‘My Heart is Here.’ Aguirre Arrives at County Amid High Hopes, Wariness 

Incoming San Diego County Supervisor Paloma Aguirre is a surfer, not a golfer. 

To celebrate her recent election to fill a vacant South County seat on the powerful San Diego County Board of Supervisors, Aguirre, previously mayor of Imperial Beach, did not hit the links, as many politicians do. 

She gathered at Ocean Beach one recent Sunday morning with a few dozen like-minded elected leaders, campaign supporters and friends from the community. Everyone suited up, grabbed boards and plunged into what Sierra Club San Diego chapter leader Mark West, who joined the group, described as “a nice south swell, two to four feet…very playful.” 

It was a chance for the politicos, including Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer, National City Councilmember Marcus Bush and former Imperial Beach Mayor Serge Dedina, to exult in a Democratic win and “put all the stuff of the world behind and [be] with mother ocean taking what she’s giving,” West said. 

It was also a chance for some opportune political messaging. 

Aguirre, a Democrat whose victory cemented Democrats’ control of the five-member Board of Supervisors, wasted no time posting a video of herself in a wetsuit leaning on her body board and proclaiming, “our big victory, our big majority, progressive majority, Democratic majority on the County Board of Supervisors.” 

Lawson-Remer, standing beside her in her own wetsuit, chimed in: “I’m just so stoked to have Paloma on the Board, to really have a partner driving forward the change we need for San Diego County.” 

For Aguirre, who will be sworn into office this morning at an outdoor ceremony at the County Administration Building, the beach outing was just the latest in a long line of political events combining her personal passions – Aguirre has surfed and competed on body boards since she was a young adult, and she entered politics as a clean-water environmental activist – with clear political goals and a gift for connecting directly with voters. 

She campaigned for supervisor on a pledge to clean up the ongoing Tijuana River sewage crisis that has fouled beaches in her Imperial Beach hometown and caused widening health and economic problems in her South County supervisorial district. 

She entered politics as an Imperial Beach councilmember in 2018, rose to become mayor and for years has pitched herself to voters as an everywoman who understands South County’s unique Southern-California-meets-Mexico culture because she has lived it. 

Beach lover, environmental crusader, daughter of immigrants, hand-to-mouth renter struggling to make ends meet, political consensus-builder, partisan fighter, hometown problem-solver – Aguirre has worn all of those political identities at various times in her nearly decade-long political career. 

Now, taking her place as one of San Diego County’s five most powerful elected leaders, she said she plans to bring the entirety of her experience to bear on solving the entrenched problems that she said have held back residents in her district, indeed the entire county, for far too long. 

“I’m…ready to get to work,” she said in a recent interview, before ticking off a list of issues she plans to tackle right away: A five-point action plan on the sewage crisis, protecting recipients of Medi-Cal and food stamps from federal budget cuts and exploring a possible countywide tenant protection ordinance similar to one she recently helped enact in Imperial Beach. 

“My heart is here,” she said of South San Diego County, where she has lived in Imperial Beach since arriving as a young adult from Mexico in 2001 to attend the University of San Diego and surf Imperial Beach’s legendary breaks. 

“These issues…are very close to my values because I know them,” she said. “There are people who get into power for the sake of being in power. I’m someone who wants to use power for good.” 

Aguirre’s challenge as she arrives in office riding a wave of high hopes is that, claims of her “big victory” notwithstanding, Democrats actually have been in power in county government for the past five years. And not all voters are thrilled with their performance. 

By many measures, including the number of homeless people on the streets, the availability of affordable housing, conditions in county jails and the state of county finances, San Diego County is in worse shape than it was when Democrats assumed control following the 2020 election of Aguirre’s South County supervisorial predecessor, Nora Vargas. 

In last November’s presidential election, many Democrats stayed home, leading to a rightward shift in county vote results, especially in Aguirre’s South County district. 

Campaigning for supervisor this year, Aguirre actually won a smaller percentage of votes against her Republican opponent, Chula Vista Mayor John McCann, than Vargas did in 2020 running against a fellow Democrat. 

Aguirre barely won a majority of voters in Imperial Beach (53 percent), according to results compiled by the San Diego County Registrar of Voters. And she gained her highest vote shares not in the politically moderate working-class districts of South County where she conducted much of her public campaigning but in affluent, left-leaning, mostly White San Diego neighborhoods such as South Park, Golden Hill and Balboa Park. 

Aguirre’s victory may have ushered in what she described as “a progressive majority” on the Board of Supervisors. But it is not yet clear there is an equally progressive majority in San Diego County, or in Aguirre’s district. 

Aguirre said she understands the volatile political dynamics. And she said she and her fellow Democrats will be judged by results. 

“You have to balance all the interest groups,” she said. “I remember not being an elected official and begging elected officials to help us with the sewage crisis. And it fell on deaf ears. It was like pulling teeth: ‘This is a federal matter, there’s nothing we can do here locally.’ And I say not true. Where there’s political will, there’s a way. You have to have political courage.” 

Aguirre came to San Diego politics by way of a peripatetic, bi-national upbringing. 

She was born in 1977 in San Francisco, where her parents, immigrants from Mexico, waited tables and took part in the waning days of the city’s hippie scene. 

“My parents were total bell-bottom wearers and would hang out in the Haight,” Aguirre recalled, referring to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. “I’m the child of immigrant hippies.” 

Aguirre attended kindergarten and first grade in San Francisco then moved to Mexico when her parents decided they wanted to raise their children – Aguirre has an older brother and a younger sister – among extended family. 

“It was a culture shock,” Aguirre said of the family’s move to Tepic, the capital of the Mexican state of Nayarit. “I didn’t speak Spanish. I understood it but didn’t speak it. My parents had to put me in Spanish classes.” 

After finishing elementary school in Tepic, Aguirre moved again to the coastal resort town of Puerto Vallarta, where her parents got jobs at beachfront hotels. 

Aguirre said she wanted to go to college after graduating high school in 1995. But she couldn’t afford it. And there were no college campuses in Puerto Vallarta. 

She worked a series of low-wage jobs manning a reception desk at a Best Western hotel and serving as hostess in a restaurant. 

She also started body boarding and fell in with a group of competitive body boarders who traveled up and down the coast competing in amateur contests. 

When the University of Guadalajara opened a satellite campus in Puerto Vallarta, Aguirre enrolled as a psychology major and attended for two years until a body boarding friend who attended college in San Diego invited her to join a surfing expedition to California. 

Aguirre said her parents sensed – rightly, it turned out – that if she traveled to the United States, she would never return to live in Mexico. They discouraged her from going. 

“I took a leap of faith, and I said I want to do this, and if I don’t do this now, I’ll never do it,” Aguirre said. “I bought a one-way ticket to Tijuana [and left with] a suitcase and $500 to my name…My buddies picked me up at the airport and brought me to Imperial Beach. I didn’t have a wetsuit and it was so cold, and the waves were incredible. I was just hooked.” 

It was Sept. 3, 2001. A few days later, the 9/11 terrorist attacks shut down the American economy. 

Aguirre, a U.S. citizen, had come to San Diego eager to surf and vaguely hoping she might end up attending an American university. Now, she was hundreds of miles from home and almost broke. 

She found a job at a Casual Corner women’s clothing store at the Chula Vista Center shopping mall and applied to the University of San Diego after discovering the university would transfer college credits she’d earned in Mexico. 

“My boss [at Casual Corner] wrote me a handwritten letter of recommendation,” she said. “I got accepted and had financial aid, and I wasn’t going to let that opportunity go.” 

Two years later, in 2005, Aguirre graduated from USD with a bachelor’s degree in psychology.  

Around the same time, she showed up one morning to surf her customary break in Imperial Beach and saw a man posting signs reading, “Clean Water Now!” 

“Don’t you know you surf the most polluted beach in America?” the man replied when Aguirre asked what he was doing. 

The man was Serge Dedina, a fellow surfer who a few years earlier had founded an environmental nonprofit called WILDCOAST to advocate for clean beaches. 

Dedina, who would go on to become mayor of Imperial Beach, told Aguirre about the problem of untreated sewage flowing from Mexico into the Tijuana River and polluting waters along the San Diego coastline. He invited her to volunteer for WILDCOAST. 

“I showed up and did cleanups and learned about the river and the sewage and how unfair it was that this situation disproportionately impacts working-class communities like Imperial Beach,” Aguirre said. “That’s when my journey on the sewage fight started.” 

Aguirre abandoned plans to earn a master’s degree in marriage and family counseling and took a series of environmental advocacy jobs with WILDCOAST, the International Community Foundation and the now-shuttered community organizing group ACORN. 

She earned a master’s in marine biodiversity and conservation at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla and spent a year in Washington, D.C. as a legislative fellow in the office of U.S. Sen. Cory Booker. 

Aguirre said there was a moment in Washington when she saw a different political path before her, perhaps rising through the ranks in the nation’s capital and ending up in a comfortable job at an organization like the Pew Charitable Trusts, where she worked for a few months after finishing her year with Booker. 

Then, in February 2017, a sewage pipe collapsed in Tijuana, sending 143 million gallons of raw sewage into the Tijuana River. The spill decimated marine life and closed beaches from Rosarito in Baja California to Coronado in San Diego County. 

“It wasn’t an option for me to stay in D.C.,” Aguirre said. “I couldn’t have lived with myself. I would have felt too selfish.” 

She returned home and, with Dedina’s encouragement, ran for City Council. Four years later, she was elected mayor. 

At City Hall, she has earned praise from fellow councilmembers of both political parties for being a collegial consensus-builder who focuses on solving problems in the community. 

“I think we all get along,” said Imperial Beach Councilmember Mitch McKay of the Council under Aguirre’s leadership. 

McKay said that, since Aguirre became mayor in 2022, the Council successfully tackled potentially divisive issues such as new campaign finance rules and a citywide firearms ordinance. 

“We were able to work together to resolve issues even if we were on different sides of an issue,” he said. “We hope our mayor can go in there [at the county] and make some waves.” 

Aguirre focused much of her work on the Imperial Beach Council on the Tijuana River sewage crisis. She scored some notable wins, especially the last-minute insertion of $600 million into the federal budget earlier this year to repair an ailing cross-border sewage treatment plant has been blamed for exacerbating the crisis. 

She also has earned criticism from opponents who say her years of advocacy have not yet solved the sewage problem, even as publicity from the issue boosts her political career. 

“It’s politics as usual,” said Richard Sparkman, a crane operator in Imperial Beach who showed up at a local polling place on July 1 to cast a vote for McCann, Aguirre’s opponent in the supervisor race. “She talks about the urgency of the sewage, but we smell it every day.” 

Aguirre said she is eager to use the county’s vast resources to speed up help for South County residents whose health and livelihoods have been damaged by the sewage problem. 

She said she also is aware her desire to make progress on the issue that has defined her political career soon could be overwhelmed by myriad other issues confronting the county. 

Recent interviews with a range of South County business, political and community leaders yielded a laundry list of fears, hopes, problems and desires that now will fall to Aguirre as the region’s most powerful elected official. 

The impact of tariffs of cross-border trade; the state of roads in unincorporated communities; outrage at a recently approved storage facility near the Sweetwater River; fears that federal budget cuts will end in-home care for vulnerable seniors; housing developers clamoring for permission to build in outlying rural areas; calls to strengthen, or eliminate, county support for undocumented immigrants – all of these issues and more await Aguirre the moment she takes office. 

Aguirre said she’s ready.  

“I love governing,” she said. “I love all the details and the nuts and bolts of it. You get to improve people’s lives, even if it’s at small increments at a time.” 

Aguirre joked that she loves governing so much she doesn’t do much else. 

“I don’t have a social life,” she said. “I go surfing. That’s my church for me. Or I’m on the couch listening to music with my husband [Delio Bacalski] and chilling.” 

(For the record, Aguirre sticks with the 1990s-early 2000s alternative rock she listened to when she and Bacalski, a musician, met at a rock concert. She’s said she’s not a fan of contemporary pop. “Rock and roll is dead, dude,” she said.) 

Aguirre said she puts up with the long hours and the inevitable combativeness of politics because she relishes the results. 

“People tend to think that Serge [Dedina] pushed me to [run for City Council], but he wasn’t that enthused,” Aguirre said. “He said, ‘Are you sure? It’s really hard and people are sometimes not nice.’ I said, ‘I can do it. Let’s do it.’” 

(Also for the record, Dedina said he considers Aguirre a rare political talent whose relentless energy will surprise supporters and detractors alike. “She’s fearless, determined, resolute and she charges,” Dedina said. “People underestimate her at their peril.”) 

Aguirre says she remembers arriving in the United States as a young adult with waves on her mind and not much of a plan. 

“I did not see myself doing this,” she said of becoming County Supervisor. ‘Being a career politician wasn’t in my long-term life plans. All I know is, I want to help my community. If that’s through this job I was elected to do, I’ll do it gladly.” 

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