By Lucas Robinson / San Diego Union-Tribune / June 29, 2025
As a policy researcher, Noah Yee Yick knows more about keeping tabs on the San Diego County budget than the typical resident.
But the sprawling document, hundreds of pages long, can vex even a professional researcher like Yee Yick.
After the county released the budget in May, Yee Yick combed the pages trying to confirm that it still would fund a legal aid program for detained immigrants. But the document can be sparse on those kinds of specific details about county spending, and Yee Yick had to contact Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer’s office to confirm the program still existed.
“That’s been one of our big frustrations,” said Yee Yick, who works for the Center on Policy Initiatives, a think tank that has long pushed for the county budget to become more transparent and better shaped by community input. “Plain and simple, it’s not accessible. It’s not transparent. It’s really difficult to know what the county’s spending money on.”
In recent years, the county has transformed and expanded how it engages the community, moves appreciated by many of the groups most tuned in to policy.
But those same groups remain frustrated by a budget document bursting with figures about complex intergovernmental revenues but short on exactly how money is spent on the ground.
“Imagine you’re a person who’s gone through the trouble of trying to learn about your government,” said Kyra Greene, executive director of the Center on Policy Initiatives. “You finally get to this document and you open it and it’s just the highest-level numbers possible. It’s in no way information that would be accessible to a regular person.”
For years, Greene’s organization has led a coalition of community groups calling on county officials to keep expanding community budget engagement. But their motivations go beyond that. They want to see that actually reflected in how the county spends money.
For these groups, how the county gets the public involved in the budget touches on questions at the heart of the civic process: How does taxpayer money get spent? What are the government’s priorities? How do everyday residents get involved in their local government?
On Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors approved an $8.6 billion budget that cut spending for some county programs and axed vacant positions amid dwindling aid from the state and federal governments. Those funding sources don’t figure to get more generous in coming years, while residents’ demands for services keep growing.
The county maintains that its overhaul of outreach policies in recent years has shown results.
Since 2022, the county launched an online platform, expanded community events and pivoted to collecting input about the budget year-round, said Tammy Glenn, the county’s communications director.
“With community engagement at the center of operations, it’s expected that public input will be gathered to inform programs and services,” Glenn said. “The county has invested in resources, including new engagement tools such as those available on the Engage San Diego County site to make it easier for residents to provide feedback and get involved.”
‘Dark ages’
Less than a decade ago, such efforts were almost nonexistent, community groups say. They struggled to get basic questions answered, and chances for the public to give input were limited to a single board meeting that could last less than a half hour.
This year, however, more than 1,200 people filled out county surveys, an 85% increase over last year, and more than 300 people attended the multiple budget events organized by county administration. That included two in-person open houses, a virtual event and the two formal budget hearings before the Board of Supervisors in early June.
Glenn attributed the growing interest to greater variety in the kinds of events the county organized.
“All activities were promoted for months through county platforms like social media, websites and email subscription lists, including materials in Spanish and other languages, as well as through local print and broadcast media,” she said.
But does all that translate into how decisions get made at the highest level of county government?
That’s hard to answer, said David Lagstein, chief of staff for SEIU Local 221, a major county labor union that represents thousands of county workers.
“It’s a good thing we’re no longer in the dark ages of the old board, where transparency was nonexistent,” Lagstein said. “The budget process has significantly improved, creating meaningful opportunities for the public to share their priorities. And that matters. However, much of the work still happens at the staff level before budget hearings even begin. There’s still more to be done to build participatory structures that truly empower residents to influence the final budget decisions.”
Complicating that is the 700-page budget document itself, which some see as lacking crucial details that would make it easier to understand county spending.
Take behavioral health services, a bedrock part of county services with a $1.3 billion budget, more than 1,300 county staffers and hundreds of millions of state and federal dollars flowing in.
The county budget gives an overview of its behavioral health services and facilities, key metrics and the multimillion-dollar increases and decreases in spending for different programs. But community groups say they still struggle to track county spending because the budget doesn’t give line items for how much is being spent on individual programs or how that’s changed over time.
That kind of information isn’t seen in the city of San Diego’s budget, either. But the city’s budget does contain a far more in-depth breakdown of staffing across each department and spending on things like contracting and employee benefits.
The county’s budget document is structured to be an overview of county operations, Glenn said, and its presentation is aligned with government accounting best practices, which call for “highlighting and discussing significant changes, in the interest of brevity and accessibility.”
Residents, organizations and the media can request more information from county officials if they like. But for Greene, the damage to public trust has already been done.
“The ability to be able to go into a budget and say that thing looks wasteful to me, that money would be better spent over here as a solution to this problem, is something that I think people should have a right to be able to do even when I don’t agree with them,” Greene said.
Successful engagement
Public input does prompt the county to redirect money toward services and programs.
That happened with multiple programs during the recent round of budget talks, from tenant legal support to homelessness prevention services for LGBTQ+ residents.
Due to the sundowning of federal stimulus funds, the county planned to discontinue a $3 million contract with the San Diego LGBT Community Center, which had given housing navigation, security deposit and utility assistance and other housing services to about 1,300 people.
In its initial draft of the budget, the county didn’t plan to put in any of its own money to keep the program going. When the center learned that, it mobilized, circulating petitions and getting supporters out to county budget hearings.
That push proved successful. In the county’s revised budget, $800,000 in unused federal funds was added to the budget to keep the program going another year.
“We really had to ramp up our advocacy efforts,” said Karina Piu, the organization’s policy and advocacy coordinator. “That was a really, really big win.”
For Piu, there’s still a need to do more.
“At the end of the day, those dollars are your tax dollars, and the dollars that the public is paying into these local governments,” Piu said. “They have a right to see how those dollars are being spent, to see how those dollars are reflected values that they want to see in their local government.”
