The San Diego City Hall motto: Due diligence is for losers

In 2018, more than 78% of San Diego voters were convinced to double the mayor’s salary and raise City Council members’ salaries by 60% — and to set them up to receive regular future raises by linking the positions’ pay to the salaries of state Superior Court judges. The author of Measure L, attorney Bob Ottilie, said the previous pay of $100,000 for the mayor and $75,000 for the council was simply inadequate to attract the kind of high-quality governance that City Hall needed after 20-plus years of pension scandals, real estate ineptitude and poorly vetted decisions.

Seven years later, a case can be made that Measure L itself is one more example of a civic mistake. The City Council’s stunning rush to judgment this summer on Mayor Todd Gloria’s complex, high-stakes plan to salvage the city’s disastrous acquisition of the 101 Ash Street office tower — by converting the building into 247 “affordable housing” units — is not evidence of high-quality governance. It’s the opposite. And what makes this mistake even worse than many of those seen since the mid-1990s is that the deal’s flaws were uncovered and widely known before it was approved, not after the fact.

Yes, it’s understandable why Gloria would want to make the best of the Ash Street mess. Perhaps something good can come out of the city’s baffling 2016 decision to acquire the decrepit building without any seeming awareness that, in 2014, a consultant for its previous owner had called it fundamentally obsolete and cited asbestos contamination. But especially since Gloria supported the deal as a City Council member — and very much joins then-Mayor Kevin Faulconer on the list of civic officials who completely failed at due diligence — one would think that might lead to caution.

Instead, as U-T Watchdog reporter Jeff McDonald detailed in a July 27 analysis, Gloria urged the council to quickly approve a complex $267 million deal — one that “relies almost entirely on public funds and loans backed by tax credits” — without following best practices recommended for major real estate decisions outlined in a 2021 city audit. These include giving the City Council and public adequate time to review terms and obtaining an independent property condition report. The city released key financial documents just days before key decisions were to be made — and, incredibly, no detailed condition assessment was made public.

The eye-opening details don’t stop there. Instead of being subject to competitive bidding, the deal was awarded to a partnership that includes a Gloria political appointee who sits on the city’s Planning Commission. On its face, this presents a conflict of interest, especially given the partnership’s request for an environmental regulation waiver that might otherwise trigger commission review. And while Gloria and his staff depicted the deal as having smart safeguards, if it fails, taxpayers could end up on the hook to forgive a $45.6 million city loan.

What you hear isn’t a lone siren going off in the distance. It’s a deafening cacophony of warning bells. But on Tuesday, the City Council voted unanimously for the deal, with Council President Joe LaCava dismissing skeptics and critics as “wallowing in the past.”

Calling this hubris doesn’t do it justice. It’s more akin to a belligerent embrace of civic amnesia. It brings to mind William F. Buckley Jr.’s famous line from the 1960s: “I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard.” After this week’s display by Gloria, LaCava and the rest of the City Council, San Diegans can be forgiven for thinking they’d rather be governed by the first 10 people they encounter in a visit to 7-Eleven.