Endorsement: Mara Elliott for San Diego City Attorney

By The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board

Jan. 31, 2020 11:44 AM PT

Only once since San Diego instituted term limits in 1992 has a city attorney not won a second term.

Michael Aguirre, who eked out a victory by 3,293 votes in 2004, lost by nearly 90,000 in 2008. Voters considered his combative style — “fighting for the people” while also fighting City Hall — and they elected Jan Goldsmith, who stabilized the office over eight years before one of his top deputies, Mara Elliott, succeeded him in 2016. Her race wasn’t close.

Could a few mistakes now cost Elliott re-election?

They shouldn’t. Elliott doesn’t deserve to get fired, which is what a vote for challengers Cory Briggs or Pete Mesich would mean. The Deputy City Attorneys Association endorses her, and neither Briggs nor Mesich can match her management experience, which is crucial for overseeing a department with 400 employees and a $60 million budget.

Mesich, who worked under Aguirre and Goldsmith, promises to do the “quote-unquote boring” work of the city attorney, but he doesn’t inspire confidence he could guide the City Council, for instance, toward a short-term vacation rental policy. Briggs, who currently has some 20 lawsuits against the city, would be anything but boring, and that’s a gamble. He said he would prosecute short-term rental operators “in a heartbeat” by issuing 30-day cease-and-desist orders. Briggs could be more of an activist attorney than Aguirre, and San Diego doesn’t need that disruption when it will soon have a new mayor, five new councilmembers and just one councilmember with more than two years’ experience. It needs a steady hand in the City Attorney’s Office.

How steady? Elliott’s innovative use of gun violence restraining orders to save lives is a model for other jurisdictions. Her 2017 assessment of short-term vacation rentals — they’re illegal because city code doesn’t expressly allow them — was definitive and quick, as she said it would be in her first campaign, and it’s not her fault the council can’t fashion a policy. Her office’s detailed analysis in 2018 of two proposals to redevelop the Mission Valley stadium site helped both the council and the public better understand them. And she has also pushed the San Diego Police Department to test every rape kit in its backlog — thereby treating every rape victim with respect. When SDPD fell short, she and others kept pressure on the chief to raise its testing standards.

On the down side, her legal gambit to challenge the two Mission Valley ballot measures failed and cost the city nearly $600,000 in legal fees, she briefly (and, since, regretfully) backed a bill that would have made it more difficult to get public records, and on her first full day in office in 2016, the City Council preliminarily approved a $30 million “Smart Streetlights” contract that allowed thousands of surveillance cameras citywide — without telling anyone. Since then, community members’ concerns about discrimination and access to the data have left Elliott on the defensive about why she said nothing. There’s lots of blame to go around — Goldsmith, Mayor Kevin Faulconer and all nine councilmembers were also silent — but it’s the city attorney’s job to read the fine print and call out such issues.

The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board trusts that she has got the memo on that. We endorse Mara Elliott for San Diego city attorney.

See all of our endorsements.