The Issues

The Challenge: 

Mayor Todd Gloria is responsible for San Diego’s homelessness issue becoming a full-blown humanitarian and economic crisis. 

In the 4 years since his election, our homeless population has surged by 45%, from 4,887 to 7,070 individuals. That increase is fueled in part by Mayor Gloria’s previous actions as Interim Mayor and City Council President, when he approved the elimination of more than 10,000 units of desperately needed low-income housing.

The city’s budget allocated towards homelessness has ballooned more than 800%, from $8M in FY2019 to $65M in FY2025. During Mayor Gloria’s tenure, he has budgeted over $200M on a failed approach to fixing this crisis. This costly, ineffective “strategy” includes temporary and very costly “solutions”, including shifting shelter locations at incredible expense and failing to assess outcomes to determine which programs are actually successful.

As an SDPD Community Relations Officer downtown, I have extensive experience dealing with our homeless population and personally know many homeless San Diegans. I know their names, their faces and their stories. Mayor Gloria knows them as only numbers to be shuffled around and warehoused out of sight.

My Plan: 

As a U.S. Marine Officer with experience in humanitarian missions, I have a realistic and effective strategy to combat homelessness in San Diego. Instead of focusing only on temporary shelters, my plan emphasizes wrap-around and transitional services crucial for long-term success. By investing in permanent supportive and affordable housing, we can cut taxpayer costs significantly while providing a stable environment for our homeless neighbors to access services, find jobs and, once again, become contributing members of our community.

The tenets of my immediate homelessness strategy are: 

1. First, I will apply a tourniquet to the bleeding of shelter beds in our city. We must preserve the short-term shelters currently in place. 

2. Because the County’s task force on homelessness has proven ineffective, I will appoint a Regional Unified Command on San Diego Homelessness, which I call RUSH, to emphasize the urgency of this team’s mission, to include homelessness provider experts, that will be led by a homelessness response commander with operational expertise. 

3. I will identify and select appropriate locations to provide specific services such that each shelter allocated will address the unique needs of each population, including mental illness, substance abuse, families, LGBTQ+, youth, seniors, etc. We will always listen to – and consult with – community residents and business owners before finalizing locations for any shelter and resource centers. 

4. I pledge to be transparent and accountable on our successes and failures. I will issue monthly reports to the public with detailed information, required from all homelessness providers, on shelter bed availability, placements into permanent housing and ongoing construction projects with timelines for completion. Utilizing successful best practices, we will track progress, measure impacts and ensure that resources are being used  effectively to ultimately both avoid and resolve homelessness. 

Homelessness is not just a crisis for those living on the streets, it affects all members of our community. While the above shelter strategy is an immediate necessity, by implementing proactive prevention measures to address homelessness, such as diversion and shallow subsidy programs, and prioritizing permanent supportive and affordable housing, we will create a safer, more compassionate San Diego for everyone. 

In the face of challenges, I offer not just promises, but concrete solutions. Together, we will transform the narrative on homelessness in San Diego and build a city where every individual has the opportunity to thrive.

The Challenge:

One of the most basic expectations of San Diego residents and businesses is that the city provides reliable infrastructure – stormwater flooding protection and well-maintained and safely lit streets and sidewalks. The city’s 5-year infrastructure funding gap has more than TRIPLED in four years from $1.27B to $4.8B and has clearly been reported to the public by city staff, however, political decisions have prevented staff’s recommendations from being implemented. 

Nowhere is Mayor Gloria’s failure to provide even the most basic infrastructure maintenance more apparent than the flooding the city experienced in January of this year. Despite Mayor Gloria being fully aware of the City’s No. 1 infrastructure challenge since day one, which is stormwater management, and includes flood prevention and measures to prevent pollutants from entering local waterways, he consistently and blatantly ignored community complaints and concerns until that fateful day of January 22, 2024, when thousands of people were flooded from their homes in San Diego and several even died.

The average annual funding needed for stormwater maintenance is $275 million and the average funding budgeted by Mayor Gloria during his tenure has been $50 million. The short-term strategy of band aid projects fell apart during the January floods when more than 1,000 families were displaced from their homes. Many of them still have not been able to return.

Mayor Todd Gloria seduced San Diegans with his slogan of “Sexy Streets”, but, at this point, we would welcome just drivable streets which exist almost nowhere in the city. We have poured city funds into empty, expensive bike lanes, polluting buses, and an inefficient transit system, including a trolley that transports only 3% of San Diegans. All the while, our roads are dangerously littered with potholes, our sidewalks are blocked by homeless encampments, and our houses are still not safe from stormwater flooding.

My Plan: 

As a Marine, my leadership has been tested in the most adverse conditions around the world with outstanding results. I have assembled a crack team of financial and operational experts who know the city and are aligned with my focus on core city services. 

My priority as mayor will be fiscal responsibility with a laser focus on YOUR top 3 priorities of infrastructure, public safety and homelessness. Because I am independent, beholden to no political party or special interest group, I will not spend a dime of your tax dollars on frivolous pet programs that pander to friendly donors as Mayor Gloria does. 

I will prioritize matching federal and state grants that contribute to local infrastructure funding and prioritizing lease revenue bond proceeds to infrastructure versus pet political projects that do little if anything to benefit the taxpayer. My infrastructure plan will allow for no more potholes, no more flooding, and no more failures. 

The Challenge: 

We all see and experience an unsafe San Diego. We also know that crime is underreported as a result of long wait times at peak hours when calling for police help, a propensity to report crime via the City’s Get It Done app versus 911, and long wait times for an officer response due to the current level of understaffing (the city currently has 184 officer vacancies). While overall crime decreased in San Diego from 2022 to 2023 by just under 3%, violent crime had increased every year since 2018 until last year. The crimes of aggravated assaults, vehicle theft, kidnapping and other sex offenses all increased. 

It is important to note that San Diego already has the least police staffing of any major city, so 184 officer vacancies is a substantial handicap for such a small force. Mayor Gloria has led the single largest exodus of talented officers from our police department with over 600 leaving by 2023, during Mayor Gloria’s tenure, contributing to the City’s lowest sworn officer staffing level in 15 years. In addition, over the next 2 years, 130 seasoned officers are projected to retire, with Mayor Gloria having no strategy to backfill the tremendous experience leaving the city. 

Mayor Gloria has established a negative culture within SDPD which does not contribute to retaining or recruiting officers and has created an all-time low in morale. He held onto a vaccine mandate long after other major cities, and even the state of California, had dropped the requirement and he handcuffs our police by prohibiting them from enforcing current laws. 

My Plan: 

As your Mayor, I will never accept any goal short of being the safest city in America. As an SDPD Community Relations Officer downtown, I am on the front-line combating violence and crime every day. Mayor Gloria, who is far from the front line of crime, considers it a great accomplishment that San Diego is simply less violent than Baltimore. I have a personal incentive to ensure San Diego is a safe place to live and know how to get it done.

As your Mayor, I will work closely with Chief Scott Wahl to set a positive culture of respect that encourages officer retention, hire more 911 call takers and dispatchers, and remove the city ordinances that inhibit our law enforcement from being able to urgently respond to your calls. I will modernize and reform our police department to foster a better relationship with our communities. Recognizing that police recruitment is a challenge across the US, I plan to hire nonsworn behavioral health experts and investigative personnel to respond to calls from the public that do not require an armed presence. 

Officer response times are three times as long as they were a decade ago which serves to erode the trust between officers and community members at a time in our society when we can least afford to damage trust.

I support the modified version of the original Prop 47 passed in 2014 that will be on the November ballot. This revised bill reverses the lack of accountability for repeat drug and theft offenders who currently have no incentive to curb their behavior since Prop 47 first passed. I also support enforcing misdemeanors for thefts under $950 which is allowed under current law, but not a priority of Mayor Gloria who was an early proponent of Prop 47 and still has not endorsed the obvious reform needed.

We deserve a city where all citizens, from children to seniors, can walk through their neighborhood without fear and my vision for safety in the city is honed through my 8 years as an SDPD officer.

The Challenge:

Today we are experiencing a rare population exodus from San Diego. In the last year, we lost 31,000 residents, citing the high cost of living and homelessness, which is one of the most significant outflows of residents in 3 decades. Downtown San Diego, the hardest hit by homelessness, has a current total office vacancy rate of 26%, which has worsened from 20% in 2020 at the beginning of Mayor Gloria’s term. 

In a recent poll, key voter concerns were reducing political corruption and reducing local government spending.

Major downtown projects newly developed for life science sit vacant and have zero leases to show for their efforts and the largest office owner in San Diego is rumored to be considering a portfolio sale of all downtown office properties. This is significant because it demonstrates the lack of confidence by business leaders for San Diego to recover. 

My Plan:

I will not let our San Diego follow this downward trend. The reasons both residents and businesses are departing are the same – high cost of living and lack of confidence in San Diego’s mayor to successfully and ethically provide the core services of public safety, infrastructure maintenance and reliability, and management of homeless services to create an environment that provides an alternative to living on the street.  

I will ensure that the city focuses on excellence in providing the core services that people expect and will not be distracted by pet political projects. This will require following best practices of professional accounting organizations and a structurally balanced budget that does not use one-time revenues to pay for ongoing expenses without a clear strategy for funding in the future. 

Our entire city is living off a credit card and creating debt that it has no means to repay. My focus is on fiscal responsibility and cutting non-core city expenses. I have assembled an expert team that knows the City of San Diego intimately and exactly how to manage the city’s finance and operations to focus on only core services.  

I am not supportive of the Mayor's proposed 1% sales tax that would take $374M/year out of YOUR pockets, because Mayor Gloria has not proven to our residents that he will appropriately manage that additional income. Do you really want your tax dollars spent on more of the types of financial decisions Mayor Gloria has already made that hogtie our city for decades to come such as these:

1. $348M to purchase 101 Ash Street and Civic Center Plaza, with no strategy for how to use these buildings, when it would have only cost $184M to continue paying rent on the already negotiated leases
2. $1.1 B for a 35-year lease of Kettner & Vine to place a 1,000-bed homeless shelter with no source of future funding and no homeless strategy
3. $0 in proposed revenue from Midway Rising to the City on Sports Arena when the previous successful bidder, who was subsequently canceled by Mayor Gloria, had proposed $5M/year to the city over 55 years. By way of comparison, the City’s largest lessee is SeaWorld who pays a minimum of $10M/yr. Mayor Gloria forced SDSU to stand down from a potential free stadium deal in order to allow his donor, the successful bidder on Sports Arena, to build an arena on city-owned land at great expense to the taxpayer.

If residents and businesses cannot trust the mayor to provide the core city services of public safety, infrastructure and homelessness management, they will continue to vote with their feet by leaving the city. 

Mayor Gloria has driven a budget deficit ever since being in office, rising to the current level of a $172M deficit! I will prove that San Diego’s mayor can provide these expected services with accountability and transparency. I will not waste your tax dollars on pet political projects because I am not running for higher office. My focus is to fix our beloved city so that we all feel safe and can excel in our life goals while living in the city of our dreams.

The Challenge: 

In April 2024, US Border Patrol encountered 37,370 migrants entering the San Diego Sector which was a whopping 49% increase from the year before. San Diego is now the busiest sector in the U.S. for illegal crossings which is attributed to the increased efforts of Texas and Arizona to secure their borders and has led to San Diego being viewed as the least risky border crossing in the US. In the last 8 months, the federal government has released more than 136,000 migrants onto the streets of San Diego. While most of these migrants simply want a better life, we cannot look away from the criminal element that accompanies them and preys on, not only immigrants, but citizens of San Diego.

My wife’s family came to California undocumented from Mexico and worked hard to make a beneficial difference for their children. Now they proudly make positive contributions as U.S. citizens. So many immigrant San Diegans, like my family’s, are amazing people who believe in the American dream, but that dream darkens when they arrive here and have to hide in the shadows, afraid to call the police when they are victims of crime.

My Plan: 

I fully embrace that all people are looking for a better life and that, for some, immigrating to the US is their way to that better life. I will not only support opportunities and services for immigrants, but I will also ensure the protection of our own citizens from the evils that enter our city with them. I recognize the concerns of San Diego, as a border city, with the criminal element that often accompanies any large group, and I will not ignore the concerns of immigrants or the concerns of our citizens in that regard. 

I will ensure a coordinated task force is established between SDPD, Border Patrol and the Coast Guard to combat human trafficking, gangs, drug cartels, and transportation of narcotics being dropped in our city or entering via panga boats on the shores of Pacific Beach and La Jolla.

As your Independent Mayor, I am not beholden to any political party, and I will call out our state and national political leaders of both parties when they are guilty of dereliction of duty that impacts San Diego. I will respond with immediate action if the federal government drops off undocumented migrants into our city. I will work closely with the County, which has taken the lead in providing services to the migrants dropped in San Diego by the federal government, specifically with a migrant transition center that was recently approved and funded by the federal government.

The Challenge: 

People are fleeing San Diego by the masses due to safety concerns, cost of living, lack of affordable housing, and inability to attain home ownership. Mayor Gloria has ruined what makes San Diego the best place to live. Instead of preserving our green canopies and protecting the environment, he has approved the development of large apartment complexes without parking, water, sewage facilities, parks, libraries or other infrastructure to support them. 

We do not have a housing shortage, we have an AFFORDABLE housing shortage, and we cannot afford what Mayor Gloria is building. State goals require San Diego to build 64,199 affordable units by 2029, but, as of last year, San Diego had only permitted 3,720 such affordable units making it infeasible that San Diego will meet this goal. 

Mayor Gloria’s push to add housing density in already oversaturated communities knows no bounds and completely ignores community feedback. Developers are no longer required to present proposed projects to their local community planning groups, who know their neighborhood best, and Mayor Gloria recently spearheaded the elimination of the Uptown Planners Community Planning Group because they asked too many questions about Mayor Gloria’s Hillcrest plan to double the already extensive density in this neighborhood, with no additional funded infrastructure. 

While people may have different opinions as to the level of housing density desirable in San Diego, we can all agree that eliminating a democratically elected body representing the community to fulfill a political agenda is highly undemocratic.

My Plan: 

Simply allowing developers to build more market rate housing, whenever and wherever they want, will not provide the affordable housing so desperately needed in San Diego. 

The failed policy of allowing multiple ADUs on formerly single-family housing tracts with minimal, if any, setbacks have degraded the quality of neighborhoods, contributed no truly additional affordable housing stock, pitted neighbor against neighbor and, ironically, increased the value of those single-family homes which can now be redeveloped as multi-family housing. This has resulted in investors outcompeting local families to purchase homes because they realize the true value of maximizing the allowable buildout of every single-family home site. As your Mayor, I will insist upon community input for planned development projects and fast track affordable housing projects.

Greater accountability is necessary by the city, if a developer states that they will build affordable units, that the rent or purchase amount on those units will actually comply with the affordability promised by the developer. In addition, developers should not be allowed to get initial fees waived by promising an affordable development and then later decide to build market rate because the affordable version did not “pencil” for the developer without having market rate fees assessed by the city.

In addition, far too many single room occupancy hotels, low-income rental units and federal rental subsidy contracts are not being renewed by property owners and are being removed from low-income housing stock as many families’ last resort prior to homelessness. I will work closely with the San Diego Housing Commission and Development Services to ensure these current low-income options are incentivized to remain an option for our community.

Mayor Gloria just raised developer fees from $4,925 to $6,640 for a 3,000-sf house with no accountability as to how quickly permits will be issued. Regulatory costs now account for 34% to 51% of the average cost of building housing. The city needs to consider more streamlined permitting processes that include AI technology and potentially outsourcing the permitting process to ensure quicker response times. 

High developer fees and slow issuance of permits, which can literally take years, is no way to improve affordability of housing and I will ensure there is accountability for issuing permits quickly. We cannot be the greatest city in America if we cannot offer San Diegans the American dream of home ownership. 

The Challenge: 

The City of San Diego has been known for many years for poor real estate decisions and there seems to be confusion in the public about how these decisions were made. Let me be clear that, under San Diego’s strong-mayor form of government, these decisions start with the mayor and have been driven by obvious pandering to large donors and desperation to meet campaign promises to ensure re-election or being elected to higher office, regardless of the cost to taxpayers. 

Each one of the decisions below was initiated directly by Mayor Gloria and made for corrupt purposes having nothing to do with the best interests of the taxpayers or the community:

1. $348M to purchase 101 Ash Street and Civic Center Plaza, with no strategy for how to use these buildings, when it would have only cost $184M to continue paying rent on the already negotiated leases
2. $1.1 B for a 35-year lease of Kettner & Vine to place a 1,000-bed homeless shelter with no source of future funding and no homeless strategy
3. $0 in proposed revenue from Midway Rising to the City on Sports Arena when the previous successful bidder, who was subsequently canceled by Mayor Gloria, had proposed $5M/year to the city over 55 years. By way of comparison, the City’s largest lessee is SeaWorld who pays a minimum of $10M/yr. Mayor Gloria forced SDSU to stand down from a potential free stadium deal in order to allow his donor, the successful bidder on Sports Arena, to build an arena on city-owned land at great expense to the taxpayer.

Like what happened with the police department, Mayor Gloria’s leadership led to a mass departure from the Real Estate Assets Department, which lost a staggering 180 years of experience from its ranks in the last 3 years. The department has become so decimated that Mayor Gloria has attempted to hide what has happened by “merging” it with the Economic Development Department, which has little in common with the Real Estate Assets Department. 

The department is now unable to provide the real estate support needed throughout the city. Meanwhile, outside broker experts are not allowed to be used for important real estate transactions where they could potentially save the city millions of dollars via their market expertise. This is particularly disturbing as a taxpayer because income from real estate activities has historically been the 5th largest revenue generator for the city.

My Plan: 

As San Diego’s next Mayor, I plan to implement several reforms in order to restore the credibility of the city’s real estate transactions, ensure that city real estate records are accurately tracked and re-establish the desperately needed lease and sale revenue once generated by this department. 

I will re-establish real estate as a separate department and hire a dedicated real estate expert known and vetted in the marketplace to lead the department. I will also ensure that a process is established to properly contract with and manage brokers to prevent the abuses of the past several years and to ensure that the city is getting the best deal on every real estate transaction it manages.  

A City Council policy already exists that requires city staff to present an annual Portfolio Management Plan that details to the City Council and the public what real estate goals the city has set for the year and summarizes current real estate assets held by the city and plans to maximize the value or public use from these properties. Since the city owns more than 120,000 acres, the most acreage of any large city in the US, we should all want to know how the city plans to use this property each year, yet, incredibly, 

Mayor Gloria has never complied with this council policy and no Portfolio Management Plan has ever been presented during his tenure, once again preventing community input on extremely important decisions.