This story first appeared in the Politics Report, our weekly newsletter on politics.
Jack McGrory, the city’s former city manager among many other things, did a podcast interview recently with Discover La Jolla. He discussed La Jolla’s effort to secede from the city of San Diego and he said something no one has been talking about.
He indicated the citizens of greater San Diego may not have any say at all in whether La Jolla gets to break away.
If true, that would be huge. And to be clear, the officials overseeing this process don’t think it’s true. But this is a largely untested legal territory.
McGrory’s argument bucks everything we’ve understood about how this process would work. The common understanding has been this: The agency overseeing the petition will commission the study of how it would work, and approve a deal to be considered. Then La Jollans get to vote on whether they want to secede. And all voters in the city of San Diego get to vote on whether La Jolla can secede. Both must say yes.
But McGrory told me that what the law actually says is that anyone who is affected by the detachment gets to vote. He and the rest of the secession camp are testing the argument that the rest of San Diego won’t be affected.
That’s not how it worked in 2002 when Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley tried to break away from Los Angeles. In that case, both residents of the seceding territories and the rest of Los Angeles got a vote. (Citywide, voters shot down both measures. Hollywood voters also didn’t want to secede. In the Valley, voters narrowly approved secession — but it didn’t matter.)
Just because that’s how it went down in 2002, doesn’t mean the La Jolla secession group couldn’t take this to court and challenge the citywide vote. Very few detachments efforts have happened in the past century or more and so there is little legal precedent to draw on.
McGrory likes to say that the last city to successfully detach was Coronado from the city of San Diego in 1880, but I could not confirm whether Coronado was actually the last across the entire state.
At any rate, officials at the Local Agency Formation Commission, or LAFCO, say it’s their understanding that the citywide vote is necessary.
Much about this process seems to be taking shape in real time — which leads to another bit of news.
How the Ballot Would Work
It had been our understanding at the Politics Report that first La Jollans would vote on the secession and then, if secession passed, the rest of the city would vote, at a later date. Not so, say LAFCO officials.
The entire city and the neighborhood of La Jolla would vote at the same time. The current target date is November 2028.
And it wouldn’t just be the question of secession. On the same ballot, La Jollans could vote on a potential City Council for their new city, say LAFCO officials.
If La Jollans approved separation and the city approved separation — some extraordinarily big if’s — then the new city of La Jolla might be incorporated as early as the summer of 2029, LAFCO officials say.
What’s Next
A lot — and at the same time, not that much — has to happen before anything gets on the ballot.
On Monday, LAFCO’s board will meet to decide who to hire to conduct a “comprehensive fiscal analysis” of the detachment. Only two companies made bids to conduct the analysis and a panel of folks is going to recommend that London Moeder Advisors — a local company that has conducted real estate and financial analyses of all kinds — get the contract.
Representatives from the city of San Diego and the La Jolla seceders, led by McGrory, will then haggle back and forth, likely for months, about what should be included in the analysis. How much of the city’s pension debt is La Jolla on the hook for? How much will San Diego lose in property tax revenue? This will all get debated, with LAFCO at the center.
But that fiscal analysis will get done. And when it’s done (the target date is May 2028) LAFCO commissioners will decide on what, if anything, to put on the ballot.
Despite McGrory’s time at the city, he thinks San Diego is now so poorly managed that he owes it no allegiance.
“I was skeptical at first [of secession,]” McGrory said on the podcast. “But the more I have watched the city of San Diego and what is really a disastrous system of government down there — nobody’s really in charge, nobody’s accountable. Dealing with the city is a nightmare.”
He added: “It’s mindboggling what goes on down there.”
Irrespective of the former city manager’s opinion, the law that LAFCO, and the City must follow is clear, City voters must approve any attempt of LJ incorporation.
Interesting to hear about the lack of a citywide vote on La Jolla secession. What do people think about that decision?
I’m all for it. La Jolla wouldn’t be pushing for this if San Diego had not allowed core city services to decline so precipitously. Fix the streets, focus on infrastructure, provide quality public safety.
Instead, it’s a constant stream of dumb actions (101 Ash St, the grand homeless shelter, blocked flood channels, ruining neighborhoods with apartment like ADU’s then saying “we didn’t expect that”🤡).
Go for it La Jolla. Firing the city of San Diego maybe the only way to get the message across.
McGrory might want to study his history, because when Coronado separated from San Diego in 1890 it was via a citywide vote.
Also, the situation was very different. The California supreme court ruled Coronado wasn’t part of San Diego in 1877, then reversed itself in 1888 and ruled it was. In the interim San Diego declined to provide anything to the peninsula, not even firefighting or schools, even after the second ruling. Coronado residents in turn refused to pay city taxes.
Also the local real estate market had just collapsed, the private companies that built the roads and water lines in Coronado were going out of business, and someone was going to have to take up their maintenance. A lot of people in Coronado wanted to stay in San Diego so the whole city would pay for it, and a lot of people in San Diego wanted them to leave so the city could spend its money somewhere else, but both sides decided it was simpler to let Coronado pay for itself, as it already had been for years.