By Madeline Nguyen / Times of San Diego / June 23, 2025
San Diego City councilmembers slammed Mayor Todd Gloria Monday afternoon for improperly spending millions in city dollars, even as he vetoed funding for homeless services and other aid organizations to tighten the city’s budget.
Councilmembers Kent Lee, Sean Elo-Rivera, Henry Foster III and Joe LaCava unloaded on Gloria for cutting funding to key community services and urged the council to overturn all of his vetoes during that afternoon’s vote.
It’s the latest development in the city council and the mayor’s tug of war over San Diego’s budget for the upcoming year as the city works to solve a $258 million deficit.
“(Gloria) labeled community investment, like cultural events and nonprofit support as a ‘discretionary slush fund‘ for the council,” Councilmember Foster said. “The council has not paid for employees that were not identified in the budget.”
“That has been the practice of this administration, the practice of this mayor and it’s time for that to end.”
Throughout his administration, Gloria added $155 million to the city budget for contracted employees without the required pre-approval of the council, according to a city audit.
Foster blasted Gloria’s years of unauthorized spending and lack of cooperation for striking down the “balanced and equitable” budget that the city council delivered to his desk earlier this month.
The nearly $5 million vetoed by the mayor would cut funding for some of the city’s most underserved communities, including aid organizations, homeless outreach, the arts and the city’s Office of Race and Equity, which Gloria created in 2020.
“The council has been extremely unified with the approach that we want to take: We want to step up for our communities,” Elo-Rivera said. “The mayor’s position has been to retreat.”
Over the last few months, the city council and mayor have wrestled over how to fill the massive hole in the upcoming city budget.
While Gloria has favored unpopular budget cuts that would’ve closed libraries and recreation centers on certain days, the city council has fought against the sweeping cuts by creating new initiatives to generate money for the city, like a new trash fee.
The city council squeezed out a major win when it successfully restored funding for libraries, pools, recreation centers and other community services that were on the line earlier this month.
But Gloria’s vetoes cut funding for many other needs that the council has fought for throughout the budgeting process, including for stormwater infrastructure and wildfire prevention.
While the city council expects its new initiatives will generate millions to pay for these needs, San Diego Independent Budget Analyst Charles Modica has warned that those hopes may be optimistic at best. Gloria agrees.
“As mayor, I cannot in good conscience allow a budget built on shaky assumptions to move forward — not when we’re facing national economic uncertainty, global instability and real threats to the federal and state funding we rely on,” Gloria said when announcing the vetoes.
Gloria warned that layoffs may wrack the city, and libraries and recreation centers may close completely if the city doesn’t have enough money in the middle of the fiscal year.
Ahead of the council’s vote, council President LaCava urged the mayor to work with the city council to pass a budget they could all agree on. At this afternoon’s vote, two more councilmembers must join the four who are against the vetoes to strike down all of the mayor’s cuts.
“The vetoes were guised as measures of responsibility,” Elo-Rivera said.
“There’s nothing responsible about pulling a lifeline out from the nonprofit organizations that serve this community and help keep foster kids housed, hungry people fed and seniors connected to vital resources.”
It would be nice to learn more about the ‘ $155 million to the city budget for contracted employees’. Are some of them responsible for the ridiculous ideas like ‘street calming’, jutting curbs, unwanted bike lanes, dangerous traffic circles, and simple projects that take three times longer to finish at a budget twice as estimated? Are many sitting at desks collecting $250,000 annually twiddling thumbs until they come up with the aforementioned ideas? Gee, maybe $3M from unsightly electronic billboards can pay for 12 of those positions.
Let’s cut some of the clowns at the planning department. People nobody elected getting paid to come up with expensive ideas that nobody asked for and nobody needs.
The Council shares as much blame for the budget deficit as the Mayor. For starters, Council staffing increased from 109 position in 2022 to 161 in 2026. It has signed off on bad real estate deals, a spike in senior management positions, and approved every dollar the mayor has spent.
Maybe we have a top down problem that begins with us. No, “we” are not on the top by any imagined scaffolding, but we decide who is. We vote. So the state of the State and the state of City is ultimately on “us”. In order to process this topic, maybe even have meaningful discussions, what is required? It is simply complicated as Jimmy Buffett once trilled. How we define ourself, ‘who’ we are, religiously, politically, morally, is the cement that fills the cracks of our beliefs. Beliefs in our own personal opinion of ourself, are real, correct, true, (so we think), and we spend our life defending and promoting those beliefs. What if there was no cement in the cracks? What if we used a more fluid composition? Would our description of the world expand? Would we be able to ‘hear’ voices outside of our belief system? I know this waxes philosophical, but what if we could sink a drone into our consciousness to observe our patterns, actions, and beliefs? Maybe the glue that holds everything together is too rigid, and that inner drone would expose our own description of the world. Maybe we would expand our ability to think and talk and act outside of our beliefs, hey maybe we would let go of our beliefs long enough to listen to “them”. Musings from the inner side.
Ego-Rivera’s email response from his budget pushback.
“The future we’re building is one where no family fears the loss of their local library, where parks and rec centers are never on the chopping block, and where those who’ve gained the most in our city finally contribute their fair share. It’s a future where visitors no longer use San Diego as a free playground — while residents shoulder the cost. It’s a future of abundance — not austerity.”
Remember that, as your trash costs grow, taking your kids or grandkids to the zoo will result in parking fees and higher entrance fees as he advocates for $25 an hour for hospitality workers (but not city workers) and then says the added business costs are not his problem to figure out.
https://voiceofsandiego.org/2025/06/24/businesses-threaten-referendum-as-minimum-wage-for-hotels-amusement-parks-and-event-venues-moves-forward/