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San Diego’s four major mayoral candidates have broad jobs ideas. To help you understand what they’re proposing, we’ve defined their plans, explained their key ideas and called out potential weaknesses in a series of posts. See our posts on Carl DeMaio, Bob Filner, Nathan Fletcher and our introduction.
The Candidate: Bonnie Dumanis
The Word: Trust
Bonnie Dumanis’ jobs plan amounts to buzzwords and Bonnie.
The buzzwords? Streamline, task force, the border, university internships, veterans. The Bonnie? She believes voters should trust her to create a job-friendly environment because she’s headed a big government agency for a long time. She’s fond of equating the mayor to the CEO of a multi-billion dollar corporation — the size of the overall city budget.
But her plan offers little details for how she’ll reform San Diego’s business environment.
The Ideas: Dumanis’ ideas rely on simple principles. She wants to make it easier for businesses to get permits, increase opportunities for students and veterans, and appoint a jobs czar.
The jobs czar will have dual roles of specializing in cross-border commerce and trade and helping convene a task force of San Diego’s core industries and small businesses. Dumanis wants the task force to generate ideas for regional job growth.
And that’s it as far as specifics go. Dumanis instead said she will focus on making the city’s bureaucracy run well by importing budgeting and management principles from San Diego County.
“I think we all do have similar ideas in terms of jobs and the economy,” Dumanis said in an interview. “But what sets me apart is the fact that I’ve done it before.”
The Weaknesses: Dumanis’ quotation begs a significant question: What does the District Attorney’s Office have to do with job creation?
She said her office, which she has led for almost a decade, has been efficient and innovative. That means, she said, she has the experience to measure and improve the city’s economic development performance during her tenure.
But she’s offered nothing that shows more than a rudimentary understanding for how San Diego government’s business processes work.
In an interview, she couldn’t name one permit process she believed needed to be streamlined or one process that worked well. Instead, she said she’d make every department review their procedures and rely on her industry task force to identify changes.
Compared to the ideas of the two other Republicans in the race, Dumanis’ details are thin.
Next Up: Bob Filner
Liam Dillon is a news reporter for voiceofsandiego.org. He covers San Diego City Hall, the 2012 mayor’s race and big building projects. What should he write about next?
Please contact him directly at liam.dillon@voiceofsandiego.org or 619.550.5663.
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