Mayoral Hopeful Seeks New Era for National City 

National City Councilmember Jose Rodriguez says he still remembers the day he decided on a career in politics. 

It was 2010. Rodriguez was a 25-year-old political activist at the end of a week-long campaign trip through California’s Central Valley. He and a group of other young activists were returning to San Diego after promoting a ballot initiative that would make it easier for California Democrats to control state budgeting. 

“We were knocking on doors, registering people to vote, gathering signatures to get this initiative on the ballot,” Rodriguez said. “I remember driving back in a van with community college students thinking, ‘I’m going to do this for the rest of my life. I absolutely love this.’” 

Sixteen years later, Rodriguez is living his road trip epiphany. 

He is, by his own description, a career politician – a two-term city councilmember now mounting his sixth run for elective office. 

This year, Rodriguez is making a repeat attempt to unseat National City’s long-serving and indefatigable mayor, Ron Morrison. Rodriguez lost to Morrison four years ago by just 68 votes. 

National City councilmembers earn a monthly stipend of $1,700. A home-based day care business run by his wife has enabled Rodriguez to live as a full-time politician since he first won a seat on the National City Council in 2020. 

In an earlier part of his life, Rodriguez worked a series of jobs in food service and labor organizing. Now, he spends his days meeting with constituents, attending city meetings and rubbing shoulders with San Diego County’s Democratic Party elite. 

He can often be found where other aspiring Democrats gather – on union picket lines, at protests and at gala events such as last summer’s outdoor inauguration ceremony for newly elected County Supervisor Paloma Aguirre. 

Rodriguez attended the inauguration and afterwards could be seen working his way through an entire event tent’s worth of dignitaries. He clasped hands, dispensed hugs and posed for pictures as he advanced toward a knot of well-wishers surrounding Aguirre. 

Though Rodriguez is one of five councilmembers in one of San Diego County’s smallest cities, his mayoral bid this year has gained outsize importance. As one prominent labor leader put it, Rodriguez represents Democrats’ best shot at recapturing a mayor’s seat in South San Diego County. 

Democrats outnumber Republicans in majority-Latino South County. Yet, this year, not a single mayor in the region is a Democrat. 

“[Republican Chula Vista Mayor] John McCann has done a very good job at constituent services, and he’s popular,” said Brigette Browning, president of the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council. “I haven’t heard of anyone viable [to recapture the mayor’s office for Democrats] in Imperial Beach…National City will be the only pickup.” 

Rodriguez has been involved in National City politics almost from the moment he bought a house in the city in 2013. He has run for City Council four times – in 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2024 – and ran once for mayor in 2022. 

This year, he is pitching himself to voters as a new voice with a future-oriented vision for his ethnically diverse and often cash-strapped city. 

In a recent series of interviews, Rodriguez excoriated Morrison as a relic from a former time whose iron grip on City Hall has plunged city government into turmoil and halted progress on a range of pressing issues. 

Morrison, a registered independent, has served in National City government for most of the past 30 years. He is a ubiquitous presence at city events and styles himself as a guardian of the city’s long-term interests. 

“We are at a crossroads,” Rodriguez said. “We have an individual [Morrison] with a 1960s vision of National City. Those times are gone and are never coming back. We can either go forward or have a nostalgic vision.” 

In place of what Rodriguez described as Morrison’s “idea of a white picket fence for National City,” Rodriguez ticked off an ambitious series of proposals to transform his largely industrial and residential hometown into a taller, denser urban hub of thriving small businesses, robust bayfront tourism and renovated parks and streetscapes. 

Presiding over all of it would be an activist city government unafraid to convert private property into publicly supported high-density housing developments that enable working-class residents to buy into the American dream. 

“We need to embrace development with the needs of our community and embrace homeownership,” Rodriguez said. “We must use public land to build units for sale.” 

Above all, Rodriguez said, the city needs to turn the page on Morrison, who Rodriguez said stopped trying to improve his city long ago and now devotes himself solely to perpetuating his own power. 

Morrison’s behind-the-scenes machinations, Rodriguez said, have diverted city leaders’ attention and stoked constant turmoil at City Hall, where numerous top city leaders resigned or were forced out over the past year. 

“All this drama is not helpful to our community,” Rodriguez said. “Residents say, ‘Fix the streets, [provide] affordable housing, public safety, parks.’” 

“We need more of a spirit of service and getting things done,” he said. 

Told of Rodriguez’s attacks against him, Morrison said it is Rodriguez who needs to cultivate a greater spirit of service. 

“If you look at almost all the turmoil within City Hall, it’s been caused by Rodriguez,” Morrison said. “He’s constantly stirring things up…Jose is just constantly playing out on the edges of everything he can get away with.” 

Morrison pointed out that he hasn’t yet announced whether he plans to run for re-election in November. He said he expects to make up his mind “in late spring or early summer.” Most political observers expect Morrison to run. The city clerk’s office says it will post filing deadlines for the November election beginning in June. 

Morrison said Rodriguez’s constant attacks are merely an effort to mask a thin record of actual accomplishments. 

“He doesn’t do anything but run around the county to every protest or picket line wherever he can find a microphone and camera,” Morrison said. “It’s a lot of promises and rhetoric. But has he done anything? Absolutely not.” 

With forecasters predicting an energized Democratic electorate in November, this year may represent Rodriguez’s best opportunity to achieve his long-held mayoral goal. 

But Rodriguez faces one obstacle that political tailwinds alone might not be sufficient to overcome: Himself. 

However unifying and forward-looking his vision for National City, there is no getting around the fact that Rodriguez is a polarizing figure in his hometown. 

He has many supporters, including labor union members, environmental advocates and residents in his city council district, who say he worked tirelessly for them in the wake of devastating winter floods two years ago. 

His opponents are equally numerous. In addition to Morrison, two other city councilmembers, along with numerous leading figures in the city, accuse Rodriguez of being self-serving, willfully blind about city finances, a puppet of labor unions and even low-grade corrupt. 

Shortly after voters re-elected Rodriguez to a second term in 2024, his fellow councilmembers voted 3-2 to censure him. Alleged offenses ranged from using city resources for campaign purposes to effectively doxxing a Republican city planning commissioner out of little more than partisan animus. 

Councilmember Marcus Bush, a fellow Democrat who once was Rodriguez’s closest political ally, has become an especially harsh critic. 

Both on the council dais and in interviews over the past year, Bush said his view of Rodriguez has changed since Rodriguez joined the council six years ago. 

“He’s very ambitious,” Bush said. “He sees Ron [Morrison] as a threat…Jose will tell you a complete lie because Jose is running for mayor.” 

Among Rodriguez’s failings, according to Bush: Undermining the city in dealings with the Port of San Diego by voting to oust the city’s former port commissioner; disclosing information from closed session City Council meetings to damage Morrison’s reputation; threatening an employee union leader to gain support for a city manager pick; and allying himself with a pair of funeral home owners who have become the mayor’s chief public antagonists. 

Bush said he is now weighing his own mayoral bid, which he acknowledged could complicate Rodriguez’s election efforts by potentially splitting the city’s Democratic vote. Morrison’s 2022 defeat of Rodriguez resulted from a split between Democratic candidates. 

“Jose is more afraid of me than I am of him,” said Bush. “[He’s] scared I’ll expose him.” 

Asked about the many allegations against him, Rodriguez was unapologetic. He said he has never disclosed sensitive city information or used city resources to boost his political efforts. And he flat-out denied threatening city employees or colluding with Morrison’s opponents. 

Such accusations, he said, were simply “an attempt to shift the conversation” away from Morrison’s problem-plagued leadership. 

“The mayor and his actions…is a major reason senior [city] staff has left,” Rodriguez said. “There are so many needs in our community and we are dealing with that b.s.” 

Rodriguez was equally unapologetic about his close alliance with San Diego’s labor movement. Unions have supplied much of the campaign cash and canvassing muscle in Rodriguez’s numerous runs for office. 

“If people say I’m working for the unions, you bet I am,” Rodriguez said. “My question is, why are they not?…[Unions] are the only way to build a middle class in this country.” 

Rodriguez said his affinity for organized labor comes from his childhood in the Coachella Valley of Riverside County. There, he grew up the third of five children in a household headed by immigrants from Mexico. 

Rodriguez’s father worked as a landscaper. His mother cleaned Marriott hotel rooms. 

Rodriguez said Marriott exploited non-union workers by assigning heavy workloads, especially a large number of so-called checkout rooms, which departing guests often leave in disarray, and which must be returned to a spotless condition. 

“[My mother] injured her shoulder and had to retire early,” Rodriguez said. “Union housekeepers clean fewer rooms and are paid more and [have] fewer checkouts.” 

Rodriguez said he learned from his parents the value of hard work and the equally important value of homeownership. 

He said his parents scraped together to buy a house early in his childhood. That house, he said, became a source of family stability. Before becoming property owners, his parents moved seven times in as many years, Rodriguez said. 

Those twin influences – watching his parents toil on the margins of the American economy while also experiencing the upward mobility afforded by homeownership – now guide Rodriguez’s political platform, he said. 

“We can’t sit around and assume the market will take care of our needs,” Rodriguez said. “We need to be proactive in generating revenue and bringing opportunities.” 

Rodriguez himself is a homeowner. He and his wife bought their three-bedroom National City house in 2013 for $310,000, according to real estate records. It’s now worth more than twice that. The couple have four children. 

Rodriguez also owns a multi-unit rental property in Riverside County, he said. His experience on both sides of the property equation – he and his wife rented before buying a home – give him unique insight into how to improve National City’s housing situation, he said. 

In an interview about his mayoral ambitions, Rodriguez ticked through a series of housing, hotel and other development projects he hopes to pursue if elected. 

He said he also wants to hire more police officers, accelerate streetlight repairs, pave alleyways and boost safety in parks via a stepped-up police presence and security cameras. And he said he supports efforts to adopt a citywide rent control ordinance. 

He acknowledged that his plans, as well as his support for competitive wages for the city’s unionized workers, will cost money at a time when National City is projecting deficits and is on track to draw down its reserves. 

But Rodriguez said investing in development would generate new revenue. 

“This is why we need an entrepreneurial mindset,” he said. “We either let the market do everything, or we play a more active role.” 

“I’m proactive with a vision,” he said. “It’s a generational difference between me and the mayor. He’s a Boomer. I’m a Millennial with young kids…We can have the most wonderful people in our city. But as long as there’s dysfunction in the mayor’s office, nothing will get done.” 

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