Straight Talk on City of San Diego from Jack McGrory, Part I

OB Rag Staff Report

Jack McGrory has seen a lot happen in San Diego over the past 50 years, and he knows a lot about how the city has evolved. In his 24 years at City Hall, where he rose from a trainee in 1973 to City Manager between 1991 and 1997, McGrory had a singular role in helping shape our city government.

At a June 20 dialogue hosted by the San Diego Community Coalition and Neighbors for a Better San Diego, McGrory answered questions about City Hall’s perilous state with astonishing candor.

In this Part I of a report on the forum, McGrory discusses how a lack of professionalism at City Hall has led to financial instability and public distrust.

On city government “best practices”:

We always measured ourselves against other large cities. All the city managers would meet every six months, and we’d exchange ideas about best practices. San Diego went to automated trash pickup because I saw Phoenix doing it, and they showed me their numbers. Before we had automated pickup, we had two or three people on every truck handling 11 tons of trash a day. The costs of back injuries and workers’ comp were insane.

At another one of these conferences, someone described a new technology for fixing potholes that used trucks with computers and hot tar dispensers. The truck would drive over the pothole, and the computer would drop the hot tar and tamp it down. I bought eight pothole trucks, and we were fixing potholes in 24 hours.

Then one day, I saw a city employee fixing a pothole by shoveling in hot tar. I asked, “Where are the pothole trucks?” He said, “One of the drivers got carpal tunnel syndrome, so the union lobbied the Council, and they got rid of the trucks.”

Joe La Cava recently reported in a newsletter that the City has gotten responses to pothole repair requests down to eight days [more than seven times longer than during McGrory’s tenure]. And the Mayor recently announced at a press conference that the City has gotten streetlight repairs down to a 2-year backlog.

On city compensation practices:

When I was manager, our compensation practices compared to other cities in the county were number one, especially on police and fire. Now I think we’re near the bottom. That creates a situation where people don’t want to stay. The City Hall staff increases have taken up a lot of San Diego’s very limited revenue. They have prioritized staff and special programs over taking care of employees in terms of compensation. There are 300 vacant positions in the Police Department, which is crazy.

On municipal tax practices:

After Prop 13 passed, a lot of California cities adopted a utility tax on water, sewer, cable, cell phone bills, all of it. Outside of San Diego, you’ll see a surcharge of 5 to 10 percent on the bottom of those bills. L.A. is now up to 12 percent. We have zero. Our business taxes aren’t even worth collecting. Businesses are getting away scot-free in this town. They aren’t paying anywhere near their fair share.

On trash fees:

San Diego has been the only city in the state that doesn’t collect trash fees. I took that measure to the Council 24 times, and I was 0 for 24. So I was happy when they did that. But they screwed it up badly. When I was city manager, I would make different departments compete against the private sector. And our trash crews won two of those competitions. But we don’t do that now. They built into the trash fees that collection has to be provided by city employees, so there’s no incentive to be competitive.

On service cuts and fee increases:

I think Todd has been trying to piss us all off so we would be induced to vote for a tax increase. Why close the restrooms at the beaches? And the savings are peanuts. The budget cuts this year are 6.1 percent of the General Fund. For a private sector CEO – and I’ve been one for 30 years – you can do that in your sleep. And there was no political calculus that went into it. Why would you charge for parking at Balboa Park, raise $7 million in a $2.2 billion budget, make everybody in this city angry, and cause a 35-percent reduction in attendance at museums? There was no cost-benefit analysis.

On infrastructure:

The communities that grew in the ‘80s and early ‘90s were north of I-8, and we made the developers pay for everything. So north of 8, you’ve got landscaped streets, great libraries, great parks. South of 8 didn’t have that funding mechanism because there wasn’t that much growth south of 8. So we created 13 redevelopment areas, and every neighborhood south of 8 had one. Then Jerry Brown decided in 2012 that redevelopment had gone far enough, cities were abusing it, and he got rid of it, which got rid of the funding for poorer communities. On top of that, we had a Council policy that one-third of sales tax money went to infrastructure. But the City got rid of that and moved the money into the General Fund.

In Part II of “Straight Talk from Jack McGrory,” to be published on Monday, June 29, the former city manager explains how concentrating political power in the executive branch has tipped San Diego into chaos.