; the council was already set to throw taxpayers under the bus.

Why? The Mayor, hoteliers, and downtown developer interests drew their line in the sand on the Convention Center expansion here, and the council had to decide whether to give away the convention center or face retribution. It’s why, in the months leading up to this vote, so few councilmembers were ever willing to say that control of the Convention Center was actually a dealbreaker issue for them. It was just important to put up a nominal fight in the interest of plausible deniability when constituents come asking.

And to accomplish this, they used the most basic tactic of rationalization and dodging responsibility. Even though the fix is in, implement it in small enough bites that no one is singularly definitive but all are inevitable. The vote yesterday was a rubber stamp on hotel owners controlling the Convention Center. It gives them not only the power, but nearly the responsibility to hollow out Convention Center booking for their own profit. Heck, they didn’t even hide it from the council.

By the time the terms are negotiated and the IBA has a chance to examine the impact, it will be a couple years before ConVis has done enough booking for performance metrics to kick in. By then, hotels will be taxing the public without a public vote and the city will be on the hook for an unlimited liability in the Convention Center Expansion. And wouldn’t you know? Because of the expansion it’s going to take another decade to really know whether ConVis is doing a good or bad job because the expansion totally changes the performance metrics.

And at that point? Well gosh, ConVis is the only organization that’s ever dealt with the shiny, new, expanded Convention Center. They’re the ones with the institutional knowledge, and the hotels and ancillary private businesses have so tightly woven their business models into the ConVis booking model for the Convention Center… It’s too big to fail.

By then, all the folks who delivered us will be long gone from here, so they don’t care. And in the meantime, they’ve feathered their beds in hotelier pockets with tax dollars, so they’ll stay comfortable.

by Lucas O’Connor

As mentioned yesterday, it’s going to be a busy couple of days at the City Council for gigantic corporate power grabs, and it won’t just be whether we will require the mayor to distribute hundreds of millions of taxdollars to campaign contributors. Also on Tuesday, the council will be considering whether to give away control of Convention Center booking to a consortium of hoteliers and private tourist and business interests.

Right now, the Convention Center Corporation handles booking at the Convention Center. It’s accountable to the city’s elected government and the public, and its purpose is specifically to maximize the financial wellbeing of the Convention Center. Since the Convention Center is a public asset, it means the CCC’s job is to protect the economic interests of all San Diegans. This proposal would end all that by outsourcing control of the booking to the Convention & Visitors Bureau, a private group with no public accountability that exists to maximize private profits. In fact, it’s their job to specifically profit off the public if and whenever possible.

So the plan to hand booking over to ConVis means that hotels would be able to directly divert business out of the Convention Center and into their own meetings spaces. In practice, that means anything that doesn’t demand use of one of the largest halls at the Convention Center. It means that basic labor practices that have been established and protected with public input and accountability wouldn’t apply to the outsourced events, and that the public wouldn’t see the money generated by those events. It would hollow out the business that the Convention Center Corporation has spent the last decade building up, undermining not just revenue but its long-term fiscal health in order to pad the bank accounts of rich hoteliers.

And wouldn’t you know it, the private push to seize control of a public asset and cut off all accountability was dropped in at the 11th hour via the second supplemental to the Tuesday docket. By design, it prevents legitimate public review, input or opposition. By further AMAZING coincidence, the ballots go out on Monday for hotel owners to vote on imposing the tax, letting the mayor deliver on promises to his cronies at the very moment they’re receiving their ballots. Unclear which councilmembers have also bought into this absurdly choreographed rip-off, but we should find out soon enough.

Of course, that sort of contempt for the public is par for the course in this whole saga. The deal has been on legally, ethically, and economically shaky ground from the beginning. It’s a tax that proponents at City Hall still continue to dishonestly represent, likely being put in place through an illegal process. It creates multiple layers of conflict-of-interest and its desperation to plunder the city for rich downtown profiteers is painfully transparent. And oh by the way, the economic projections sponsored by proponents have been roundly discredited by independent analysis. In other words, proponents are deceiving the public whenever possible, and trying to sneak past the public entirely when deception isn’t an option.

To recap: Hoteliers spend zero dollars to fund a major convention center expansion, de facto operation of the Convention Center, its hiring and labor practices, and even its booking. They would be able to divert a core chunk of the Convention Center’s business to their own coffers at the public’s expense, and leave the public with no recourse. The public would pay the hotels $300 million in taxes directly, an unknown and uncapped number diverted from the city’s general fund, and lose control of a huge public asset. To accomplish the giveaway, proponents are trying to ram approval through at the last minute before anyone can notice or react.

This is straight up robber baron stuff that should conjure images of the worst moments of kleptocratic governance. We know that several councilmembers see giving away the city to corporate interests is a feature not a bug. And we know others talk the right talk up until the point that their campaign checks are threatened. We’ll see which are able to keep the interest of the city ahead of their personal ambition on Tuesday, and which are in the ever-deepening pockets of their donors.

Look: If city councilmembers vote to give away the Convention Center and charge the public for their trouble, they might get nice mention in a plaque on the Mayor’s shiny legacy project. Trouble is, will anyone else in San Diego be able to afford to see it?

by Lucas O’Connor

The City Council has a few crazy items lined up for the beginning of next week, all of which merit attention. But we have to start somewhere, so how about the recommendation on Tuesday to give the mayor unilateral control over all Capital Improvement Projects (aka all city contracting), essentially using taxpayer money to create a multi-billion dollar slush fund for the mayor to reward friends and campaign contributors. The city council would give up all oversight of contracting, and the public would lose any chance at accountability.

The proposal would apply to all projects up to $30 million, running the entire approval process through the mayor’s office. The IBA report on the proposed plan shows this policy would have meant that out of 256 projects approved in the last three years, every single one would have been at the mayor’s discretion. CIP currently has $7.2 billion worth of projects, over which the city council would have no control going forward. Checks and balances that ensure efficiency and representation for taxpayers or workers at the table would be gone, and there would be no way to influence whatever the mayor chose to do.

It isn’t just terrible policy though, and here’s where the politics comes in. The mayor will be given unilateral control — no council accountability whatsoever — to distribute hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to whoever. We have a mayoral candidate right now in Carl DeMaio who says that, if elected, he owes the people who backed his campaign. And wouldn’t you know, developers and city contractors have been lining up to dump money into his campaign account. That is, they are giving money to Carl DeMaio, who would then be empowered to turn around and hand them sacks full of taxpayer dollars. Someone might want to compare that process with the definition of a bribe, but that’s for another day.

It’s a huge ethical conflict that’s dramatized by DeMaio openly declaring that he *will* be corrupt if given the opportunity, but the same issue applies to anyone in the mayor’s office. It’s a taxpayer-stocked slush fund for the mayor that carries no accountability. We’ve already seen a mayor that knowingly violates contracts and state law, but when the city council responds by issuing a slush fund? All bets are off.

The potential for the council to approve such a thing is the most stunning. Foremost, approving this change doesn’t just invite corruption, it demands corruption. The mayor must distribute contracts to major campaign supporters. The council would be insisting on a perpetual conflict of interest in which those doing business with the city buy influence through elections. And institutionalizing that corruption by choice.

Which also again raises the #leadershipy question. Will the council sell off yet another basic responsibility? And if so, why even keep up the pretense if they’re only in office to proactively create corruption and otherwise avoid taking responsibility for any aspect of governing San Diego? We could probably outsource corruption for pennies on the dollar.

Watching the council vote on Tuesday, it will be a stark line being drawn to identify who wants a more corrupt city government and who does not. Who thinks corporate interests should be able to more easily buy control of the city and who does not. Who wants to deny accountability to the public and who does not. Who wants to sell their responsibilities as public servants to the private sector and who does not.

There’s no additional nuance, it’s actually that simple.

by Lucas O’Connor

An odd story in the UT last week announcing the plan for WalMart to open up in the Farmers Market building in Sherman Heights. Odd, because it didn’t include a single negative comment from anyone in San Diego. A Walmart spokesperson was liberally quoted. Mayor Sanders gushed about the project. A local business owner offered tepid support. But despite years of organizing around Walmart issues in San Diego, not a single negative comment from any San Diegan.

It isn’t as though there are a dearth of people to call. Elected officials, community leaders from a number of neighborhoods, and labor leaders have all spent a lot of very public time and effort on WalMart issues over the years, and they all have phones.

It seemed a glaring omission, so I asked why there wasn’t space for a single San Diegan to voice any concern or opposition to the plan. I was told that the story was an exclusive, and therefore quotes could not be gathered. But there are a couple problems with this.

One, clearly quotes from the local business owner and Mayor Sanders are in the story, they came from somewhere. Either they were gathered by the UT for the story, which means that not including an opposing position has nothing to do with the ‘exclusive’ explanation, or they were part of the press package provided by Walmart, which would mean the quotes are essentially part of a press release but not presented that way.

When I asked specifically about using an anonymous Reuters quote from a labor official in Los Angeles instead of any number of local leaders, I was told he had been briefed on the project and so it applies. But those other quotes came from somewhere.

And there’s a second problem: There’s nothing exclusive about this story. Information about the plan has been public for quite some time and the community has been holding meetings for a couple weeks. Which means that this was simply Walmart issuing an elaborate comment on an ongoing story. The closest it comes to being exclusive is if Walmart only offered their spin to one outlet.

Wouldn’t it be weird if WalMart packaged a fake ‘exclusive’ specifically to get a full article without a single meaningful word of counter-argument from a San Diegan? If they were relying on media credulity to avoid a single critical question or challenge to their spin?

Maybe the most stunning part of this is that there are so many potential ingredients.

by Lucas O’Connor

In a ruling late Friday and breaking wide today, the state’s Public Employment Relations Board has decided in favor of a challenge by San Diego’s Municipal Employees Association to the validity of of June’s Comprehensive Pension Reform ballot measure.

PERB found that Mayor Sanders improperly attempted to circumvent meet-and-confer requirements in helping to craft and promote the CPR initiative, and will challenge the measure’s validity in court.

It’s the latest in a long line of legal problems for San Diego’s elected leadership that’s gone beyond coincidental and can only be considered the proactive systemic choice. As the pattern morphs into business-as-usual, it’s past time to call it what it is: vigilante governance.

There was no need for the mayor and the city attorney to endorse this measure as ‘private citizens.’ But they did anyways, and PERB has determined it’s illegal. In December, Jan Goldsmith dramatically sprinted to a council meeting to assure everyone that there was no problem with the private citizen/public servant distinction.

While PERB’s ruling is to do with the mayor, it clearly finds that the private citizen/public service firewall is not what it was cracked up to be. That would mean that not only does Goldsmith’s conflict of interest exist, but his statements benefited the measure in question.

The new Convention Center deal would impose a tax without a public vote — a tax that voters twice tackled and twice defeated. The Mayor and city council signed a Memorandum of Understanding to support the Jacobs Plan for Balboa Park that was later found illegal. Mayor Sanders was told outright and in advance that it was illegal to give a taxpayer handout to Qualcomm for its Snapdragon promotion, but he did it anyways. There are now four separate CERF lawsuits all centering on the city’s insistence on special exemptions to ignore state law, and no end in sight, which has prompted breathless pearl-clutching declaring the absolute necessity of abandoning the law for the sake of expedience. At the regional level, SANDAG was told repeatedly before passing its RTP that it failed to meet the legal requirements of state law and did it anyways, compelling the Attorney General to intervene in the matter.

And baked in to each one, indignation that anyone would care much less try to insist that the law be followed. Outrage that a standard of following the law would even exist in the first place. Vigilante governance.

So it isn’t really a surprise that Carl DeMaio’s immediate reaction today to the PERB decision was to condemn the administrators who are tasked with enforcing the law. It amounts to little more than trying to blame the HR manager for labor laws, but demonizing the law and its custodians has become so commonplace in San Diego politics that even the notion of having to justify the legality of one’s actions is considered outrageous. So much so that even an independent organization like PERB, which exists to administer the collective bargaining agreements that are negotiated by others, becomes a biased enemy in DeMaio’s world as soon as it doesn’t support his own designs, and accuracy takes a backseat to vitriol.

Of course, this is a reflection of the far-right ascendancy from DC on down. With a legislative branch that’s become ineffectual, an executive branch running amok, there’s good reason that beneficiaries of vigilante governance would block dozens of judicial nominations, why folks like Darrell Issa want to close the courts to workers entirely and totally eliminate the NLRB, why so much feigned outrage is ginned up over “activist” judges: In court, sometimes vigilante governance actually gets blocked. And that’s a real drag for those in power.

Meanwhile, who benefits from it all? Corporations. Millionaires and billionaires. Hoteliers. Developers. At the expense of the law and the people who are supposed to be protected by the law.

Over and over, we’re told that the only way that the city can be run is by disregarding the law. And when that doesn’t work, the law is ignored anyways. Heck, Nathan Fletcher is even running for mayor telling people he won’t let process get in the way of making decisions. But is it reasonable to take such pronouncements seriously?

To have a full cast of leaders who consider vigilante governance not only appropriate but desirable means at least one of these things: Our system of government is completely broken and cannot function within the legal framework, these leaders are unable to execute their jobs within the boundaries of the law, or they have simply chosen to disregard the law because it doesn’t allow them to do what they want.

There are plenty of systemic challenges in the current governmental system, but across the state most elected officials seem to have found ways to execute the basics of their jobs within the law. The options left on the table aren’t very inspiring.

by Lucas O’Connor

Guest post by Jared Quient

I am all for pension reform. Clearly our city’s budget needs work and we need to do something. But just because I believe the system is broken and it needs fixing doesn’t mean I support the Comprehensive Pension Reform (CPR) ballot measure that Carl DeMaio and his allies has been trying to sell me for the past year. Because once you look closer at CPR, it reveals itself to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

CPR is being sold to San Diego voters as the answer to our city’s fiscal problems, and the centerpiece of CPR is a provision that transitions all new employees from a defined benefit pension to a 401k individual retirement plan. Proponents claim that passing CPR and making the switch over to 401k plans for new employees will save the city billions of dollars. But that’s a fair bit of creative license.

All indications are that CPR is very popular. And when you first hear about the signature piece of the measure, it sounds reasonable. City employees should receive similar benefits to what people get in the private sector, proponents will argue. Sounds fair, right? But what proponents don’t tell you is that changing over to a 401k actually costs the city a significant amount money.

As Liam Dillon pointed out last June, by passing CPR, San Diegans are voting to spend $94 million over the next five years to implement the 401k program.

94 million dollars that could keep firefighters on duty and police officers on patrol.

94 million dollars that could help keep libraries open for longer hours across the city.

94 million dollars that could go to fix streets and help maintain our city’s crumbling infrastructure.

Mr. DeMaio knows that the less the public knows about the measure, the more likely it is to pass. And by suggesting that the 401k is integral to pension reform, DeMaio and his allies are being disingenuous. In reality, the 401k provision will actually make it harder for the city to pay its pension costs in the short term.

Further, very little of the billions of dollars in projected savings comes from the 401k provision: 87% the savings in CPR comes from the freezing of pensionable pay, a separate provision in the measure that has legitimately earned consensus support.

Not only does the switchover cost the city significantly in the short term, its long-term savings numbers aren’t even guaranteed. Plus, it presents a major challenge for the city in how it deals with Social Security for its employees.

So what can we do about the gap between myth and potentially devastating reality that will head to the voters in four months?

We can fight CPR tooth and nail and try to beat it in June on its merits. But we’re already behind.

Or we can present voters an alternative to CPR. It’s not too late. Councilmember Alvarez floated such an alternative last week, a competing ballot measure that takes the core reforms of CPR but leaves out the reckless 401k provision. He officially released it yesterday.

I think we can do both, and we need to do both. CPR is a bridge too far and as a result, it’s bad policy. And San Diegans should stand up and say so. But we should also provide voters with our own version of what a fix should look like – a reasonable alternative to the radical changes DeMaio is pushing.

Some big news for sleepy little San Diego this week, as both Sierra Club of California and Attorney General Kamala Harris joined a local lawsuit challenging SANDAG’s 2050 regional plan.

For her part, the Attorney General had previously weighed in on the plan, cautioning that it failed to meet the state’s standards for emissions reductions and warning of trouble on the horizon if action wasn’t taken. And yet, no action was taken. Despite being explicitly warned that its plan would have significant legal problems, SANDAG’s leadership just went ahead and did it anyways. And now SANDAG Chairman Jerome Stocks is very sad that the state’s Attorney General would spend tax dollars to ensure the law is followed.

Not so much chagrined, but frustrated and disappointed. There is rather less of the same sentiment from Stocks that after all the time and money invested in coming up with the plan, it couldn’t manage to address legal problems that were flagged in advance. Instead, his lament is that anyone would bother to care whether the plan is legal. Stocks, of course, has publicly railed against the enforcement of basic environmental protections on principle before, so perhaps his reaction to the law applying is understandable.

It’s a disturbing trend throughout the region — elected leaders who are indignant about steamrolling the law to get whatever they want, and telling anyone who cares to stop wasting time. But laws aren’t optional. Neither individual people nor government agencies get to pick and choose what laws apply based on what’s convenient. And applying a standard of ‘would you personally prefer the law not apply to you’ would empty our prisons pretty quick.

Is this the best our current leaders can do? It isn’t even the bare minimum anymore. We’ve somehow even managed to descend past that to ‘barely legal if we’re lucky’ and a debate over whether the law should even apply when it’s inconvenient.

The idea that we have to pick between the law and getting things done is just not true — it’s a canard of the lazy and those who can’t accomplish their goals legally. If a judge asked “Why did you rob that bank?” and the robber replied “Because working takes too long,” we wouldn’t all turn around and say “Exactly! Legalize bank robbery!” For leaders like Stocks to push such a premise should be embarrassing.

But this is the same mentality we’ve seen with Snapdragon. With Balboa Park. With the city permitting process. With the proposed Convention Center expansion deal. What’s a hundred grand between friends? Public review isn’t fast enough. Making sure we don’t poison each other takes too long. Taxpayers are too careful with their money to sufficiently subsidize developers.

This sort of whiny excuse-making ought to be laughable, but somehow it passes as an acceptable standard of leadership. If it’s inconvenient for those who think we have to choose between the law and getting things done? Good.

by Lucas O’Connor