San Diego County’s fiscal health has long stood out in comparison with that of the city of San Diego.
This isn’t just on display in terms of how much more stressful it is to balance city budgets each spring. It’s on display in basic quality of life. For many years, motorists driving northwest on the city’s section of the major Camino del Norte artery couldn’t help but notice how much better conditions were the instant they reached county-maintained portions of the road near 4S Ranch. It’s also on display in the increasingly comic way that Mayor Todd Gloria and the City Council depict desperation-driven moves to increase revenue by charging far more people for garbage service and parking as “reforms.”
But are we heading toward a time when this city-county gap disappears? Based on this week’s actions by a narrow majority of county supervisors, maybe. The board’s three-Democrat faction backed a new policy that could lead the county to spend $380 million in discretionary reserves — more than half the total available — to cover loss of federal funds due to the Trump administration’s push to reduce grants to local and state governments.
Board Chair Terra Lawson-Remer suggests that with smart management, the long-term impact on county finances would be minimal. For her to make this claim when she is on the record as also supporting a $1 billion county tax hike is telling enough. But when that is paired with her view that the county may need to add 1,150 new full-time workers — creating massive ongoing new salary and pension benefit costs — it suggests a level of denial about the need for fiscal prudence approaching that seen at San Diego City Hall in the 1990s.
This is underscored by the November warning from the respected state Legislative Analyst’s Office that state finances are in such rotten shape — with chronic “structural deficits” looming for many years to come — that local governments need to anticipate a steady long-term decline in the state funding they have relied on.
The good news here is that it will take four votes of the five-member board to access county reserves in coming weeks and months. There may be specific situations where the needs to keep providing services are so acute that Republicans Joel Anderson and/or Jim Desmond will be amenable.
But at the very least, they should use their clout over reserve spending to force Lawson-Remer to scrap as much of her reckless tax-spend-and-hire agenda as possible.