San Diego’s business executives trekked up to the City of Trees this week to advocate for policies that make housing easier to build. Their visit was met with fanfare.
Labor leaders urged San Diego councilmembers to not attend the San Diego Regional Chamber’s annual event in Sacramento this week over job postings the organization listed on its website for a company that operates immigration detention centers.
The chamber is a key political organization that acts on behalf of San Diego’s businesses, both large and small, in Sacramento and Washington. Business leaders and elected officials join the two-day trip to Sacramento to discuss the chamber’s legislative priorities.
Representatives with the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council have attended the event in the past, and the labor council, which advocates for the region’s thousands of hotel and hospitality workers, has steadily risen as its own dominating political force in local campaigns over the past two decades.
While labor and the chamber have tussled before, tensions reignited between the organizations last month.
California Labor Federation President Lorena Gonzalez drew attention to a job posting the chamber shared about positions at the Western Region Detention Facility, which is managed by the U.S. Marshals Service and run by The GEO Group, a private company responsible for numerous ICE detention facilities across the country.
“Times have changed, so should you,” Gonzalez said in the Instagram post last month.
Shortly after, the chamber removed the listing on its website and newsletters.
“The chamber is not affiliated with the hiring of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents,” the organization said in a statement. “The chamber has a proven, long-standing record of and continues to support immigration reform policies that provide a legal path to citizenship and connect our business community with a skilled workforce.”
But that didn’t stop local labor council President Brigette Browning from urging members not to go on this week’s Sacramento trip.
“I think if the chamber is going to behave like that, there should be consequences,” Browning told Voice of San Diego about the job posting and the chamber’s ties with the company.
“We also said that if people were looking for the chamber’s endorsement in the political process, that we would weigh that heavily in our endorsements.”
It was a reversal by Browning from when she urged the Biden administration to keep the Western Region Detention Facility open when it nearly closed four years ago.
Browning said that she was supporting workers and their jobs when she pushed to keep the facility open at the time, not GEO Group.
The chamber maintains that it opposes unnecessarily aggressive and inhumane immigration enforcement, and that it has partnered with the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council for jobs at the facility in the past.
There has been a divergence of interests between labor and chamber for decades, “but I don’t think that’s necessarily unhealthy,” said Julie Meier Wright, who served as the California Secretary of Trade and Commerce and used to be on the chamber’s board.
The chamber’s focus has always been to bring a regional perspective to Sacramento and elevate the dynamics that make it unique, Meier Wright continued, such as its trade relationship with Mexico and heightening the profile of BIOCOM, the major representative of the life sciences industry in San Diego.
Sometimes the chamber conflicts with labor.
Sometimes it doesn’t.
Why Business Leaders Were in Sacramento
As far as policies it wants passed this year, the chamber is prioritizing housing reform to make permitting even easier and eliminate additional environmental regulations protected under the California Environmental Quality Act.
Its focus on CEQA reform isn’t new, either. But the Legislature’s recent moves to roll back major environmental protections in order to build more housing has made it more of a priority for the chamber.
“It’s been a priority of both the Chamber and EDC (San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation) for years, but unfortunately, sometimes policymaking moves at a glacial pace and other special interests are powerful in Sacramento,” Meier Wright said.
“In the last year or two, CEQA reform has become more possible because of the backlash against unaffordable housing.”
At the federal level, the chamber is focused on upcoming trade negotiations over the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which is up for review in July.
In addition to executives with the chamber, Democratic assemblymembers Chris Ward, David Alvarez and Tasha Boerner, and senators Catherine Blakespear, a Democrat, and Brian Jones, a Republican, were also present.
What I’m Reading Now
President Donald Trump declines to apologize for a racist video of the Obamas he later removed on social media after receiving bipartisan blowback, The New York Times reports.
Chief Border Patrol agent Greg Bovino faces a complicated history in the Imperial Valley where he oversaw the agency’s operations for several years, from inewsource.
City leaders roll back on parking fees at Balboa Park and look to find new revenue sources elsewhere, The San Diego Union-Tribune writes.
Thank you for reading the Sacramento Report. Please reach me at nadia@voiceofsandiego.org for any tips, feedback or questions.