Politics Report: Election Winners

It’s kind of crazy how many people have asked us over the last few days about whether Mayor Todd Gloria, Councilman Stephen Whitburn and others have won outright if they are able to stay above 50 percent in the ongoing vote counts.

No, they all must go to the runoff. Measure K made this change in 2016. I know you knew this, of course, you erudite Politics Report fans. Sorry for writing something you already knew, but, just in case one of your friends (definitely not you) didn’t know that, there you go.

Here is a Politics Report selection of some of the winners from this week.

Henry Foster: Foster is the exception to what I just said above. He can win outright as he ran to finish the term of former San Diego City Councilwoman Monica Montgomery Steppe, who won the chance to finish the term of former county Supervisor Nathan Fletcher.

Carl DeMaio: I’ve heard it often said you can’t lose three elections because you can’t come back from that. You can lose two, but you lose a third and you gotta look for another hobby or you’ll become a gadfly who runs for everything. But DeMaio may be pushing the rule to four: You can’t lose four elections. Since serving one term on the San Diego City Council, DeMaio has gone on to lose the race for mayor in 2012 and two congressional races after that. He seemed settled as a talk show host and architect of a vast promote-Carl cause.

Now, though, he is back. He has a commanding lead in the 75th Assembly race to replace Marie Waldron. The Republican Party endorsed Andrew Hayes and Hayes is one of the many people across the state refreshing the results page of the county registrar every day at 5 p.m. He could close the gap and still make it to the runoff. If so, it will be a very big and ugly battle and a rare one for state legislative positions.

And here comes Hayes: The latest results released Friday night have Hayes gaining more than 1,000 votes on Kevin Juza for the second spot in the runoff. Now

Related: I love what Mason Herron is doing on his site: He’s not just posting the updated election totals but how much the vote totals are changing with each update.

Heather Ferbert: This week was yet more proof that having the title of chief deputy city attorney has to be worth $1 million at least in the race for San Diego city attorney. Ferbert, a chief deputy city attorney, is at 53 percent of the vote compared to Assemblyman Brian Maienschein’s 47 percent. This race doesn’t matter except to whatever extent it does matter in a vibes way.

The vibes are definitely leaning Ferbert. We suspect she heard from a bunch of new friends this week.

Both candidates spent about $25,000 each from donations to their campaigns.

But the Democratic Party, the Labor Council, the Laborers, the Police Officers Association all spent independently to help Maienschein. If having the ballot title “chief deputy city attorney” is really worth a $1 million or more in the city attorney’s race, Maienschein has some calls to make.

Mixed Bag for Cops

The San Diego Police Officers Association, or POA, wants to take out Council President Sean Elo-Rivera but it’s not going to be easy. Elo-Rivera is at just below 50 percent. The POA spent big, comparatively, to help retired police officer Terry Hoskins make it to the runoff over Fernando Garcia. Hoskins got it.

The district is heavily Democratic, 54 percent to 14 percent Republican with a large independent block. The runoff will have more votes from areas where Elo-Rivera is stronger. But POA is going to go hard.

“The sharks are in the water for Sean Elo-Rivera. That’s going to be a priority race for us,” said Jared Wilson, the president of POA.

Wilson was also pleased that Geneviéve Jones-Wright came up short and won’t make it to the primary. The cops though have notably, though, not endorsed Larry Turner for mayor. Wilson declined to comment on that race.

Wilson and his colleagues, though, were not able to stop Henry Foster in District 4.

That Housing Commission Audit

Buried in the audit report released this week about the Housing Commission’s acquisition of hotels to house homeless residents was a stunning revelation. Our old friend Andy Keatts at Axios first highlighted it Thursday.

And now I have more.

Catch up: The big headline from the audit was about stuff we already knew: We knew that the Housing Commission had likely purchased a Mission Valley Residence Inn for more than it was worth. We knew that the broker the Commission had hired to help it purchase the Residence Inn and another property, Jim Neil, had recommended the hotel and then bought 40,000 shares in the company that owned it.

It was classic San Diego junior varsity corruption.

We knew that the purchase happened during the pandemic lockdowns, and we knew that, to justify the price it paid, the Housing Commission had relied on an appraisal of the hotel that was pegged to a date before the pandemic. In other words, it valued the hotel as a hotel when people traveled and not as a hotel when people did not travel.

It was nice for the audit to confirm all of that in its own voice and with the auditor’s thorough research.

The new thing: What we didn’t know was why exactly the Housing Commission and appraiser all agreed to use an appraisal of the value of the hotel from before Covid. Nobody from the city had bothered yet to investigate this wild and obvious reach to boost the value of the property that taxpayers were buying.

Then Keatts spotted this deep in the notes of the report: “CBRE, the appraisal firm, provided auditors with an email from Neil saying the commission’s legal counsel ‘only wanted a pre-COVID appraisal valuation.’ None of the agency’s staff or legal counsel received the email.”

I got that email exchange and it’s wild: In it, on Aug. 12, 2020, Dan Beverly from the appraisal team at CBRE asked the broker, Jim Neil, what it should do.

“Our contract from the [San Diego Housing Commission] states that we should prepare an As Is value of the property, which is assumed to be a current date of value which would reflect post-COVID values. The value range discussed of $63 to $67 million is based on pre-COVID values, and a current As Is value which reflects the impacts of COVID would likely be below the range discussed,” Beverly wrote.

“Can you please clarify what value we should provide?” Beverly asks Neil.

The Housing Commission purchased the hotel for $67 million, remember.

Neil responded with one line.

“Chuck says pre-COVID,” he wrote.

Chuck is Charles Christensen, the general counsel of the Housing Commission.

I reached out to the Housing Commission to see what Chuck was thinking.

The Housing Commission denies this: Scott Marshall, the spokesman for the Housing Commission referred me to Appendix D of the audit report as their response.

The Commission acknowledges that Christensen confirmed the contract requested an As Is appraisal of the property “which would reflect post-COVID valuations.”

But it disputes that he signed off on just the pre-COVID appraisal.

“According to the Housing Commission’s legal counsel, the decision to use a pre-COVID date was made between CBRE and the Housing Commission’s broker without involvement by or knowledge of SDHC or SDHC’s legal counsel,” the audit report reports.

So someone lied. If Neil, the broker, lied that “Chuck” wanted the pre-COVID value of the hotel, then it seems the city could have secured much more from him and his firm than the $1 million it recovered when the city attorney and City Council settled the city’s lawsuit with him.

It’s the Cop Versus the Mayor

Ousting an incumbent mayor is no easy, or cheap, task but the first step is to make it through the primary and Larry Turner has done that. He also got the good news Friday that a woman named Helen Michelle VanDiver chose to dismiss her lawsuit against the city alleging Turner is not eligible to be mayor because he had not established residency in the city of San Diego.

The news: VanDiver and her attorney notified the court they were dropping the lawsuit and VanDiver gave the Politics Report this prepared statement: “My hope from the start was that the Court would disqualify Mr. Turner from the ballot prior to the primary election. This case was driven by a need to hold our democracy accountable and to preserve our political processes locally; however, it’s taken a real toll on me and my family members — who have nothing to do with the case, yet have also been subjected to harassment by Mr. Turner’s supporters. I trust that the voters will reject Mr. Turner’s disingenuous campaign and hope that the media will hold him accountable and find the true answer to the important questions posed by this case.”

I asked if she still felt the case had merit. “Absolutely,” she wrote back.

Her attorney is Bob Ottilie, a well-known public interest lawyer who has been longtime friends with Mike Aguirre, the former San Diego city attorney who is representing Turner. Aguirre worked intensely on behalf of Turner alleging that the suit was evidence of illegal collusion between Mayor Todd Gloria and Gil Cabrera, who runs the PAC New San Diego that supports Gloria but must act without coordination with the mayor’s campaign.

Ottilie told me he was ready to go to court and the case is still sitting there baked for anyone who wants to pick it up.

“This is without question the most overwhelmingly clear domicile case I have ever seen in 40 years looking at these kind of cases,” Ottilie told me.

Third place isn’t interested: The court punted the hearing on the matter until after the election after the city made clear it would not be a big problem because, if Turner made it to the runoff but the court disqualified him, it would be easy to promote the third-place finisher into the runoff instead.

But Geneviéve Jones-Wright, the former public defender and civil rights lawyer, who has come in third, doesn’t appear to have any interest in taking that route to the runoff.

In her public note conceding the election, she wrote that the voters had spoken.

“And while I am aware of a legal challenge between the top two candidates, I want to make clear that I do not wish to substitute the voters’ decision with that of a judge,” she wrote.

If you have any feedback or ideas for the Politics Report, send them to scott.lewis@voiceofsandiego.org.