By OB Staff
David Garrick, the San Diego Union-Tribune’s City Hall Reporter, will give a Saturday, December 13 presentation on “This Just In: Covering the City Hall Beat.”
The forum, part of a series organized by the San Diego Community Coalition, will take place from 12 noon to 1:00 p.m. at the Logan Heights Library, 567 S. 28 Street. Following Garrick’s brief remarks, the floor will open for questions from the audience.
Garrick has had a front row seat in San Diego politics for more than a decade. When he started covering City Hall in 2014, Kevin Faulconer was the new Mayor, Todd Gloria was City Council President, and Sempra Energy occupied the tower at 101 Ash Street.
Before taking the City Hall beat, Garrick covered North County for 16 years for the U-T, North County Times, and Pomerado Newspapers. He earned his undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley and his master’s in journalism from New York University.
The next Coalition Town Hall forum will feature prominent land use attorney Everett Delano, who will speak on Saturday, January 17, at 10:30 a.m. at the La Jolla/ Riford Library. The series is co-sponsored by Neighbors for a Better San Diego and is free to the public.
The Coalition is a resource for community leaders across San Diego who are working to curb predatory development and push back against City Hall’s culture of disrespect for constituents.
To keep communities informed and engaged, the Coalition publishes “This Week at City Hall,” a regular bulletin of upcoming Council and Planning Commission hearings with dates and times, significant agenda items, and instructions on how to participate via Zoom.
To sign up for the bulletin, email OBRagBlog@gmail.com and put “Coalition Bulletin” in the subject line.
I hope these are preserved/ archived for access for those unable to attend.
Chris, thanks for asking, yes, the Rag is the Coalition’s communications platform, so we will report on all the Town Halls and other events. In case you missed it, the story on our first Town Hall with Councilmember Raul Campillo is at:
https://obrag.org/2025/10/councilmember-campillo-offers-valuable-insights-at-san-diego-community-coalition-meeting/
When it comes to the new trash fees and the no longer cost-efficient trash department that will surely saddle us with even higher burdens going forward, David Garrick had more than a “front row seat” — he was instrumental in helping Measure B proponents paint the false picture that a century-old law guaranteed free trash pickup only for single-family homes. And he and they persisted in this framing during the run-up to the council setting the fees earlier this year.
That picture has never been true. Not in the past, nor recently. As of 2024, about 35%, a full one-third, of households receiving no-fee city service were in non single-family residences — condos, apartments, multiplexes, mixed-use, and even a few thousand small businesses. Over half were renters.
The Environmental Services Department should have made those figures part of the public record. It did not. Still, the data was available to calculate it and report on it to anyone who cared to dig.
Yet, in piece after piece, Garrick framed city trash service as a perk only available to single-family homeowners. Straight out of the campaign blueprint put out by Elo-Rivera, LaCava, and their employee union funders. Meant to create division based on housing type, and renters v. owners.
The 2022 Measure B vote passed by only a few tenths of a percent. I have little doubt that it was this wedge issue based on misinformation that made the difference.
Thanks Jeff for illuminating some of the disappointing half-baked reporting that we sometimes see out of the San Diego UT. While I appreciate the city news beat covered in this paper, I’ve also been disheartened with headlines, as well as contents within articles, that sometimes don’t clearly and adequately reflect the full picture. One case in point was the notion that trash pick-up was free. I truely believed that the continued false narrative resulted in what we are now paying for in our property taxes. In that instance the voters were played; perhaps not always intentionally, but nonetheless played.
Hopefully those who will be attending today’s meeting with David Garrick will present these ‘reporting biases’ to David.
I have a feeling David has his articles reviewed by city hall first so as not to offend and maintain his access to city hall. More bias reporting by our local media outlets.
Even when challenged about his ‘free trash’ statement, he persisted with this political talking point. Sorry, that’s not journalism.
David Garrick will be the guest speaker at this Community Coalition forum — emphasis on “guest.” He has agreed to take questions from the floor, which is rare for journalists; we prefer to do the asking. I’m sure he expects tough questions, even hostile ones. But I cannot imagine anyone would be so snarky and crass as to speak to him belligerently.
David Garrick is a terrible reporter. His stories just parrot the crap the city puts out. I wouldn’t go across the street to hear anything he says.
What I find curious about Garrick’s work is how rarely taxpayers and residents are quoted in stories about city moves that hurt us. It took years for Neighbors for a Better San Diego to be recognized and included in discussions.
When city hall disempowered planning groups in areas developers selected, his coverage of these largely benign groups flatly parroted the city hall line. When Joe LaCava protected the La Jolla group (his neighbors) from challengers that he would have backed in any other area, Garrick didn’t question it.
During the trash bait-and-switch, activists reached out to him and did NOT hear back. He quotes citizens who speak at meetings he watches remotely, but that’s about it. He presents ‘facts’ and ‘statistics’ that do not appear in public records or anywhere else and it appears that nameless city insiders are hand-feeding him while he ignores and discounts the people who are most affected or who try to correct his inaccurate reporting.
Look at his city Middle Manager coverage and you’ll find no numbers for the currently open jobs and MEA positions, which far outnumber the mid mans. If middle managers are a small percent of all city jobs, that should be mentioned and a fair reporter would be working mightily to find someone to respond to the attacks on their behalf.
The MEA is now a prime funder of city hall elections, and yet he doesn’t report on that – instead parroting their party line when they are unmistakably a powerful special interest.
I have to agree. It may have come from the top at the paper through the various UT ownerships but Garrick seems to have a pretty extensive track record of blowing off activists, citizen groups and John Q. Public.
I welcome Garrick’s coming to Jesus moment now; but Marty is right, the guy has a long history of blowing regular San Diegans off.
It’s now Garrick’s own skin on the line and he doesn’t seem to be looking down on us simpletons anymore.
So I’ll take anyone on our team. Even if they are this late to the game. And even if he just came to the actualization that he is one of us frogs in this pot that has been coming to a boil for a long time.