by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
San Diego City
Councilmember Todd Gloria
Out of all the
issues facing San Diego — ensuring livable incomes and affordable housing,
fixing the city’s infrastructure, restoring cuts in city services, expanding
the Convention Center, keeping (or not keeping) the San Diego Chargers in town
— City Councilmember Todd Gloria named “reforming the referendum” as the most
important political concern when he spoke March 26 at the predominantly Queer
San Diego Democrats for Equality in Hillcrest. He admitted that to most of his
audiences, this is pretty much insider baseball — “mostly when I talk about
this issue, the group is pretty uninitiated,” he said — but he stressed that
the achievements of the hard-won Democratic City Council majority are at risk
from Right-wing business interests who can spend hundreds of thousands of
dollars on referendum campaigns to get them reversed.
The referendum
is the flip side of the coin from the initiative, which far more Californians
are familiar with because it’s the source of the long lists of propositions
that frequently clutter up the state’s ballots. The initiative allows citizens
to write their own laws, overriding elected legislatures, if they can get
enough signatures to put them on the ballot and get a majority of voters to
cast ballots for them. The referendum allows voters to overturn a law already
passed by a legislature. If the referendum organizers get enough signatures to
put a law on the ballot, the legislature that passed the law in the first place
has two options. Either they can repeal it themselves, or they can put it
before voters — and if the voters choose to override their representatives’
decision, out it goes.
Along with the
recall — the ability of voters to circulate a petition to get rid of a sitting
elected official and have another election to replace them — the referendum and
initiative were originally added to the California state constitution as part
of Hiram Johnson’s reform movement in 1912. Back then, they were sold as ways
for citizens to attack the power of well-financed special interests in general,
and the Southern Pacific Railroad in particular, to control the political
process through campaign contributions. But Gloria and other opponents of the
referendum argue that this original purpose has been turned on its head; now,
most of the referenda being pushed in San Diego and elsewhere in California are
being pushed by big corporations and developers to reverse progressive
legislation that might cost them money.
“It really
reflects a lot of what Senator [Elizabeth] Warren and others are talking
about,” Gloria told the Democrats for Equality. “It’s really a separate set of
rules for wealthy folks. We’ve seen that in the tax code and in various
different things, but to see it in our democracy that if you cannot get the
outcome you want through the normal legislative process, if you have a couple
of hundred thousand dollars, you can purchase the result you’re looking for.”
A Tool for the 1 Percent
The
transformation of the referendum and initiative from tools to control the 1
percent to strategies used by the 1
percent has been going on for decades, especially as getting measures on the
ballot has itself become a major business — and a source of quick money for
homeless and other economically marginalized people, who can circulate
petitions and make from $2 to $12 for everyone they get to sign. But the
current spate of corporate referenda in San Diego really began in November
2010, when a Democratic-majority City Council passed a law aimed at controlling
the expansion of Walmart and other large big-box stores. Fearful that Walmart
would crush local businesses and damage the city’s economy, the Council
overrode Republican Mayor Jerry Sanders’ veto of a bill that would require an
“economic impact review,” as well as an environmental impact review, before the
Council could approve such stores.
Walmart reacted
with both barrels blazing. According to Gloria, who wrote the economic-impact
law, they spent up to $2 million to circulate a referendum to put it on the
ballot. “At the time,” Gloria told the Democrats for Equality, “the city’s
ordinance said the election had to be called within 90 days” of the County
Registrar of Voters’ certification that the referendum had enough valid
signatures to qualify. With no regular city election scheduled for 2011, the
cash-strapped city would have had to spend $3.4 million just to have an
election on Walmart’s referendum. So Gloria joined seven other Councilmembers
and voted to repeal his own ordinance because “there was no way I could justify
spending that kind of money” on a special election, especially a low-turnout
one in which Walmart could vastly outspend the ordinance’s supporters, appeal
to more conservative voters and likely win anyway.
At the time,
Walmart’s local opponents in the small-business community and organized labor
were hopeful that their problems would be solved at the state level. Then-State
Senator Juan Vargas, a former San Diego City Councilmember, pledged to
introduce a bill that would impose the economic impact review requirement on
big-box superstores statewide. He got it through both houses of the
legislature, but Governor Jerry Brown vetoed it — and Walmart began building
superstores all across California, including one in Sherman Heights that wiped
out an historic farmers’ market and caused a number of small businesses in the
neighborhood to close even before Walmart moved in, so sure were they that the
giant chain would destroy them financially.
Walmart’s
success in getting the city to back down from an ordinance that would have put
the brakes on their expansion plans in San Diego led other businesses to copy
the strategy. Jerry Sanders, the Republican mayor who had vetoed the
economic-impact bill in the first place, was hired as president of the San
Diego Chamber of Commerce after he was termed out of the mayoralty, and under
him the Chamber became aggressive at using referenda to impose their will on
the city and thwart the efforts of a Democratic Council to hold businesses
accountable.
In the face of
referenda, the Council bailed on at least two other pieces of legislation, one
to raise the fees developers are required to pay the city to fund
affordable-housing programs and one to regulate medical marijuana dispensaries.
The latter backfired on the dispensaries, Gloria told the Democrats for
Equality. “It hurt patients,” he said, because the Council ultimately passed “a
more restrictive ordinance” than the one the dispensaries had challenged by
referendum.
Barrio Logan Loses Its
Plan
But, according
to Gloria, the issue that most vividly showed how the referendum has become a
tool of “the wealthy versus those who are not” was the battle over the Barrio
Logan Community Plan in 2014. “We spent millions of dollars and years updating
the community plan for Barrio Logan,” Gloria told the Democrats for
Equality.”All of that just went up in smoke when you basically had three
defense contractors decide that it wasn’t to their benefit. So they were able
to purchase the result they weren’t able to get from the City Council. … They
spent money and got signatures telling people a whole bunch of lies, like about
how the Navy was going to leave San Diego.”
Gloria, who was
serving as interim mayor at the time following the resignation of Bob Filner,
brought the Secretary of the Navy to assure voters that the Navy wasn’t going to abandon San Diego if the Barrio Logan
Community Plan was passed. Supporters of the plan went to court to stop the
referendum organizers from having their signature gatherers lie to voters to
get them to sign — and the judge ruled that they indeed had lied, but they had
a constitutionally protected right to do so and so the referendum qualified for
the ballot. In the June 2014 election, voters overwhelmingly rejected the
Barrio Logan Community Plan on the basis of a six-figure TV ad campaign that
repeated all the lies the referendum supporters had told to get the petition on
the ballot.
“It really just
comes down to money,” Gloria told the Democrats for Equality. “If you have
enough money, you can get this other result. People talk about ‘this is about
the citizens having the right to petition the government,’ and I just say,
‘Baloney.’ If the roles were reversed, does anyone in this room seriously
believe that the residents of Barrio Logan could marshal the hundreds of
thousands of dollars necessary to overturn the City Council’s action? No, of
course they couldn’t. And that’s exactly what we’ve seen time and time again.”
The next
referendum campaign to get on the ballot in San Diego is to repeal the proposal
Gloria pushed through the City Council when he was its president to raise San
Diego’s minimum wage to $11.50 per hour. The original proposal was for a $15
per hour wage, but that got talked down first to $13.09 and then to $11.50
after owners of small businesses — real
small businesses — convinced Gloria they couldn’t support $13.09 but would be
O.K. with $11.50. This time, however, the plan ran afoul of the San Diego
Chamber of Commerce, which organized a political action committee called the
“Small Business Coalition” to sponsor a petition drive to qualify a referendum
to stop the minimum wage increase.
What the
Councilmembers and public supporters of the minimum wage increase didn’t know
until after the referendum qualified was that the so-called “Small Business
Coalition” had only two bona fide small
businesses among its members. “The rest were the big hotels, the National
Restaurant Association, the National Franchisees’ Association,” Gloria told the
Democrats for Equality. “Big lobbying groups spent hundreds of thousands of
dollars to delay the minimum wage. What I thought was really ironic was that we
got reports that they were paying up to $12 a signature to defeat a $11.50 per
hour minimum wage. I mean, this is insane. But they’re business folks, right?
Ultimately they looked at it and made a business decision that it would cost
them more actually to increase the minimum wage than to spend a couple of
hundred thousand dollars to delay it.”
The
not-so-small businesses in the “Small Business Coalition” have already delayed
the minimum wage increase until June 2016, when it goes on the ballot, and it’s
anybody’s guess whether San Diegans, faced with a major TV and direct-mail ad
blitz and with a history of economic conservatism at the ballot box, will vote
for it. Meanwhile, as veteran San Diego political reporter Matt Potter wrote in
the April 1 Reader (http://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2015/apr/01/radar-referendum-renderings/),
the San Diego Chamber of Commerce has quietly put the “Small Business
Coalition” out of business now that it has served its purpose.
When
Elephants Fight …
Meanwhile,
San Diego is seeing another no-holds-barred referendum fight over a planned
development in Carmel Valley called One Paseo that has the distinction of
having big-money interests on both sides. The developer of One Paseo was a
company called Kilroy Realty Corporation, and once their plan got through the
City Council on a 7-2 vote (with Gloria one of the Councilmembers who voted for
it), a supposedly grass-roots organization called “Protect San Diego’s
Neighborhoods” arose to start a referendum petition to block its construction.
Only it turned out that “Protect San Diego’s Neighborhoods” was largely funded
by Donahue Schriber, a rival developer who owns a shopping center next to One
Paseo and developable land nearby.
Schriber,
worried that his land would be less valuable if One Paseo were built, launched
a referendum drive and got current City Council President Sherri Lightner, San
Diego County Supervisor Dave Roberts, and San Diego Community Planners
Committee chair Joe LaCava to appear at the press conference announcing the
campaign. Once the “Protect San Diego’s Neighborhoods” signature gatherers hit
the streets, however, Kilroy fought back. They launched an advisory petition to
support keeping the San Diego Chargers in town, allegedly to hire so many
signature gatherers that the anti-One Paseo forces couldn’t find people to circulate
their own petition. Kilroy also sent out 27,000 postcards to people who’d
signed the anti-One Paseo petition asking them to take back their signatures.
The
anti-One Paseo referendum is currently before the San Diego County Registrar of
Voters, whose staff have the unenviable task of figuring out not only how many
signatures are invalid for the normal reasons (like people not being registered
to vote at all, or not being residents of the city of San Diego) but also how
many people who signed the petition originally used Kilroy’s postcards to take
their names off. This rare spectacle of seeing big-money interests on both sides of a referendum campaign recalls the ancient
proverb, “When elephants fight, the grass gets trampled.” It also puts the two
most prominent Gay male elected officials in San Diego, Todd Gloria and Dave
Roberts, on opposite sides.
Gloria’s
proposals to reform the referendum process are modest, largely because most of
the rules regarding referenda are set by the state constitution. “But there are
two things we could do locally that I think would be really meaningful,” he
told the Democrats for Equality. “Number one is with regard to disclosure. … As
candidates for elective office, we have to disclose who’s contributing to our
campaigns. Towards the ends of our campaigns those disclosures have to be on a
24-hour basis.” Gloria said “the same rule should prevail” for referendum
campaigns, especially since they only have 30 days to collect the estimated
33,000 signatures needed to get on the ballot.
“At
least give the citizens the information,” Gloria told the Democrats for
Equality. “You can choose to sign it or not, but if you’re being told that this
is being sponsored by small businesses when it’s really just Fortune 500 companies and big corporate CEO’s, maybe that
would make a difference in the decision-making process of those who are asked
in front of Trader Joe’s or Ralph’s to sign this.”
Another
change Gloria would like to see in the referendum process is to allow the
elected officials whose decisions are being challenged by referendum to be in
the room at the Registrar of Voters’ offices when the signatures are being
validated. “Currently, only the people who are proponents of a referendum can
be in the room,” Gloria explained. “I’m not allowed to be in that room to say,
‘That signature does not match the voter record. I challenge that one.’ There’s
no one there on the opponents’ side to represent that point of view. I don’t
think that’s fair; I don’t think that’s right. We need to change that.”
SDG&E
Encourages Climate Change
Gloria
fielded audience questions on various other issues facing the city, from the
huge gap between the need to fix its infrastructure and the money available —
“at least $3 billion, probably more like $5 billion … far larger than the
pension debt,” Gloria explained — to the prospects for a new Chargers stadium
(the current proposal, he said, is for a $1.4 billion stadium of which the
Chargers and the National Football League are committed to only $200 million
each, leaving a $1 billion shortfall they’re expecting the public to pay), the
status of the Balboa Park Centennial and the condition of the park’s rose
garden.
But
the issue that most engaged him besides the referendum was yet another case of
a giant corporation trying to sabotage one of the progressive issues Gloria
pushed through the City Council when he was its president. That was the city’s
historic plan to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and other sources of
human-caused climate change. This time the culprit is San Diego Gas &
Electric (SDG&E), whose new proposal to restructure electric rates would
actually penalize people for using less energy.
Currently,
Gloria explained, “SDG&E has four different tiers of charges. The lower
your tier, the less you pay. If you have your lights on all the time, you pay
more; that’s tier 4. They’re arguing to collapse it into two tiers instead of
four, and make it so there’s not as much differential between the two tiers.”
What’s more, Gloria said, SDG&E also wants to impose a flat “base fee” of
$5, later raised to $10 (“and if you believe it stays at $10 I’ve got some
beautiful properties somewhere in Florida to sell you,” Gloria joked), on all customers, no matter how much they use.
“Pretty
much everyone in my Council district will end up paying more,” Gloria said,
“because we have smaller homes, we’re closer to the coastline, and most of our
homes aren’t particularly air-conditioned.” He added that when he asked an
SDG&E representative what the impact would be in his district, the
SDG&E rep said “roughly 70 percent of my constituents in Old Town are in
tier 1” — and therefore they’d be hit by the “base fee” and the higher rates
from collapsing the tiers. What’s more, the SDG&E rep couldn’t or wouldn’t
give him a straight answer when Gloria asked just what that arbitrary “base
fee” was for.
SDG&E’s
rate proposal now goes before the California Public Utilities Commission
(CPUC), which is supposed to regulate utility rates but over the last two
decades — especially since the appointment of former Southern California Edison
(SCE) CEO Michael Peevey as its head — has acquired a reputation as a
rubber-stamp for whatever utilities want to charge. The CPUC is currently in a
state of flux as Peevey resigned following allegations that he received favors
from utility executives.
Gloria
tried to get the City Council to approve a resolution not only asking the CPUC
to vote down SDG&E’s rate proposal but to ask SDG&E themselves to
withdraw it. He had Council support for the resolution to the CPUC, but several
Councilmembers balked at the idea of a government agency actually making a
request to a private corporation to change a business decision. The Council
passed the watered-down version 7-2, but Gloria and former Mayoral candidate David
Alvarez voted against it because they didn’t think it went far enough.
“I
don’t understand how this was substantive,” Gloria told the Democrats for
Equality. “I don’t understand why we couldn’t ask SDG&E, our franchisee —
we provide them a franchise to do this in our city — to ask them that. I didn’t
see any harm in doing that, and I still do the head-scratcher as to why that
happened.”
