San Diego City Council Approval of Ash Street Deal Just Tip of Iceberg of Kowtowing to Developers

Gloria Did Make an Ash of Us All

By Mat Wahlstrom

In a city where corruption is standard operating procedure, the agreement approved Tuesday by the City Council on 101 Ash Street stood out as the most blatant screwing of taxpayers in living memory.

While in comparison the Chargers ticket guarantee and the pension fiasco were done in relative secret with the consequences only apparent later, our electeds proceeded in broad daylight under howls of protest to put their own interests above those of their constituents with immediate results.

Every week, new revelations indicate that, in 2016, former mayor Kevin Faulconer and former councilmember Todd Gloria conspired to overpay their property owner donors tens of millions for 101 Ash. And now that he’s mayor, Gloria is throwing more good money after bad to cover his ass.

As a reward for their part in the scandal, Cisterra Development gets paid $132 million — with money taken from parks and public projects — for property they couldn’t give away; and gets the City of San Diego to be its personal attorney on civil lawsuits for free. (Prepare yourselves now for sticker shock on that lawyer bill, as the claims by the workers remodeling 101 Ash exposed to asbestos continue to wind their way through the courts.)

In return, Cisterra promises to keep their mouth shut about how complicit Gloria was in the original deal — so long as they’re not under oath in a criminal trial.

That last part is key, because there is an ongoing criminal investigation, and this is all a desperate hope against hope that will fizzle so no one will ever know for sure just how dirty this deed was.

That this is all so obvious makes the council approving this by a 6-3 supermajority almost inexplicable. Until you realize that Southwest Strategies, Cisterra’s lobbyist, raised thousands of dollars in campaign contributions for each of them — as well as for the mayor and the city attorney.

Which makes the momentary willingness of even three councilmembers and the city attorney to buck their donors appear well-nigh heroic.

But sad to say, this is just the latest and most obvious low reached so far in our race to the bottom. And those who are courageous today are cowards the next.

On issues of land use across the board, our electeds continue to kowtow to their developer donors, agreeing to sweetheart deals and approving schemes that enrich them at the expense of residents.

They approve schemes like Complete Communities, which takes zones and codes to handle density fit to existing infrastructure and the built environment and throws those limits out the window — along with the fees needed to offset the burdens incurred.

They redefine ‘affordable housing’ and ‘naturally affordable’ to be devoid of meaning, increasing housing precarity and homelessness.

They set deliberately unattainable housing goals to pander any production as positive, and propose eliminating historic resources and protections against pollution to feed the growth machine rather than steward our future.

They pass a Climate Action Plan that actually increases greenhouse gases, both during the construction cycle to the emissions from concrete after, by endorsing unsustainable development.

They plan to absolve themselves of what little fiscal responsibility they’re held to by only bothering to approve contracts over $3 million — freeing up more taxpayer money for them to bankroll their favored lobby shops without oversight.

And this Monday, August 1, they’re set to accept Build Better SD, which will take all the fees developers have paid in the past and what little they will in the future and turn them into the mayor’s personal slush fund.

In short, although how who votes might shift now and then, there’s not a single initiative our electeds are moving forward that doesn’t renege on their duty to serve and protect our interests, but rather promotes their careers at our expense.

And the concern is that there will be nothing left to salvage should we ever find a way to undo the legalization of looting.

As Jesse ‘Big Daddy’ Unruh, the infamous Speaker of the California Assembly during the 1960s, told someone new to office who complained about his accepting lobbyists’ largesse: “If you can’t eat their food, drink their booze, $@#% their women and then vote against them, you’ve got no business being up here!”

If today’s politicians had his integrity, we’d all be better off.