The city’s real ‘structural deficit’ is the deficit in honesty

Mayor Todd Gloria’s State of the City address on Thursday made a credible case that San Diego is making progress on some key issues.

Gloria cited a nearly 14% reduction in unsheltered homelessness based on the point-in-time count by the Regional Task Force on Homelessness, a reduction in downtown tent encampments and the opening at H Barracks of the city’s largest Safe Parking site for people living in vehicles. He also noted that for the third straight year, the city had issued housing permits at a pace that nearly doubled the city’s long-term average — and that San Diego, already one of the safest big cities in the nation, saw crime fall significantly in several categories last year.

But Gloria’s contention that the city was doing an impressive job in dealing with what a press release called “the structural budget deficit — the result of decades of underfunding and deferred decisions, while costs and demand for services rose” is preposterous.

Yes, the city cut its deficit of $318 million by about $270 million. Yet the duplicitous bait-and-switch that the mayor and a majority of the City Council used to win approval of trash fees on 220,000-plus homes —  fees that were far higher than what voters were told in 2022 when they narrowly cleared the way for their being assessed — will hang over City Hall for years. And, if anything, the imposition of parking fees at beloved Balboa Park was even more unpopular among San Diegans.

Why? Because residents who have paid attention over the decades know that what Gloria calls the “structural deficit” that led to his push for the fee hikes is not caused primarily by benign factors. It’s caused by elected officials’ decision to ignore the public’s specific directions in favor of policies favorable to public employee unions. This is made obvious by a Jan. 10 U-T story showing the city would have to pay “a record-high annual pension payment of $563.2 million” because of what the pension board’s actuary called “extra salary increases above and beyond our assumptions during many of the past seven years.”

That mandatory payment would be far smaller if City Hall heeded the 60% of city voters in 2006 who rewrote the City Charter to authorize outsourcing of many services, only to see the potent money-saving tool mostly be put on the shelf ever since. That number would also be far smaller if the 66% of voters who in 2012 supported ending defined-benefit pensions for most new city hires had been heeded after state courts threw out the ballot measure on narrow technical grounds.

City voters saw the present nightmare coming and acted to address it. That they were ignored shows San Diego’s most important “structural deficit” is the deficit in honest leadership.