Supervisor Candidate Left Trail of Unpaid Debts, Taxes 

San Diego County Board of Supervisors candidate Paloma Aguirre has made the county budget a centerpiece of her campaign. She recently urged supporters to back her because “control of San Diego County’s $8 billion budget and the direction of our region for years to come depend on who wins this election.” 

But Aguirre’s own debts, including unpaid property taxes, lawsuits filed by multiple creditors and a 2015 bankruptcy filed by her husband, Jose Bacalski, have become a campaign issue in their own right. 

Aguirre, a Democrat currently serving as mayor of Imperial Beach, still owes more than $2,600 in three-year-old unpaid property taxes and penalties on the Imperial Beach condominium she and Bacalski own, according to county tax records. 

Creditors in California and Washington, D.C. have sued Aguirre on multiple occasions for unpaid credit cards and other debts totaling nearly $7,000. Court records show Aguirre failed to attend key court hearings in at least two of those cases. 

In 2015, a year after she and Bacalski married, Bacalski filed for bankruptcy, seeking relief from more than $31,000 in debts owed to banks, credit card companies, bill collectors, department stores and a payday lender. 

Aguirre’s Republican opponent, Chula Vista Mayor John McCann, has seized on the money woes, questioning Aguirre’s financial acumen and accusing her of hypocrisy for failing to pay taxes to the same governmental agency she seeks to lead. 

“Paloma Aguirre can’t even pay her own bills – yet she wants to manage an $8 billion county budget?” McCann recently wrote on his campaign Facebook page. 

Aguirre referred questions to her campaign consultant, Dan Rottenstreich. 

Rottenstreich said that, far from calling into question Aguirre’s budgeting ability, the financial setbacks she and her husband faced give her insight into the fiscal challenges experienced by working-class families in her South County supervisorial district. 

“Paloma comes from a working-class background,” Rottenstreich said. “And like a lot of families struggling with rising costs, she and her husband missed a few payments during a rough patch. They worked with the county on an approved repayment plan and are staying current. That’s what responsibility in tough times looks like.” 

Rottenstreich said Aguirre’s unpaid property tax bill stemmed from an unintentional oversight following the 2021 purchase of her and Bacalski’s two-bedroom Imperial Beach condominium. 

“When [Aguirre and Bacalski] became aware of the error, they contacted the county and arranged a repayment plan, which they are current on,” Rottenstreich said. Rottenstreich said he was unable to specify how much of the outstanding $2,600 tax bill Aguirre and her husband have paid so far. 

Rottenstreich said Aguirre’s other debts – including $775 owed to a former friend who took Aguirre to small-claims court in 2010; $1,575 in credit card debt incurred in 2017 while Aguirre served as a legislative fellow in the office of New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker; and $5,300 owed since 2023 to the credit card company Capitol One – similarly stemmed from everyday financial hardships faced by working-class people. 

“Like a lot of working people, Paloma has had to juggle bills and make difficult financial choices,” Rottenstreich said. “She always takes responsibility and works to make it right.” 

Rottenstreich said Aguirre was working to pay back the $5,300 owed to Capitol One and had already repaid the Washington, D.C. debt and the debt owed to her former friend. 

Court documents show that in both the 2010 and 2017 debt cases, Aguirre did not show up to court hearings and lost both cases by default. Rottenstreich said he did not know why Aguirre did not attend the hearings. 

Rottenstreich said it was no coincidence McCann is attacking Aguirre on her financial record in the final stretch of the supervisor campaign. 

“If John McCann wants to make this race about financial judgment and trust, it’s not even close,” Rottenstreich said. “John McCann used his Republican political power to lobby Donald Trump for a convicted felon’s early release from federal prison, then got over $58,000 in campaign support from that criminal and her family.” 

In 2020, McCann wrote a clemency letter to then-President Donald Trump on behalf of a businesswoman serving a federal prison sentence for fraud. Following her release, the woman and her brother spent tens of thousands of dollars supporting McCann’s 2022 mayoral campaign. Last year, a jury convicted both siblings in a second fraud scheme. 

Rottenstreich said McCann’s attacks on Aguirre’s finances were simply an attempt to distract voters from his own record. 

“Working people can see the difference between Paloma, who understands their lives and fights for the economic security families need, and John McCann, who sells the public out to benefit himself and his millionaire criminal campaign donors,” Rottenstreich said. 

Aguirre and McCann are competing to represent the 640,000 residents of supervisorial District 1, which stretches from just south of downtown San Diego to the U.S.-Mexico border. 

Central to Aguirre’s campaign is a pledge to overhaul how the county handles its budget. Aguirre frequently argues that District 1 and its mostly working-class residents have been neglected by previous generations of San Diego leaders and disadvantaged by supervisors’ yearslong refusal to invest in adequate government services. 

She has urged supervisors to boost county revenue for government programs by loosening restrictions on billions of dollars in rainy day funds. And she has expressed openness to raising taxes on sales of high-priced homes if voters approve of the idea. 

In an April interview with Voice of San Diego, Aguirre called the county’s reserves “the people’s money” and pledged to reorient the county’s historically conservative approach to budgeting. 

“We have a massive amount of reserves that have been governed by very old-school conservative policies of the past,” Aguirre said. “That will be my focus, that we take a look at policies for reserves so we can put the people’s money back into the communities.” 

McCann, who has promised to rein in unnecessary county spending and highlighted his own financial leadership in Chula Vista, said in a statement that Aguirre’s budget plans would raise costs for District 1 residents – and are hypocritical given her failure to pay county taxes. 

“Paloma Aguirre wants to raise taxes and the cost of living for working people in San Diego County,” McCann said. “But now we learn that she’s refused to pay her property taxes for almost five years, the same taxes she demands the rest of us pay. That is the definition of hypocrisy.” 

Aguirre, who earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology at the University of San Diego and a master’s in marine conservation at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, does not have formal training in economics or financial management. 

But she has gained government budgeting experience during her six years on the Imperial Beach City Council. Earlier this month, the Council unanimously approved a two-year budget that raises salaries for lifeguards and other city workers while cutting some recreation spending and using $750,000 in reserve funds to pay one-time expenses. 

Chula Vista also recently adopted its budget. The unanimously approved budget fully funds city programs without cuts to services or use of reserve funds.  

Imperial Beach councilmembers are paid a part-time salary of $950 per month, plus city-funded health insurance and retirement. Mayors earn slightly more, $1,109 per month. 

Since her 2018 election to the Council, Aguirre has supplemented her city income by working various full-time and part-time jobs, according to financial disclosure statements. 

Until 2019, she served as coastal and marine director for Wildcoast, an environmental nonprofit founded by former Imperial Beach Mayor Serge Dedina. 

From 2019 to 2023, she was a senior environmental adviser to the International Community Foundation, a National City-based philanthropy that distributes millions of dollars in grants each year to nonprofit organizations. Financial disclosure forms show both the Wildcoast and foundation jobs paid Aguirre between $10,001 and $100,000 per year. 

After taking office as mayor in 2023, Aguirre shifted to part-time consulting work for the foundation while devoting most of her time to mayoral responsibilities. That same year, Bacalski started an electronic waste recycling business called Nerd Recycling. Previously, Bacalski had worked as a part-time notary, operated an online music business and drove for the rideshare company Uber. 

Aguirre listed the recycling business as a primary source of family income on her 2023 and 2024 financial disclosure forms, reporting annual spousal earnings from the company between $10,001 and $100,000 per year. 

Last year, the owner of another electronic waste recycling company, San Diego E-Waste, sued Bacalski, alleging that Bacalski and several other former employees stole San Diego E-Waste’s list of clients and a proprietary revenue-calculating formula before starting their own recycling business. 

The suit asked a judge to order Bacalski and the other employees to stop using San Diego E-Waste’s proprietary client list and “immediately return…all confidential information, documents and any other misappropriated materials.” 

Gavin Summers, the owner of San Diego E-Waste, declined to comment on the suit, saying only, “These guys just did some bad business practices. We’ll find out in court.” 

Bacalski referred questions to Rottenstreich. 

Rottenstreich called Summers “a disgruntled ex-employer who is suing not just Jose Bacalski but numerous of his ex-employees and partners and making outlandish claims against an array of former employees and business partners. The case has no merit.” 

Rottenstreich said Aguirre’s financial difficulties were not unusual in South San Diego County and likely would not count against her in the supervisor race because many South County residents have faced similar difficulties themselves. 

“This isn’t news – this is real life that a lot of folks in South County deal with,” Rottenstreich said. “Most people in South County have faced rising costs and unexpected bills and tough choices. Paloma understands that because she’s lived it…That’s exactly why working families trust Paloma because she understands them and she fights for them.”