The two Candidates vying to represent San Diego’s District 2 — which covers Point Loma, Ocean Beach, Pacific Beach and Clairemont — faced off Monday over how to address city spending and homelessness, two reliable parts of any city debate.
But at the evening candidate forum they also jumped in on the recently re-ignited debate over automated license plate readers.
Both Nicole Crosby, a deputy city attorney, and Richard Bailey, the former mayor of Coronado, rehashed their respective positions on topics like the proposed Midway Rising development and Liberty Station leasing at the forum, hosted by the Point Loma Association and League of Women Voters at Liberty Station Conference Center. This time around, though, as the two candidates who survived the primary, they had more opportunities to take direct shots at one another ahead of the Nov. 3 general election.
The first question of the night, about where the budget should be cut, provided Bailey the opportunity to repeat a mantra from his campaign: The city has a spending problem not a revenue problem. The solution, he says, does not necessitate cuts to programs, but significant trims to personnel – as in back to 2015 staffing levels.
“We have to restructure City Hall, starting with cutting back personnel across most departments, so that we can actually do more with less instead of doing less with more.”
For Crosby, this line of reasoning was an opportunity to question if it is effective to compare two different decades in city government, whether based on nationwide inflation or the city’s specific circumstances.
“If we’re looking at a 2015 baseline number that Mr. Bailey would like you to look at, we need to remember that we were operating with a shoestring budget,” she said.
“Proposition B and the pension decimation and salary freezes in that era destroyed (the) city infrastructure we had, and I mean human capital as opposed to the longstanding infrastructure we have.”
Instead, she believes the city does not need to rein in staffing, but to audit current contracts and leasing agreements while going after grants, a key piece of her proposed financial platform.
Bailey challenged Crosby’s revenue stances, calling her proposed reevaluation of lease agreements insignificant in the scheme of the city’s budget woes. Auditing, he argued, is already in place.
“A comment was made earlier that we just need to do more audits. Well, the city has an internal auditor,” Bailey said. “They did 45 audits for the past five years. 20% of those recommendations still haven’t been implemented by our current city council and mayor.”
Despite wanting to reduce staffing across the board, there are positions that Bailey would like to fill. For one, he wants to bring back a city manager, doing away with the strong mayor form of government.
Crosby was less concrete on her personal feelings toward hiring a city manager, deferring to the will of the voters.
In addition, in an effort to reduce overtime spending, Bailey wants to see the city hire more police officers.
This, he says, would lead to quicker response times as well, amid a rise in calls for service for homeless individuals. Bailey’s approach to homelessness in San Diego would be to advocate for more enforcement of ordinances like not allowing vehicle habitation.
Crosby called out these policies in tandem, saying she believes homeless enforcement is not the best use of police resources and that those without shelter need housing and treatment to be able to make their way out of the system.
“I’m so glad that he proved my point because enforcing homelessness using police officers is not a way to do business. That is not a good use of city resources,” she said.
“What’s important is things have gotten more expensive, and overtime is more expensive. San Diego is a giant city, and there are people here that deserve to have their priority-one calls responded to in a very quick manner.”
An element of San Diego policing that residents didn’t bring up at the primary candidate forums in the spring was Automated License Plate Readers. Despite being a point of debate in pockets of San Diego for years, the topic has hit the national stage and enlivened the local discussion.
Crosby said that she neither supports nor trusts Flock, the ALPR vendor for San Diego police,,aggregating government data for private purposes.
“I don’t trust the entities that are controlling that information, but I do trust our local San Diego police officers, and I think it’s really important for our officers to be able to talk to people, do the real investigation, because errors happen, and we need to make sure that our communities are safe and they’re not being overrun by big brother Flock,” she said.
Bailey said that as a “civil libertarian” he is keenly aware of the slippery slope of government surveillance.
“It’s something that we all, as Americans, should be keenly aware of and do whatever we can to keep that from happening,” he said.
Though, he said, after reviewing the city’s systems he believes private Ring cameras around the city have more surveillance power than the city’s ALPR technology.
For him, it’s an issue of placing more guardrails around the technology. He proposed that the public database that logs ALPR searches should include license plate numbers, so residents can see if they are actively being surveilled. He also said he would like to see the city delete data after a week rather than a month.
Bailey called Crosby’s opposition to the technology surprising considering the city attorney’s office has signed off on the technology for years.
In their closing remarks both candidates continued to work to draw a bright line differentiating themselves from each other.
Bailey made an effort not only to paint his views as contrary to Crosby’s but also to each of the current councilmembers. He said that the present composition of the council, made up of primarily former government employees and community activists, made him want to run to offer someone with experience in the private sector.
“I’m running to offer an alternative perspective on the city council. Right now, it seems that the city council is balanced between higher taxes and fees with lower service, and even higher taxes and fees with even lower service,” he said.
Crosby quickly noted her private sector experience in her closing remarks, apologizing partially in jest that she did not note her experience as a commercial real estate broker, or a California Pizza Kitchen server. She went on to repeat her main talking point, bringing evidence-based solutions to City Hall, while taking a subtle dig at Bailey’s stances throughout the night.
“I actually bring real solutions. I’m not here to talk to everybody about jargon and numbers taken out of context,” she said. What we actually need to do is show up and do the work for the people who it matters for, and that’s all of you.”
