My mother has lived in Allied Gardens since 1956. She just watched the San Diego City Council settle a lawsuit over a trash fee that nearly doubled what voters were promised, and repeal a Balboa Park parking scheme that drove away the seniors and families who have treasured that park for generations.
Those were hard-won victories against a city government that called the residents demanding accountability “civic arsonists” before the pressure finally forced their hand. My mother deserves a moment to breathe. Instead, the San Diego County Board of Supervisors is asking her to open her wallet again.
A labor and advocacy coalition has now qualified a half-cent sales tax increase for the November ballot — the San Diego County Health and Safety Act — projected to extract $360 million annually from county residents already absorbing the highest cost of living in the nation. The goals are broadly popular: healthcare, child care, clean water, public safety. They always are.
The details are something else entirely. Nearly a quarter of the projected revenue is designated for “yet-to-be-specified” solutions to the Tijuana sewage crisis — a real and urgent problem being deployed as a blank check to be filled in later, after the votes are counted. San Diego residents have seen that movie before, and they know how it ends.
But the sales tax is only half of what the Board of Supervisors is asking voters to swallow this November. Supervisors Terra Lawson-Remer, Paloma Aguirre and Monica Montgomery Steppe have placed a charter reform package on the same ballot that would, among other things, extend supervisor term limits from two four-year terms to three — allowing the current board members who passed it to benefit directly from the change they voted for.
Supervisor Jim Desmond called it precisely what it is: “the worst form of politics and self-serving politicians.” Supervisor Joel Anderson was equally direct, describing the effort as a “rushed power grab” dressed up in the language of reform.
They are both right.
Every sitting supervisor ran under the current rules. Every one of them asked voters to hire them for up to eight years under a contract that was openly advertised. Changing those rules from inside the building, in a way that extends your own hold on power, is not reform. It is the precise behavior that term limits were designed to prevent, and presenting it alongside a genuinely popular ethics commission and independent budget analyst is the oldest political trick in the playbook — wrap something voters would reject inside something they would support and hope nobody reads the fine print.
The ethics commission and independent oversight positions deserve to exist on their own merits, and several supervisors on both sides of the aisle have said so. Desmond explicitly said he supports an ethics commission, a program auditor, and an independent budget analyst. Those reforms can be implemented without extending the political careers of the supervisors proposing them. The fact that they were bundled together rather than separated tells voters everything they need to know about the actual priorities driving this package.
San Diego County residents are being asked this November to simultaneously approve a $360 million annual tax increase built on vague spending commitments and a charter amendment designed in part to keep the current political majority in power longer. Both are being sold as necessary, urgent, and in the public interest. Both arrive from a government that a recent poll found 57% of San Diego residents already believe is on the wrong track.
That number is not cynicism. That number is the accumulated experience of residents who have watched water rates climb while pipes aged, trash fees double what was promised, parking fees punish seniors at public parks, and budget deficits compound year after year while the bureaucracy expanded and the infrastructure crumbled. It is the experience of people who were told to trust their government, trusted it, and got a different deal than the one they were offered.
Before the county asks working families and fixed-income seniors for $360 million a year, it owes them what it has consistently failed to deliver — complete transparency about where every dollar of existing revenue is going, specific and binding commitments about where every dollar of new revenue would go, and a structural accountability framework built to serve the public rather than protect the officials running it.
The legitimate pieces of this charter package — real independent oversight, genuine ethics enforcement, transparent budgeting — deserve a fair vote on their own, completely separated from a term limit extension that benefits no one except the supervisors who voted for it.
San Diego voters already answered the term limit question. The honest response from their elected officials is to respect that answer, not repackage it in November alongside a tax increase and call it reform.
My mother has given over 85 years to this county. She deserves a government that earns her trust before it asks for her money.
David A. Myers is a retired commander in the San Diego Sheriff’s Office with 35 years of service. He served as director of safety and security at Jewish Family Service of San Diego from 2023 to 2025.
