National City Councilmember and mayoral candidate Jose Rodriguez today plans to announce a third attempt to place a business tax hike before city voters.
Rodriguez said he, along with members of the Working Families Party and unions representing city employees and firefighters, will file paperwork for a citizens’ ballot initiative that would increase the amount the city collects in business license taxes from $760,000 per year to roughly $7.5 million.
The City Council twice voted down earlier attempts to place the business tax proposal on this year’s or next year’s ballot.
Rodriguez said the proposal, which falls most heavily on larger businesses, will ensure greater fairness in the city’s tax structure and help plug a gaping budget deficit.
“Everyday working families and community members ultimately support big businesses to pay their fair share,” Rodriguez said in an interview earlier this week.
Business groups, along with Rodriguez’s mayoral opponent, City Councilmember Marcus Bush, oppose the business tax proposal because they say it was rushed and could have unintended consequences for city employers.
Need More South County Politics?
You can come see Bush and Rodriguez duke it out (metaphorically) in the race for National City mayor at our 2026 Politifest, South Bay Edition.
On Friday, Oct. 2, we’ll be hosting a debate at the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center in National City starting at 6 pm.
We’ll be hosting a debate between all of the National City mayoral candidates, which also include a political organizer and the city treasurer. And we’ll also be hosting a debate between Chula Vista mayoral hopefuls: incumbent Republican John McCann and Democratic challenger Francisco Tamayo.
San Diego’s Flock-Load of Surveillance Cameras
San Diego has a whole lotta Flock cameras. In fact, the city has the densest concentration of Flock cameras of any California city, according to a new analysis from the organization FlindingFlock.com.
“At 2.3 per square mile [San Diego] is more densely covered than 63% of the 2,384 US cities indexed nationally,” the organization wrote in its report.
In all, volunteers for the organization documented 732 automated license plate readers in San Diego, which amounts to about 3.5 percent of the readers in the state. About 500 of those cameras are owned by the SDPD, while the rest are owned by other organizations.
Backlash against the surveillance devices, which use AI to identify and store information about the comings and goings of vehicles, has surged nationally in recent months. Much of the concern has been about how law enforcement is using the data. Multiple stories of officers misusing the cameras to do things like surveil ex-girlfriends or stalk actresses have surfaced.
SDPD leaders have begun to release more information about how they used the system to conduct 115,000 searches this year, reports Times of San Diego. The reasons include reports of stolen vehicles, wanted suspects and shots fired, but one line item in particular sticks out: “other.” Officers used that tag to conduct searches about 4,000 times this year.
Firefighters Swap Their City Council Endorsement
The San Diego firefighters union publicly endorsed outsider San Diego City Council candidate Martha Abraham on Tuesday.
The announcement comes the union dropped its endorsement of Councilmember Henry Foster earlier this month. The union’s vice president Mark Morrison said Foster didn’t fight hard enough for them in this year’s budget cycle.
He said the union pleaded with Foster – who’s chair of the budget committee – to not make cuts to the Fire-Rescue department, but cuts happened anyway.
“There’s nothing personal, right?” he said. “It’s just a matter of when we look at the scorecard nothing was done, right? Martha Abraham seems to understand our problems better and is willing to commit to trying to fix them.”
The firefighters are the only municipal union that has not secured a contract. They’ve been fighting to keep an option to be able to choose their own health insurance.
Abraham said on day one of her tenure she would push the city to go back to the table to deliver a fair contract for firefighters.
She also said she will fight to get a permanent fire station 51, which currently operates in Skyline out of a tent. We asked about her plan on how she would fund the fire station, but she did not offer specifics.
“ Fire Station 51 has been in a tent, in a trailer for the last 11 years, and that’s actually a public safety matter,” she said. “So we can’t sit here and talk about a budget deficit when we’re putting people’s lives and community lives at risk.”
According to the fiscal year 2027 adopted budget for Fire-Rescue capital improvement projects, it would cost more than $31 million to build the new station.
In Other News
- A Times of San Diego investigation reveals how migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border die within sight of surveillance cameras meant to find them. The investigation found at least 138 cases in the last four years along the California border where migrants’ remains were found within range of the cameras designed to help track and intercept them. (Times of San Diego)
- Non-profit Father Joe’s Villages opened new dorm-style apartments for San Diegans exiting homelessness. The units at the downtown campus are $842 a month, a fraction of the cost of a studio in San Diego. (KPBS)
- The lawyer representing a North Carolina girl accused of helping the San Diego mosque shooters says prosecutors haven’t provided enough information to defend his client. Prosecutors have yet to provide information about how and when the North Carolina girl communicated with the shooters. (KPBS)
The Morning Report was written by Jim Hinch, Jakob McWhinney and Mariana Martínez Barba. It was edited by Will Huntsberry.