An effort to raise taxes to fix San Diego’s crumbling and clogged stormwater system took a step toward the November ballot Thursday.
The city of San Diego’s Rules Committee unanimously directed city staff to bring a recommendation back in June on how to tax properties based on square footage of surfaces that don’t absorb water (like concrete driveways or parking lots) to raise money for the stormwater system.
Urbanization and the paving of otherwise natural soils, especially along waterways, is a big reason why San Diego flooded so badly on Jan. 22. San Diego unsuccessfully tried to tax land that promotes flooding by putting a tax on the ballot back in 2022. Back then, a survey suggested there was support for a tax of 4- to 5-cents per square-foot. San Diego’s Independent Budget Analysts have said it would take an almost 26-cent tax to fully cover the lengthy laundry list of stormwater needs.
San Diego City Council President Seann Elo-Rivera picked up that fallen baton this year in an effort to close a multi-billion dollar backlog of stormwater projects.
“This morning somewhere in the range of 1,700 city of San Diego residents woke up in hotel rooms three months after being displaced from their homes at no fault of their own,” Elo Rivera said Thursday. “We need to take every measure possible to prevent that.”
Public Power Fails Next Test
San Diegans who want to wrest the power grid from San Diego Gas and Electric failed to win support from council members on Thursday.
The group, called Power San Diego, asked the Rules Committee to put a public takeover of the city’s grid before voters in November. Power San Diego needs to gather thousands of signatures to independently attain a ballot measure, but support from the Rules Committee is another way to achieve that same goal. Other environmental activist groups like San Diego 350 turned out to hold posters that read, “Fire SDG&E.” But multiple union labor organizations turned out in equal measure to pressure councilmembers against public power.
Union reps like Nate Fairman of IBEW Local Union 465, which represents hundreds of SDG&E workers, and Brigitte Browning, executive secretary-treasurer of the San Diego & Imperial Counties Labor Council, argued Power San Diego had made no effort to work with unions on their proposed ballot measure.
“I find it very offensive and disrespectful for people who have no idea what it’s like to negotiate a contract to tell us how they’re going to be protected without engaging with us,” Browning said.
Bill Powers, one of Power San Diego’s leaders, said he’s made informal attempts to reach out to Fairman and his base, but said it’s state law that a public takeover of a private utility must honor union labor contracts for at least three years.
Under the proposed ballot measure, “we go a step further,” he said. “We’ll honor those for 10 years.”
Councilman Joe LaCava, who chairs the city’s public energy-buying company called San Diego Community Power, said he didn’t support this ballot measure while the city is conducting its own municipalization study. Elo-Rivera said he didn’t think the proposed ballot measure was “baked enough.”
“I have no love for corporate monopolies reaching into the pockets of everyday people but this is a very complex issue,” Elo-Rivera said.
A political action committee that SDG&E execs started to fight the ballot measure, called Responsible Energy San Diego, commended the City Council for, “standing alongside working families and business community, and others to reject this reckless ballot proposal to force a government takeover of the electric grid that would cost $9.3 billion or more,” said Matthew Awbrey, a spokesman for the PAC, in an mail. The company hired a consultant to study pricetag, concluding it would cost the city $11 billion or more to buy-out their grid and part ways.
But that’s several billion dollars more than consultants hired by the city estimated in a 2023 study. It concluded that shifting a privately-owned power grid to one held by the public would eventually save ratepayers money.
Correction: A previous version of this story misidentified Power San Diego.
Note to Sean Elo-Rivera: The floods that displaced 1,700 San Diegans (many of them your constituents) could have been prevented if you and your Council colleagues hadn’t rubber-stamped the 101 Ash Street settlement that diverted funds from storm drain maintenance and other infrastructure projects. You made a bad bet. Now you want taxpayers to cover your losses, and you expect voters to bail you out. Good luck with that.
This. Close to a billion will have been wasted on this debacle when it’s all said and done. Not to mention the endless paving of lots and clear-cutting of urban canopy for the developer-driven ADU fest. I’d have voted NO on public power, despite the Sempra/SDGE gouging, just based on prior history of the City being unable to NOT be incompetent AF. Imagine how they’d run a utility.
Cost of living here is $$$ and the City wants to make it even more so to cover their own incompetence. At the least Gloria et al. should just resign over their borderline criminal incompetence; no clue how to run a city efficiently.
Kate Callen has my vote for D3 this fall.
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Easy to say let’s slap a tax on it and now they want to know how to tax properties based on square footage of surfaces that don’t absorb water. This is reinventing the wheel and coming back with a square one. Vote no to Todd and Elo-Rivera and end taxpayer subsidies to builders. Affordability starts with taxes, water rates, trash rates, and all the bandages to cover the inability to stay within a budget.
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Our electricity monopoly charges us the highest rates in the nation, discourages rooftop solar and is incentivized to keep charging us more and more. If we’ve learned anything over the past few years, isn’t it that the lesser of two evils is still an extremely important distinction? A “public takeover” (aka, a municipal electric utility… like the ones in every municipality in CA with a non-profit structure, who ALL have lower rates than we do) is preferable to a corporate monopoly that just announced rate hikes along with record profits.
Why do we still have investor-owned utilities?
Like all good for-profit businesses, a key goal is to charge the highest rate the market will allow, and deliver the highest profits to their investors. And SDG&E is a fine example, reaping $1 million-per-day in profits from San Diego residents and businesses and with rates increases of 10% for the next five years already approved. Is it any surprise that the electrical rates in San Diego are the highest in the country?
SDG&E is not evil; they support some good causes, and are generally popular. But this just masks the reality that they are picking our pockets.
How about adopting an initiative that would put electric power generation in the hands of someone on our side? A public power initiative could provide long-term rate relief for hundreds of thousands of households and businesses.
Do we have the will to do this? Time will tell.
The City of San Diego wants an additional tax from property owners with too much impermeable cover on lots forcing more runoff into the storm drain system.
You mean, such as impermeable, lot-crowding, neighborhood-destroying, tree-killing ADU’s? If the storm drain system is choking, it’s not from runoff. It’s choking on a cynical, myopic hypocrisy flowing out of City Hall.
The proposed storm water tax is a result of the city underfunding storm water maintenance. Given there are currently many underfunded city responsibilities will we be dragged through one mismanaged disaster after the next, in order to increase the municipal treasury? Quite the strategy to fund giveaways to wealthy institutions and developers. Developers will no longer have Development Impact Fees, so that shortfall needs to be made up somehow. The answer seems to be regressive taxes/fees like the new trash tax/fee and exploding water and sewer bills with no end in sight.
The city gave SDSU 400 million by selling the stadium site at 16 cents on the dollar, while the University sat on a 300 million dollar endowment. The auditor resigned since he did not want to lie on the ballot but the City Attorney stepped in and on the 2018 ballot lied about the stadium sites fair market value. When I called the City Attorney on it, their response was: “Buyer Beware on what they claim”. Our ballot measures are deceptive so maybe we should start there.
When it comes to municipal dollars San Diego residents are losing the competition with wealthy institutions and their lobbyists.