San Diego Mayors on Parade----part two

COUNCILMEMBER GLORIA BOUNDS TO THE RESCUE (2013--2014) 

According to the City Charter, the presiding officer of the city council has limited authority to act as mayor in the event of an unplanned vacancy in the mayor’s seat.  

With a wink and a nod from City Attorney Jan Goldsmith, Councilmember Todd Gloria put his feet up on the mayor’s desk and immediately got to work reorganizing city government in his own image.   

He hired an efficiency maven from Indiana, touted as an expert in privatizing city government (supplementing our in-house expert in  privatization matters--former councilmember Carl DeMaio).  Far exceeding his limited authority, Interim Mayor Gloria hired, fired, rearranged, undid, proclaimed, reversed, and erased all traces of ex-Mayor Filner's popular reforms and political direction, saddling the next “strong mayor” administration with his own hand-picked officials, appointees, directors, restructured lines of authority, policies, decisions, and hidden alliances.

(The city has resorted to temporary mayors in the past: Bill Cleator held the honor for 4 months... Ed Struiksma for 6 months... Mike Zucchet for 3 days (a whole other story)... Toni Atkins for 5 months.  None had abused the position as Todd Gloria did for 6 months.)  

🐘 Our parade of mayors resumes with Kevin Faulconer (2014-2020) 

Kevin Faulconer passed himself off as a moderate Republican.  As Mayor, he was one of the most airbrushed, remote-controlled officials our city has yet produced.

⇢ He was already on record--alongside Mayor Sanders, Carl DeMaio, the SD Taxpayers Association, and the Republican Lincoln Club--as a promoter of the shrink government ploy on the 2012 ballot to wipe out reliable retirements for incoming city employees (excluding police).

 

⇢ A few years later, Mayor Faulconer was on the speaker's list at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) conference held in San Diego (reminder: ALEC is a Koch brothers/tobacco industry-funded/ conservative conglomerate of legislators and corporate lobbyists who create and promote model bills and resolutions that advance "free-enterprise" objectives like minimizing corporate regulation, reducing taxation, loosening environmental regulations, tightening voter ID rules, weakening labor unions, and promoting gun rights).  

 

⇢ Despite his sun-kissed smile and ingratiating persona (what a contrast to Bob Filner!), Mayor Faulconer managed to back away from nearly every municipal challenge that crossed his path and substitute wishes for action.

• as the city’s homelessness count worsened and complaints from downtown businesses and residents grew, he responded with a list of empty wishes--but no action 
• he wished that unhoused people would be dispersed from downtown.  Jagged rocks were installed beneath sheltering overpasses to discourage and disgorge them
• he wished for the deadly hepatitis A epidemic to magically disappear.  His unconscionable incompetence as a manager contributed to 20 deaths and over 400 hospitalizations as disease swept through downtown streets 
• he wished for voters to endorse an increase in hotel taxes (TOT) to finance his #1 priority --the expansion of the downtown Convention Center.  As a cynical campaign sales pitch, some funds for homeless services were tacked on to the proposal
• he wished for an overall plan for temporary housing and emergency shelter.  His newly-hired “senior advisor for housing solutions” resigned after a few months on the job... no explanation... no replacement... no plan forthcoming

But wait!  Though Mayor Faulconer’s inactions were bad enough, it got worse whenever he did take action: 

• in his early days in office, Mayor Faulconer created a charity called One San Diego to finance events and various furnishings inside the Mayor’s office.  He distributed some turkeys on Thanksgiving for impoverished residents in a few city neighborhoods 
• contributions to his charity (slush fund?) were solicited by Mayor Faulconer from individual and corporate donors, many of whom had business before the city.  The ins-and-outs of these “behested” payments to his charity-- reaching $1.6 million by the end of Faulconer’s term in office—teetered on the edge of corruption.  One San Diego was dissolved shortly after Mayor Faulconer left office
• Mayor Faulconer, as the city's chief executive officer, accepted an offer to purchase the former Sempra headquarters office building at 101 Ash Street  
• the deal was handled by Cisterra Development (a generous donor to Mayor Faulconer’s One San Diego charity) and involved an elaborately choreographed handoff 
• first, Cisterra arranged to purchase the abandoned building from owners Sandor Shapery and Doug Manchester
• then, in a creative arabesque, Cisterra sold the property to the city, erasing evidence that Mayor Faulconer and ex-council president Todd Gloria were engaged in doing business with Papa Doug Manchester (another generous benefactor of the Mayor's)
• Mayor Faulconer was the ultimate decision maker in the 101 Ash St. affair.  His brainless action--enabled by then-Councilmember Todd Gloria-- to purchase the building AS-IS, without first obtaining a building appraisal and assessment of its condition, planted a ticking time bomb in the bowels of City Hall.  The entire transaction was an unmitigated catastrophe for San Diegans

 But wait again…there were more real estate fiascos:

• Mayor Faulconer engineered the purchase of a Kearny Mesa operations yard used for maintaining the city’s fire trucks.  The costs of needed improvements to the property rose from an initial estimate of $6.5 million to an actual $14.8 million 
• Mayor Faulconer squandered millions of dollars above appraised values to acquire motel property for use as transitional housing for former drug offenders.  Here again, he skipped performing basic assessments of building conditions.  Improvement costs came in at $2 million more than the original estimate
• The Mayor engineered and fast-tracked a $7 million purchase--once more without a prior city appraisal--of a defunct indoor skydiving building for use as a one-stop homeless “navigation” center.  Mayor Faulconer ignored dissenting voices.  The voice he did heed was that of influential political financier and hustling dealmaker David Malcolm--whose personal finances were intertwined with the city’s purchase of the skydiving lead balloon 
• Mayor Faulconer paid out untold millions on a contract to outfit the city with “smart street lights.” Plagued by mismanagement, cost overruns, maintenance problems, and deceptive practices, the project had to be rescinded and completely overhauled
• Mayor Faulconer’s last ditch efforts at legacy projects still clog the city’s agenda: the Midway Sports Arena… loose construction deals with San Diego State University at Qualcomm Stadium… non-standard city parks…defective and deceptive zoning overhauls entitled Complete Communities  

🦄 Bringing up the rear in our parade of mayors is our current chief executive Todd Gloria (2020-??). 

Existing evidence reveals that Mayor Gloria is as ruinously incompetent at running and managing city government as was his immediate predecessor.  He is proving to be as devious... irresponsible... reckless... dishonest... over his head...and yes, corrupt as those who paraded behind him.   

This may sound peculiar, but--in a city like ours where truth is stranger than fiction--have you noticed that Mayor Gloria is really  a doppelgänger--a 21^st century reincarnation of former Mayor Susan Golding?  

He is (as she was) laser-focused on his personal political future.  He has (as she had) abused his contract with the San Diego public by prioritizing his personal welfare over and above the welfare of 1.4 million San Diegans.  And coming full circle, Todd Gloria’s unbridled political ambitions (coupled with defective judgement) are digging the city’s financial hole (first dynamited by Mayor Golding) wider and deeper than ever before, accelerating the city’s descent into financial crisis.  

To illustrate, let’s take an independent tour around our present-day mayor:

→ As of today, the city is over $5 billion in the red.  This is the gap between the city's projected infrastructure needs over the next five years and the funding available to pay for them.  Right now, the city is unable to pay for normal municipal services like paving the streets, upkeep of city parks, repairing streetlights, adequately staffing city departments, or creating alternatives for people who camp out on our sidewalks and alleys…unable to pay for crucial repairs to roads, flood prevention, bridges, upgrading our sewage system and storm drains…unable to provide new infrastructure needed to keep up with persistent demands to increase housing densities and construction….

→ Consider this: it was Todd Gloria as then-president of the city council, who promoted the most disastrous real estate deal in our city’s history: the acquisition of the derelict office building known as 101 Ash Street.   It’s still a puzzle--did he do it out of ignorance? stupidity? carelessness? or simply as a favor to some cronies?

⇢ And once he became Mayor, Todd Gloria compounded the fraud.  Amid lawsuits and general chaos over what to do with an unusable, abandoned, valueless, high-rent, 19-story office building across the street from City Hall, Mayor Gloria foisted a sleazy (possibly illegal) “settlement agreement” on San Diego taxpayers.  It’s called borrowing from Peter to pay Paul...at public expense.

• here’s how Mayor Gloria’s "settlement" deal works: the city buys--with cash--the offending property for $132 million.  
• the cash comes from raiding public funds that have already been earmarked for street paving, flood control, and city parks (public projects) 
• after purchasing the property, the city goes to the Wall Street bond market and borrows around $175 million to backfill the budget and pay for designated on-hold public projects.
• of course, the city will pay interest on this borrowed money   
• this means that Mayor Gloria’s initial role in the AS-IS purchase of a building that was asbestos-ridden and electrical and plumbing-delinquent, when added to Mayor Gloria’s “settlement agreement,” will cost San Diegans $11.6 million each and every year for the next 30 years.  That’s $348 million of public money
• with leadership schemes like this, is it any surprise that the city’s existing funding gap has tripled in the past four years? 

⇢ The Mayor’s judgement was already suspect when he (alongside then-councilmember Kevin Faulconer) used his influence as Interim Mayor to award a flimsy sole-source contract to an inexperienced organization (Balboa Park Celebration Inc.) to organize what was to be a gala celebration of San Diego’s Centennial anniversary.  Through failed leadership and lack of oversight the venture collapsed, stiffing the public for $3 million in the bargain.

⇢ Years earlier, then-councilmember Gloria engineered the establishment of the Balboa Park Conservancy, whose mission was to raise funds to maintain and improve the park (Balboa Park was in his council district).  The Conservancy stumbled, sputtered, and languished under his negligent supervision.  Today, under Mayor Gloria’s indifferent eye, Balboa Park is on life support.

⇢ It was not the last time that San Diego taxpayers had to pick up the pieces following Todd Gloria’s ineptitude.  A jury found that councilmember Gloria improperly pressured city staff at the Planning Department to fudge a report about a disputed expansion of the Academy of our Lady of Peace, a private religious school in North Park.  The city was originally slapped with a $1.1 million fine for this unethical interference (but managed to settle the matter for half that amount).  

 

⇢  Unfortunately, Mayor Gloria’s judgement or devotion to the public welfare have not improved over the years.  His recent “settlement” of the 101 Ash Street scandal is--for him-- a crude but crafty get-out-of-jail card that sweeps under the rug the central role he played from the start.  And it lets off the hook his fellow-perps (past, present, and future campaign donors).  Apparently, the District Attorney can’t prosecute a politician for bad judgement ...or stupidity.

⇢ Then there's the Mayor’s curious decision to cherry-pick the ”Midway Rising” multi-billion dollar master plan proposal for massive redevelopment in San Diego’s Sports Arena community.  The business record of his anointed firm-- Zephyr Development-- is pockmarked with tax liens, breach of contract, lack of experience with large projects, civil complaints, partnership disputes, and more.  Yet, Mayor Gloria disregarded these red flags when he chose Zephyr over competitive bids.  

⇢ Surely, the Mayor's decision can’t be chalked up to bad judgement... or stupidity.  Is it possible that that Mayor Gloria was influenced by the $100,000 campaign check written by the company’s chief official to help get him elected mayor?  The city's Ethic Commission seems to be asleep at the wheel.

⇢ Also menacing for the San Diego public is the fact that Mayor Gloria is a consenting captive of a formidable pileup of San Diego’s entrenched power brokers whose mission is to drive and accelerate economic and residential growth and development in the region--with scant regard to issues of equity, justice, quality of life, or negative environmental impacts.  

Our home-grown "growth machine" members range from bankers, to big business owners, to consultants, to convention center purveyors, to developers, to financiers, to building trades unions, to hoteliers, to law firms, to lobbyists, to newspaper owners, to the real estate establishment, to land speculators.  

⇢ On any day of the week, you’ll find Mayor Gloria sitting at the feet of local lobbyist Colin Parent (regional avatar of San Diego’s YIMBY cult and opportunistic executive director of Circulate San Diego).  Colin Parent's land development mission is Mayor Gloria's mission.

⇢ You'll find the Mayor issuing directives to rewrite the city’s zoning codes, eliminate neighborhood voices, and reduce environmental standards.  With his gift of hyperactive happy talk, our Mayor delivers deceptive promises of “affordable housing” as a pretext for generously gifting his campaign donors free rein to overdevelop San Diego with high-rise apartment buildings and dense backyard units in residential areas throughout the city--without analyzing or evaluating long-term consequences.

It's not very different from the city purchase of property without appraisals or assessments--except for the massive scale differential and predictably devastating outcome.

⇢ And in an ominous throwback to his Interim-Mayor days when he hired an out-of-town “efficiency expert” who specialized in privatizing government services and selling city functions to the private sector, Mayor Gloria just signed contracts with two private companies to replace city staff and take over decision-making functions in our city's Planning /Development Services Departments.

⇢ And while Mayor Gloria announces almost daily: “Addressing homelessness is my top priority as your Mayor,” some may remember when Interim-Mayor Gloria reversed a program--previously funded by then-Mayor Filner-- to keep shelters open year-round.   Closing cold weather shelters eventually led to a deadly outbreak of Hepatitis A just a few years later.  You might think he had learned something from that tragedy.  

⇢ But the acts of addressing and accomplishing are not synonymous.   Mayor Gloria has been unable to accomplish even the limited task of providing and maintaining desperately needed public toilet facilities in downtown locations.  He shifts the blame for his inability to ameliorate the problem and sputters incoherent excuses: "I don’t have enough park maintenance people to keep this thing clean, right?  So just for God’s sake, if you see someone messing this up…this is getting crazy…. I think my staff’s gonna have a heart attack... be a decent human being for God’s sakes. And flush when you’re done if it’s not too much…”  This is our Mayor talking.

⇢ A couple of years ago there was an editorial headline published in the San Diego Union-Tribune that warned: "Keep Faulconer Away From City Real Estate."  It came too late.  

⇢ We're overdue for a follow-up warning from our daily newspaper: "Keep Gloria Away From City Real Estate... Away From the Planning Department... and Away From All Important City Business."  But it may already be too late.

******************************

Our Parade of Mayors leaves us with many questions.  We can start with this one: 

 what can explain the degree of incompetence, insubstantiality, indifference, shortsightedness, and inadequacy that has defined San Diego's political figures? 

Incidents of low level corruption are unavoidable but they're not necessarily fatal.   What is fatal to the public good is the lack of fervor, integrity, intelligent conviction, stability, and dedication to public-oriented service from the people we elect to city government.  The reasons aren't obvious but they're worth debating.

We need to ask ourselves: Are the people of San Diego better off since we switched to a “Strong Mayor” form of government?  Was it a wise decision for San Diego to throw out our City Manager system?  

To be more blunt: were we fu*ked over?  Are we being screwed?  Have we had it with political bullsh*t from unworthy city leaders?  

If so, let's unzip our collective lips-- not to fool around with language niceties... not to indulge in salacious gossip... not to be the most correct person in the room -- but to demand the initiation of a formal process to reevaluate the city's governance system and reform our City Charter.  This time, we must insist that neighborhood voices dominate the process.  It sounds mundane, but self-preservation and the future of our city are at stake.

San Diego Mayors on Parade ---- part one

Times change.  We’ve unzipped our lips.  Words that used to be taboo are now commonplace.   We can say just about anything we want: bi*ch…fu*k… bullsh*t… cu*t… scumbag… c*cksucker… (not the n-word, though--that's still a no-no).

* (But whoa...not so fast! I've been foiled by the Google Blogger censors, who won't let me say my taboo words on their platform. Darn it!  You’ll just have to fill in the blanks for yourselves.)  

One thing's for sure--all San Diegans are under a gag order when it comes to naming names and identifying the corrupt, self-serving, and unethical maneuvers of many of our city's  influential players--elected and unelected--who steer the San Diego ship.

 

Isn't it time to unzip our lips and acknowledge the scuzzy underside of our city government—particularly the incompetence and corruption that have crisscrossed the office of San Diego Mayor for generations?

Isn't it time to reckon with the fact that the past never disappears? that tainted fallout from the actions/decisions/sins of San Diego's previous political leaders still darkens our horizon? 

Isn't it time we put our mayors on parade and figure out if there's still time to change direction? 

🐘 OUR PARADE WILL START WITH MAYOR SUSAN GOLDING (1992-2000)

We should be generous about this Mayor’s environmental credentials.  But it’s been strictly taboo to acknowledge (let alone condemn) the choices she made as Mayor for the sole purpose of advancing her political career.  

Mayor Golding’s maneuvers to cater to big-money Republicans (she hosted the 1996 Republican Party national convention in San Diego) bled the city dry as she dipped into untold sums of public money.  The disastrous consequences of her political decisions haunt us, still.  

⇢ Ably assisted by her city manager Jack McGrory and her chief of staff Kris Michell (later recycled as chief operating officer for Mayor Kevin Faulconer), Mayor Golding tapped the city budget, waived SDG&E’s obligation to bury power lines via a secret side deal for a $3.4 million cash infusion into the city treasury, diverted TOT funds, and mortally wounded the municipal pension fund--ALL for personal/political gain.

 

⇢ And don’t overlook how her special relationship with San Diego Chargers owner Alex Spanos (a partner with John Moores on Golding’s Senate campaign finance team) was nourished by public money.  The city forked over multi-millions for over-the-top rent credits on the Chargers San Diego headquarters and for a ravenous ticket-guarantee scheme to subsidize Chargers games.

 

⇢ Mayor Golding’s use and abuse of public funds for self-serving political goals and her calamitous strategy to underfund the city’s pension system to the tune of $100 million (not counting unpaid-for retroactive benefits to city workers) created invasive tentacles that are strangling the city’s financial health to this very day. 

 

⇢ Each year since she left office it’s been an increasing challenge to balance the city budget.  Each year, cuts in city services gouge deeper.  Each year, the city creates sources of new revenue--utility user fees, storm drain fees, garbage collection fees, property transfer fees, TOTs, sales taxes-- not slated for new services but attempting temper a chronic structural imbalance.  This is Mayor Golding’s legacy.

🐘 FOLLOWING IN HER WAKE IS MAYOR DICK MURPHY (2000-2005)

Susan Golding’s successor inherited a city budget destabilized by years of mismanagement, scheming, public corruption, and fraud.  Innately unable to make difficult decisions, Mayor Murphy went along to get along… for as long as he could.  

⇢ The City Council eventually got on the ball and hired a governmental risk management firm called Kroll, Inc. to conduct an independent inquiry into possible illegalities related to the underfunding of the municipal employee pension system and misrepresentation of the city’s financial status.  Over the next few years, the city was under scrutiny by the U.S. Justice Department, the San Diego District Attorney’s office, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and an independent audit (which cost the city $20.3 million).

 

⇢ The 400-page Kroll Report excoriated San Diego politicians and upper management for financial dishonesty, securities fraud, gross lack of accountability, egregious cover-ups, non-transparency, obfuscation, and denial of fiscal reality.

⇢ According to the San Diego Business Journal: "Dozens of local officials and municipal employees put their own welfare ahead of the taxpayer for close to a decade, then tried to keep the lid on their wrongdoing…the evidence demonstrates not mere negligence, but deliberate disregard for the law, disregard for fiduciary responsibility and disregard for the financial welfare of the city's residents over an extended period of time…"  

⇢ Top city officials--former City Managers Mike Uberuaga and Jack MGrory, former City Attorney Casey Gwinn, and former Assistant City Attorney Les Girard--had their hands slapped for being “negligent in the fulfillment of their duties to the city.”  City Councilmembers of the day--Scott Peters, Toni Atkins, Jim Madaffer, Brian Maienschein, Ralph Inzunza, Byron Wear, and George Stevens (Donna Frye was justifiably excused)--were chastised for failing to ensure that complete and accurate financial data were disclosed to the bond market.  

 

⇢ In other words, city officials were caught skinny-dipping in a sea of fraud, dishonesty, cover-ups, denial, negligence, and unaccountability.  Recently, a current councilmember (Joe LaCava) philosophized that those who were responsible for that debacle were long gone.  He assured us that today’s generation of city leaders had learned from past mistakes.  Surely he was kidding!  Except for deceased George Stevens, many of those irresponsible old-timers and their present-day clones are still doing their thing and wading in the same polluted waters.

 

ENTER "STRONG MAYOR"  

By 2004, San Diego voters fell for the promise that a change in San Diego’s governance system would bring about greater political accountability and transparency.  

 

⇢ Succumbing to the active urging of then-Mayor Murphy, San Diegans agreed to switch from our longstanding City Manager form of government (in which a presumably independent, credentialed, well-trained individual was hired by the City Council to oversee and run the city) to a Strong Mayor form of government (in which the management and responsibility for running the city was put in the hands of an executive Mayor (CEO)… who would then hire a Chief Operating Officer (COO)... who would then oversee and manage city departments and their chiefs).  The COO--as a political appointee-- would be working exclusively for the Mayor, not the City Council.  Presumably, the public would finally have certainty about where the buck stops in city government. 

 

 ⇢ Proponents of the switchover claimed that the City Council would be strengthened in the process.  But the opposite was true.  The new “strong mayor” now had control over city departments and operations.  Councilmembers who didn’t play ball could find themselves punished in a variety of ways (by the "strong mayor" withholding services and facilities from their council districts, for example).

 ⇢ As another consequence of a weakened city council neighborhood residents, community planning groups, and the general public lost a good deal of their clout as councilmembers fell in line and rubber-stamped most of the mayor’s directives.

 

⇢ Mayor Murphy, the congenial politician who had promoted the switch to a “strong mayor” form of government, was under-equipped to confront the calamitous fallout from the previous administration’s financial abuses.  Our bedeviled and depleted city was more than he could handle.  Having suffered national ignominy by being branded by Time magazine as one of the worst big-city mayors in America (a weak mayor? yes…one of the worst? no), Dick Murphy resigned from office at the start of his second term as Mayor. 

🐘 HERE COMES JERRY SANDERS, THE MAYOR WE LOVE TO LOVE (2005-2012).  

Jerry Sanders had initially opposed the switch to a “strong mayor” form of government.  He called it "a power grab by inside players who would drain public services…to subsidize powerful developers."  He said it "would reduce accountability of your elected officials."

 

⇢ But Jerry Sanders changed his tune once the beleaguered Mayor Murphy resigned.  Those "inside players" and "powerful developers" who had sold the voters on the strong mayor concept knew that the former police chief--with his endearing grin and flexible principles—was their man for the job.  In a special election, voters opted for Jerry Sanders to take over as successor strong mayor of the city of San Diego.

⇢ Hidden (or perhaps expunged) was Jerry Sanders’ past history when—as a SWAT commander in the San Diego Police Department--he was participating in a social gathering at Mission Bay.  A frantic call arrived reporting an ongoing massacre at a McDonald’s restaurant in San Ysidro.  By the time Sanders was able to suit up, sober up, and arrive at the scene to take credit for giving the go-ahead to a sharpshooter to target the lone gunman and end the mayhem, 21 people lay dead alongside 19 wounded… mostly Mexican-Americans.  Jerry Sanders, the mislabeled hero, was subsequently promoted to Police Chief by then-City Manager Jack McGrory and Mayor Susan Golding.  For the past three decades, an airbrushed Jerry Sanders has evaded acknowledging—much less apologizing for—his clouded, self-aggrandizing actions that devastated and destroyed so many human lives.  It’s one of San Diego’s taboo subjects.

 

⇢ Once ensconced in the mayor’s seat, Mayor Sanders hired retired Navy Rear-Admiral Ronne Froman as his first chief operating officer (COO).  They were like peas in a pod in their quasi-military approach to running the city.  Their rules of the game consisted of tight controls, rigid lines of authority, and directives to clamp down and zip up whenever conflict arose.  

 

⇢ The scent of corruption was hard to miss as Jerry Sanders once again engaged in activities that threatened public safety.  In his position of command as Mayor, he intervened on behalf of one of his major donors to permit construction of a 12-story Sunroad Enterprises office building near Montgomery Field airfield.  The problem?  The building exceeded permissible airport zone height limits and was deemed unsafe by the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) and California Department of Transportation. 

 

⇢ Mayor Sanders was finally forced to force the Sunroad developers to abide by FAA safety regulations and lop off the building’s top tower.  (When Mike Aguirre filed suit to cut the building down to size, the Mayor’s favored horse-whisperer Fred Sainz told a reporter, “We don’t think it sends a positive message to the development community.”)

 

⇢ The designated fall-guy for this fiasco was the Mayor’s advisor Jim Waring, who dutifully resigned.  (He was soon reinstated when Sanders nominated him to the San Diego Housing Commission.  Today, Waring serves as Mayor Todd Gloria’s deputy COO (*correction: today, Jim Waring serves as executive chairman of CleanTECH San Diego)

⇢ COO Froman moved on, along with a tidal wave of senior management officials (Land Use chief Jim Waring, Parks & Recreation director Ted Medina, Development Services chief Gary Halbert and his successor Marcela Escobar-Eck, Water Department director Frank Belock, Fire Chief Jeff Bowman).  Who was left in charge of running city operations?  The folk who ran the city when Susan Golding was Mayor--operatives like Kris Michell and Fred Sainz, who had their fingers on the button for many decades to come.  

 

⇢ Despite claims of financial acuity, Mayor Sanders resisted calls for fiscal responsibility and meaningful reorganization of city finances.  He chose to feed the crippled budget by selling off “excess” city property and outsourcing city services.

 

⇢ By 2011, Mayor Sanders, propped up by his COO Jay Goldstone (replacing Ronne Froman), claimed that he had miraculously balanced the city budget and that the city was on solid financial footing.  It was a sleight-of-hand fabrication (aka creative lie).  Under the direction of Mayor Sanders, his administration fudged the numbers by eliminating internal audits, halting routine oversight of city departments, and stopping the tracking of city services.  Reality reared its ugly head when, barely one year later, San Diego was cited as having the worst crumbling infrastructure, streets, and storm drains in the entire state, perhaps even the country. 

 

⇢ The swindles multiplied.  After nearly 8 years of overseeing the deterioration of San Diego’s public infrastructure, city finances, city planning, truth in government, workplace security, and workers’ morale, our aw-shucks Mayor again assured the public that “the city’s decades-long structural budget deficit is over.”  He partnered with councilmembers Carl DeMaio and Kevin Faulconer to initiate a ballot measure called “Comprehensive Pension Reform.”  While scamming the public with a $94 million bill for an alternative 401K pension system, the ballot measure left in place the destructive abuses embedded in the old pension system.  

 

⇢ The Sanders/DeMaio/Faulconer pension reform fiasco didn’t hold up in court.  It has been dismantled and is currently costing taxpayers at least $100 million to undo and rectify. 

 

⇢ Today our streets are still crumbling.  But Jerry Sanders, in his political afterlife, thrives as the well-paid head honcho of the San Diego Chamber of Commerce.  This same man who--as Mayor--modestly self-certified that he was an honest chap who would always own up to any mistakes he might make, was recently crowned with the honorific: “Mr. San Diego.”  In a city like ours, truth can be stranger than fiction.

🦄 NEXT IN LINE IS BOB FILNER, THE MAYOR WE LOVE TO HATE (2012-2013)

Among San Diego’s most guarded taboos, speaking the whole truth about Bob Filner is a punishable no-no.  But dig we must if we are to make sense of the public opprobrium and shaming directed at him to this day.  One thing’s for sure--the story behind Filner’s truncated time as Mayor is as juicy, riveting, and malignant as local politics gets.  

 

Let’s acknowledge the positive before going in for the kill:

 

⇢ What distinguished Bob Filner from San Diego’s lineup of leaders were a few notable traits: he was an experienced politician with a lively mind, sharp wit, and ethical agenda.  His credentials as an unregenerate liberal Democrat were first-class.  

 

⇢ From the start of his abbreviated mayorship, Filner’s penchant for promoting the public interest over private interests alarmed and alienated San Diego’s entrenched power brokers.  His assertive presence on the scene also cast a shadow across the political ladder of competitors like my-time-has-come Democrat Todd Gloria, whichever-way-the-wind-blows Nathan Fletcher, and public-relations-is-my-god Republican Kevin Faulconer.

⇢ To implement his progressive agenda, Mayor Filner came out swinging against San Diego’s powerful “establishment.”   In his first months in office, he churned out directives to:

• create solar-powered city buildings/install public toilets downtown /design bike-able and walk-able streets 
• hire a first-class planning director, Bill Fulton
• install new building standards for a 332-unit “mixed use” project near San Diego State University to prevent it from being rented "per bed" rather than per apartment
• bring in real estate broker Jason Hughes (introduced to Filner by Southwest Strategies head honcho and lobbyist Chris Wahl) on a temporary and voluntary basis “without compensation from any party” to help find additional office space for city workers
• eliminate automobiles from Balboa Park’s Plaza de Panama with minimal city expense or intrusive park redevelopment
• veto a city council decision to permit a Sunroad Enterprises project to infringe beyond its property line without requiring public benefits in return
• extract a $100,000 contribution from Sunroad for two public projects in return for the requested property line variance 
• assail the city’s routine permissiveness in code enforcement and specifically to block a Jack in the Box restaurant claim that their remodel permit allowed them to do a full rebuild 
• redirect over $30 million of public money toward better wages for hotel workers and greater benefits for the city, butting heads with the city’s influential “hotelier cabal” (the Tourism Marketing District, the Convention Center, the Tourism Authority) and then-city council president Todd Gloria, who supported the hotel industry 
• propose a 5-year freeze on pensionable pay to confront the city’s structural budget shortfall and remove budget cut exemptions that had been granted to the City Attorney’s office 
• establish San Diego’s prevailing wage law for construction projects

And now for the negatives:

 ⇢ Bob Filner’s personality has been described as prickly, peremptory, abrasive, inappropriate, disagreeable, tone deaf, disrespectful, rude, brusque, and arrogant.  

 

⇢ Add on his awkward and adolescent compulsion to play the role of ladies’ man with inappropriate flirty jokes and asking scads of women out to dinner.  He sometimes wrapped his arm around their shoulders and neck, just like the high school jocks used to do (in Filner’s case they called it assault and battery).

 

⇢ Then there were his top advisors.  Most of them were poorly grounded in city affairs.  Others had dubious loyalty to their boss.  And promoting tranquility in the mayor’s office was a bigger job--given his own volatile tendencies--than his overwhelmed chief of staff could successfully handle.

 

⇢ The coordinated anti-Filner crusade that finally pushed this Mayor out of office was quick, crude, and adroitly orchestrated by inside and outside agents.  In the process, City Attorney Jan Goldsmith crossed several ethical and professional lines (for which he should have been disbarred):

• City Attorney Jan Goldsmith put a private detective on Mayor Filner’s tail
• according to Homeland Security, the Mayor’s office was bugged
•  the City Attorney worked on obtaining a restraining order to block Mayor Filner from entering City Hall 
• then-councilmember Todd Gloria and the City Attorney jointly honed their skills at regicide and privately communicated on methods to bring down the Mayor
•  City Attorney Goldsmith coordinated with Mayor Filner’s top legal aide (who harbored mayoral dreams of her own) to change the locks on Filner’s private office to keep him out
•  City Attorney Goldsmith lied to Mayor Filner and the City Council by denying that the city was obligated to provide legal defense to the Mayor (it is--for any elected official accused of wrongdoing while in office)
• City Attorney Jan Goldsmith turned the screw a notch tighter with threats to the Mayor that if he didn’t resign he would be pauperized 

⇢ Meanwhile, an avalanche of women—some politically motivated, some coerced, some (most?) rewarded--were recruited to testify that they were victimized, harassed, and traumatized by Mayor Filner’s overtures.  Juicy accusations went viral on the local news media and were fed to the national press:

• He touched my cheek with his finger, revealed the aggrieved ex-Navy Admiral/ former COO to Mayor Sanders, Ronne Froman
• He stroked my arm and sneaked a feel of my breast with his drooping left elbow, reported a Parks & Recreaction worker 
• He jammed his tongue down my throat, testified a lunch date 
• He leered…he ogled

While it’s common knowledge that the ex-Mayor’s relentless habit of coming onto women provided his political adversaries with enough free ammunition to set him ablaze, there’s an irony here: the story that was assembled to bring down Mayor Bob Filner had less weight and substance than the seeds of his real undoing--his underestimation of what it would take for him to successfully run the city while simultaneously engaging in a lopsided battle against two strange bedfellows: San Diego’s elite power players and competitors from within his own political party.

 

Bloodied by arrows launched from all directions, Mayor Filner resigned after eight months in office.

(to be continued...)

 

Omertà, San Diego style

Let’s pretend we’re hotshot detectives in a Netflix blockbuster about a real estate deal gone bad…really bad.  The action takes place in San Diego, where most every city official--past and present—is hell-bent on burying the evidence.  

An apt name for our show is “Omertà, San Diego style”  (a code of silence about criminal activity and a refusal to give evidence to authorities) But prepare yourselves: this whodunit is a true story about real perps, real victims, real consequences, and a labyrinth of backroom deals, tangled networks, secret handshakes, and a really convoluted chain of events. 

As icing on the cake, Omertà has a star-studded cast of characters whose private/public perversions, criminal negligence, gross incompetence, deception, dereliction of duties, coverups, and relentless assaults on the public welfare are guaranteed to knock your socks off.   

Now let's do what TV detectives do.  On a big posterboard we’ll pin up a rogues’ gallery of names, faces, and traces of evidence linked to the villainous activities in question.  And then try to connect the dots. 

So far, here's what our rogues’ gallery looks like: 

EXHIBIT A: the centerpiece of this true crime procedural is a 21-story steel frame, concrete and glass high-rise office tower in the central business district of downtown San Diego.  In its heyday it housed the world headquarters of Sempra Energy (parent company San Diego Gas & Electric).  Today it’s a building of ill-repute known simply as 101 Ash Street.  

Backdrop: in late 2016 the city of San Diego entered into a lease-to-own agreement with the owners of the 101 Ash St building, Cisterra Partners, a local real estate development company.  By September 2020, the city had paid more than $23 million (in monthly increments of $535,000) to lease the building.  The city spent an additional $40 million on upgrades, maintenance, operating costs, and legal expenses, even as the building sat useless and empty.

EXHIBIT B: All we want are the facts (just the facts, ma’am). 

1.  The city was well-aware that 101 Ash St. contained decades-old asbestos.  But the city chose not to perform its own inspection to determine the extent of contamination. 
2. City officials also chose not to call for an independent assessment of the building’s various systems before signing a lease-to-own contract with the seller Cisterra.
3. Instead, the city accepted a “property condition assessment” submitted by a firm hired by the seller. 
4. The Cisterra assessment was “based on a Site visit, in which AEC (consultants)performed a visual, non-intrusive and nondestructive evaluation of various external and internal building components… not a building code, safety, regulatory or environmental compliance inspection.”  
5. The Cisterra consultants gave the building a passing grade.
6. City staff was instructed to tell the City Council that the building would only need “a $10,000 power wash” before workers could move in.  
7. In reality, $66-$115 million in repairs were required to make 101 Ash St. safe and habitable.
8. The lease with Cisterra stated—upfront--that the city would take the building “AS-IS” and that the “LANDLORD (Cisterra) SHALL HAVE NO RESPONSIBILITY OR LIABILITY” for repairs of any known or unknown defects with the building.
9. In 2016, the City Council went along with a motion by then-Councilmember Todd Gloria to approve a 20-year lease-to-own contract with Cisterra.

EXHIBIT C: Warnings to the Mayor 

1. An independent report on the building’s automation systems (March 2019) found that “Many of the temperature and duct static pressure transducers have been removed, relocated or are damaged beyond repair,” rendering the heating system useless…”
2. And worse--the consultant stated that “If there had been a fire, there was no way to isolate it.  We went to the City and told them that the fire system was no longer functioning the way that it was designed.” 
3. Later in 2019, a contractor in charge of renovating the vacant office tower warned the mayor and city officials about serious problems with the building’s water and sewer infrastructure and fire alarm system. 
4. Nevertheless, Mayor Faulconer and his senior aides recklessly moved 1,000 city workers into the 101 Ash Street building, hiding behind spurious documents falsely attesting to the adequacy of the building’s safety.
5. Within a month, the County Air Pollution Control District declared the building unsafe due to asbestos contamination and shut it down.  

EXHIBIT D: Lawsuits and Investigations 

1. The city now confronts dozens of legal claims by city employees and contractors alleging exposure to asbestos.  
2. The city is suing Cisterra and real estate broker Jason Hughes for defrauding the city over secret fees swept into the $128 million lease the city signed. 
3. The city has sued CGA lenders, whose investors have countersued the city. 
4. The city is negotiating settlements with lobbyist Chris Wahl. 
5. The city is being sued for illegally indebting the city without a public vote and the fraudulent waste of public funds.  
6. The city, Cisterra, and previous owner Sandor Shapery are being sued for concealment of facts that enabled a one-sided real estate deal.  
7. The investment management firm is countersuing the city for violating the terms of the 101 Ash St. lease.
8. District Attorney Summer Stephan is conducting criminal investigations into 101 Ash St. dealings.  Subjects include Jason Hughes and Cisterra, among others.  

EXHIBIT E: Private sector players in this true crime procedural (in alphabetical order)

🎯 CGA Capital, a Maryland-based corporation providing debt and equity capital for “credit net lease real estate transactions” for corporate and government agencies.  CGA provided the loan for Cisterra Development’s purchase of 101 Ash St. in January 2017.  Cisterra then created a lease-to-own agreement with the city of San Diego, assigning responsibility to the city to pay off the loan with monthly lease payments to CGA $128 million over 20 years.  By September 2020 the city had ceased payments.  CGA sued the city for defaulting on the loan. 

🎯 Chris Wahl, prolific political fundraiser and chief executive at Southwest Strategies--one of the most successful public relations/crisis communications/government affairs/lobbying firms in San Diego—with direct access to top officials in city government.  For example, in the summer of 2015, Wahl met personally with Mayor Kevin Faulconer, chief of staff Stephen Puetz, director of Real Estate Assets Cybele Thompson, and Deputy COO Ron Villa to promote city leasing of 101 Ash St. on behalf of the building owner Sandor Shapery. 

Earlier this year, in mediation efforts on behalf of his client Cisterra, Wahl had private meetings with city attorney Mara Elliot, Mayor Todd Gloria’s chief of staff, and the city’s COO Jay Goldstone. 

🎯 Cisterra Development, San Diego private real estate developer.  Impressive company portfolio includes new downtown corporate headquarters for Sempra Energy (completed in 2015), as well as Sorrento Gateway, Gateway at Torrey Pines, Biogen IDEC Research Campus, 7^th & Market (home to new Ritz Carleton Hotel), Carmel Valley Corporate Center, Peregrine Systems Campus, and the San Diego Padres Tailgate Park.  

In mid-2016, Cisterra purchased 101 Ash St. from owners Sandor Shapery and Doug Manchester for $72.1M, predicated on an explicit understanding that the city would promptly buy or lease the building from Cisterra (aka double escrow--"the simultaneous purchase and sale of a real estate property involving three parties: the original seller, an investor (middleman), and the final buyer.”)  

An additional $5M was quietly tacked on by Cisterra for a tenant improvement loan plus $14.4M more for undefined fees, bringing the total loan amount to close the 101 Ash St. deal to nearly $92M.   

Although the building had recently been appraised at $62 million, then raised to $67.1 million, Cisterra commissioned yet another building appraisal (unearthed and revealed only recently) that came in at $92 million--conveniently folding in Cisterra’s extraneous lobbying expenses by inflating the size of the loan charged to the city.  The deal with the city closed in January, 2017. 

🎯 Doug Manchester, controversial public figure, influential developer, former owner of the San Diego Union-Tribune, and Mayor Faulconer’s largest donor.  In 2015, Manchester purchased 49% of 101 Ash St. from Sandor Shapery for $20 million (suggesting the building’s true appraised value at around $40 million). 

Shortly thereafter, Manchester met with Mayor Faulconer to promote city purchase of the building and set up a walk-through of the building. “Dear Kevin and All…Thank you for your time yesterday…Sandy (Shapery) and I look forward to your tour on the 27th. Warmly, Papa Doug.” 

But it would be the kiss of death for Faulconer to do public business with Manchester.  According to Cybele Thompson, when CFO Mary Lewis promoted outright purchase rather than lease of the property, this was his response: “(Faulconer) said something along the lines of, you know, ‘Mary, I know you’re no political genius, but imagine the optics of me writing a check to Doug Manchester for this building. You know, he’s the biggest Trump-loving, gay-hating, womanizing’ — he went on kind of a tirade about Doug,” Thompson said. ‘So how could I possibly be seen writing a check to him?’”  

It is said that, Manchester may have sold back his minority share of 101 Ash St. to Shapery prior to the Cisterra acquisition, for certain taxation benefits. 

🎯 Jason Hughes, commercial real estate broker.  In 2015 presented himself as an unpaid adviser to the city of San Diego to broker a 20-year lease-to-own transaction between the city (buyer) and Cisterra (seller) of downtown’s Civic Center Plaza tower.  The deal was overseen by city real estate director Cybele Thompson, Mayor Kevin Faulconer, and City Attorney Jan Goldsmith.  

By 2017, Hughes had walked away with $9.4 million in compensation paid by Cisterra for his work on both the Civic Center Plaza deal and its carbon-copy lease-to-own transaction at 101 Ash St.  Hughes’s huge fees were silently rolled into the loans (i.e., charged to the city) and expertly obscured in public records. 

🎯 Jason Wood, Cisterra Development principal, played a key role in structuring the transition and development of Sempra Energy Corporate Headquarters out of 101 Ash St. and into a new $165 million, 16-story office building overlooking Petco Park.  

Shortly before the 101 Ash St. deal was struck, Wood played a key role in the lease-to-own deal between Civic Center Plaza and the city.  He was able and willing to “rig a formula” to deceive San Diego's debt management director Lakshmi Kommi and others about the $1 million buffer and $10 million payoff to Jason Hughes that Cisterra embedded in that lease proposal.  Cisterra successfully netted unreported millions in that transaction. 

In 2016, Wood continued to work his magic in the 101 Ash St. transaction and could confidently assure his associates: “We made a deal today with the City…using the same lease as [Civic Center Plaza]… The Mayor signed off today and we hope to have council member briefings and buy-in by the end of the week. Committee hearing will be in 2 weeks then City Council hearings with lease execution in November.” 

Wood made $1.3 million when the deal was sealed.  Cisterra’s chairman Steven Black collected over $4 million.   

🎯 Sandor Shapery, longstanding downtown developer and owner of 101 Ash St. for more than 20 years before negotiating unsuccessfully to sell the building to the city (2014) with an asking price of $100 million.  The following year, Shapery sold a 49% share in the building to local hotel developer “Papa” Doug Manchester for $20 million (imputing the building’s value at just over $40 million).   

A couple of years later, Shapery bought out his minority partner for $25 million.  Although protesting his innocence in the local press, Shapery may have hooked up as a silent partner with Cisterra as the city’s 101 Ash St. landlord. 

🎯 Steven Black, Chairman of Cisterra Development and Manager of a Delaware limited liability company called 101 Ash, LLC (created at the end of 2016 and owned by Cisterra )--the official owners of the 101 Ash St. property.  

Black’s substantial development interests in the city’s recent real estate deal for a two million square foot mixed-use project at Tailgate Park are temporarily on hold.  He has been convinced to lay low and wait for the noxious 101 Ash St. winds to blow over or at least die down.  

EXHIBIT F: Public sector players on the city payroll in this true crime procedural (in alphabetical order) 

🧩 Cybele Thompson—Director of San Diego’s Real Estate Assets Department, appointed by and answerable to Mayor Kevin Faulconer.  Her team was instrumental in securing a similar lease-to-own deal for the Civic Center Plaza. 

In 2016, Thompson perpetuated the myth that the 101 Ash Street building was in excellent condition and required only a $10,000 cleaning, caulking, and pressure wash of the exterior.  She was aware that city staff had been working for months on a deal to purchase the building and that a direct purchase could save $17 million over the cost of a lease-to-own arrangement.  But she yielded to heavy pressure from the mayor to promote the fiction that the timing of the deal made a direct purchase all but impossible.  

Thompson arranged for Jason Wood (Cisterra) to lobby Todd Gloria to promote the lease-to-own arrangement that Mayor Faulconer had privately endorsed. She resigned from the city in August, 2020. 

🧩 Jan Goldsmith, San Diego’s City Attorney from 2008– 2016 (and, curiously, one of the most protected figures in San Diego politics, running a close second to former mayor Jerry Sanders).   He oversaw and signed off on Cisterra’s lease-to-own scheme to transfer office space in the Civic Center Plaza building to the city.  He was still in office when the spitting image proposal for the now-notorious lease-to-own proposal for 101 Ash St. was being readied for city attorney sign-off. 

Purportedly, Goldsmith issued a confidential memorandum defining terms and risks associated with Cisterra maneuvers , which is not, so far, publicly available.  It appears he’s getting off scot-free.  Not true for his successor, current City Attorney Mara Elliot.  She is now juggling the hot ball of wax inherited from Goldsmith and must answer for his sins of comission and omission in addition to her own. 

🧩 Jay Goldstone, Chief Operating Officer appointed by Mayor Todd Gloria.  In behind the scenes attempts to protect the mayor and other city staff, Goldstone responded to meetings and communications with Cisterra lobbyist Chris Wahl and Cisterra’s chairman Steven Black to advance a settlement and/or strike a deal between the city and these private sector actors in the 101 Ash St. legal morass. 

Goldstone saw fit to retract some of the sworn testimony he gave in a lawsuit deposition related to his role in facilitating the lease-to-own agreement between the city and Cisterra operatives.   

🧩 Johnnie Perkins, San Diego’s ex-deputy chief operating officer of Infrastructure and Public Works (2019-20), was assigned by Mayor Faulconer’s COO (Kris Michel) to oversee building renovations on the 101 Ash St. albatross.  He witnessed asbestos screwups by subcontractors.  He heard complaints and warnings about “an obsolete heating and ventilation system, corroded sewer piping, clogged asbestos tests, a whistleblower raising red flags, a flawed fire system the fire marshal never signed off on, and an unrealistic timetable driven by significant political pressure.” 

He was a lobbyist, advocate, and past president of San Diego Fire-Rescue Foundation, so what could induce him to remain silent about the harm his fellow workers and buddies were facing inside that noxious building? What blocked his ears to the city fire marshal’s warnings of the about the lack of safety for over 1,000 city employees being moved into the building per instructions from the mayor’s office? 

🧩 Kevin Faulconer, Mayor of San Diego (2014-2020), jumped on the opportunity to expand working space for city personnel once Sempra Energy vacated their headquarters in an Ash Street tower conveniently adjacent to City Hall.  But a glitch emerged: the building was owned by Sandor Shapery but Doug Manchester was a minority shareholder.  It was not politically feasible for Mayor Faulconer (much less for councilmember Todd Gloria) to engage in public business with Manchester.  

The game of deception was on.  Faulconer’s reasonable desire to acquire adequate space to conduct city government devolved into a chain of events that are revealing the innermost dirty secrets long embedded in San Diego political life.   

🧩 Kris Michel, COO appointed by Mayor Faulconer and perennial go-to person (fabled woman behind the throne?) for past decades of San Diego mayors.  Michel was ultimately responsible for overseeing renovations and improvements in the 101 Ash St. building and in early 2020, as problems mounted, assigned the task to Deputy Chief Operating Officer of General Services Alia Khouri and fellow Deputy Chief Operating Officer Johnnie Perkins.  

🧩 Mara Elliot, San Diego’s first female City Attorney, took office two months after the City Council approved the 101 Ash St. lease-to-own agreement and 10 days before  Jan Goldsmith’s name was crossed off the final lease document and Elliot’s signature added. 

At the time the 101 Ash St. contract was signed (true also for the mirror-image Cisterra contract for the Civic Center Plaza building), San Diego City Charter Section 225 required a “full and complete disclosure of the name and identity of any and all persons directly or indirectly involved in the application or proposed transaction and the precise nature of all interests of all persons”.

Elliott (but not Goldsmith) is being lambasted for violating Charter Section 225 by failing to confirm that all of the people who benefited from the lease (specifically, Jason Hughes) were properly disclosed. 

🧩 Mary Lewis, the city’s CFO from 2008 to 2017, oversaw the city’s $3 billion annual budget and managed city departments of the Comptroller, Treasurer, Debt Management, Risk Management, and Financial Management. 

Lewis, the city’s most qualified financial expert, opposed the proposal to acquire 101 Ash St. through a lease-to-own arrangement when the city could opt for a less expensive straight purchase arrangement (saving $16 million).  She and other senior staff members (COO Scott Chadwick, Deputy COO Stacey LoMedico, Assistant COO Ron Villa, Director of Real Estate Assets Cybele Thompson, and Chief of Staff Stephen Puetz) were reportedly met with fierce opposition by Mayor Faulconer, who was determined to choose the Cisterra option of a lease-to-own arrangement. 

🧩 Mike Zucchet, once a city councilmember and for the past 13 years the General Manager of the Municipal Employees Association--the city union representing over 4,000 city employees and one of the most ardent supporters of the 101 Ash St. lease-to-own deal. 

Zucchet was rewarded for his vigorous advocacy of the 2016 Cisterra lease-to-own deal.  He was appointed to a prized position as commissioner on the San Diego Unified Port District Board.  And in the blink of an eye he’s became Chair of the Board, obvious conflicts of interest notwithstanding.

Fundamentally disturbing is the fact that Mike Zucchet (like Johnnie Perkins) folded to political pressure to cynically betray his fellow city workers.  He closed his eyes and turned his back to the dangers surrounding city staff in a building plagued by floating asbestos, electrical malfunction, and fire system failures, putting his personal interests--and those of previous mayor Kevin Faulconer and current Mayor Todd Gloria--over and above the health and safety of people he presumably serves. 

🧩 Ron Villa, former Assistant Chief Operating Officer--long in charge of 101 Ash St. acquisition and renovation--resigned in mid-2020 in the midst of mounting accounts of health and safety violations in the building.  All the while, the city was making rent payments of $18,000 per day for a vacant and dangerous building.

Villa--along with Cybele Thompson—bowed to direction from Mayor Faulconer to advise city councilmembers that the Cisterra lease-to-own option was the only feasible choice they had.  

He went much further than that to demonstrate his loyalty to the mayor’s interests over the public interest.  In March 2018 he responded to city worker complaints about the building safety: “I hear you. I heard every single complaint that was brought because [the City’s Asset Manager] shared with me every single complaint. The reason why it took so long is there was no way for us to break the lease and we would have been held liable for all of that. Now, that is over a $1 million. Is that worth everybody’s whatever? Maybe, maybe not. The fact of the matter is there is a cost to that and we would have been in litigation over that.”

🧩 Stephen Puetz, former chief of staff for then-councilmember Kevin Faulconer.  In 2012 he managed Carl DeMaio’s losing campaign for Mayor.  He then managed Faulconer’s successful campaign for mayor.  In 2014 was appointed chief of staff by Mayor Faulconer.  He was the mayor’s point person in the city’s 101 Ash St. lease-to-own transactions (particularly with Southwest Strategies lobbyist Chris Wahl and Jason Hughes).  In his deposition for a pending lawsuit concerning 101 Ash St., Puetz has acknowledged that he  routinely deleted text messages from his phone that involved official city business in that matter.  

This whodunit takes an odd twist with the appearance of Puetz’s wife Diana Palacios, who had previously worked as an aide to Councilmembers Carl DeMaio and Scott Sherman.  One year after Puetz became Faulconer’s chief of staff, Palacios was hired by Chris Wahl’s lobbying firm Southwest Strategies to lobby both Mayor Faulconer and her husband, the mayor’s chief of staff, on behalf of assorted clients, including the San Diego Padres.  She is now the VP of Public Affairs for the Padres and lobbies city officials on Petco Park issues (e.g., the city’s recent Tailgate Park agreements). 

🧩 Todd Gloria, current San Diego mayor, has been trying to lay low in the face of the 101 Ash St. tsunami.  (He is scheduled to be deposed next month in a taxpayer lawsuit.)  In 2016, after a superficial walk-through look at the building, then-city councilmember Todd Gloria reported his impression of the condition of the 101 Ash St. building “…it’s extremely well maintained.”   

Based on meetings arranged for Councilmember Gloria and his chief of staff Jamie Fox with Cisterra lobbyists Chris Wahl and Jason Wood… coerced by city staff force-feeding of Mayor Faulconer’s orders… armed with the assurance that mention of LGBT-antagonist Doug Manchester had been expunged from view… and, above all, gullible enough to swallow the deceptive package whole hog, Gloria took the lead and made the motion to approve Cisterra’s lease-to-own deal.   

To this day he takes no responsibility for his bad judgment and passive acceptance of spurious information.  “From the beginning,” he claims, “the public and the members of the then-City Council, including myself, were deceived.” 

************************************** 

Our rogues’ gallery has been pinned up.  You've been introduced to the players.  But the final episode of this whodunit has not yet been written.

Who’s the chief culprit? Who should be punished? Locked out of office? Sent packing? Lose city contracts? Pay the city back for damages and expenses?  

Are the mayor and city council complicit or simply inadequate… over their heads… no match for the fraternity of big boys who own our city?  

Is it just a systems problem? Does the problem lie in our “strong mayor” system, in which the chief operating officer (aka city manager) and all department heads answer directly to the top official, the mayor?  Was it better when they answered to a full complement of elected councilmembers and (by extension) to the general public?  We remember that bad deals were done under the old system.  Were they this bad? 

The San Diego public is ready for a proper, grand scale,  town hall meeting to take stock of where we are and where we're going.  In fact, we're more than ready. We’re entitled to one.