San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria gave his annual State of the City address Wednesday night at the Balboa Theatre in downtown San Diego. It was the fourth and final speech of his term before he faces voters to seek a second and final term. You can watch the full address here.
Gloria spent much of the speech touting progress on filling potholes, clearing homeless encampments and improving the morale of city employees. Here are four key takeaways:
Rolling back criminal justice reform
Gloria started his speech talking about public safety, sharing local crime data that showed a reduction in reports of murder, rape, robbery and burglary from 2022 to 2023. He said San Diego remains one of the "safest" big cities in the United States, using a crime reporting database managed by the FBI.
But despite San Diego's relative safety, he argued California is too soft on criminals and that a major criminal justice reform law passed by voters in 2014 should be rolled back. The law, Prop 47, downgraded certain nonviolent crimes from felonies to misdemeanors and increased the use of noncarceral punishments like probation.
"That law may have made sense at the time," Gloria said. "However, since it was implemented, we’ve seen criminals exploit these reforms, leading to organized networks of career thieves ransacking stores with little to no consequence."
There was a wave of media coverage in late 2023, suggesting that "organized retail theft" was a growing problem across the country. But the data behind those claims have since been debunked.
Streamlining housing near transit
Gloria's speech contained two big policy announcements, the first of which related to building more mixed-income housing near public transit.
Last year, Gloria ordered the city's Development Services Department to permit affordable housing projects within 30 days. Since that order, he said the average permitting time for those projects has been reduced to just nine days.
Now, Gloria is expanding that direction to include apartment buildings that make use of a local incentive program called Complete Communities. The program, passed by Gloria's predecessor, Kevin Faulconer, allows developers to exceed density and height limits if their projects are within walking distance of public transit and include units that have to be rented below the market rate.
"Complete Communities incentivizes housing near transit," Gloria said. "And last year it accounted for 1,000 of the new homes permitted, with 15% of those set aside for low- and moderate-income San Diegans. This new, faster timeline will likely increase those numbers, creating even more homes San Diegans can afford."
It's possible that Gloria's direction to speed up permitting on Complete Communities projects could result in delays for housing projects that don't use the program.
Union hiring
The second major policy announcement that came from Gloria's speech has to do with hiring union labor on public works projects like bridges, libraries and fire stations.
Last year, Gloria said he would propose a citywide "project labor agreement" with the San Diego County Building and Construction Trades Council, an umbrella group that represents unionized construction workers. In his speech Wednesday, Gloria said that the agreement is ready for a City Council vote next month.
Project labor agreements, or PLAs, require the use of unionized workers. In exchange, those unions guarantee there will be enough workers to get the project done.
"The agreement… will ensure city projects get done on time and on budget," Gloria said. "It will provide the city with a reliable source of highly-skilled workers for all city construction projects. It'll encourage the employment of local residents for these good-paying jobs. And they will meet high standards for worker health and safety."
While project labor agreements are pretty obscure to the average San Diegan, they've long been a hot topic at City Hall. Voters banned them in 2012, when Republicans held more influence in San Diego. Then in 2022 voters repealed that ban — a sign of the city's trend toward more progressive politics.
Words unspoken
Notably absent from the mayor's speech was any mention of the threat posed by climate change. Gloria made only one passing reference to delivering infrastructure projects "equitably and in keeping with our ambitious climate action goals."
The core of those climate goals is a commitment to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2035. The city's most recent emissions inventory showed progress had stalled in 2021 due to an increase in driving as COVID-19 restrictions eased.
Gloria also stayed silent on taxes. A citizen's initiative to raise the countywide sales tax rate by a half percentage point recently qualified for the November 2024 ballot. Most of the money would go to public transit, with a smaller share of funds going to highway and road maintenance. Gloria is not listed among the measure's endorsers.
However, there's another tax measure that Gloria is on board with: a one percentage point sales tax hike that would support the city's general fund. The measure would help alleviate the city's chronic budget shortfalls, but voters would not be able to direct the funding to a specific purpose.
The larger sales tax proposal, being spearheaded by City Councilmember Raul Campillo, still needs the approval of the City Council to make it on the city ballot.
