Disappointment Follows Gloria Into Sixth Year

In early 2020, the future was bright for Todd Gloria. Gloria hadn’t been elected yet, but his campaign was cooking and it seemed he held all the cards to become San Diego’s next mayor.

He convened a kitchen cabinet — an unofficial group of advisers — at a political consultant’s office downtown. Gloria sat at the head of the table and the group had heady discussions about his future.

At the time, he was San Diego’s shining son. Affable, polished and able to work a room like few other politicians. Child of a gardener and a hotel maid. First-generation college graduate. And soon he would be the first openly queer, non-White person elected mayor. Gloria had an amazing story to tell – and the assembled team was there to decide how to tell it.

The polls at the time showed Gloria was beloved citywide and the majority of San Diegans believed the city was heading in the right direction. These circumstances would be used to Gloria’s advantage. The priority for his team would be to focus on Todd as a personality, not the issues, a consultant said, according to one person at the meeting. (Gloria’s deputy chief of staff said they very much ran a campaign on the issues.)

Gloria’s team would steer clear of big issues. Instead, they would portray Gloria as the handsome and affable captain of a glorious, unstoppable ship.

No one spoke of what Gloria would do when he became mayor, the person said. In fact, some people were already thinking past City Hall.

Steve Alexander, a life coach and political consultant who has been connected to San Diego’s political elite for decades, conjured up a dreamy vision.

Alexander had spent some time in the White House, while Barack — as he called him — was president. He had seen what the world also witnessed: Obama was intelligent, personable, an American everyone could be proud of.  Alexander had walked the halls of the West Wing and seen pictures of Obama’s family, diverse and reflective of a new America. All of what he saw brought to mind Todd Gloria, Alexander said. Gloria shared the same powerful political alchemy as Obama – one that cuts across race, gender and party lines – and, if everything went well, Gloria himself could grace those halls as one of America’s next presidents.

**

Gloria breezed into office in 2020 on a campaign promise to bring what he called “Big City Energy” to San Diego. Past administrations had been playing small ball, acting like townies, even though they had been running the eighth largest city in the country and second largest in California. Gloria would solve the small problems easily and make important advances on the structural ones, like homelessness, housing and public transit.

“Together, I believe that we can and will solve the biggest problems of our time,” Gloria said, at his first State of the City address after being elected.

But Gloria’s time as mayor — even to many of his supporters — has been a disappointment.

He came into office with an 8-1 Democratic super majority on the City Council. Since then, Democrats have taken control of all nine Council seats. But even with all that fire power, Gloria has few major achievements.

“Normal politicians over promise and the decent ones deliver at least something. People might feel disappointed relative to what was promised, but there is action,” said Kyra Greene, the executive director of the Center on Policy Initiatives, a left-leaning advocacy organization. “In every single area I can’t name something significant that [Gloria] has done.”

Gloria’s administration has staggered from one loss to another — while his vision for the city remains unclear.

Early in his term, his vaccine mandate for city workers not only cost him political capital, it made him look weak when he didn’t follow through with firing employees as he promised. Councilmembers ridiculed one of his biggest, boldest ideas: to transform a massive warehouse into a 1,000-bed homeless shelter. On other real estate deals too, the losses are astounding. He made big promises to redevelop Civic Center Plaza and expand the Convention Center, but both projects are indefinitely paused. Gloria eviscerated the previous administration for multiple failures related to the redevelopment of Midway, but Gloria’s redevelopment plan just got shot down by the Supreme Court. 

Throughout his career he made big promises on public transit and climate change, but when presented with an opportunity to advance those goals, he caved.

La Jolla is methodically going through the process to separate and Gloria has failed to stop it in court.

He pledged to fix the city’s structural budget deficit once and for all. But despite passing controversial new fees and making cuts, the deficit remains — and threatens to cripple city services and investments in infrastructure. The biggest increase in revenue, a new fee on residential trash collection, is now in danger of being repealed, which would transform a troubled budget into one teetering on insolvency.

Gloria’s relationship with the City Council has devolved into near-total chaos. Whether the mayor will win or lose on any given issue seems to be an open question right until a vote takes place. The mayor’s team can’t figure out where individual councilmembers stand — nor they him.

Gloria isn’t totally without wins.

By far the biggest flex of his mayoralty was a controversial law that banned homeless people from camping in many parts of the city. Gloria pressured city councilmembers with different parts of the political apparatus and got his law through on a tight 5-4 vote. Visible homelessness downtown decreased significantly. Critics said both that it merely masked the problem or didn’t go far enough.

The number of people counted during the annual homeless census dropped by 13.5 percent in the city last year. It was a significant reduction, but not everyone believed homelessness itself actually decreased.

Another achievement: Gloria has significantly increased the amount of housing that can be built in multiple neighborhoods, like University City and Clairemont, through Community Plan updates. He has also tweaked major housing initiatives from previous administrations that may be beginning to work. Rents recently went down for the first time in 15 years – albeit by less than a percent.

Despite these advances, many people are disappointed. In conversations with dozens of people close to City Hall, people expressed surprise and sadness that Gloria has had such a hard time governing. The public is also disappointed. A poll by Competitive Edge Research in November put Gloria’s approval rating at 33 percent – lower than Donald Trump’s.

“I’ve never seen a mayoral office be this ineffective,” said one City Council staffer. “I used to think I was being gaslit — like this is a weird prank show. Now I think, ‘No, this is just how terrible they are.’”

Gloria and his team don’t totally understand the criticism. In their minds, it is clear they are driving progress.

They insist the city is making measurable gains on key issues like housing and homelessness. Outside forces, like the pandemic, the current presidential administration and the rising cost of living, have made it difficult to operate, yes – but even still, the city is running smoothly and important work is moving forward.

“Being a big city mayor is a difficult job,” Gloria told me. 

“These number of years have been challenging. And that would’ve been true just because they included a pandemic and federal challenges and other issues. But trying to shift the city to where it needs to be in order to be successful, that was never going to be an easy task,” he said. “I believe we’re making progress. And when taking the longer view, I believe that this time will be seen as what was necessary to get the city where it needs to go.”

On his relationship with the Council: “I would characterize the situation as extremely functional,” Gloria said.

Will Rodriguez-Kennedy, chair of the San Diego County Democratic Party, also defended Gloria.

The mayor is doing “as well as can be expected, given the structural issues our city is facing,” Rodriguez-Kennedy said.

“I know and understand why people are disappointed. If you go out and say you’re going to bring ‘Big City Energy,’ people are going to expect that,” he said. “I do not think we show enough grace for people doing these tough jobs… The reality is that the problems that plague our city, they are long-term problems that go back to multiple generations of leadership.”

It’s too soon to rate Gloria’s performance as mayor, Rodriguez-Kennedy said.

“I think it may be a little too early. Next year we might have a good sense about things are going finally,” he said.

**

It is difficult to overstate just how much people loved Gloria before he became mayor.

Voters elected him to the City Council when he was 30 years old. A few years later, when the chaotic reign of Bob Filner engulfed City Hall, Gloria helped steady the course. When Filner resigned, Gloria, who was council president, automatically became interim mayor — or, as he was affectionately called, iMayor.

The political establishment had nothing but kind words for him. Former Mayor Jerry Sanders, a Republican, called him “a class act.”

“He does things he thinks he should because it’s in his heart or he thinks it’s the right thing to do. So I admire Todd tremendously,” Sanders said.

But Gloria didn’t get just right the ship. He also pursued what the U-T called an “ambitious agenda.”

Gloria cracked down on illegal medical marijuana dispensaries, which Filner had ignored. He championed a ballot measure to raise the minimum wage and a plan to borrow more than $100 million to fix aging infrastructure. Then, he pushed a bold Climate Action Plan his Republican successor would later finalize. All of the action came in just six months.

Todd Gloria in 2013. / Photos by Sam Hodgson

He left City Hall with the political establishment’s unconditional gratitude and a reputation as a do-er.

People were excited for Gloria’s election in 2020, in part because he had such deep political experience. He had been a political staffer, a councilmember, interim mayor and an assemblymember. He seemed to truly want to advance Democratic causes and, critically, know how to get things done.

“It’s so interesting to me because he’s such a talented politician. He’s smart. He’s well-spoken. I have watched him in different moments and settings over the past 10 years be very good at navigating the politics,” said one person who has known Gloria for more than a decade. “What’s really kind of wild about his time as mayor is that he hasn’t been very good at that.”

**

Initially, it seemed as if Gloria’s Big City mindset might be working.

Prior Councils had tried, and failed, to regulate vacation rental homes multiple times.

But now, Gloria had an alliance with the new Council President Jennifer Campbell, whom he had actively supported. The two of them managed to create a license system and limit the number of vacation rentals.

Gloria also managed to successfully negotiate a deal that gave San Diego Gas & Electric a 10-year renewal, with a 10-year extension option, on its contract with the city. Environmental groups and the power giant wanted wildly different things out of the new agreement. Environmentalists weren’t happy with the deal — which was for a longer term and more lucrative for SDG&E than they wanted — but Gloria convinced some on his left flank on the City Council to come along with him. 

He seemed to be successfully navigating the politics on what he had called the small issues. But several months later, Gloria tested his political skills on something much larger.

He decreed all city workers would be forced to get a Covid-19 vaccine. If they didn’t, he’d fire them.

“Bold action is necessary to get out of this pandemic. And let me be clear: Vaccines are the way out of this pandemic,” he said.

But the mandate was a political sinkhole that radicalized some cops against him.

He set a first deadline for the vaccine mandate to take effect, but then moved it back. When that deadline came and went, at least 629 officers still weren’t vaccinated, NBC 7 reported.

Rather than deal with the mandate, 130 officers left the force, union officials said.

The cops left behind got angry.

“Everyone has to keep doing their job with one less person. It puts people’s lives in danger and it punished the people staying behind,” said one officer. “A lot of people can’t get over that.”

Gloria never followed through on his threat to fire people. So, on the one hand, he was trying to “bully” cops, as the officer put it. But, on the other, he looked weak.

**

When it came to public transit and urban design, few San Diego politicians have talked bigger than Gloria. As iMayor, he envisioned a region where people seriously shifted their behavior, ditching cars for sidewalks, bikes, buses and trains.

When Kevin Faulconer became mayor in 2014, he followed Gloria’s lead and hired Hasan Ikhrata to lead the San Diego Association of Governments, the region’s transportation planning agency. Gloria and Faulconer both wanted someone who would plan for world-class public transit.

“When Mayor Faulconer asked me to come to San Diego he said he wanted me to put forth big ideas,” Ikhrata recently told me.

Ikhrata was a bombastic leader, unfazed by controversy, who did exactly what they hired him to do.

He laid out the vision for a public transit utopia: commuter rail, running from north to south with trains every 5-10 minutes; light rail running from east to west, every eight to 15 minutes; fast busses crisscrossing the entire county.

The people would pay for it, in part, with a road-usage fee that taxed drivers based on how many miles they drove. It was the crux of the plan, not only because it generated money to pay for the vision, but because it created a disincentive to driving.

No other political opportunity in Gloria’s tenure has lined up so well with his Big City Energy philosophy. It was “the very heart of that,” Ikhrata said.

But conservatives made an effective wedge issue out of what they dubbed the driving tax. “They want to tax you to drive!” is a powerful message.

Gloria had the power to push through the transit plan virtually by himself, because of how much power the city of San Diego has on SANDAG’s Board of Directors. But he saw the driving fee as a potential career-ender, environmental activists say.

“That’s what I was hearing from [other SANDAG representatives] and Gloria: ‘If we do this, we will get voted out of office and then who will you have to champion all the wonderful things you want us to do,’” said Livia Beaudin, legal director of the Coastal Environmental Rights Foundation, or CERF. “Well, why do we need you in office if you’re not going to champion all the wonderful things we want you to do?”

A week before a vote to ratify the plan, Gloria withdrew his support.

The plan was essentially dead.

“The minute they took out the most important element of plan, I knew it was not just [the end of] me but the end of the great creative idea that San Diego needs,” Ikhrata told me. He decided to leave the agency. “I could have continued getting my salary and pushing paper, but I wasn’t interested in that.”

Ikhrata called Gloria “a smart mayor and a smart guy.”

“I always felt that Mayor Gloria wanted to do the right thing and I’m sure deep inside he knew this was the right thing,” Ikhrata said. “But you know politics is politics. Every time in our nation when politics guide policy, the policy fails.”

He acknowledged the driving tax is an emotional issue.

“Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, once said something important. He said, ‘If you want to make everybody happy, go sell ice cream. Don’t lead.’ I think a lot of leaders want to sell ice cream,” Ikhrata said.

**

Gloria seemed to be realizing how hard the job could be. He began making jokes about how it sucked.

This fuckin’ job, am I right, Gloria might say, according to people close to City Hall. Or, when asked how it was going, he might joke: Another day in paradise.

(Nick Serrano, the mayor’s deputy chief of staff, said he did not believe the quotes were accurate and had never heard the mayor say those things.)

The jokes became so frequent that people around City Hall started talking. It sounds like he actually hates the job. Should he keep saying this stuff? People started advising him that he had to quit it with the Being Mayor Sucks bit.

Gloria eventually stopped with the bit, but many people came away thinking he was becoming embittered.

**

One of the most frequent criticisms of Gloria’s office is that his team has a “with us or against us” mentality. The people in San Diego’s political orbit feel they are not allowed to offer constructive feedback. If they do, they’ll end up like Nicole Capretz.

Capretz worked as a staffer for Gloria, while he was iMayor, and helped create the first Climate Action Plan. She went on to found and run an influential nonprofit called Climate Action Campaign. Gloria liked to call Capretz his “favorite socialist.” The Union-Tribune called her the “climate change maven of San Diego.”

Gloria and Capretz were tight and she worked hard to get him elected in 2020. But once Gloria made it to office the dynamic changed. Gloria suddenly had the power to make deals and Capretz was back in her role as an activist. The mayor had many important environmental decisions headed his way: a contract with SDG&E, the road-usage fee and a new Climate Action Plan.

Capretz, who declined to comment for this story, had strong positions on all those items – and advocated for them.

On the new Climate Action Plan, especially, Capretz had strong feelings. She and Gloria had helped usher in the city’s first climate plan together and it had been hailed as a model for the whole country. Now, Gloria needed to update the plan and start making the necessary investments for the city to hit its goals.

Climate activists like Capretz should have been thrilled. Instead, they sued. The plan, they said, was nothing more than words on paper. It contained no timeline, no funding and no teeth.

City officials acted offended. They insisted the plan was important. They drew up a matrix, showing actions that could be taken in the coming years to reach net zero and ranked each with anywhere from one to four-dollar signs.

“The matrix is literally meaningless,” Capretz said at the time.

By all accounts, Gloria and his team cut Capretz off. The message to other political groups in the city has been that if you advocate beyond Gloria’s comfort level you will be pushed to the side.

That mentality has acted like a toxin on the political process, said Beaudin, the legal director of CERF. Activist groups are supposed to advocate for what they want. Elected officials listen and they try to advance the cause as much as possible within the constraints of the moment. Most importantly, no one takes it personally.

“To punish people for disagreement out in the public sphere, it just undermines the whole political process,” Beaudin said.

Gloria said this isn’t the case at all. He said he meets regularly with people with whom he disagrees and is constantly keeping the door open. He says he gets criticism from the other direction, too.

“I hear from folks, ‘Why are you talking to that person when they’ve said some of the nastiest things about you?’” he said. “This is my whole life, right? It’s, ‘You’re too much’ or ‘You’re never enough.’ Forgive me for watching the Barbie movie a few years ago. Just by being a man, I could at least sympathize with the monologue,” about being unable to meet people’s expectations.

Gloria said that while he understands the Capretz example, he has also appointed people allied with her to boards and commissions. The feedback cycle of politics is in working order, he said.

**

Gloria’s biggest, and most controversial, victory was a new law in 2023 that banned street camping citywide when homeless shelter space was available.

Gloria used the levers of power available to his office. He used his bully pulpit to advocate for the law publicly. He and his staff made calls, pressuring councilmembers. They rallied external groups to call and apply pressure, too.

But this concerted effort also represented a shift. Gloria had been critical of the previous mayor, Faulconer, for policing homelessness too aggressively and insisted the city should have a more compassionate response.

“No more band-aids. No more temporary tents without a plan. No more criminalizing the existence of San Diego’s poorest and sickest residents,” his team wrote in a campaign document.

For the first year of Gloria’s time in office, he did make some small changes that delivered on his promise of compassion, like providing notice to homeless people before city workers did homeless camp clean ups. But by the beginning of his second year, public angst over homelessness was becoming more and more palpable everyday. In a several block radius near Petco Park, hundreds of people lived in tents and shanties crammed together on the sidewalk. The FOX News depiction of San Francisco was a San Diego reality — never mind how small the geographical area.

Faulconer told me he was not at all surprised by the shift away from lofty talking points and toward enforcement.

“Unless you intervene and enforce the rest is just empty rhetoric,” he said. “No one said to me, ‘Hey, I wish that tent was still in front of my house or small business. It was, ‘Thank you for doing something.’”

Faulconer also said the camping ban wasn’t really needed. The city already had encroachment laws that barred people from blocking the sidewalks. Faulconer and the police department had used those laws to clear the streets.

One Gloria ally told me the entire episode highlighted Gloria’s weakness as an executive. Police chiefs serve at the pleasure of the mayor. Gloria should have been able to lean on then-chief David Nisleit to get cops to enforce the encroachment laws and break up encampments.

“The police chief, I don’t think he had fear Todd would fire him… A forceful executive would say, ‘Take care of it.’ If the chief doesn’t do it, then you fire the chief,” the ally said. “Todd’s a nice guy. He likes making people happy and telling them what they want to hear.”

Gloria denied he is scared to fire people and pointed to the last year, during which he fired Chief Operating Officer Eric Dargan.

“The fascination that people have with wanting to end other people’s employment is a fairly frequent experience, I have. You know, ‘Why aren’t you firing that person?’” Gloria said. “There’s no humanity behind that [sentiment.]”

Gloria said he pushed the camping ban – not because he was afraid to apply leverage to the police chief – but because it was important to “reassert our expectations for how people comport themselves in public.”

Gloria may not have struck fear in the police chief, but he was putting heavy pressure on councilmembers. Either you support encampments or you don’t — vote accordingly, Gloria told them.

A week before the full Council was scheduled to vote, he held a press conference at a fire station flanked by cops and firefighters in uniform. A small handful of protestors stood nearby, calling for “a plan, not a ban.” Gloria directly addressed the TV cameras.

“I want you all, when you report this tonight, to make sure you understand where the majority of San Diegans are. They” — the opposition — “support encampments. We don’t,” he said. “We will pass this ordinance.”

Gloria was right. He managed to hold onto the five votes he needed to get the ordinance through. At the time, Gloria had a somewhat reliable coalition made up of councilmembers Stephen Whitburn, Jennifer Campbell, Joe LaCava, Raul Campillo and Marni von Wilpert. They stuck with him on the camping ban, but in the coming months that coalition would almost completely unravel.

“Sure, [the mayor’s team] kind of stuck their neck out most on the encampment ban,” one person close to City Hall said. “But the difference between how they moved on that and how they moved on other items of importance is pretty significant.”

**

In April 2024, he went on the offensive again, pitching an idea to turn an empty printing warehouse in Middletown into a massive 1,000-bed homeless shelter. The project would be an undertaking, Gloria said, but it would mean “a thousand people off the streets, off the sidewalks, out of the riverbeds, off of our beaches and instead connected to care and on a path to permanent housing.”

Gloria aggressively sold the idea in public, as he did on the camping ban, but this time he lost his ability to whip votes on the Council  – something he has not regained since.

On the day of the vote in mid-July, the mayor’s team believed he had enough support on the City Council to get the lease deal passed, according to people close to City Hall. In particular, the mayor’s team believed Councilmember Marni von Wilpert would be a “yes.” (The mayor wouldn’t comment on what happened with von Wilpert. “I don’t remember anything in particular with regard to that council office,” he said.)

Instead, she panned the proposed lease from the dais. The vote failed – a stinging defeat for the mayor and the end of what turned out to be many months of wasted effort.

After the vote, people from the mayor’s team said von Wilpert told them she had concerns, but they weren’t so serious she couldn’t support the deal, according to people close to City Hall. Von Wilpert, meanwhile, said she had made clear she wouldn’t support the deal as it stood.

This has been typical of how the mayor’s team interacts in City Hall, the City Council staffer said.

“Every time they insist they have five votes for something, they never do. They don’t know how to count,” said the staffer. “They always think things are fine and it’s never fine and they’re always scrambling at the last minute. It’s just common occurrence that they don’t know what’s going on.”

This communication breakdown between the mayor’s office and Council has been a regular feature of City Hall business for the last two years. On everything from budget amendments to the placement of homeless shelters, the mayor’s team has been unable to carry votes.

The mayor disputed this characterization. He said a single digit number of votes had not gone his way, which ignores “the hundreds or maybe thousands, that have gone smoothly.”

“I would characterize the situation as extremely functional and we’re moving the city forward,” Gloria said. “In coequal branches of government, there’s always going to be conflict and tension.”

The previous mayor Faulconer, a Republican, governed with a Council that was majority Democratic. His chief of staff Aimee Faucett used what she called a “council of individuals” strategy to whip votes, she told me.

“We went through every councilmember and figured out what their needs were, who supported them, who opposed them. Then when we had to do a vote, we knew who to go to for what issue,” she said.

Faucett wouldn’t comment on Gloria directly. “If you want to be successful you have to learn to work with people,” she said.

In a well-oiled City Hall machine, Council meetings are at least somewhat choreographed affairs. Mayors bring forward votes that, by and large, they know will pass. But under Gloria, city councilmembers have begun “governing from the dais,” as one person put it.

This culminated in January 2025 when Councilmember Henry Foster tried to roll back the city’s housing laws on the spot during a Council meeting.

Foster and the other councilmembers were repealing a relatively small piece of housing law that applied only to Encanto, a neighborhood Foster represents. Seemingly out of nowhere, Foster added another action to the motion. He requested a vote to kill the city’s accessory dwelling unit density bonus program. The program, which allowed homeowners or developers to build additional “bonus” ADU’s, if they built some that were price restricted, had led to thousands of ADU’s being built across the city.

Foster said his staff had heard countless concerns about the law, which in some cases allowed developers to pack multi-story ADU buildings onto single-family lots.

Foster has developed a reputation on the Council as a “shake the trees guy,” as he called it. To anyone watching, his motion likely seemed abrupt and antagonistic. But for Foster, the moment had been building for months.

He said he had multiple conversations with Gloria’s planning director about his problems with the ADU bonus law. They painstakingly went over “detail after detail” of the program, he said. Foster claimed he didn’t actually want to kill the law. He wanted it paused and clarified so developers couldn’t use it to build apartment complexes on single-family lots.

“And what I got from the mayor was constantly a ‘no.’ They’re not willing to do anything,” Foster said.

Councilmembers Stephen Whitburn and Joe LaCava, who frequently vote with Gloria, pushed back lightly on Foster’s motion and tried to have it separated from the original piece of housing law before the Council. Ultimately that failed. In the end, all seven of the other councilmembers present voted with Foster.

It’s not unheard of for a councilmember to go rogue, as Foster did. What’s shocking is that the other councilmembers had such little regard for Gloria they supported the mutiny.

Gloria clearly wasn’t interested in rolling back the ADU density bonus program. A Gloria spokesperson said the mayor was “disappointed” in the vote and called the program “highly successful” in producing new homes. “We are exploring options for how to respond,” Dave Rolland said at the time.

In the end, the Council voted to roll back, rather than kill, the ADU density bonus law, which is all Foster said he told the mayor he really wanted from the beginning. When the mayor refused to engage, Foster took governance into his own hands and, amazingly, he succeeded.

“[The mayor] publicly said, ‘I didn’t even know Councilmember Foster had an issue.’ I think that is just disingenuous,” Foster said. “And if you did not have the knowledge that I had a problem, how are you going to [run this city.]”

Gloria wouldn’t comment on exactly what happened with Foster. “I’m constantly in touch with these folks and try and collaborate and share information with them,” he said of councilmembers. 

**

One councilmember, more than any other, has learned to wield the power of the leadership vacuum left by Gloria.

Sean Elo-Rivera joined the Council in 2020 at the same time Gloria became mayor. Elo-Rivera has clearly learned that if others aren’t going to propose major initiatives, the space is wide open for him.

Since 2023, Elo-Rivera has championed a tenant protection ordinance, a ban on rental price-fixing algorithms and a $25 an hour minimum wage for tourism workers. He is also pushing a controversial ballot initiative that would tax vacation rental homes and second homes $5,000 per bedroom.

Meanwhile, Gloria is having trouble moving even necessary operational votes, like water rate increases, through the Council.

When the mayor’s team attempted to shepherd a 63 percent water rate increase through Council, Whitburn — typically a Gloria stalwart — called the idea “dead on arrival” from the Council dais.

At the same meeting, Councilmember Kent Lee said Gloria’s administration was “eroding” trust with the public and councilmembers. “It’s time city leadership own up to its responsibility to clearly communicate challenges the city faces rather than pass blame onto anyone else,” he said.

Gloria’s chief of staff recently told one powerbroker in City Hall: “We’re not going to take any votes to floor unless we can win them.”

“Losing votes is all they seem to do,” the person later reflected.

Gloria’s talk about Big City Energy has all but disappeared. When he does mention it, the phrase doesn’t allude to solving “the biggest problems of our time,” as he once said, but more minor advances. In a recent newsletter, he claimed his election as vice president to the U.S. Council of Mayors as an example of his Big City swag.

In his 2021 State of the City address, Gloria talked about ending homelessness once and for all, but in 2025, he resorted to full-on finger pointing. Gloria heaped blame on every level of government. He called out the state, other cities, and county government.

“My fellow San Diegans, it is my hope that any time you see a person on the street suffering from extreme mental illness or addiction, that you think of the County of San Diego and ask: When will they step up to provide the services they need to end this crisis once and for all?”

Activists who believed they would have at least some voice in the Gloria administration, feel they have been shut out of decision making.

“I had more meetings with Kevin Faulconer than Todd Gloria. That’s not a high bar, but still,” said Greene, the director of CPI.

They no longer believe he is willing to make anything other than politically expedient choices.

“He says the right things when it comes to making unpopular decisions but he doesn’t walk the walk. It’s been a disappointment,” said Beaudin, the legal director of CERF. “We have to make the tough decisions that are best for everybody and Todd has just shown himself not to be that guy.”

Gloria says he is exactly the same person and politician he has always been.

“There’s no template for a Democratic mayor and Democratic city council. There’s no template for doing this in the 21st century with social media and a president who doesn’t support cities. There’s no one that’s had to deal with a pandemic in over a hundred years. And we figured it out and got that behind us and moved forward,” Gloria said. “I have not changed in any way. I am the same person who put his name on the ballot in 2007 to be the District 3 city councilmember on a pro-housing, pro-public safety, pro-infrastructure platform.”

In recent months, the disappointment over Gloria culminated in recall rumors circulated around City Hall by Gloria’s allies. The recall effort, however, doesn’t appear it will go forward — mainly because recall elections are so hard to control. If Gloria gets voted out in the recall, then whomever gets the most write-in votes automatically becomes mayor. Better the devil you know, people who run the city say.

Steve Alexander, who believed Gloria could become president, isn’t shook by all of this – and he hasn’t changed his mind that Gloria might one day end up at the White House. “I believe in his heart and soul. I believe he has the talent and the intelligence. He is like Atlas holding up the world, which in this case is San Diego. In some people’s minds he can never do right,” Alexander told me.

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