By Alex J. Chavez / Only In San Diego / Sept. 28, 2026
Todd Gloria has spent most of his adult life in public service. Few people entered the San Diego mayor’s office with more experience, more political relationships or a friendlier City Council.
Nearly six years later, that makes the question increasingly awkward:
What, exactly, has Todd Gloria delivered?
That is not an unfair standard. It is his.
As president of the United States Conference of Mayors, Gloria now travels the country under the banner “Mayors Deliver,” promoting local leadership on housing, affordability and public safety.
It is a catchy slogan. It also begs San Diego to look at the record at home.
Gloria came into office selling competence. He had been a councilmember, interim mayor and state legislator. He knew City Hall. He knew its personalities, processes and dysfunctions. If anyone was supposed to know how to make the machinery work, it was Todd Gloria.
Yet reporting this year found frustration even among former allies over both his policy record and the administration’s ability to execute. His ambitious homeless shelter proposal collapsed. Major Civic Center ambitions stalled. His administration has repeatedly misread or lost Council votes it expected to win.
And somehow, through all of this, the people closest to Gloria remain remarkably secure.
His chief of staff, Paola Avila, is one of the most powerful unelected officials in San Diego. Recent reporting detailed allegations by former Deputy Chief Operating Officer Alia Khouri that she was retaliated against after investigating and disciplining an employee whom Khouri alleged had a relationship with Avila. Avila disputes key allegations, Gloria says the claims were investigated and unsubstantiated, and the City Council’s $269,000 settlement was not an admission of wrongdoing.
Gloria’s response was unequivocal: he continues to have full confidence in Avila.
Loyalty may be the most consistent policy of the Gloria administration.
The broader concern is not whether Avila is personally liked. Chiefs of staff rarely win popularity contests. It is whether the culture surrounding the mayor helps him govern effectively.
Public reporting has described a “with us or against us” mentality inside Gloria’s orbit — one where criticism can strain relationships and where Council staff have described repeated scrambling, poor vote-counting and an inability to recognize when things are not fine until the failure is already public. Gloria rejects that characterization.
But the consequences are visible.
A chief of staff is supposed to protect relationships, manage conflict and make the mayor better. When relationships repeatedly fracture, votes repeatedly fall apart and senior staff repeatedly find themselves managing fallout, toughness starts looking less like effective management and more like isolation.
Gloria appears comfortable delegating those difficult relationships to people he trusts deeply. That can work only if those people build trust themselves.
When they do not, the mayor becomes increasingly insulated from the very people he needs to hear from.
The administration’s personnel history makes that question harder to ignore. Gloria fired Chief Operating Officer Eric Dargan in 2025 and eliminated the position entirely. Dargan later sued alleging racial discrimination and breach of contract; the city denied those allegations. Months later, two deputy chief operating officers — Khouri and Kristina Peralta — left amid another executive reorganization.
The organizational chart keeps changing. The political inner circle does not.
That same dynamic extends to Deputy Chief of Staff Nick Serrano, whose career has largely developed within Gloria’s political orbit.
Institutional memory matters. Trust matters.
But there is a difference between knowing your boss and knowing the city.
And if Serrano eventually asks San Diegans to elect him to office himself, he should not be permitted to present himself as merely an observer of the Gloria years.
He has been part of them.
Political heirs do not inherit only the photo opportunities, relationships and endorsements. They inherit questions about the record they helped build.
Serrano cannot claim proximity to Gloria as evidence of experience while treating the administration’s failures as somebody else’s responsibility.
That is the uncomfortable reality of being a longtime loyalist: eventually, proximity cuts both ways.
And that brings the argument back to Gloria himself.
A mayor cannot blame his chiefs for the weaknesses of his administration.
He chose and he empowered them.
Their advice shaped his decisions. Their relationships became his relationships. The culture surrounding them became his culture.
Now Gloria is asking mayors across America to embrace the idea that “Mayors Deliver.”
So San Diegans should take him at his word.
What has Todd Gloria delivered for San Diego?
Delivery is execution. It is competent management. It is building coalitions before the vote. It is knowing when something is going wrong before everyone else does. And it is trusting people who make you a better leader — not merely people who make your political life more comfortable.
Todd Gloria’s loyalty to his team is obvious.
After nearly six years, the more important question is whether that loyalty has served San Diego.
