San Diego wants to dissolve its parking districts, alleging mismanagement, frivolous spending

Mayor Todd Gloria plans to dissolve nonprofit groups that oversee city parking districts in San Diego after an internal review found alleged mismanagement, including contract violations and inappropriate spending.

If the City Council approves the mayor’s plan, Gloria’s staff says he will immediately take $1.8 million in parking meter revenue away from the districts and spend it fixing sidewalks, streetlights and potholes.

Leaders of some of the nonprofit groups said Wednesday that accusations of mismanagement are either overblown or entirely inaccurate. Others acknowledged the groups didn’t spend money as efficiently as possible.

San Diego’s four parking districts are downtown, Pacific Beach, the mid-city area centered on El Cajon Boulevard, and uptown — a term the city uses to describe Hillcrest, Bankers Hill, University Heights and Mission Hills.

The districts, which date to 1997, were created by the city to oversee how parking meter money is spent within each district, including proposing and sometimes coordinating specific projects.

While critics say the mayor’s move is another cash grab aimed at closing a large budget deficit, his staff says problems with community parking districts started before city finances became grim.

A previous review that began last year prompted the city to shrink the share of meter revenue parking districts can keep from 45% to 15%, and to require districts to diversify their boards beyond mostly merchants.

And the mayor isn’t the only critic.

His proposal comes after the county grand jury in April called the districts an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy, and the city’s Mobility Board in May slammed the parking districts for lack of accountability.

But the grand jury and the Mobility Board didn’t recommended a complete takeover by the mayor. The Mobility Board recommended reforms and improved policies on transparency and accountability, while the grand jury recommended the districts get taken over by neighborhood planning groups.

The mayor’s staff says a complete takeover by City Hall makes sense because it eliminates what is essentially a “middle man” panel that spends money earmarked for neighborhood upgrades on expenses the mayor’s staff characterized as frivolous.

The internal review showed the kind of widespread mismanagement that makes a takeover the right move, said Craig Gustafson, a deputy director in the city’s Transportation Department.

“The key findings show that all the community parking districts have poor management practices and many of them were in violation of their contracts,” he said. “Either they weren’t doing competitive bidding, there were conflicts of interest, they weren’t charging reasonable fees or they couldn’t provide invoices to back up the work they said that they did.”

Much of the parking meter revenue the districts get is typically spent on rent for offices, salaries for workers at the nonprofits, decorative lighting, landscape maintenance and other expenses the mayor’s staff calls questionable.

The money is supposed to be spent on pedestrian improvements, bike parking, enhanced street crossings, signage, shuttles, removal of abandoned driveways, valet parking, shared parking and related projects.

Gustafson said the misspent money comes at a time when sidewalks and streetlights in city neighborhoods with parking meters are in bad shape.

“We could be taking that money and fixing streetlights,” he said. “There are 1,200 streetlights out right now in downtown.”

If the council approves the plan, the mayor would get all the parking revenue that previously went to districts during all future years. And that amount is expected to increase beyond $1.8 million as the city raises rates and increases the number of meters deployed citywide.

It would be another example of power shifting away from neighborhood leaders toward City Hall. The council approved last year a series of reforms weakening neighborhood panels called community planning groups.

Michael Trimble, executive director of the Gaslamp Quarter Association, said the mayor’s staff is exaggerating any problems with the parking districts and not telling the whole story.

“Every year we get projects approved that we spend our money on — we’re not just spending it on overhead,” Trimble said. “We’ve been able to do projects that make the neighborhood safer, like improved lighting.”

Trimble said he never uses parking meter money for rent, but that he has used it for administrative costs like personnel expenses because that’s a legitimate move.

“If I’m going to work on a project, I’m going to get paid for my time,” Trimble said. “Everything I do is legitimate and gets documented. I give project-specific invoices.”

Trimble said he believes the mayor’s plan is another desperate City Hall effort to increase revenue, just like new parking fees in Balboa Park, doubling meter rates citywide from $1.25 to $2.50 and new special events parking in downtown.

He said city officials know — and have always known— that there are personnel costs that come with asking nonprofits to coordinate big projects, such as the Gaslamp Promenade that Trimble oversees.

“They’re leaving out a lot of the story,” he said.

Gustafson said the Gaslamp Quarter Association requested what the mayor’s staff considers an egregious reimbursement: $339,000 for contractors who install and remove bollards to block cars from Fifth Avenue to create the promenade.

City officials have decided to only reimburse the association $100,000.

“I don’t think $339,000 is an appropriate amount,” Gustafson said.

Trimble said city officials saw the contract for bollard work when it was signed and didn’t raise concerns, noting that the amount was higher than expected partly because of city prevailing wage rules.

“They knew how much it would be,” he said. “It’s pretty frustrating.”

Gustafson said it’s true that the city is not reimbursing some expenses that it has reimbursed in the past, but that such changes are necessary when things are being run poorly.

“All we are doing is holding them accountable,” he said.

Trimble said he thinks another motive for the mayor is not having to worry about gathering neighborhood input on potential projects.

“They don’t want our input,” he said.

Randy Wilde, a senior policy adviser to Gloria, said this week that community input can be gathered in other ways.

The city has thousands of requests for upgrades and fixes from its Get it Done! tipster app. In addition, council offices forward hundreds of monthly complaint emails to Gloria’s staff.

Projects funded by the parking district money will also become part of the city’s annual capital improvement budget, which gets debated publicly and voted on by the council based on community feedback.

Benjamin Nicholls, executive director of the Hillcrest Business Association, said Wednesday that he isn’t surprised by the mayor’s move, conceding that parking districts could be spending their money better.

“Was it as efficient as it could have been? No,” Nicholls said.

He held out the Pride Promenade as an example of an important project built partly with parking meter money, but conceded that there aren’t many other strong examples.

Nicholls, however, said city officials must show neighborhoods with meters what benefit they are getting compared to neighborhoods that have no meters, such as La Jolla.

“What’s the benefit?” he said. “Streetlights are out in Hillcrest and sidewalks are crumbling. It’s incumbent on the city to describe to Hillcrest customers where their money is going.”

Gustafson said none of the city’s four parking districts have submitted work plans for the fiscal year that began July 1, but some have proposed individual expenditures that the mayor’s staff has declared ineligible.

They include proposals for bike racks and wayfinding signs without specific locations, a “hospitality patrol” for events at Petco Park, promotional videos, website updates and digital marketing campaigns.

Gustafson said the marketing efforts are an example of the parking district boards, which often serve also as business improvement districts, conflating their marketing roles with their roles overseeing parking money.

Wilde, the mayor’s aide, said no date has been set for a City Council debate on the mayor’s proposal to dissolve the parking districts. He said the council would also have to approve moving the $1.8 million to the city’s Transportation Department.