Why Mayor Gloria Thinks He’ll Get More Stuff Done

Correction: This post has been updated to correct a typo in the transcription of the interview that changed externals to extra nos.

San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria feels more empowered than ever to make decisions.  

Since he took over the role of chief operating officer in February, he has been running the city from the ninth floor. The mayoral office is two floors up, but positioning himself on the lower floor has helped him get more done, he told me during an interview last week. 

“I’m getting multiple bites at the apple rather than being presented with a fully baked idea,” he said.  

However, during budget discussions this year, some councilmembers made it clear they did not believe he should be the COO. They tried stripping him of the role by adding the position back into the city’s budget. They also wanted him to fire two members of his team. Gloria vetoed the first and unilaterally decided not to do the latter.  

This year’s budget negotiations were some of the tensest exchanges between the mayor and City Council in recent memory. This week, councilmembers demanded that he explain how he’s going to pay for the staff he’s not firing.  

In a conversation with Voice of San Diego, he defended his budgetary decisions. He told me that as mayor he’s responsible for the city, yet the system we had in place didn’t always allow him to get his hands dirty.  He says working from the ninth floor will result in things happening faster. However, the city’s financial troubles are still looming over him, and he says budget cuts will make city services slower.  

As I’m getting to know my new beat and this city, I wanted to talk to the mayor about his decisions. Here’s our conversation below. 

Editor’s note: The following has been edited for length and clarity. 

Mariana: At your State of the City address earlier this year, you talked about this being the year of reducing and limiting city services, non-essential spending. How do you feel about the decisions you made surrounding the budget? 

Mayor Gloria: This is a very difficult budget year, and it was always going to be that. We have this massive gap that we have to fill. There’s no help coming from the federal or state government as it had in the past, particularly during Covid. 

Where we’ve ended up, it’s a compromise. It was a back and forth. Ultimately, I think we are closer to structural balance, which was our goal. Couldn’t do it all in one fiscal year, or at least in time for the July 1 start of the fiscal year, but we got a lot of it done.  We’re on a pathway to what would be a more stable financial environment.  

The hesitation you hear in my voice is really the externals to the city. What’s the global economy going to be like? What are tariffs going to do to our bottom line? And the cost that we bear as a city (is) that even if we can solve our structural issue, that goalpost may get moved as we try and hit a target.  

I very much want to get us into the structural balance and then start regrowing the organization in a way that is much more focused on the priorities San Diegans have which is centering on public safety, housing affordability, homelessness action and infrastructure investment. 

A good step in the right direction. A lot more to go. 

The Council wanted to nix some folks from your office. Ultimately, you have decided not to get rid of those positions. Why? 

Mayor Gloria:  I think important in that conversation is front loading the fact that we will meet the budget targets. That’s not always been clear. I want to be abundantly clear, I will not make those specific position reductions in large part because these are filled positions. A big part of how we tried to balance this budget was by limiting direct impacts to city employees. 

We’ve spent a lot of the first four years of my time as mayor in investing in our workforce to get higher service levels for San Diegans in our neighborhoods. We’ve managed to close a $300 million budget deficit without massive layoffs. 

Making that reduction roughly a million dollars, we will meet that. I point that out because I think it’s important to say we’re following the law, which is our responsibility. The Council sets appropriation of targets. While there’s always some going over or under on that, it is our intent to meet that with the mayor’s budget. Obviously, all the departments will be vetted on a regular basis by the City Council so set that aside. 

 To your question, the voters of our city created a form of government that gives me the responsibilities for hiring and firing in our city. That’s an authority that I’m going to reserve and continue to use. I appreciate the Council’s input, but this is maintaining the division of power that the voters have set up. 

I think also many of the initiatives the (councilmembers) are most interested in advancing — things around revenue creation, efficiency, and cost savings — absolutely require the position of DCOO (Deputy Chief Operating Officer). These are city executives who are empowered to work with multiple departments to try and get them to work together to get things done. 

I would argue that at the Council’s direction, we’re required to do more of that than we ever have. So, it doesn’t align to reduce the number of people doing that work at the same time. I also would say that I don’t feel as though those position reductions were particularly well thought out. 

You are both mayor and chief operating officer. What does that look like?  Is it one position? Is it two?  

Mayor Gloria: How I see it, it’s one position. 

When the voters created this form of government, they wanted the mayor to be hands-on and directly accountable to them for what does or doesn’t get done. When thinking about this decision months ago, it reminded me that when the chief operating officer was created during the 2005 mayoral campaign, it didn’t come because the voters authorized or recommended or wanted a chief operating officer — the mayor at the time created that position. We kind of all just went along with it. I’m challenging this organization to rethink many assumptions that have been made over years and decades, this was one of them. 

 What I found over four years as mayor is that I’m held directly accountable for pretty much everything going on in the city. But in many cases, there was a layer between me and those people that are making those decisions. 

 What this does is it gives me direct insight and allows me to have more direct say in how this organization is working. I think it’s extremely important. I think it’s what the voters wanted. It obviously comes at significant cost savings. My strong belief is that this means that stuff will happen faster.   

How do you see this as a cost-saving decision? 

Mayor Gloria: Well, it’s pretty simple. The former chief operating officer makes nearly double what the mayor’s paid. Now that position no longer exists. So those dollars now are free to flow back to the general fund to pay for things like filling potholes and fixing streetlights. 

That aligns with my priorities as mayor. In that February action, we consolidated several other departments and offices and made other reductions to management and mid-management positions to generate, I think over $5 million in savings annually. It’s our expectation for that to continue. 

Now, the Council has restored some of those positions, which is a bit counter to the arguments in public. Nevertheless, there are still millions of dollars (in) savings and savings that have been realized because of February’s action to include the roughly 400 plus thousand in salary, plus the benefits, et cetera. 

It’s real money that we can use to do the things that people want us to do. I’m happy to take on those responsibilities. My salary did not increase when this change happened, what we did was eliminate the highest paid city position, getting those dollars back to neighborhood services. 

Where are areas you’re trying to find savings?  

Mayor Gloria: One point of clarification, we did cut my office’s budget by 10 percent which is more than double what the City Council was asked to do.  Again, not only just to take on those additional responsibilities, without additional pay, but also leading by example and cutting my own office budget by more than other independent departments were asked to do. 

So, there were cuts to the office’s budget. 

Mayor Gloria: Correct.  

But there weren’t cuts for the staff. 

Mayor Gloria: Ish.. not impacting people who are here, but as folks have left, holding those positions vacant. Going back to December when it was very apparent what kind of situation we were going to be dealing with, I issued a request to fill order. 

This is where the savings come from. So, you have someone who leaves our organization. We had an administrative staff member who returned to the private sector. We have not filled her position and that savings is a part of our reduction. 

There are reductions in training and travel, paperclips and Post-its. All these things come together to help us achieve our offices’ reductions. That’s what presumably the City Council will similarly do to meet their targets.  

You asked the question, though, about where are the cuts happening? The Council’s additions to the budget kind of masked the cuts that were made, and I recognized the cuts that we had put into the original draft budget. Council in many cases restored those. 

 In my May revise, I restored some as well. Then obviously through the veto and override process more with that. You know, I saw some rhetoric around “libraries were restored.” Well, that’s in part true in terms of the full cut that was recommended. But as a reminder, the libraries will now be closed on Sundays, and some will be closed on Mondays. 

So, there were the cuts there. A lot of the cuts are kind of internal and are intended to try and limit their impacts to taxpayers, residents and neighborhoods. If you’re dealing with fewer purchasing clerks, if you have less supplies, if you have less overtime, I mean that will impact folks. 

They’re just a little less obvious to the public. Generally, that’s what we should do. We should try and minimize the impacts to community members and whatnot. But they do exist, and people will feel them when things take longer to respond to. When certain services that maybe are not as high profile as library hours are reduced.  

What are some of those less apparent cuts to the public?  

Mayor Gloria: Some of them are still playing out. And again, back to why it’s important for me to be sitting or taking on the responsibilities of more day-to-day operation management, department directors get a budget, and they are managed and expected to manage that budget.  

I think what people will see though, is less — or longer time to fix streetlights. 

They’re already taking too long. It’ll probably take longer. Less graffiti abatement, particularly on private property. As someone who is a neat freak, trust me, that would drive me insane, and I know it’ll drive a lot of people in the community crazy.  

There’s some hope that if the economy continues to tread water and perhaps rebounds, maybe we can restore some of those at midyear but that remains to be seen. 

One that I think people may start to notice is San Diego has long had a storm water pollution public education effort Think Blue that’s around PSAs (public service announcements) and other public messaging, billboards, sponsoring community events and fairs. 

That program is now largely defunct. I want to be very clear — I don’t want to make any of these reductions. No one runs for mayor to say, I want to do less of this or less of that. Generally, I want to do more of a repair. I want to have libraries open more. 

This is not a great position to be in. Reminder, unlike our federal partners, we have to balance our budget. Reducing that particular initiative around public education and commercials and things of that nature seem preferable to laying off employees or permanently shuttering libraries or rec centers, right? 

These are the give and takes. Now will people maybe miss the commercials? Maybe? But I think it’s less likely that than missing another day’s worth of library hours, right? Those are the kinds of decisions we’re grappling with. 

Earlier we were touching on this whole COO and mayor dynamic. Could you explain to our audience what your day-to-day looks like? 

Mayor Gloria: What’s a great example? We’re sitting on the ninth floor. You may not know we have an office. The mayor traditionally has sat on the 11th floor. The chief operating officer has often been here. Two floors are a lot of distance between direction and execution. Collapsing that and sitting here on nine with the other city executives and managers means that there’s not two floors of distance between direction and execution, right? Collapsing means things work faster. There’s less lost in the translation. I’m now here daily. 

On the 11th floor, I will typically take more external facing meetings and particularly diplomatic meetings. This floor is where our chief financial officers are a couple of cubicles down, or the police chief and fire chief also satellite offices here. It just means I’m more in direct communication.  

The other thing is I read more. I would always go home and read a lot anyway — staff reports, items for the Council, or for fun. Last night I went home and read the College Area community plan update draft. Before the differences, I would’ve probably read it in a few weeks or months from now as opposed to today, which means that if there was something in this draft that I looked at last night, I could help influence before it’s published, provide that feedback. I can pick up the phone and call the councilmember who’s involved, a community leader I may know, and just take their temperature on it. It’s just a few less layers between me and the decisions that matter in people’s lives. 

It is more work. I don’t mind more work. Because of the extreme accountability that comes with being mayor, I feel more empowered than ever and feel more confident in the decision making that I’m doing because I’m getting information sooner. I’m getting multiple bites at the apple rather than being presented with a fully baked idea. 

Being in the more nascent phases of some of these policies, plans, initiatives just means that they’re more reflective of my views and my priorities, which are directly informed by the people of the city. It’s more work with no additional pay, and that’s okay. I’m not here to do anything other than to serve my hometown. 

It has challenged me with new things I haven’t done before and frankly, keeping me on my toes, which I like. 

How does this shift your relationship with the City Council? I know they were trying to bring the COO position back. 

Mayor Gloria: The central flaw in this year’s budget process, in addition to the massive deficit that we’re having to deal with was that there was not the normal collaboration, not just with the mayor’s office, but with the independent budget analyst. I have not seen since the IBA was created say in public that they weren’t consulted on the final draft budget. 

That’s extraordinary and a departure from norms that really should be pushed back against. That’s a whole different thing that’s unrelated to me. It’s apparently their process and I don’t think it was a positive one and one we should not repeat with regard to my relationship with them. 

I think one of my value adds is that I was a councilmember, I was a budget chair, and I was a council president. I know exactly what it is to sit up on that dais. From day one of my administration, I’ve tried to be more consultative with the City Council than I ever felt that I was as a city council member. 

 I would like to think that this would be better. I recognize for some of them, particularly based on that restoration, I could assume, that for some maybe it is a desire to see that restored. 

I would just say there are better ways to spend more than half a million dollars than on another city executive. Particularly when almost all of them are preaching that they want to see fewer management positions and more money for frontline services.  

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