By Ron Donoho / San Diego Sun / January 16, 2026
Was San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria hoping to turn the page on public outrage over new parking fees by ignoring the topic during his 2026 State of the City address?
If so, the tactic backfired.
Those fees – in place at Balboa Park and also covering 17 blocks in downtown San Diego – are what many people still wanted to talk about after the mayor’s glaring omission in his annual speech. It was delivered on January 15, and the setting for the second year in a row was the 250-seat City Council Chambers at City Hall.
TV newscasts, online reports and other headlines focused on parking fees. Leaving the topic out of his address didn’t tamp down the ire. It stoked flames of discontent.
After the city faced more than a quarter-of-a-billion-dollar deficit in its last annual budget, one of the hot button fixes by the mayor was implementation of new charges on people who drive cars.
Rookie move by a veteran politician. Southern Californians revere their automobiles. Boosting or creating car-related fees in San Diego would be akin to taxing cheese curds in Wisconsin. Or putting a tariff on peaches in Georgia.
In early January, these woebegone parking fees were rolled out in Balboa Park. Often referred to as a city treasure, or the jewel of San Diego, it had always been free to park nearby and enjoy the museums, cultural offerings and manicured green spaces.
Now, there’s a confusing payment structure in place that charges you depending on which lot you park in, if you bought a pass, and whether or not you’re a resident of the city.
After a shaky rollout, San Diego City Councilmembers Sean Elo-Rivera and Kent Lee called for freezing the fees until better implementation can be put in place. Councilmember Stephen Whitburn announced he wants all fees to be completely repealed.
In a fairly unprecedented move, politicians from surrounding cities are also calling on Gloria to reconsider parking fees. Chula Vista Mayor John McCann, El Cajon Mayor Bill Wells and San Marcos Mayor Rebecca Jones believe Balboa Park is a regional asset and financial barriers to family visits shouldn’t exist.
Scorecard: The city has already collected hundreds of thousands of dollars from Balboa Park meters and parking passes. However, anecdotal reports say parking lots are about 30% emptier than usual.
In downtown San Diego, business owners are aghast over increased parking meter rates. Especially special event parking fees that affect East Village and the Gaslamp Quarter. On the 81 days when the San Diego Padres have home games at Petco Park, prices surge and meter rates quadruple to $10 per hour for six hours (before, during and after Padres games).
Gaslamp proprietors saw empty parking spots on the streets and fewer patrons inside their bars and restaurants after the fees were implemented.
City Councilmember Raul Campillo has proposed his “5/5/5 Plan” be substituted for the current scenario. His idea calls for charging $5 per hour during special events, for five hours, and only in five blocks that surround Petco Park.
Scorecard: The mayor said collected meter fees have already been put back into the city in the form of streetlight replacement. Fifth Avenue business owners said parking fees have left a bad taste in the public’s mouth and Gaslamp business has suffered. Plus, staff that can’t afford to shave $60 off their nightly pay for parking have quit.
Media members filled the back of the the City Council Chambers.
The San Diego State of the City is about more than parking meter fees. Safety, homelessness, affordable housing, street and pothole repair were broached by Gloria. But if you’ve heard one of his addresses you’ve heard all six of them.
Homelessness numbers and police statistics are easy to pick and choose from. Some amount of affordable housing is a future endeavor yet to be seen. Did we really learn anything?
Street repair and pothole maintenance is the baseline job requirement for any city. Crowing about street repair and filling potholes sounds like a commercial trying to sell you a car by boasting it has four wheels and brakes.
Being mayor of a major U.S. city can’t be an easy job. Especially post-Covid and in a time when state and federal dollars are waning. Yet, even before Gloria was re-elected in 2024, his stock had been dropping. Longtime boosters of the local Democratic Party whispered about their dissatisfaction with a lack of forward progress.
The one-time party golden boy had always been considered bright, charismatic and driven, with potential to be a change agent rather than a placeholder elected official.
Gloria had spent eight years as a San Diego City Councilmember (2008 to 2016). He served briefly as the “iMayor” after Bob Filner was ousted from the position. Gloria moved on to state government before returning to San Diego to be elected mayor in 2020.
He’s always been ambitious. Though he denied he would leave the city, it was anticipated that if Kamala Harris won the presidency in 2024, Gloria would’ve been offered a spot in her administration. It’s a moot point now.
Political observers told The Sun Gloria seemed distracted during his first term as mayor. During the primary, he declined to participate in all the mayoral debates. Larry Turner, an independent who was a police officer, garnered 45% of the vote in the general election. Campaign professionals said a first-time candidate shouldn’t have been able to pull that many votes from an incumbent mayor in a predominantly Democratic town.
Looking ahead politically, Gloria may be eyeing a 2028 run for one of the local seats in Congress. If so, San Diegans will have to hope he’ll be able to multitask a run for national office while leading the city out of rolling deficits.
We’ll see. During his State of the City, Gloria’s presentation was less inspiring than in the past. His voice was flat, lacking punch. Scattered applause for some of his points was tepid and sounded perfunctory rather than supportive.
One of five protesters removed during the mayor’s speech.
The mayor’s speech was interrupted five times by protestors. Most of those escorted out of council chambers shouted anti-ICE messages and beseeched Gloria to protect them from U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.
If the protestors had waited, they would have heard Gloria take his most impassioned stance of the day: against future ICE activity in San Diego. He vowed to not cooperate with ICE officers engaged in immigration enforcement.
The mayor also mentioned the name of Renee Nicole Good, the woman shot and killed by an ICE officer last week in Minneapolis. He called Good’s death, “a life lost because of the callous and reckless actions of a federal agent, which outraged all of us.”
City Council President Joe LaCava briefly spoke with The Sun after the State of the City. La Cava wasn’t surprised Gloria didn’t mention parking issues and didn’t think he needed to.
“He did talk about challenges for the city,” La Cava said. “And he did talk about ICE and that was important news.”
In wrapping up his address, Gloria said San Diego was a city “in transformation.” That’s akin to a baseball team manager blaming a bad season on it being a “rebuilding year.”
Sports fans don’t like rebuilding years. Citizens don’t want transformation years. Everybody wants leadership and action. Nobody wants to wait until next year for results. Kicking the can down the road gets old. Even if that road is relatively clean and has a few less potholes than last year.
Fans also don’t like it when you raise ticket prices. And you can be sure residents of Greater San Diego don’t like paying for parking at their city treasure.
Failing to address an issue rarely makes it go away. And in this case, it shined an even brighter spotlight on the topic. SDSun
Food for thought: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2026/01/18/this-emerging-group-of-young-transit-advocates-wants-to-reshape-how-san-diego-gets-around/
If there’s a paywall:
https://archive.ph/
Soon as I read they consider Circulate SD as an ally and the reporter failed to even mention CSD’s developer mission, any food for thought went down the garbage disposal. I mean, yeah, we support mass public transit and have for years, but Circulate is not a transit-friendly organization despite their veneer.
It’s always smug young dudes trying to push everyone to use public transportation. For a while, I had to use it in LA. How fun it was to have to wait at the bus stop or walk to the station before sunrise or after dark, regularly harassed, catcalled, and followed. How convenient to have to change clothes and do makeup at work, because women are expected to “look nice” at work, but drawing attention (heels, makeup, skirts) make the street harassment ten times worse. Stuck in my apartment, I avoided going anywhere at night if I didn’t have to, meanwhile carefree anti-car guys told me how great it was to take transit because they could “safely” get drunk and then stumble/ride home, unbothered save for the occasional panhandler asking them for change. Smug young men don’t have waste their mental energy being hypervigilant all the time….how nice for them. The day I got my humble used little car was the day I once again became free to come and go in peace and the world opened back up. I wouldn’t give my car up for a million dollars no matter how much the anti-car zealots bleat and whine.
Plenty of “smug” young women who support this same cause. Go to any so called “urbanist” meeting and you’ll see as many and in some cases more females than males. So no it’s not always young dudes.
Personally, I don’t fully agree with these guys. I still have my truck and have no immediate plans to give up driving. I don’t consider myself an urbanist but I do support the cause of improved and/or enhanced public transit. While having a car is freedom for many, I’ve reached a point where not having to need one all the time is its own kind of freedom. I love being able to go places and not even have to care about parking. As vehicles are getting to the point of being financially out of reach for more and more people, the demand for public transit is only going to grow. Even Stevie Wonder can see that.
Validating what Lee said. Because I also remember what it was like to be a young woman harassed by men in public. Once, to the point of asking another man nearby to help me. I can still remember the anger I felt when he just smiled at me and laughed. Another topic for sure, but I wonder if the transportation/bike advocates ever take a woman’s safety perspective into account? Seriously asking. Anyone have any insight or knowledge on this?
” but I wonder if the transportation/bike advocates ever take a woman’s safety perspective into account?”
As I said, many of these advocates ARE women. So with that I’d assume they very much do take women’s safety into account. Maybe reach out to Bike SD, SD Bike Coalition and Ride SD. Ride SD is still a work in progress as far as listing their staff. The other two have names and contact info.
Why do you refuse to mention the only REAL Bicycle Club in San Diego? The oldest bicycle club is the San Diego Bicycle Club formed in 1946 whose membership is made up entirely of cyclists and free of any political affiliation and corporate advocacy. You only mention political groups with little to no cycling membership, and one of them is a wholly concocted machination of the politico-corporate real estate monopolists from Circulate San Diego?
I’m having a hard time believing this is a real question Mateo. SDBC (an awesome organization BTW) is completely N/A in this thread. They are an actual bike club whose purpose is to promote and organize cycling as a sport, which is great. The organizations I mentioned serve a completely different function. They exist as advocacy groups for cycling infrastructure and along with that, public transit. That’s why I included Ride SD. They are relevant to this thread in response to lee and Steph. And yes it’s political as this is a political article.
It’s like the difference between the Surfrider Foundation and The Pacific Beach Surf Club. Both surfing related but very different purposes.
SD Bike Coalition is a wholly owned subsidiary of Circulate San Diego the premiere politico-corporate real estate monopolist cabal. Which leaves one group Ride SD and no support, written or otherwise from the San Diego Bicycle Club?
Chris do you do anything but obsess over bike lanes? Lanes that few if any at all, are actually using? While all of our current bike paths are unmaintained and new ones are only designed to facilitate the constantly growing number of homeless encampments that are the direct result of over-development lobbyists Circulate San Diego housing policy mandates for the crooked Mayor and Council to further gouge the public by eliminating parking? Where does SD Ride stand on those issues?
My post on here was about public transit, not bike lanes. You’re the one bringing that up. Bike SD and SD Bike Coalition also advocate for transit.
And what a disingenuous question. You’ve really never seen my posts about non bike related things?
My response:
After reading the referenced article I went to the organization’s web site to see who these people are and who supports them. Nada, zip, zilch. I have an innate distrust of any organization that does not use its web site to provide the names of its leaders and the names of individuals and organizations that support it. Why the secrecy?
The only one defending this is Chris. What does that say?
Mayor Driving Miss Daisy demands a tax-funded chauffer and a Chevy Suburban at his beck and call.
Get the pencils out. What will a 30% drop (and probably growing) in traffic into Balboa Park do to the “rosy” revenue estimates from parking fees? They’ve already dropped from $12m annually to under $4m. Not to mention killing our museums and other park attractions.