Politics Report: Zoo Freed from Minimum Wage Push

The city’s push to raise the minimum wage for the tourism industry (and bump up a few other workers in the process) is going to the City Council Sept. 16. That means there are a couple short weeks left for a flurry of negotiations. City Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera and the mayor’s office want to avoid a referendum.

Already exempted: The Zoo. The draft ordinance advanced by a council committee months ago would have included the San Diego Zoo but now it won’t. City leaders felt the zoo as a nonprofit was not a major target of the effort.

I asked Brigette Browning, the head of the Labor Council and chief advocate for the new law, what she thought about that.

“Workers at the Zoo did not have strong feelings about being included – wages at the Zoo are pretty good. We felt and the city felt we should be focusing on lower-wage employers,” she said.

Also in the works: Some kind of phase in.

“Negotiation are ongoing about a phase in. Everyone recognized going from $17.25 per hour to $25 per hour overnight is not realistic,” Browning said.

One approach may be to start with the living wage and ramp it up from there. The city requires businesses working in city facilities or contracting with the city to pay the living wage, which is now at just more than $21 per hour. That’s what the Padres are required to pay so it would not raise anything for them immediately.

But $17.25 to $21 per hour is a big jump for others.

Maybe related: The city is in negotiations with the Zoo about redoing the Zoo’s lease in Balboa Park that would include making visitors to the giant parking lot outside the Zoo start to pay to park and share that money with the city.

Notes

Still early but: U.S. Rep. Scott Peters last week told us he is running for re-election to Congress but he doesn’t want to be left out of conversations about who will be the next mayor.

Here was his full answer:

“(The Union-Tribune’s) David Garrick wrote an article the day after Todd Gloria was sworn in. …it was who’s going to be next? And, we talked about it. I can’t not be in it. I want people to know I’m interested in it, but I sent Todd a text. I didn’t want this to start. Now he’s the mayor…. I’m running for re-election — that’s my announcement. I’m running for re-election for Congress in 2026. Yeah. I just still have a lot of work to do there. It’s a, it’s a full-time job. So I’m not trying to take his job, but I’m certainly looking at it hard. I think I’m certainly well prepared for it.”

Labor Council takes stand on Gaza: The San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council unanimously passed a resolution this week on the war in Gaza. “The San Diego & Imperial Counties Labor Council (SDICLC) formally recognizes the campaign in Gaza as genocide, consistent with international legal definitions and the assessments of leading human rights organizations,” it reads.

“We wanted to create some momentum so other people would do the same. It’s too much and someone has to start calling it what it is,” Browning told me.

I don’t tweet much anymore: That’s a story for some other time. Twitter used to be my thing. But I don’t understand X. Not because of politics. It’s just different and I’m glad because I lost way too much time to it.

But a few weeks ago, I was stunned when my family got a postcard in the mail alerting us that our print subscription to the Union-Tribune would rise to almost $38 per week or nearly $2,000 a year. I posted and the post had some legs like the old days.

This week, CBS 8 talked to a man who started to help his mother with her finances and discovered she was now paying even more: $202 per month.

Couple things going on here: A lot of people replied to me saying they clearly wanted us to switch to an online subscription. No, they don’t. They want us to keep paying lots of money.

This is the big switch that happened when MediaNews Corp. and the private equity firm that owns it bought the Union-Tribune. The U-T was trying to get everyone to do online subscriptions and eventually get rid of its print product. They had a plan and were making progress to carrying it out. The idea was cut the enormous costs of printing and delivering the paper and offer a cheaper subscription to the actual journalism online.

The new owners flipped that model. They decided to cut costs needed to generate the journalism (leading to dozens of layoffs and the shuttering of the headquarters) but keep the print paper and jack up the cost of it in ways hopefully people wouldn’t notice.

The Atlantic wrote about Alden Global Capital, the U-T’s owners, four years ago.

“What threatens local newspapers now is not just digital disruption or abstract market forces. They’re being targeted by investors who have figured out how to get rich by strip-mining local-news outfits. The model is simple: Gut the staff, sell the real estate, jack up subscription prices, and wring as much cash as possible out of the enterprise until eventually enough readers cancel their subscriptions that the paper folds, or is reduced to a desiccated husk of its former self,” the magazine wrote.

Bottom line: I think the U-T’s journalism is worth $2,000 a year, if it were a philanthropic cause and I could afford that. We have lots of donors who make bigger contributions than that. But this is not the way and it’s hurting trust.

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

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