Todd Gloria is Making a 101 Ash Out of You and Me

King Gloria. Photo by Tom Mullaney

By Mat Wahlstrom

You may have heard that today, Monday June 27, the City Council is being called into a special meeting to formally approve a ‘settlement’ agreement possibly illegally negotiated in closed session just a week ago.

The original deal being ‘settled’ is the disposition of the 19-story building at 101 Ash St. Approved in 2016, it called for taxpayers to lease to own a building for $128 million that insiders knew was really only valued for $67 million — and that was before anyone outside their circle realized it’s a toxic vertical landfill.

There’s currently a lawsuit, likely to prevail, claiming this deal was illegal and so not only is it void, but all the millions paid to date in rent would have to be refunded. Not only isn’t this lawsuit costing the city a penny but, even if it were to fail, there are other lawsuits and remedies.

Yet rather than let that legal drama play out, Mayor Todd Gloria’s ‘settlement’ puts taxpayers on the hook for $84 million to buy this towering fiasco outright and inexplicably shield the sellers from any liability for wrongdoing.

Why would he snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? Many speculate that it’s to keep him from being deposed and having to testify about his involvement in the approval of the original bad deal in 2016 — or answer for his possible role in coverups about it since.

In fact this agreement is such complete crap that even a lawyer of usually dubious competence as City Attorney Mara Elliott is against it — and submitted a withering analysis of why it should be rejected.

In doing so, she joined in a rare display of division among our normally lockstep Establishment, in which only five of the nine councilmembers have signalled they’ll go along.

Or has she? And will they? Let’s start with Elliott.

Right now, her position is that she will sign off on this only “as to form,” that is, that she’ll approve only that it says what it says, not that she agrees with it.

But per the City Charter, if she is truly against this deal for the real and compelling reasons she states in her analysis, then her duty of care as *the* fiduciary for the City of San Diego requires her to withhold her signature and nix the fix.

It bears remembering that Elliott has defended her originally approving this agreement in 2016 as simply going along with what was already decided by others. Only days removed from serving as second in command in the same Office of the City Attorney that she was just elected to head, she has repeatedly begged off any responsibility for supposedly not knowing what she signed.

But now she can’t say the same. She knows where all the bodies are buried (hopefully metaphorically speaking), and may have some of the dirty shovels in her closet that she wouldn’t want found. If she were to go along with yet another bad deal but make a big show of her reluctance, somehow none of the dirt will end up on her.

Standing by Gloria’s side supporting him when this was announced was Councilmember Chris Cate and Council President Sean Elo-Rivera.

We can imagine Cate going along because, hey, he’s the only one still on the council that originally voted to approve this dirty deal. And he’s only got a few months before terming out and landing a cushy job in the private sector — possibly even with one of the big names involved in this scandal?

And we can believe Elo-Rivera going along because he’s got ambitions to follow in Gloria’s footsteps to political office, which would explain his yes-person performance on everything he proposes.

(As an aside: We can suspect Jen Campbell going along because of the deal she apparently cut to get Gloria’s dark money buddies to save her in the primary, virtually guaranteeing her re-election. But if there’s one thing we know about her, it’s that she’s relentlessly self-interested; and this deal is so rotten the stink could stick. Plus going back on her word once elected is really on brand, so who knows?)

Supposedly the incentive for everyone for making this ‘deal’ is that it is key to other possibly illegal negotiations with SANDAG and the state, whereby this and the surrounding properties get rolled into an even more complicated and dubious arrangement in which everyone gets a pony.

All of which is to say that absolutely no one in favor of this agreement has learned a damn thing from the City Auditor’s absolutely devastating report of the city’s refusal to correct how it keeps ending up in real estate doo-doo.

The title of this article is a riff on the old saying, “when you ASSUME, you make an ASS out of U and ME.”

But if Gloria gets the City Council and City Attorney to agree to spend almost $113 million total for a deal based on flop sweat assumptions that SANDAG and the state will play along with his Rube Goldberg real estate swap, then you and me are asses if we ever vote for anyone who approves it.