When Bruce Ehlers narrowly defeated incumbent Tony Kranz in the Encinitas mayoral race last fall, it was seen as a rejection of how the city was run.
Ehlers ran on a platform of more local control and pushback on state housing mandates.
“The goal is to actually maintain our small beach town ambiance and clean coastal environment,” he said. “That's kind of the main vision statement.”
One of the biggest issues he wants to tackle is infrastructure, especially storm drains to prevent flooding in places like Leucadia. That area is prone to flooding, which has been an issue since before Encinitas was incorporated as a city in 1986.
Ehlers said the previous council has been prioritizing unneeded projects such as streetscaping and buying Surfer’s Point.
“What had happened is we'd spent $100 million over the last 10 years on nonessential vanity beautification projects where we should have been spending it on basic infrastructure, pavement flooding and storm drain refurbishment,” he said.
This past November, voters rejected a half-cent sales tax increase that would have paid for road repairs and other infrastructure. While Ehlers didn’t campaign against the measure, he thinks the voters were correct in rejecting it.
He believes there’s enough money in the coffers to fund those infrastructure needs.
“We’ll find the money in the budget. And, without having to do the tax,” he said. “The tax would have been nice, but, you know, I think it was the wrong time.”
Ehlers also acknowledges the city, like many coastal cities in the region, has an affordability issue. But he doesn’t think state housing mandates are the answer.
Encinitas is already in compliance with the state's requirements for affordable housing, but some residents are pushing for more. They want the Encinitas to turn the city-owned lot, L7 or Quail Gardens, into affordable housing.
Ehlers is against this. He agrees with other residents that it should be turned into a park and said there are a number of new homes being built around that area.
“There's going to be 1,045 units with roughly 3,000 people moving in there over the next several years,” he said. “It was the absolute place where we need a park, and they were switching it out for a paltry number of units, low-income units.”
He also wants to tackle the issue of homelessness, saying it’s a regional issue that the county needs to step up on, especially by implementing CARE Court to get drug users off the streets and into treatment centers.
