All eyes are on the city budget, knowing cuts are coming to close a $120 million budget deficit. Residents and council members alike have been told that if they want to reverse a budget cut in one area, arts grants for instance, they need to pull the money from another program.
Frequently, residents point at the Transportation Department, and more specifically new bike lanes, as a place those cuts can be made.
But the independent budget analyst has another concern in the transportation budget: overtime. The cost of overtime has exploded in recent years as city workers address a backlog of streets that need repaving.
Transportation department’s budget to backlog
Money allocated to the department as a whole has increased too. It accounted for $200 million in last year’s budget, a $70 million increase from two years prior.
Of that $200 million, $184.2 million came from the general fund, making transportation the fourth-most expensive department in the general fund in last year’s budget, behind police ($703.5 million), fire-rescue ($378.3 million) and parks and recreation ($188.8 million).
That budget increase has helped the city put a dent in its pothole backlog and make other delayed infrastructure repairs to sidewalks, streetlights and more – all of which are popular with the public.
“We don’t have the staffing or resources to keep up with the ever-increasing requests from the public,” said Naomi Chavez, interim director of the Transportation Department. “The core baseline services that transportation provides are also among the most frequent requests the city receives.”
Overtime over budget
But the independent budget analyst has raised concerns about transportation spending, particularly that overtime costs keep going over budget.
“In general, the concern is that if transportation is overspending on overtime overall, that could require reductions elsewhere in the budget,” said Jordan More, the city’s principal fiscal and policy analyst.
The independent budget analyst’s mid-year budget review predicted transportation overtime would go $4.6 million over budget, an expense the department made up by cutting planned tree-trimming services.
Some of the department’s overtime — typically about $2 million per year — comes from emergency infrastructure fixes at night and on weekends.
The rest is what Bethany Bezak, the city’s chief performance and logistics officer, described as an “expansion of the day,” by letting workers extend their regular working hours. In the second half of this fiscal year, most of that overtime went toward resurfacing and adding slurry to streets.
The highest paid transportation staffer brought in $73,000 in overtime in calendar year 2025, with two others making over $70,000 in overtime.
Bezak told the council’s budget review committee that this overtime saves money.
“Overtime of our existing staff, if it continues to be sustainable and there continues to be interest in it, is the best approach that we have,” Bezak said.
The public’s budget priorities
Hiring new staff means buying new vehicles and equipment for them, which has ripple effects in other departments too. General services, which handles vehicle maintenance, is already understaffed and facing backlogs, city staff said at a budget review meeting.
Gloria’s budget prioritized the more public-facing backlogs — infrastructure and road repair — based on resident surveys.
“Their priorities are very clear: Public safety, neighborhood infrastructure and homelessness,” Gloria said during his April budget unveiling. “This budget invests in the basics by committing funding for more than 311 miles in road resurfacing and nearly $60 million for safety improvements at key intersections, sometimes known as the Fatal 15.”
The city’s budget survey, with 11,000 respondents, found most residents rank poor street or sidewalk conditions as the issue they are most concerned about, over homelessness and housing costs. In addition, street repair or resurfacing was the most-clicked option when residents were told to pick the top three areas they wanted to protect in the budget, beating out police and fire-rescue (both police and fire, as it turns out, have overtime issues of their own.
Cutting bike lane designers
The transportation department is facing some cuts. Gloria wants to eliminate a team that designs restriping and bike lanes when the city repaves its streets.
Some city council members worry the decision is not based on balancing the budget, but to end controversy over the bike lanes.
“This is what I’m concerned about, that the mayor’s office heard one too many complaints about bike lanes and just decided to make a sharp left turn and say, ‘we’re not doing them anymore,’” said Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera at a budget review meeting.
“It does feel like a complete retreat,” added Councilmember Kent Lee. “And that is perplexing.”
Gloria’s proposal to eliminate the transportation’s 14-person multimodal team would save the city $2.4 million in the next fiscal year.
But it could also cost the city, by making it harder for affordable housing developments to compete for state grants that prioritize projects near bike lanes.
Charles Modica, the city’s independent budget analyst, emphasized during an initial city budget hearing that bike lanes are not to blame for the city’s budget deficit.
“I want to be clear that the city spends a fraction of a percent of its budget on bike lanes in any given year, and that amount is generally associated with striping streets after repaving,” Modica said.
He was concerned that critics had conflated multi-million dollar bike lane projects that were designed, built and paid for by the San Diego Association of Governments — like the $14 million Pershing Bikeway — with city projects that are far more modest.
The council is set to adopt the budget by June 9.
