Zucchet is General Manager of the San Diego Municipal Employees Association and resides in Ocean Beach.
In his Jan. 13 op-ed published in Voice of San Diego, former Coronado Mayor Richard Bailey argues that increased spending and poor management are the real culprits of the city of San Diego’s budget woes.
But in many of the issue areas that Bailey cites (personnel and pension costs, lack of public safety spending and trash collection fees) San Diego is in line with or even outperforming other cities – including the city of Coronado under Bailey’s leadership as councilmember and mayor for 12 years:
- According to the Census Bureau, the city of San Diego’s population steadily grew more than 7 percent between 2010 and 2024 to 1,404,000. During the same period, the population of Coronado decreased 5 percent to 18,000. Despite this decline in residents, Coronado’s general fund personnel budget rose 89 percent from FY 2014 (Mr. Bailey’s first full fiscal year in office) to FY 2026. During the same period – with a rising population – San Diego’s general fund personnel expenditures rose 76 percent. Coronado has one city employee for every 70 residents; San Diego has one employee for every 107 residents.
- San Diego’s total pension payment rose from $275 million in FY 2014 to $533 million in FY 2026, a 94 percent increase. During the same period, the total pension payment by Coronado rose from $4.3 million to $11.8 million, a whopping 174 percent increase. Both plans have about the same funded ratio of assets compared to future liabilities, with San Diego’s plan having more conservative actuarial assumptions than Coronado’s.
- Between FY 2014 and FY 2026, Coronado’s general fund budget nearly doubled (up 97 percent) from $42 to $82.9 million. During the same time, San Diego’s general fund budget increased by 76 percent ($1.23 to $2.17 billion).
- San Diego spends 57 percent of its general fund budget on police, fire/emergency medical services and lifeguards ($1.23 billion out of $2.17 billion). Coronado spends only 42 percent of its general fund budget on the same public safety services ($34.6 million out of $82.0 million).
- Finally, Mr. Bailey’s claim that San Diego is “nickel-and-diming residents” with fees like paying for trash really takes the audacity cake. First, San Diego was the last city in San Diego County to begin recovering the cost for trash collection. Coronado has been charging its residents for trash collection for decades. Secondly, when Mr. Bailey took office, Coronado subsidized 50 percent of residents’ cost of trash collection. A 2025 inewsource article documented how over the last decade, the city eliminated that subsidy such that Coronado residents now pay all or nearly all of the cost. There’s nothing wrong with that – it is what literally every other recognizable city in California and the United States of America does – but it is wrong for Mr. Bailey to talk about “nickel-and-diming residents” when what he did in Coronado with trash fees is perhaps the definition of nickel-and-diming residents. And the elimination of the subsidy also amounted to a textbook bait-and-switch for the residents of Coronado. Oh, the irony.
Nothing written here is intended to throw shade on the city of Coronado. By most accounts, it is a well-run city with very strong financial reserves and generally satisfied residents.
But Mr. Bailey’s sermonizing about San Diego’s woes falls flat given his own record. The notion that Mr. Bailey can swoop in and run for office in San Diego (as he is suspected of considering) based on his record in Coronado is dubious at best, both because his record, on the metrics he cites, is not flattering to him and because Coronado and San Diego are obviously very different cities.
San Diego is the second largest city in California (eighth largest in the United States). Coronado’s size ranks 372nd among cities in California. Coronado is 7.4 square miles with about 2,500 residents per square mile; San Diego is 325 square miles with 4,300 residents per square mile. Demographics, household income, poverty rates, homeownership percentages and pretty much every other metric is wildly different between the two cities – as are the challenges faced when governing.
Of course, Mr. Bailey is right about one point in his piece: the explosive growth in management at the city of San Diego since 2015 is costly, outrageous and indefensible. The statistics he quotes (460 percent growth in middle management positions since 2015, which is 23 times more than the growth in frontline workers) come directly from a presentation the Municipal Employees Association made to a San Diego City Council committee one year ago.
We welcome his voice to this issue. MEA will continue to work with Mayor Todd Gloria and the City Council to right-size that part of the city’s workforce so we can better focus on employees who actually deliver essential services to San Diego residents.