Watchdog group says number of middle managers in San Diego city government exploded by 461% over 15 years
By Jeff McDonald / San Diego Union-Tribune / April 13, 2026
The San Diego city workforce has grown by 2.2% a year over the past decade and a half – more than four times the rate of the general population, according to a new report from the San Diego County Taxpayers Association.
At the same time, capital-improvement needs across the city have reached $7.8 billion and the cost of deferred maintenance is at least $1 billion, researchers said.
But the most alarming finding from the tax-conscious group may be this: The number of middle managers at San Diego City Hall has increased from 70 positions in 2011 to 393 – a 461% increase.
While Mayor Todd Gloria and the City Council grapple with a budget deficit of at least $120 million for the fiscal year that begins July 1, the taxpayers association is sounding the alarm over the fraught state of San Diego finances.
The 21-page analysis lays out case after case in which city officials approved new positions, new programs, salary increases and other spending with too little consideration to maintenance, capital projects and needs.
In all, the report noted, San Diego is confronting budget deficits for each of the next five years between $91.5 million and $139 million in its general fund alone. The total general fund deficit in fiscal years 2027 through 2031 is estimated at $540 million.
San Diego, which employs 12,000-plus people and will spend $6.1 billion this year, also is confronting challenges in its capital-improvement, enterprise and other funds, researchers said.
“The city of San Diego is spending more every year to grow its bureaucracy while its roads, pipes and facilities fall apart underneath it,” said Mark Kersey, the former council member who took over as association president and CEO earlier this year.
“Taxpayers are paying a higher cost per person for city services today than they did 15 years ago, and the data shows they are getting less for it,” Kersey said. “That is not a sustainable model, it is a countdown to failure.”
The study was released last week by the San Diego County Taxpayers Association, which was founded in 1945 as a non-partisan, nonprofit civic watchdog.
It is the first major initiative since Kersey was named the organization’s new leader in February, and came just over a year after the group nearly folded amid a financial collapse in the wake of former executive Haney Hong’s unexpected departure in March 2025. Over the ensuing months, a group of volunteers slashed expenses, trimmed operations and convened a new board of directors.
The analysis came in the same week the San Diego Municipal Employees Association, the union that represents thousands of the city’s white-collar workers, announced a tentative agreement on a new three-year contract that provides a handful of members a special 8% pay bump on top of 9.5% in proposed raises.
“More good news,” the announcement is titled.
It also was published as Gloria and his top aides launched a high-profile bid to explain their hiring decisions ahead of the proposed budget due to be released this week.
“You might be hearing a lot about middle managers as we work on next year’s city budget, so let me break it down,” Gloria said in a social media post Thursday. “These are the people who help keep city services running. They schedule crews, manage contracts and make sure work gets done safely and correctly.”
The mayor said some of the positions were created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but that the job growth has since slowed down.
“We are not stopping there,” Gloria added. “The next budget includes about 48 fewer management jobs. So yes, we are taking a hard look at staffing but we are doing it responsibly, with transparency and with a focus on protecting the services you rely on every day.”
One day before the mayor released his video, Chief Financial Officer Rolando Charvel issued a memorandum to the council saying “much of the growth is not what it appears.” He said the city already is cutting some jobs and the criticism has been overblown.
“Unclassified positions have become a focal point of public commentary and political debate, unfairly characterized as administrative bloat or excessive management layers,” Charvel wrote.
The taxpayers’ study also raises questions about other city financial practices, including escalating overtime, unfunded pension obligations, lapses in infrastructure maintenance and a history of approving overly optimistic revenue assumptions in order to pass balanced budgets.
Overtime increased by 65% between 2019 and 2024 alone, the study said. In 2024, some 211 employees each collected more than $100,000 in overtime. Almost all of those were police and fire personnel, at a time of persistent vacancies in both departments.
“In the short term, overtime may be seen as a way to save money by leaving vacant positions unfilled,” the analysis said. “In truth, the costs associated with overtime likely outweigh any fiscal benefits.”
The San Diego payroll is outpacing overall spending, meaning it accounts for a growing share of general fund expenditures, the study said.
“Demographic projections confirm there is no way for the city to ‘grow its way out of the deficit,’ so the city must make spending cuts,” it said. “Because the city has not yet made obvious reductions in personnel, they may be underfunding other city services to meet funding requirements for personnel.”
The taxpayers’ analysis also challenged city officials to do more to address the growing gaps in maintenance spending and infrastructure development.
“The consequences are persistently increasing costs of maintaining facilities as their needs grow and conditions deteriorate, additionally risking them becoming capital improvement projects and, at worst, continuing to go unfunded,” the report said.
The result of so much short-term financial decision-making by city officials has dramatically boosted the cost of living in San Diego, the study said.
“Residents are absorbing a much higher cost of city services today than they were 15 years ago,” the report said. “In 2011, on average the city received $1,192 per taxpayer, whereas in 2025 the total climbed to $1,538 – a 29% increase.”
Over the same period, the city payroll jumped by nearly 25%, an increase from $859 per resident to $1,070, the study found.
The report concludes with a handful of recommendations aimed at addressing San Diego city finances in a more pragmatic manner.
City officials should shift from adding administrative jobs to hiring the workers needed for facility and infrastructure maintenance, it said. They should also adopt more realistic budget projections and invest more in capital projects to reduce deferred maintenance.
The mayor and the council also would benefit by using more key performance indicators to measure success department by department, and employ that feedback in developing their budgets.
The association “urges the city to act on these recommendations ahead of the Fiscal Year 2027 budget process,” it said. “Absent significant changes to spending priorities, the city will continue to increase the burden on taxpayers without providing commensurate benefits.”
This article has been updated to note that a tentative San Diego Municipal Employees Association contract covers three years and an 8% pay bump is limited.
In 2013 when he was i-Mayor Todd Gloria started using the City Charter Section 117(a)(17) legal loophole to get around the 5-year pensionable pay freeze that started on 07/01/2013.
Todd create the extra Middle Managers by taking them out of the Unions, and exempting them from Classified Service at 2x to 3x the cost for the same work.
Also, according to the Annual Comprehensive Financial Reports Mayor Todd Gloria has gifted the San Diego Police Department (SDPD) an additional +$186 million or +35% in 3 years from 2022 to 2025. Mainly due to overtime. Murders went down and the police budget overtime increased tremendously. Why?
The watchdog group’s next review should be the forever balooning and bloating City Attorney’s Office legal team expenditures to fight lawsuits for il-concieved, sometimes unlawful and unconstitutional legislation that should have been thwarted by reasonably adequate and legitimate legal oversight by the City Attorney’s office in the first place.
Had Mara Elliot and now Heather Ferbert (Elliot x 10) provided sound legal counsel for the City Council and Mayors office we would not be looking at draconian austerity and paid parking everywhere due to irresponsible fiscal negligence. In almost all cases; this amounts to free legal counsel for corporate developers provided by San Diego taxpayers.
Quick google search will tell you that:
$1,192 in 2011 is equivalent in purchasing power to approximately $1,749.88 today
$859 is the equivalent of $1,247.30
So in summary – the city employee’s salary has gone down when adjusted for inflation while they have less money (adjusted for inflation) to work with.
Even if you cut half the middle managers, you’d save maybe $25 million. Didn’t we learn anything from DOGE’s failed attempts at finding waste?
Nope, cut the bloated staff. Todd can lead by example.
The San Diego City Attorney’s Office uses lots of outside legal counsel for the big lawsuits that they lose. The City had to pay a $30 million settlement from the San Diego Police Department shooting of the 16-year old boy who was fleeing violence in downtown.
State laws changed in 2020 and the City is now required to issue Compensation Reports every year. In 4 Years from 2020 to 2024, the City Attorney’s department increased by +94 employee positions or +22.3%. There is no Compensation Report for 2025 yet.
City Council District 2 Candidate Nicole Crosby is part of the Deputy City Attorney’s negotiating team. In 5 years, from 2019 to 2024, Nicole Crosby’s Total Pay and Benefits Increased. +$220,568.61 or +132%. According to Transparent California as of 2024 her Pay and Benefits were $387,977.
In 2022 the year she ran then dropped out of the City Council District 6 race, Nicole Crosby compensation increased +108,420.54 or +52% in one year.
In 5 Years from 2020 to 2025 in Annual Comprehensive Financial Reports (ACFR) the City Attorney Department’s Expenses Increased +$28.4 million = +46%.
With City Attorney Salary and Wages Increasing +$21.2 million = +60%
And
Non-Personnel Expenses like outside legal counsel Increasing $7.2 million = +27%.
Most lawyers would earn more in the private sector vs public sector.
I am in favor of paying fair salaries to civil servants because it increases the quality of people you get and cuts down on the number of grifters and multi-millionaires in politics.
There is no empirical evidence to support your comments Mel. Plus you’re conflating civil servants with elected officials and muddying the waters. Your commentary sounds as if it would come from someone that is most likely on the dole himself.
Civil servants, or middle managers typically are employed by grifting professional campaigning politicians. There are no shortage of multi-millionaires in local, county, state and federal politics and even a few billionaires.
A contrarian argument would be that City Councilmembers pull in $175K. Sincerely doubt that few of them would pull in that kind of salary in the private sector. So one could surmise that they are much more likely to grift, or prostitute policies out to make sure their not taking a financial step backwards after they leave office. But alas, there is no empirical evidence to back that statement up either, to be fair.
Comical you advocate for a bloated city hall paying 200K + pension per person while you complain of inequity from property taxes/ other owners and trash fees. Interesting perspective.
Ok, we’ve heard several reports by Associations and Independent Individuals that say the same thing – the city is spending too much on salaries and not enough on actual services.
At what point do we do something about it? What can be done to stop the bleeding? Do we have to wait for an election and/or bankruptcy?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but didnt the previous CEO resign cause this organization(SDCTA) was overspending their budget? Kinda of an ironic study… and moreso that some people in this community railed against supporting data from “untrustworthy” institutions like SANDAG when one look at their board page shows they are in bed with big realtor companies (with policies they support that are very antithetical to some of the views held on this site). I guess when the study supports whatever narrative you want at the moment you’ll turn a blind eye to who is supplying the data… the double standard lol…
You are right, Javier, that this organization was recently resurrected after some kind of melt down, but beyond that, while they claim to be non-partisan, they are actually a bunch of right-wing fringe lunatics that believe they should have all the benefits of government services without paying taxes, a continuation of the voodoo economics of Ronald Reagan.
They are jumping on this bandwagon now because it has become a hot topic, but they are late to the table. While I read the U-T every day, and watch local news on tv, I first read about the bloated middle management here in the OB Rag. But this doesn’t mean that the data they are presenting is flawed.
Im not disputing the validity of the data at all – Im just pointing out how some of the people on this site pick and choose what data to support depending on who published it. I just find it funny that its crickets when its data they actually agree with and a storm of comments when the data comes from an organization they dont trust. One commenter said: “Trustworthy data comes from trustworthy people. If you can’t trust the one, the other is useless.” I wonder whats their threshold for trustworthy people?
What we always knew to be true
The scam of Get It Done, trash fees, Balboa Park parking, bike lanes etc all cost us via administration costs and adding more mandarins of power.
Absentee council members who collect fat salaries/pensions and either don’t show up to meetings or walk out of them is another example of costly dysfunction.
Converting prime parkland to surplus land looms.
We are a city in decline.
How about this one:
Narragansett Avenue Access Stair Repair
CIP B18026
Preliminary Engineering Start: Q4 2017
Design End: Q2 2025
Construction Start: Q1 2026
Total Project Cost: $2.21M
Construction Contract Value: $598.31K
$1.6M in design fees to do repairs to an existing stair?
City of SD is like an out of network ER when it comes to our tax dollars.
Is this an appropriate time to, once again, invite any ‘middle-manager’ to let me spend a work day with them? I’ll buy lunch!
Instead of Mayor Todd Gloria’s 108-employee Personnel Department training everyone in Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI), in 2024 Todd created a new City Department of Race and Equity with 13-employees.
Of which two are Department Directors making up to $351,125, and five are non-union Program Managers (Middle Managers) making up to $267,946 as of 2024.