Former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer doesn’t just play pundit on KUSI these days. Politics Report has learned that Faulconer is also making calls to gauge support for a new citizens’ initiative he wants to put on the San Diego city ballot in November 2024.
What it would do: It’s not clear what the measure will be or even if Faulconer knows the specifics, but it will likely be in line with the one Sacramento voters will consider in November. That initiative will make it illegal — a criminal misdemeanor — for residents to camp without shelter on the street after the city provides enough shelter or safe space for camping.
We reached out to Faulconer’s longtime assistant, Aimee Faucett, who confirmed what we heard and gave us this written statement:
“A broad coalition of San Diegans, including former Mayor Faulconer and respected community leaders, is collaborating on a citizens’ initiative that will require the City to provide adequate homeless shelter to make our streets healthier and safer. Until a few years ago, San Diego became one of the few major regions in California where homelessness was decreasing. In fact, Sacramento residents were encouraged by San Diego’s progress and got support from their community and a Democratic mayor to put a measure inspired by some of San Diego’s actions on their local ballot. It’s time to do the same in San Diego by taking solutions proven to reduce homelessness and turning them into law. We look forward to sharing more updates in the future.”
Why it matters: Mayor Todd Gloria regularly grills Faulconer about how the city was run before Gloria’s team took over “a few years ago.” This might be Faulconer’s sharpest response.
However, that is not what is important. What matters is the dire homeless situation in San Diego.
A month after Mayor Todd Gloria touted an improvement in the dismal inner city homeless population statistics, the numbers rose again for June. The Downtown Partnership, as part of its monthly count, found 1,453 people living without a roof over their heads downtown. This is more compared to 1160 last year and 721 in 2020.
Housing Commission, for a long time a large part of the city’s approach to the homeless remained without a permanent executive director. The mayor has mobilized the police, but is also dealing with a shortage of officers.
Gloria Shrugs: Reached Friday, Gloria’s spokeswoman sent a statement. They are already following Faulconer’s plan, she wrote.
“I had the opportunity to look at what they are doing in Sač, and it is not clear that it is anything more than what Mayor Gloria is already doing. This administration has increased shelter capacity by 25 percent so far, and will continue to add beds and non-housing options to help all homeless populations get off the streets. As the Voice has often reported, the mayor has been abundantly clear that he does not believe it is acceptable to camp on our streets when there are alternatives, and he is creating those alternatives at an aggressive pace. The only mandate Mayor Gloria needed from the voters to do this was his election.”
How we got here: Faulconer is no master at solving homelessness. After winning the 2014 election, the former mayor and City Council member was always reluctant to take a leadership role on the issue, and during his first few years in office, San Diego’s encampments got so bad that they caused a deadly hepatitis A outbreak, leading to deaths. 20 people and diseases among hundreds of others. The shock of the disease, the mobilization of other community leaders, and the sheer state of suffering on the streets led Faulconer, four years into his tenure, to mobilize the shelter-plus-coercion approach that we later called the Faulconer Doctrine.
Partnering with philanthropists and service providers, Faulconer’s team quickly set up temporary shelters and stepped up enforcement and street cleaning measures. As confirmation, they took a slight decrease in the annual number of homeless people.
Faulconer built his campaign for governor largely around the claim: that he has found the right balance and can help the entire state implement it.
And that promotion didn’t die with his poor performance in the race to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom. In May, Faulconer appeared at a forum in Spokane, Wash., organized by business leaders there seeking solutions to the homelessness crisis that has developed there.
Here’s how Chris Patterson, the group’s organizer, characterized it, according to the Spokane Spokesman-Review:
“It will be the first symposium the Hello for Good group has held, bringing together a former San Diego mayor, housing director and nonprofit leader to discuss approaches that have led to a 29% reduction in unsheltered homeless people on the city’s streets. city from 2017 to 2019, Patterson said.”
We’re not sure where they got the 29 percent number from. There has been a decrease in the reported number of homeless people in San Diego in the time count conducted by the Regional Task Force on the Homeless (6 percent, for example, from 2018 to 2019), but the group has significantly changed its methodology in this regard. time period and its leaders cautioned people against comparing year-to-year during that period.
No one will ever say “Boy I miss you, 2019. Visible homelessness wasn’t so bad back then.” But it was a little better. There are now as many tents and camps as there were when hepatitis A forced Faulconer and the city to face the crisis. And after grappling with the problem himself, in his first two years in office, Gloria largely adopted her predecessor’s approach — a new temporary large tent shelter is being built at Midway to house 150 people, and efforts to eradicate the encampments have been greatly increased. increased.
What’s next: We’ll see if Faulconer’s initiative will significantly change the city’s municipal code or if it will be some kind of public mandate – small in terms of actual changes to the law, but of great political significance. Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, who previously worked with Faulconer, eventually supported the initiative in that city. And now we have another race to watch in November: whether and how much the initiative will succeed.
SANDAG’s Plan to Kill Its Driving Fee Is Stuck in the Slow Lane
The San Diego Association of Government’s board is well-positioned to continue the fight into the future over whether the region should charge drivers for every mile they drive. Read also : 7 Chess Video Games for People Who Hate Chess.
The board voted Friday to direct staff to put together a path to remove the ride-hailing fee from the region’s long-term transportation plan, while making sure the plan remains in compliance with state environmental laws that require reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Staff said they expect that proposal to come back to the board sometime next spring.
The vote was almost identical to one the board had already taken in December, ordering agency planners to come up with a way to end the driver’s license fee, which became a source of significant controversy after conservative board members criticized its inclusion in the regional plan. Now, seven months later, the board reiterated that they do, in fact, want staff to come up with a way to eliminate the fee and maintain a legitimate transportation plan.
“I appreciate the acknowledgment that we’ve been waiting for a while,” said Mayor Todd Gloria, who led the charge in December to begin the process to repeal the fee, just days before the board was scheduled to approve a plan that included . “I would be open about my frustration with how long this has been going on.”
SANDAG staff and Hasan Ikhrata, the agency’s executive director, also gave conflicting answers about when the board might officially remove the region’s blueprint fee for any infrastructure projects it wants to build in the coming decades and how it would pay for them.
A staff presentation, for example, said they could come back to the board in spring 2023 with options to remove the fee, recoup lost revenue and offset greenhouse gas emissions reductions that would have occurred if only the fee had been in place.
But the same presentation also included a timeline visualization that suggested removing the fee would trigger public outreach and environmental reviews that could stretch to 2025. Staff even indicated that, thanks to that timeline, the agency could simply remove the fee as part of its the next state draft, which should be published in 2025.
“We have on the screen, the deadline you see goes all the way to 2025, but that doesn’t mean the update will wait that long,” Ikhrata said.
“Based on today’s action, we will make a change to the 2021 plan – when that happens and if it coincides with the 2025 plan, that’s a decision for you to make later,” Ikhrata also said, after staff emphasized that the change the plan would return to the board in 2023.
Fixing the plan: Dropping the fee from the plan creates two related problems for the agency. The region is being denied the revenues the plan is counting on to build all the projects it envisions, and the region is being denied the emissions reductions it needs to prove to meet state requirements.
With the fee, San Diego would reduce emissions by 20.4 percent from 2005 levels through 2035, while without it, regional emissions would fall by just 18.6 percent — below the state’s mandated reduction of 19.1 percent.
But now that it’s updating things, SANDAG staff said they’ll have to go ahead and update the costs in the plan to reflect inflation. So with revenue falling and costs rising, staff said they expect to eliminate or reduce some of the road, highway, bus and rail projects in the pipeline.
There may also have been some hints about how the agency can get back some of the emissions reductions it will lose when it withdraws the fee. The agency’s current model is based on a model from 2016. Staff will now use the new numbers based on post-pandemic behavior.
State approval: In December, SANDAG approved the new plan, and a few minutes later passed a motion promising to change the plan. The agency then submitted the approved plan to the California Air Resources Board for certification that it meets environmental requirements.
CARB is ready to sign off on that plan by the end of the month, said Antoinette Meier, the agency’s director of regional planning. She indicated that the wait for approval is why the agency is only now starting the change that the board directed on the same day it approved the plan it wants to change.
“We were waiting for state approval (of the regional plan) before we started discussions on updating (the regional plan),” she said. “We didn’t want to compromise that approval and we didn’t want to jeopardize the funding.
That caught the attention of San Marcos Mayor Rebecca Jones, who asked if the state was aware that SANDAG was promising to change the plan it was about to certify.
“I don’t see anything wrong here,” Ikhrata said, arguing that they submitted the legal plan to CARB for approval, and if they changed it after it was approved, they too would go to CARB for approval.
What’s at stake: The regional plan, more importantly, doesn’t actually impose a charge for driving. He can’t do that. He says the region, as a whole, assumes it will introduce the fee by 2030 and is using the money it would generate for all the things it wants to build. But the state would still have to make such a fee legal, some sort of technological solution to charging drivers for rides would have to be chosen and implemented, and the agency’s board of directors or voters would ultimately have to actually implement the fee. It is enough to wonder why regional officials have spent so much time arguing over what is hypothetical.
“It’s true that a regional plan doesn’t have taxing authority, but you can only include projects in your plan that have a reasonable chance of being funded,” Coronado Mayor Richard Bailey, a leading opponent of the fee, told us in an interview. “And the regional plan foresees that many projects are financed on the basis of this fee and other taxes. So, although SANDAG does not collect taxes through the regional plan, just by planning to include all these things, it is necessary that they come true. The plan does not impose a tax, but their inclusion creates a plan that then requires taxation.”
Other lost revenue: Anticipating a surprise discovery any day, the agency has already lost another major source of revenue it was counting on: a sales tax it thought voters would approve in November. By next spring, when the change comes back to the board, the loss or delay of that money should probably be included as well.
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