Politics Report: Gloria’s Faulconer Agenda

We had a little fun on the podcast mocking this town’s “nationwide” searches for managers of its big agencies that so often land on the guy down the hall. But the birdies tell me there really was a nationwide search for the new police chief and one out-of-town candidate had a strong chance of getting the job.

Oakland Interim Police Chief Darren Allison interviewed well and has gotten praise for his 14-month stint as the head of the department there. Oakland hasn’t had the best image for crime lately but blame didn’t seem to fall on Allison and his time is up – this week Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao finally made a choice for permanent chief.

The new chief: This week, San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria announced he had chosen Assistant Chief Scott Wahl to take the job. Wahl is well known and liked, at least among the right people, if you want to be police chief. He was, for years, the voice of the Police Department and he’d walk through issues with or problems he had with journalists like us. He was also the sort of City Hall liaison for the police.

But one group was thrilled about Mayor Todd Gloria’s choice for police chief this week: former Mayor Kevin Faulconer and his associates.

“He was fantastic to work with when I was Mayor and if the position had opened up I would have chosen him. He’s got the right experience and vision to help make San Diego a better and cleaner place to live,” wrote Faulconer on X.

When the hepatitis A crisis provoked Faulconer to address homelessness as the city’s top problem, he tapped Wahl to lead the neighborhood policing initiative that was at the front end, Wahl told us many times, of rooting out the criminals who preyed on homeless residents.

This was the first police chief Gloria got to pick (and it may be the only one he ever gets to pick) and he chose the exact same one Faulconer would have picked.

Faulconer’s longtime friend and former Police Chief Shelley Zimmerman was also excited. She called Wahl “a great leader to lead our great department.”

Gloria began his term as mayor relentlessly criticizing his predecessor, Faulconer. But as he rounds out his final year of his first term, Gloria has followed Faulconer’s lead on public safety and homelessness.

It was exactly a year ago when we wrote about Faulconer’s plans to pursue a ballot initiative to make camping on public land illegal and vastly increase the shelter space to accommodate all the people he wanted off the streets. Gloria immediately followed with a plan to pursue an ordinance to ban camping on public land and pursue safe spaces for people to go.

At first, Faulconer insisted he would continue his push for a ballot measure and Gloria insisted he would put up his own ballot measure too. It was never clear what Gloria’s ballot measure would do. In a press conference, he said he it would “help untie our hands” but Faulconer dropped his push and decided to run for county supervisor and we haven’t heard of either ballot measure again.

The city did ban camping and put up signs saying no camping is allowed in many parts of San Diego and now a new police chief will be in charge of enforcing it.

Notes

They’re finally talking about the sales tax: We’ve been writing for a year about the plan working its way through City Hall chatter to raise the sales tax by 1 percentage point — the “Penny for Progress.” It finally went to the City Council’s Rules Committee, which unanimously decided to advance it (Union-Tribune).

The opposition: The Taxpayer’s Association seems ready to remind people it exists by taking a stand against the measure. But more interesting is what opposition and hesitancy develops in places suffering most from San Diego’s extremely high cost of living. I had heard Councilwoman Vivian Moreno was going to be against it. She supported it at Rules Committee but not enthusiastically and suggested they pursue a hotel room tax hike instead.

Shane Harris, founder of the People’s Alliance for Justice, hit on the two themes any opposition camp could use: inflation and the city’s purchase of 101 Ash St. as an example of extreme waste. It has become the easiest symbol for fraud and waste in the city critics have had in decades.

Dems use that building too: Faulconer regularly attacks County Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer for the state of homelessness in San Diego. Her attacks often feature 101 Ash St. Here was an email to supporters this week: “This pay-to-play corruption and incompetence has cost our region hundreds of millions of dollars and led the Union-Tribune to call Faulconer’s push to buy the building without an independent assessment an act of ‘staggering stupidity.’“

It’s pretty common for people to respond to government’s pleas for more money with “how about you stop the waste, fraud and abuse, first?” But they usually don’t have such an easy thing to point to like the empty tower on Ash Street.

Will it work? Voters don’t really know about the building. Even Lawson Remer’s email started with a primer on Ash Street and says if you know what it is, “congratulations! You’re officially a local government nerd (and our community is better for it!).”

Thanks, Terra!

It’s been a year: One year ago, former supervisor, Nathan Fletcher began accounting for his admitted “interactions” with Grecia Figueroa, an MTS employee the agency had fired months before. Figueroa claims they were nonconsensual assaults and harassment but his team eventually produced evidence she pursued him. It was the second to last Friday in March last year when told MTS leaders what he was willing to about the encounters as her threats to sue became more serious. She did sue days later and he vanished from public life.

“What a fucking year,” wrote Lorena Gonzalez, the chief officer of the California Labor Federation, AFL-CIO, and Fletcher’s wife. When I suggested that could be in reference to the Fletcher scandal she said no, it was “the most amazing year of union organizing and striking in my lifetime.”

A new suit: MTS is now dealing with a new retaliation claim from its chief information officer. She claims agency leaders asked her to violate Figueroa’s privacy and lied about what they knew about Figueroa’s claims and when they knew it. If this sounds familiar it’s because we wrote about it several weeks ago but it was pulled from the court and has now been filed again.

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