Every one of the 250 seats in San Diego’s City Council Chamber was filled mid-afternoon on Wednesday, January 15. It was a capacity crowd – yet an infinitely smaller venue compared to previous sites where Mayor Todd Gloria has delivered his annual State of The City speeches.
Why was the mayor’s most important annual address piggybacked at the end of a council meeting? In recent years it’s been held as an evening fete at the 1,339-seat Balboa Theater and the Civic Theatre, which holds 2,967.
This year, the mayor was attempting to present an ambiance of austerity. Gloria was re-elected in 2024. In the election runup he made scant debate appearances and nary a mention of the prospect of the quarter-of-a-billion-dollar deficit the city is now facing.
The city is in the hole now, and Gloria likely rolled the dice on the prospect of San Diegans voting to pass Measure E, a 1% sales tax increase that would have filled the city’s General Fund with an estimated $400 million.
Perhaps in part because city voters didn’t trust surplus funding in the 101 Ash Street real estate debacle-stained hands of Gloria, Measure E failed by half a percentage point.
Gloria intended for his State of The City speech to be upbeat. He implored that San Diego is resilient, determined and reinventive. “This is not the time for us to slow down,” he says. “It’s time to double down.”
Gloria says steep budget cuts are coming. “But I also want to be clear that I’m not just just interested in slashing our way to a balanced budget,” he says. “Instead, we will reimagine how we operate – examining every service we provide and how we can make the most of our public assets.”
Now in his fifth year in office as mayor (after serving eight years on the San Diego City Council in District 3), Gloria seems to imply he is inheriting a budgetary mess, not trying to pivot to fix his own.
He continues to state that homelessness is his number-one concern. He promised a total of 1,000 new shelter beds last year. That effort was not accomplished and was a whopper of a miss for the unsheltered population. A 1,000-bed Mega Shelter was proposed mid-2024 but the mayor couldn’t get enough votes for it in the city council. Apparently negotiations with the site owner are continuing, but the project appears dead in the water.
Small gains and losses in homeless facilities were made in 2024. The city will add tents to its two Safe Camping Sites. And Gloria adamantly declares that a safe parking lot area will open at the H Barracks site near the airport, despite continued objection from Point Loma residents.
Gloria went out of his way to deflect blame on homelessness issues. He pointed his finger at The County of San Diego, other cities in the county and the state for lack of support.
The mayor blamed the county for a failure to provide beds to help treat people with behavioral and health problems that lead to homelessness. At recent count, the county had 71 detox beds and the city had just one. Eschewing city funding, downtown’s Father Joe’s Villages is currently converting a wing of shelter beds in favor of 45 detox beds and 250 sober living shelter beds — to be run under private donations.
Gloria has a point that other cities in the county could be doing more to provide shelter and homeless services.
Pointing fingers at state funding is a stretch. There definitely has been a shift by people living in tents on downtown streets to setting up camp just outside downtown’s fences that separate the city from I-5 (Caltrans’ domain). The mayor seems to want remuneration for the city to Whack-a-Mole those tented individuals to yet another place to live. Where would they go? Other cities or riverbeds, perhaps. Likely not to a 1,000-bed Mega Shelter.
San Diego is hard pressed to explain what it already does with state funding for homelessness it’s received over the years. In a 2024 CalMatters report, San Diego was one of two cities cited for failure to “thoroughly account for their spending or measure the success of many of their programs.”
Gloria touched on a multitude of other issues during his half-hour State of the City speech. He gave his administration props for permitting three times the number of “starter homes” over recent years.
With upcoming austerity moves, Gloria says he will not cut essential service like police and fire departments. To reduce costs on one front, he’ll look to downsize office space leases.
Reductions in services remain to be seen, but when it comes back around to Gloria’s oft-stated number-one priority, homelessness, the mayor wants to make sure residents don’t blame him for issues in their neighborhoods.
“My fellow San Diegans, it is my hope that, anytime you see a person on the street suffering from extreme mental illness or addiction, you think of the County of San Diego and ask them: When will they step up to provide the services needed to end this crisis?” SDSun
