By JW August / Special to the OB Rag
The son of a San Diego City Councilmember — who earns $181,545 a year plus benefits — was hired two years ago as a summer intern at City Hall as part of a state-financed program designed to target disadvantaged youth.
Henry Foster IV, the son of Councilmember Henry Foster III, was chosen to work in the same department — Purchasing and Contracting — where his father had served as Equal Opportunity Contracting Program manager a decade ago. The councilmember took office in April of 2024.
Revelations about the summer internship award come as Councilmember Foster is running for reelection to his District 4 seat in what is expected to be a tight race.
While the summer job raises ethical questions of nepotism, the team managing Foster’s campaign points out that the council member’s son never interned in the District 4 office. Instead he worked for a mayoral department.
The internship program, known as Employ and Empower, was launched in 2020 by Mayor Todd Gloria’s office, and it was financed with the help of $18.5 million in state funding from the California Volunteers program. The city’s website for the program states that priority will be given to applicants who “come from communities of concern who are low-income, unemployed, justice-involved, in foster care, currently or previously unhoused, military-affiliated, or have experienced substance abuse or mental health issues.”
The money arrives from Sacramento with no strings attached, and the state, while suggesting a number of priorities for who should be awarded internships, does not rule out applicants who are not disadvantaged. It suggests what the priorities might be for determining who gets in the internship program but leaves it to the city to set their own parameters if it chooses not to follow the state’s suggestions. The city’s goals for the program, though, do tend to duplicate the state’s guidelines.
Nicole Darling, director of the city’s communication department, says she was told by Human Resources that the younger Henry Foster was a student intern in the Purchasing and Contracting Department from June 3, 2024, until Aug 16, 2024. During that time frame, he was paid $5,991.93, according to Transparent California, a public records database.
Emails and calls to Foster’s council office seeking comment were not returned, but his campaign manager, Lydia Ball, pointed out that Henry Foster IV “did not work for Henry Foster III (council member) or intern for the District 4 office.”
The OB Rag was informed that most interns apply for jobs as a policeman or fireman or in public policy areas, but rarely such an obscure agency as purchasing and contracting.
City spokesperson Darling countered that “regarding the Employ and Empower Program, I can tell you that we have interns in nearly every department of the city.”
Carl Luna, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at San Diego Mesa College, reviewed the Employ and Empower program and the selection of Foster’s son for an internship at the request of the OB Rag.
He says the program “serves a good purpose to try to help disadvantaged, younger people to get into a good career path.”
He noted that “my dad worked at General Atomics. He was an engineer there, and one summer I got an internship working in the computer lab, which I never would have gotten had he not worked there.”
But there is a difference, he says, between an internship in the private sector and one working for a government agency.
“One of the price tags of public service, if you want to be a City Councilmember, is you have to forego certain other opportunities.” He adds that there is a “need to recognize that when you’re writing rules like this and doing programs like this,” it’s important to be more transparent about it; otherwise, “it leaves the whole thing with a bit of a taint.”
This is not the first time that questions of ethical behavior by a public servant have been raised in connection with this internship program.
A June 9, 2024 San Diego Union-Tribune article written by reporter Jeff McDonald raised the same issues. In that story, he wrote about how the daughter of Mayor Todd Gloria’s top aide, Paola Avila, received a summer internship position within the mayor’s office. Gloria’s office responded at that time by saying it was not a problem and that there was no violation of city nepotism rules.
While there may have been no violation of nepotism rules, Luna points out that those rules are controlled by the city.
“If you write the rules, it’s very easy to write them in such a way that you don’t break them,” he said.
Twice we contacted a number of agencies to find out if the city of San Diego had ever considered addressing Mcdonald’s questions about perceived nepotism in giving jobs to relatives of highly placed city employees — and if so, how did Foster’s son’s placement in the program happen?
Among the agencies we reached out to were the city’s Ethics Commission, the City Attorney’s office, and the mayor’s office. We received no responses, although City Attorney Heather Ferbert’s office says it does not comment on personnel issues.
Luna, a political science professor for 37 years, has ample experience watching San Diego politics up close, including the political careers of former San Diego mayor’s Roger Hitchcock and Susan Golding. He believes we live in a different time.
“It just seems to be business as usual. It make regular people look at this and think the people in office are there to take advantage of it, which does a disservice to a lot of the people who are in government who are really there to do a public good.”
