Politics Report: Airbnb’s Win

In December, San Diego City Councilmember Raul Campillo “cried foul” when Council President Joe LaCava removed him from the Council’s Land Use and Housing Committee. While LaCava batted away the suggestion Campillo had been punished, he clearly had been. Over 2025, Campillo embraced a populist perspective and didn’t play well with the Council majority.

The people who wanted to slap a tax on vacation rentals and empty second homes now probably wish LaCava had also removed him from the Rules Committee.

Because, with the benefit of hindsight, you can count the votes to get a majority support for the tax on the Council as a whole. But it was a ballot measure and ballot measures can’t skip the committee.

This is of course flawed. It’s saying if the Broncos had kicked a field goal last week instead of going for it on fourth down, they would have had a chance to win. They didn’t kick a field goal. And they missed two others.

Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera, who had been working on the proposal with his staff for months, never had Campillo and he never had Councilmember Vivian Moreno. But he hoped he had support from Councilmember Kent Lee, often an ally.

Lee said that he was disgusted by Airbnb’s tactics, he and his family refuse to stay in short-term vacation rentals and he directed his staff not to accept meetings with the company. But he could not come around to support the proposal to tax vacation rentals and he killed it.

He said he would have gone for the tax just on second homes.

“Let me start with what I do support as a clear progressive tax proposal, which is taxing empty second homes or vacation homes. If someone can afford a second home and not use it for any other purpose including long or short term rentals, they can afford to pay that tax and should,” he said.

But Lee said he couldn’t give San Diegans yet another vote that they may assume would fix the budget crisis only to see more news about the budget crisis coming out. He voted no and killed the proposal.

More hindsight is 20/20: When Elo-Rivera proposed the taxes, it was explicitly an effort to raise money for the city’s troubled budget. Visitors needed to pay their fair share. Part of the reason it needed to go on the June ballot instead of November was because the city’s financial situation was so dire, it couldn’t wait.

But by last week, his team had lowered the revenue assumptions and pivoted to emphasize the second, less prominent argument: That the taxes were necessary to free up housing for San Diegans.

Residents, especially along the coasts, do not like vacation rentals. They have not been satisfied by the regulations put in place and the news still comes of whole buildings being transformed into vacation rentals. Elo-Rivera is not often on the same side as these folks in local policy discussions but he was this time.

But it was almost too little, too late. Looking back, had he started it as a purely anti-vacation rental measure, a “neighborhoods are for neighbors” move, those residents could have been a bigger part of the final showdown.

Institutional opposition: Quietly, one of the groups that swung the vote was the Laborers union, LiUNA Local 89, led by Valentine Macedo and Kelvin Barrios. When Airbnb talked about how it could either be a friend or a foe to the city in its struggle to balance its budget, the “friend” part was almost explicitly a pledge to help fund a sales tax measure that LiUNA leaders do want to put on the November ballot.

Finally, the business community is back: This was a significant victory for Chamber CEO Chris Cate and the lobbyists who built the coalition Airbnb helped lead to oppose the measure. The Chamber chose a political path when they picked Cate and they got it. If this proposal had come up a year ago, instead of now, it’s not hard to see it passing.

Taxpayers Claim They’re Back Too; Kersey in Talks

Former San Diego City Councilmember Mark Kersey is having an interesting conversation. He’s been discussing the future of the San Diego County Taxpayers Association. The organization, left hobbled last year with the sudden departure of its longtime executive, Haney Hong and with some financial problems, is starting to get going again.

Kersey would only confirm he’s talking to the Taxpayers Board of Directors.

“We’re having some discussions but there’s nothing to report now,” he said.

Patty Ducey-Brooks, one of the board members, said the group is trying to get everything together to prepare for adding on an executive director again.

“We had a very successful Golden Awards ceremony, recently. It set the tone for where we’re going. We have a lot of new board members and it’s now become the most active board I have ever been on. And I’ve been on many,” she said.

They have one full time staff member and several active volunteers and they’re preparing to analyze ballot measures and bonds that will be on 2026 ballots.

Notes

I got something wrong: I wrote and talked on the podcast and on KPBS about how San Diego city leaders may be asking state legislators for help with Midway Rising. They may want some legislation that could assure the developers’ plan for the project passes another challenge based on the California Environmental Quality Act or CEQA.

I wrote and talked about how Stan Kroenke, the main financier funding Midway Rising, has some direct connection with this as he got legislation to help construction of SoFi Stadium in Inglewood leapfrog all the environmental hassles.

But that’s not accurate. I forgot that Kroenke and his team did something more interesting than that in Inglewood.

“Kroenke and his partner, the Hollywood Park Land Company, successfully took advantage of a loophole in CEQA that allows proposals enacted through the state’s voter-sponsored ballot initiative process to bypass a full CEQA environmental review process,”  reads a good explanation of what happened from USC Annenberg Media.

They did a petition to support putting the stadium project plan on the ballot. Inglewood City Council decided that was good enough and they just processed it as though the ballot measure had already passed and voila, you have a fully permitted project that is immune from lawsuits based on CEQA.

From the pod: We had Will Rodriguez-Kennedy, the chair of the San Diego Democratic Party, on the podcast this week. He seemed to side with Elo-Rivera on the vacation rental fight. He explained how the endorsement process works for the Democrats battling to take on Rep. Darrell Issa in the 48th Congressional District and more. Listen here.

If you have any feedback or ideas for the Politics Report, send them to scott.lewis@voiceofsandiego.org.

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