By Lisa Mortensen
On Tuesday, April 15th, San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria will present his budget report to the city council. It will be interesting to learn if he is going to address the needed staffing cuts with a shredder or electric buffer at the podium. It’s obvious Todd needs to perform major surgery on the bloated city staffing but we realize he isn’t capable of plugging in the needed power tools.
We all know Todd is very adept at political speak but we must read between the lines and connect the dots that HE will provide a detailed explanation on how HE plans on turning our city’s problems around without doing the blame-the-citizens game.
The city must face the fact, it has a huge credibility problem, instead of dismissing or ignoring this. It’s time city hall face the facts that it does a great job at mismanagement and has no concept of self-control when it comes to compensating those inside city hall (or it’s outside vendor contracts as well).
It is time the city hears our demand for transparency and fiscal responsibility. Does Todd have the leadership and strength to make the hard choice of scaling back on this staffing obesity? Let’s hope so at this break-glass moment, when the city’s very heartbeat is at stake.
The draft budget includes $157 million in new revenues, which include updating parking meter rates and parking citation penalties; modernization of various user fees and the retail cannabis tax; and trash fees and an increased hotel room tax.
It also proposes $175.9 million in reductions across all city departments. That includes a $30.5 million reduction in personnel costs, a $46.4 million reduction in other costs, a $35 million reduction in contracts with external companies, and a savings of $64 million by delaying contributions to city reserves.
The personnel cuts propose eliminating 393 positions, 160 of which are currently filled. The vast majority of employees in those filled positions are eligible to be transferred to other positions within the organization, the office said in a release.
https://timesofsandiego.com/politics/2025/04/15/more-money-for-police-fewer-library-hours-mayors-office-releases-preliminary-budget-for-fiscal-year-2026/
46.4m in “other” costs, 64m delayed contributions. $157m in new revenues and $176m in reductions for a $259m deficit? Fuzzy math.
In case anyone was wondering, the Dow fell 700 points today.