The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board interviewed three candidates in the San Diego City Attorney’s race ahead of the March 3, 2020, primary election in which the top two vote-getters will advance to a runoff election in November. Below is the transcript of our Oct. 10, 2019, interview with candidateCory Briggs. To listen to it in its entirety, click here. This interview was transcribed using the digital transcription service Temi and checked for accuracy by a staffer. To call any errors to our attention or to ask any questions about our interviews, please email matthew.hall@sduniontribune.com with the subject line “election interviews.”
Union-Tribune: Thanks for coming in.
Cory Briggs: Thanks for having me.
Q: A few months ago I thought we’d be interviewing you for the mayor’s race, but uh, you shifted gears. Tell us why you shifted gears.
A: I’m a better lawyer than a politician, you know that.
Q: Seriously though, uh, you have a history as a rabble-rouser. The city had a rabble rouser in Mike Aguirre not too long ago. Is this the time for another rabble-rouser as city attorney?
A: I don’t know what... If you mean, is it time for somebody who wants to be transparent and honest with the public and not secret? Yeah, it’s time for that.
Meet the other candidates for San Diego City Attorney below.
San Diego City Attorney Mara Elliott met with The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board ahead of the 2020 primary election.
San Diego City Attorney candidate Peter Mesich met with The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board ahead of the 2020 primary election.
Q: Is that a reference to [City Attorney] Mara Elliott’s support for [Senate Bill] 615?
A: It’s a reference to lots of things in the city attorney administration in past months.
Q: Well, and we’ll talk about her. I’m curious about your thoughts on her, but from your perspective, why is this the right time for City Attorney Cory Briggs?
A: Well, the main reason it’s the right time is because nobody else was running against her. And running for re-election is like a performance evaluation at work. But in our political system, if there isn’t an opponent, the employee doesn’t get a fair evaluation in four years. The employee writes his or her own evaluation and the boss, the supervisors, the shareholders of the corporation, the beneficiaries, whoever you want to talk to, they don’t get a full picture of whether the employee is doing a good job. And so you have to, in our system you have to have an opponent.
Q: Why do you think no one did run against her other than yourself until yourself?
A: No idea.
Q: You know I looked hard at that case that you publicized about the teacher ... making the allegations about that school. And I read it all the way through and it seems to me like how [Elliott] dealt with it was not unreasonable. So when you look at this and depicted it as an as a cause for outrage, what are you basing that on?
A: When you say school are you talking about the junior theater?
Q: Yeah. Yeah.
A: If somebody complains that there are child abuse allegations by law, those allegations are confidential. You don’t share them with the lawyer for the people you’re complaining against, at least before you’ve read them. Right. What’s outrageous about it is her email says, I haven’t read this yet, but here it is. That’s the problem. That’s not what prosecutors are supposed to do. Prosecutors are supposed to get complaints, evaluate them and run them through the process, not receive them and say, “I haven’t read it yet, but I recognize the guy’s name from some private conversation we had previously. Here you go.” That’s my problem with it.
Q: Isn’t part of her explanation that these were public? This wasn’t the first time these documents came to light?
A: Well, the allegations are new and he hadn’t published it on his website. He published it two weeks later because he wasn’t getting a response. Pick any prosecutor who said, well, the reason we gave the charges to the lawyer for the accused is because the basis for the charges is public information. Everybody in this newspaper would be out of their heads because that’s not the way the system is supposed to work. So yeah, I have a problem with that.
Q: Do you have more questions on this subject because I, I’m interested in inewsource, um, uh, the suit against them and the judge saying that there was retaliation, and that was the reason for the lawsuit.
A: Are you asking about the inewsource stories or the lawsuit? I wasn’t involved in the lawsuit.
Q: Well, I know that you said you weren’t involved in the lawsuit, but the judge says that there seemed that was retaliation because inewsource had been investigating.
A: You should talk to the client who filed the lawsuit. I wasn’t involved in the lawsuit.
Q: You don’t see that as an inappropriate use of the legal system or do you support that approach to lawyering?
A: Look, inewsource ran a series of stories that weren’t about news. They were about people in power trying to use their power to go after somebody who represented people trying to get at truth.
Q: The people in power, in that scenario you’re saying are KPBS and inewsource?
A: No, inewsource, whether consciously or unwittingly, carried water for a bunch of powerful people because I was causing problems for them, representing people who don’t think the city’s being run ....
Q: Or they were doing their as journalists trying to tell a story.
“Now look, this sort of thing happens when you take on powerful people at City Hall. They do what they can to try to get rid of people who deliver bad news.”
— Cory Briggs
A: So, except that I was acquitted or exonerated by the state bar twice on the things that inewsource was accusing me of. Interestingly enough, inewsource has never reported that. Nobody’s ever reported that. I met with KPBS a couple months ago and gave them all of the information. They know I was exonerated. They still haven’t written a report. When they interviewed me about running for city attorney, they asked me and I gave them answers on the record, which they took out of the video. Now look, this sort of thing happens when you take on powerful people at City Hall. They do what they can to try to get rid of people who deliver bad news. They didn’t like the message I was bringing.
Q: So you’re saying inewsource is in cahoots with people at City Hall? I’m trying to understand the allegation.
A: I think you should go look at inewsource’s tax returns, and you’ll see that in the year that they did the stories on me, they bumped a $420,000 donation. They were a $500,000 organization until they started writing stories about me. Once they did that, they went up to over $1 million. And go look at their donors and you’ll see the top two big donors....
Q: But also they started the investigation in 2015 when a lot of people were giving money to journalism all over the country and supporting journalism because of the quote-unquote Trump bump.
A: I’m not attacking inewsource. You asked the question. The state bar exonerated.
Q: Well, it did sound like you were saying that inewsource was doing journalism carrying water for people at City Hall. That’s what you said, right?
A: Right, and we know that the people who were feeding them information were in the City Attorney’s Office. All of that is documented. So when you take on powerful interests and you beat them in court time and again, they have to do something. It’s part of the process. They tried to get me disbarred. State bar looked at it twice. They said there’s nothing here. They gave me a clean bill of health. I’m glad the process works because that’s the way I clear my name. It’s okay.
Q: Talking about wins and losses, let’s talk about the number of lawsuits you have currently against the city, [Union-Tribune reporter] David Garrick reported it’s about 20. Is that accurate?
A: About 20.
Q: So why should voters choose someone who’s filed 20 lawsuits against the city to represent the city?
A: I’ll give you an example. ... The city attorney’s office is obsessed with secrecy. One of the things that I represent clients on the most is getting rid of secrecy. They’re on your team. They fight the same fights that you and your colleagues fight, right? We’re about transparency. We’re about openness. We’re about honesty. We can have disagreements about policy down the road, but we can’t disagree about whether two plus two is four or whether you can know what we think two plus two equals. Those are beyond debate. Those are the fights that we have. Is there a lot of secrecy at City Hall? You bet. You recently asked for, not you necessarily Matt, but the U-T asked for the list of phone numbers and email addresses and you were told you can’t have it for national security reasons or something preposterous like this. Okay. You have resources. You have a bunch of reporters, you’ve got a bunch of lawyers. You’re in a nice tall building. You can fight that fight. My clients can’t. So you know, sitting on your side of the table, how much resistance you get from the government day in and day out, trying to get answers to questions. What do you think the average person experiences? So now there’s somebody who’s willing to represent them because he believes it’s wrong for the government to be secret. Does it happen a lot? Yeah. How do we reduce the number of lawsuits that the city’s in? Follow the law. Which takes us back to your first question, why am I running? Because the city needs to follow the law and it needs to start by being open, by letting the policy makers decide whether the city is going to deviate from a lawful course. And they do it with their eyes wide open, knowing full well what the risks are and then they can make the decisions publicly. But it’s not to be made by the City Attorney’s Office, operating in secrecy. It’s not to be made anybody operating in secrecy.
Q: I’m fully down with transparency.
A: I know you are.
Q: But so I guess, of the 20 lawsuits you have, they’re not all records on transparency.
A: Some of them are about voting on taxes. Yeah, we think if there’s going to be a new tax, people should vote on it. That’s right.
Q: I’ll talk broadly about your track record. You won some high profile cases, lost some high-profile ... . So your version of the law isn’t impeccable, right.
A: Well look, guys who swing for the fences sometimes strike out. But if you weren’t swinging for the fences, you wouldn’t strike out. I’m not perfect.
Q: But what would you say your percentage is. What would you say your percentage is, I mean .300 gets into the Hall of Fame in baseball to use your analogy.
A: Well, yeah. Well I’m much better than .300. Look, it’s probably north of .500. Sometimes the cases settle because people realize, look, this case is not worth going to trial. It’s not worth running up the fees and that happens.
Q: I re-read the inewsource stuff and I thought this was really interesting and I can see why the reporters pursued this. So when you say that you were eventually exonerated. Exonerated is one thing, you’re not guilty. Or did they say, no, we don’t see any problems here?
A: No. The state bar proceedings, unlike going to court in the state bar proceedings, I have to affirmatively disprove what I’m accused of. That’s the way the system works. I’m obligated to cooperate and open the kimono for fear of losing my license. Even if I’ve done nothing wrong, I could lose my license, for not participating. So they send me a letter, say, this is what you’re accused of doing. In the inewsource case they actually referenced inewsource allegations. They say, tell us why this is wrong, and I had to go through a procedure and show them affirmatively how all that stuff is not true. They send a letter as we’re closing a file. No evidence of wrongdoing. Right. Inewsource has that. I take that back. KPBS has that right. I met with KPBS a couple of months ago, gave them all of this stuff. I sent them an email, I’m happy to send it to you, where we reviewet what we went over. They said they’re going to cover the race, but they’re not willing to go back and report that was exonerated on what inewsource accused me of doing. If you’re gonna cover anybody’s race, I think everybody in the room can agree, we should be clear about the facts and we should be honest about it. We can disagree about whether I’m the best candidate, but we ought not to be disagreeing about whether I was married, about whether I did disclosures to my clients and whether I did things in court that judges actually said, yeah that was the correct thing to do. I mean that’s.. Come on. Some of the stuff was litigated.
Q: I want to ask you about your clients because one of the pieces I think they did as part of their series of investigations was about your clients, which seem like kind of an amorphous group.
A: You mean the former planning commissioner, the retired police officer or the retired reverend who has a day in the city of San Diego named after him?
Q: According to their reporting, there are some clients that you have that are hard to find. I don’t know, who are your clients when you represent these cases?
A: They’re in every court document with their names. Somebody has to sign the papers. If we prevail, the judge has to approve the bill for attorney’s fees. The clients have to say, this was our relationship in the case. This is how we hired Mr. Briggs. It’s all in the documents, right, but it’s easy to just make accusations, which is why I’m glad there’s a state bar proceeding so that when they can say “Is this true?” I’m like, no, here’s the information and then they write there is no evidence of wrongdoing, all right. Every client is disclosed there in the name of the caption. Your sources don’t like to talk some times, right? That’s why some reporters refer to sources, verify their story, and then protect the sources there because they’re good sources, right? Some clients are whistleblowers. We’re going through this right now nationally. You protect whistleblowers. The fact that I won’t out whistleblowers is somehow used to suggest that I’m not honest with courts about who my clients are and who the witnesses are. This is preposterous. Any lawyer knows that can’t happen in court and I don’t get paid if I don’t go through the process and win. So the idea that I would somehow fabricate clients is contrary to the outcome in the cases. And people wouldn’t be so rankled about my clients frustrating secrecy in bad deals at City Hall if there were no clients and if we weren’t successful at it, right?
Q: When we met the city attorney, she touted her office’s role in getting, uh, [gun] violence restraining orders and setting up a model for the state that the state’s embraced. Her office can also claim to be, though it preceded her, better than anywhere else in the state at shutting down illegal marijuana shops. So those are two pretty impressive policy chops, even if the latter one is not on her watch. So is it your feeling that not only is the City Attorney’s Office not sufficiently transparent, but then it’s not doing a good job on some of these high profile issues?
A: No. Depends on your high-profile issue. She gets props on the gun violence restraining orders. You haven’t heard me criticize any of that. I have concerns that we as a city are not being transparent enough with the data about who is the subject of these things to make sure that there isn’t profiling or any sort of civil rights violations going on, right? A judge can look at a particular case and say it’s appropriate, but you need to look at the prosecutorial practice. We should have that data to make sure that people are being treated fairly. And you know, so is there room for improvement? Of course. But you haven’t seen me criticize on that. I think she’s doing a good job on it. On illegal pot shops, uh, it’s, you know, kudos to her for going after some of them. But when you go talk to the actual operators, the ones who are licensed, like I have, they’ll say, you know, the problem is we’ve got a long list and they pop up all over the place and we know who they are, they just move locations, but it’s the same people and we can’t get the city attorney to focus on those. Now in fairness, it’s not just the city attorney. They also say we can’t get the police department to do it. So they go after some, there’s certainly room for improvement.
Q: But in Los Angeles there’s more illegal shops than legal shops because they haven’t gotten the strategy yet of focusing on and going after the landlords so landlords understand there’s a huge downside. In San Diego, it seems like there’s a relative handful for a city of 1.4 million.... Weedmaps until a month ago listed all the shops, and they showed none in San Diego while they showed 20 in East County.
A: Well, I look, I, I haven’t independently verified, I haven’t seen that map. I don’t know what data you’re looking at, Chris. I’m telling you, I don’t know the data that you’re referring to. I can only tell you what I have been informed by operators. That’s the basis for my information. If you’re telling me that she’s adequately going after all of them. Okay.
Q: What are the operators telling you? How many are...?
A: Dozens. Dozens.
Q: Are these the delivery ones? Because delivery ones is a whole different ball of wax.
A: It’s sale.
Q: Retail.
A: Well, we say retail with a low r. It’s illegal sales. Yeah.
Q: I’m curious about what your role as a city attorney would be. We’ve got examples of uh, decisions being made by the city attorney that were more or less ignored by the powers that be. So what do you think? Well, short term vacation rentals, and a number of other things, scooters and things like that.
A: It hasn’t been ignored by the powers that be. The city attorney has independent prosecutorial authority. It has not exercised any of it. You don’t need to go get the city council’s permission or the mayor’s permission to prosecute people who are breaking the law. In fact, our system is designed to keep political decision makers away from prosecutorial decisions. So what you’re saying, what I think you’re saying, correct me if I’m wrong, is that her defense to not doing that is that the policy makers won’t let her, that’s a punt because she has independent prosecutorial authority. She should exercise it, but she hasn’t. On short term vacation rental, she’s already concluded that they are illegal. Okay. That’s a problem. An Airbnb lobbyist is one of the persons who fundraised for her. I don’t know whether that’s the reason she hasn’t gone after them or not. Uh, but she has independent authority to prosecute.
Q: If you were city attorney, would you prosecute them?
A: In a heartbeat.
Q: For what?
A: For illegally operating. They’re unlawful.
“What’s the biggest problem that people have fundamentally with what’s going on our society today in terms of the government? They don’t trust it.”
— Cory Briggs
Q: Would the City Attorney’s Office have the resources to do that sort of thing without support from the policy makers?
A: Sure. We have lists. We know who they are. They collect the [transient occupany tax], they know who’s remitting the checks. We could start there, send a 30-day cease and desist letter.
Q: You would start with that list of people who had given taxes to the city and you would literally send them a cease and desist letter. Then what happens in 30 days if they do not [comply]?
A: You file a lawsuit against them just like you do against pot shops or code violations or anything else.
Q: What about the ones in PB that had been doing this for 30 years and in theory could make a takings argument?
Q: Mission Beach.
A: Uh, there are some places in Mission Beach where they might have an argument. Some people might have defense, but most of them don’t. Outside of Mission Beach, they don’t, right? There’ve been some places where the city’s capitulated knowing we just said yes. Other places, they know it’s illegal. They haven’t put their imprimatur on it. And the easiest thing to do is go after the people aggregate the TOT go after the Airbnbs and the VRBOs, they send a check every month.
Q: Santa Monica just enacted a full sweeping total ban.
A: It did it a while ago and a court just upheld it. That’s correct.
Q: So that’s why I’m kind of confused by the City Council’s cautiousness on this and immediate pullback of its regulations under the threat of a vote. Why not just let the public vote on it and see if the public supports it or not instead of cowering?
A: Well but, wait, Chris. The city attorney’s office has not given good legal advice to the City Council. Right now, they’re illegal, period. So the only thing that there is for the City Council and the mayor to negotiate on is whether you’re going to allow some of them and there is no consensus on whether they’re going be allowed. If they’re illegal, they’re illegal. So until there’s a consensus, and it’s up to the policymakers that come to it, until there’s a consensus, they should be treated like the illegal business operations they are.
Q: But there’s discretion in the law all the time. I mean, look at how California deals with unauthorized...
A: There’s a housing crisis in San Diego.
Q: I’m not disagreeing, but I’m just saying that discretion is such a key part of what prosecutors do. They don’t prosecute everything.
A: I don’t live downtown, but I’m downtown. And, uh, I noticed that there are some folks who don’t have a roof over their heads. Right. Uh, that’s a problem. And if you’re telling me that discretion is so broad in a city that has repeatedly declared affordable housing states of emergency, where the city attorney has already correctly concluded that these things are illegal and she’s waiting for a politician to say it’s okay to enforce the law. Yeah. That’s City Hall beyond just being skewed, right. That’s City Hall broken. Follow the law. That’s the law. That’s on the books. And if people don’t like the law on the books being followed, there’s a democratic process and go to the mayor and the city council and get them to create exceptions to the law.
Q: Is this going to be the focus of your campaign? This could be a potent issue with a big chunk of San Diegans.
A: Following the law? Chris, uh, you have followed my work long enough to know that, you know, Matt calls it rabble-rouser, I call it the lawyer who gets hired to make sure the government follows the law. You cover these stories all the time. You can watch it nationally, at the state level. What’s the biggest problem that people have fundamentally with what’s going on our society today in terms of the government? They don’t trust it. There’s no confidence that the experiment that started over 200 years ago to improve everybody’s life at a certain level is actually running all cylinders firing in the right order. Everybody’s concern is, is government doing what it’s supposed to be doing? And in San Diego we’ve got thousands of people who don’t have a roof over their heads and we’ve got thousands of houses being rented out to vacationers. And you’re suggesting that it’s a matter of somebody’s discretion. Do they have a good breakfast or not? Did they wake up on the right side of the bed? As to whether we prosecute the people who were keeping those houses off the rental market. That’s black and white. And if you think, not you, Chris, but anybody who thinks, you know, that’s really a tough philosophical question, you have no business being in the City Attorney’s Office because it’s not a tough philosophical question.
Q: But it isn’t cut and dried.
A: It is cut and dried.
Q: We’ve had three city attorneys. We’ve had three different views on short term vacation rentals, right?
A: Have we? What city attorney came out and said they’re perfectly legal?
Q: Which one’s launched a crackdown? None.
A: But the the one who wrote the opinion correctly, that said they’re illegal, has done nothing about it. That’s not okay.
Q: So to give you another example of discretion, right? Yeah. The SDSU West project.
A: There’s another good example of secrecy that’s totally unnecessary.
Q: Okay. So in the case of, uh, here’s a project that voters overwhelmingly indicated they want this done one way or another. Would a city attorney look at that difference between the price that the two sides are coming to and say, sorry, the city’s got to hold the line because that’s the law.
A: No, a city attorney who knows his or her role wouldn’t do that because that’s a policy question, right? Measure G says that at the end of the day, the city council decides whether things are fair and equitable. That’s the language. That’s not for the city attorney to decide. The problem with SDSU is that from the beginning, No. 1, you had a city attorney’s office who was opposed to this, right? She misleads the city council into authorizing litigation that they didn’t know what they were doing, and that fails and that cost the taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars, then once it’s approved by the voters, insists on confidentiality that accomplishes nothing. First of all, certain real estate negotiations are confidential by law, and there’s a process under the Brown Act for treating them that way. She went a step further and insists on people signing a document that makes things confidential beyond what you would normally make confidential. Now ask yourself in the last couple of days, what’s the real problem? The problem is that we’ve now seen that the sausage is being made for 10 months and the parties are not on the same page, but who hasn’t been in the equation? The decision makers, the city council. They’re totally closed. They’ve had like one update months ago. Why?
Q: Didn’t they have one this week?
A: Until this week, that’s what I said, before these last few days. Measure G literally says that appraisal shall be made available to the public upon submittal. Doesn’t say final, says upon submittal. SDSU Friends, 30 people sent a letter that says we want you to adopt this thing. Well, you’re telling me that all 30 of those people signed something that they’d never seen. No. So now this thing is making its way around and the people who are most important for the voters, the city council, are in the dark. That accomplishes nothing except allows the lawyers and the consultants. How many meetings did they have on this? I think it’s 150 or 100 I don’t know. It’s like in the mid hundreds. How many people are in the meetings, right? Staff if you add all the staff members, say there’s three or four meetings, probably a couple hundred bucks an hour there. And then you add all the SDSU people because they hired outside folks. So what are we at now, $1,500 or $2,000 bucks an hour? Probably for those folks. And that’s just at the meetings alone. And we’ve had hundreds of these things. To do what? To meet secretly to find out that the city says we’re ready for an offer? Ask yourself where we’d be if from day one the only issue would have been regular public updates on the progress made to satisfy the requirements of Measure G. We wouldn’t have SDSU holding press conferences saying we’re not gonna honor the confidentiality agreement anymore and all this stuff. Right. Does this look like governments functioning well? No. And it germinated from a confidentiality agreement. A good lawyer would not have done that.
Q: Let me ask it because you brought up Mara challenging the two measures. We asked her about that obviously. And her explanation is that it was a kind of a principled stand on an issue that she wanted legal resolution on and that she knew as soon as she embarked on this, that it was going to come in a campaign, a reelection campaign, and that people would be upset, but that it was something that she felt like she needed to do because you know this isn’t the first time that public land is going to go to a public vote when private interests are involved, right?
A: So it’s legally required in some circumstances under our charter. It’s legally required.
Q: I guess my question to you is, was she really doing the wrong thing if it’s a principled stand that most people disagree with?
A: Well you just answered it. You said she felt strongly about it. That’s not the test. The test is whether the city council felt strongly about it, Matt, if you go ask the city council, they’ll tell you the only thing we knew is what Mara told us. Which by the way, we can’t tell you because she did it secretly. Also, it’s not her call. She’s not the client.
Q: Who is the client? Because I know this issue has come up in many city attorney’s races in the past. In your view, who is the client?
A: The client is the city of San Diego. The decision makers are the city council and the mayor. It’s like a trust. In a trust, there’s the entity, there’s the trust and all the things it owns. There are trustees, the people who are chosen to run it to make decisions, and there are beneficiaries, the people who are supposed to benefit from the operations of the trust. Trust lawyers know that even though they answer to the trustees, in this case the mayor and the city council, that they also have fiduciary obligations to the beneficiaries. If they give advice that has the effect of harming the beneficiaries, the lawyers are held responsible. We need to run the city that way. Unfortunately, public lawyers are immune from malpractice. Mara spent most of her years in government office as a public lawyer. She doesn’t know what it’s like to have to protect clients at that extra level. It’s just not in the equation. It’s not her fault. It’s just not part of being a public lawyer. You have to worry about decisions that affect the individuals who walked into your room, walked into your office. And that’s just not part of the municipal lawyer experience. That’s what all of my experience has been. That’s why I’m a big believer in transparency. So the client is the city, the decision makers are the mayor and the city council. Unless the law requires that something be kept confidential, all of the information should go to the mayor and the city council publicly so that the beneficiaries know whether the trustees are making a decision that’s in their best interests. The trustees are free to deviate. They’re the decision makers, not the lawyers, but they need to be fully told. And let me give you an example. I assume you’re aware of the current controversy over the intelligent streetlights, right? .... And you recently did a for and against column, I think in the last couple of weeks. So a couple of years ago, the city enters in this agreement with General Electric. Okay. It was presented as what an environmental proposal, right? We’re going to save money on electricity. And by the way, you know, this is the 21st century. There’s some monitors on these lights that’ll help us with traffic flows and make sure that pedestrians are moving. All that stuff. Good. Great. Okay, good. So what I’m giving you here is the contract, and I put on the first page, even though it’s not the first page, but I just wanted you to see that this was approved as to form, meaning it was reviewed by the City Attorney’s Office. Now here’s the reason this is a problem. Not only did nobody tell the City Council and the mayor that there was the potential to use the data gathered from the surveillance gear for police purposes, right? That never came up. Not only was nobody told that, but I want you to turn to page, the numbers at the bottom, pages eight and nine, I put a little green tick mark there. Matt, you went too far I think, or maybe I missed yours. Oh, you’re, you’re on the wrong document. Close. Closer to the front. There is several. Yeah. Got it. Okay. Intellectual property. In this contract, the city has given all of the rights to all of the data that are collected from those intelligent lights to General Electric. Okay. This is like Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. I’m confident that the mayor didn’t know this, that [Police] Chief [David] Nisleit didn’t know this. That the City Council did not know this.
Q: But it’s right here.
A: That’s correct. And whose job is it to read contracts and tell the clients this is what’s in the contract, these are the big ticket items, these are the potential pitfalls, this is what you need to know? The lawyers office. That’s why you have a lawyer.
Q: This is only 15 pages. I would assume that most council members would have ...
A: Whatever, I don’t care whether they read it or not. It’s the lawyer’s job to point stuff out to the client. I’ve read hundreds if not thousands of agreements in 25 years for clients. I can count on one hand the number of clients who come in and said, I read this now I want you to read it. Right? Most of them say, I scanned this and can you tell me what it says and I need to know the pitfalls. I need to know the big issues. I need to know whether my ass is exposed. Okay. Nobody mentioned that the city is giving GE total ownership of every data point gathered through the surveillance equipment. Now, it’s entirely within the purview of the mayor and the city council, to say, we’re getting a discount. They’re going to monetize the data. If they didn’t, it would cost us $100 million, but instead we’re getting it for $30 million, so we’re going to do it. That’s their call. City attorney gets to say nothing about that. City attorney should say, these are the civil rights implications, if we don’t have a good policy with the police, this is what you are giving up, right? Because there’s a fiscal consideration in the city’s analysis, right? You’ve seen these hundreds if not thousands of times, fiscal considerations in the staff reports. Here’s how much it’s going to cost. Mara Elliot doesn’t have a problem with secrecy at City Hall. She’s all for that, but she doesn’t care about your secrecy. She doesn’t care that General Electric or God knows, they’ve probably already assigned their rights to some other data cruncher, she has no concern whether somebody knows, Matt, when you leave and when you drive down the street there and back. That at least should have been pointed out publicly before the mayor and the City Council made a decision. And [Union-Tribune reporter] Jeff McDonald has written the story about the audit recently, right? Audit for a software program by the way, to monitor short term vacation rentals. Right. That whole audit scandal about the sole source contract was to hire a host to monitor something that your office has concluded correctly is illegal. Now just think about this, we’re evaluating a contract to monitor people who are engaging in something that you say is illegal for the purpose of collecting taxes from them, not for prosecuting them,, and your office is going to sign it approved after telling staff, yes, you can do this and then the auditor gives it to them to prosecute, to investigate for a prosecution. The conflict of interest is as wide as the Grand Canyon.
Q: And again, I think that’s why I raised the question of resources. Again, playing devil’s advocate a bit here. Saving the money so that they can, uh, get this project done means they have some money to use elsewhere. Uh, collecting TOT taxes means they have money to spend elsewhere. Um, is there no ground beyond absolutism on something like, uh, like the vacation rentals,where someone has to say, look, we need that money, but we also know it’s wrong. Is there discretion somewhere in the middle of that or is there no common ground in the issue?
A: That’s a policy question. The policy question is do we accept revenues and allowing this activity to go forward? That’s for the mayor and the city council to decide. They’ve not decided that question. It is illegal. So what do you do? Do you ignore it? Look, it’s made worse by the fact that she campaigned on promising she wasn’t going to ignore it, but set that aside. It’s a huge issue. We’ve got over 10,000 illegal units. We’ve got over 10,000 people living in the street. It’s a problem. If that doesn’t rise....
Q: Well, those are estimates. We don’t know if...
A: They’re round figures. Okay, but does anybody think that they’re low? I haven’t heard anybody say that they’re grossly overstated. So whatever the numbers are, this is the biggest issue, right? What’s the governor’s priority? Housing. Everybody says housing is in an emergency. Great. So how come the City Attorney’s Office isn’t using the resources it already has to do something about what most people agree is the single biggest emergency in the city. I don’t understand that. That’s a dereliction of duty. And you asked about resources. I got this from the City Clerk’s Office. I asked for it and I scanned this in 15 minutes. Okay. This is not difficult because if this is what you do and you have people who follow that model and you set that example. The city council and the mayor might’ve done this exact same deal. I don’t know the answer to that. What I know is that they didn’t do it with their eyes open. That’s why secrecy has to stop. Transparency has to start. Why can’t you have the phone numbers and the email addresses of the city employees?
Q: That’s a good question.
A: You know that every single person they’ve ever sent an email to has it because it’s at the bottom of everybody’s email. And not only that, most emails in the city end with a line, “Assume this is a public document, it is not confidential.”
Q: Let me ask you about another issue. We talked about short term vacation rentals. Scooters has also been a problem. If you were city attorney, how would you have handled the rollout of those regulations? How would you have avoided... or would you have done the same thing?
A: So this is a good question on a number of levels. No. 1, I wouldn’t have let lobbyists or budding lobbyists to be the people writing the regulations. Here’s one of the criticisms I often hear of a City Attorney’s Office. The staffers who want to write regulations, want to write policy, don’t have a thought partner in the City Attorney’s Office. They don’t get productive feedback. They’re told you finish everything and then we’ll review it as to form. But the lawyers are the ones who have to defend it. The lawyers are the ones who have to prosecuted. When you’re setting policy, it means making law. You should have lawyers involved on the front end. Okay. The City Attorney’s Office doesn’t do that. Like legislative counsel and other professional advisers on stuff. So No. 1, I would make it so that they want to come to us and say, Cory, here’s what we want to do. Can you help us write it? You bet.
Q: Is that something that’s done in other cities?
A: Yeah. Yeah. I’ll give you an example. Right now there’s an issue over billboards, uh, advertising for marijuana, and say San Diego is trying to get some regulations adopted, and the uh city attorney’s office in Denver wrote a memo saying this is how you do it constitutionally to satisfy the Supreme Court on First Amendment, prior restraint, this is what you do, and gave it to say San Diego and said, you’re welcome to share it with whoever you want, we’re happy to share a work product. Okay. Why? Because like we did the legal analysis, benefit from it, and if you think we missed something, by the way, tell us, right, lawyers, you do this stuff publicly and you can be sure that some colleague’s gonna say, hey, you missed something. Get that. Mara Elliot’s office doesn’t want that. But the city is grappling with how they’re going to regulate the billboards, and they don’t have a partner in the City Attorney’s Office on that.
Q: So why do you say she doesn’t want that?
A: Because she told them she didn’t want it. Go ask SAY San Diego, I can’t share the email with you, but I’m sure if you go ask, um, you know go ask SAY San Diego. Go ask them whether the City Attorney’s Office was receptive to receiving the city of Denver’s legal analysis on billboards. So that is the job. And if the city has so much work that you need more resources, you go to them in the budget process, you go to them with the May [budget] revise. You say, hey, you’re doing more policy stuff. We need to do such and such. Or you tell them you had these priorities over here, we’re going to make some adjustments, is that okay with you? Clients do this all the time. Say, hey, if the lawsuit is changing its focus to such and such, I’m going to put resources into this, or do you want me to continue to focus here? And the client makes a call and you tell them and that’s the way it works. And if you say to the client, I can only do one or the other without more resources and the client wants them both done, what does the client do? Gives you more resources or the client makes the decision and does some form of triage. You never hear that conversation ever. So I don’t buy the lack of resources argument because nobody’s ever gone out and said, hey, that’s a problem. That’s different from saying we’re not paid a competitive wage. So yeah, this stuff can be done. And yeah, there will have to be some prioritizing. But I take houses on fire to be more important than toilets overflowing and running in the middle of the night. That’s where my values are. So when I see a bunch of people living on the street and a bunch of profiteers who aren’t renting out their houses to San Diegans and your kids are having to commute from Temecula or Riverside County, yeah, that’s a problem. Let’s get rid of that problem and then say, okay, we’ve dealt with that. Yeah. There’s now a few rogues, but we’ve dealt with that, that legal issue. Now let’s move up the ladder to the next thing. Is that something the city attorney can help with? Yes or no? If not. Okay, great. That’s for the policy makers. Now we’re now we’re fighting at the margins. We’re not even fighting at the margins right now. Bunch of illegal things. Back to the scooter. Sorry, I got off on this....
Q: I like that analogy. What are the other house on fire issues in addition to short term vacation rentals at the city level right now?
A: The secrecy. Secrecy is out of control. It would cost us tons of money. The SDSU thing is the latest example today, not giving good advice. Right? We just went to the Supreme Court. We, meaning the city, not my clients, but just went and lost at the Supreme court on a CEQA issue over what a project is. City attorney’s office would not advise the city council on that issue, will only tell you confidentially, why? This is preposterous. And it puts the politicians in a horrible position and you know I’ve been critical of politicians, but I stand with them when they say it’s not right, that I’m told something confidentially that I didn’t ask to be confidential, that the law doesn’t require to be confidential, that affects my constituents and I can’t tell them about it, but I can be threatened with prosecution if I talk about it. You want to be that politician? That’s not right. Argue with them on the merits. You know I’ve had how many Twitter fights, Matt? Let’s argue about the merits, right?
Q: Yes.
A: Let’s argue about the merits. Let’s let the politicians argue about the merits. That’s democracy. But they shouldn’t be gagged because they think that the beneficiaries ought to know the legal advice given to the trustees by the trust’s lawyers. That’s not right, and it happens time and time again. Ask them, go ask the council members and the mayor, how many of them think that they get adequate advice, appropriately confidential when necessary, appropriately public when necessary. Ask them. Be shocked if you get anybody... Th. ey won’t even want to talk to you about that.
Q: Put scooters on hold for one more question. About SDSU West. What is your legal advice now? There’s some friction between SDSU and the city on the merits here. $19 million or so separates them on the payment of the park. Is the city within its right to demand that money, and SDSU West should pay it because of the language of the ballot measure?
A: Well, I’m not going to tell you what anybody should do because that’s a policy issue for them.
Q: The legal advice?
A: Well, the legal advice is that the initiative says fair and equitable. The terms are to be fair and equitable. It actually says the price and the terms are to be fair and equitable, as determined by the city council. And then it says these are the factors that may be considered. So I’m happy to tell you what I’ve told everybody. This isn’t a secret. Given what it says, SDSU should say, here’s our proposal and staff should take item by item whether the staff is real estate, independent budget analyst, city attorney, whatever falls within their purview and go item by item, say, here’s our objective analysis, this what it means in lay terms, right? Some of the language might be technical. This is what it means in lay terms. This is how it would work out in the real world. These are the consequences. This is how it fits in with other policies. No recommendation, right? Staff usually makes recommendation. There should be no staff recommendation on this one. The voters have already said, this is what we want and this is the equation, but they haven’t said, this is where you put the plus and the minus signs. That’s left for the city council. I would spell all of this stuff out and do what’s happening now without the pissing match.... The confidentiality got us here. And by the way, it was by design. Not only does it allow the lawyers and the consultants to jack up the fees and nobody gets to oversee it because it’s all secret, but you can see it just in the rollout the last couple of days, the city and SDSU are now, I think KPBS said this morning, at loggerheads. If every voter isn’t appalled that we now have the flagship university and the biggest government agency in the city with the biggest piece of, you know, developable land west of the Mississippi at loggerheads over something ...
Q: Is it really the largest west of the Mississippi?
A: I don’t know. I, that’s what I’ve heard of. That’s how it was touted. Right? I’m not verifying ... whatever. It’s large. Right? Uh, maybe in the urban area, whatever it is, you get my point. Uh voters said go do this, they have high expectations of SDSU and the city. And guess what? Apparently people haven’t been on their best behavior because they’ve been out allowed to do this secretly. And if I had been the city attorney, I’d have said, you can go to close session to get updates if you need them, but this is a little bit different. The voters have told you what it needs to be. It’s not up to staff to make a recommendation. It’s not like the usual development deals, like the usual contract. This is entirely up to you.
Q: But it is a negotiation, right? I mean clearly with different legal views of that of the park and the $19 million?
A: Oh, okay, fine. But who’s that negotiation between? The decision makers. It’s not the mayor’s decision. It’s the city council’s decision. This one’s different, and it says it right at the beginning. So yeah, and it’s not like this is something that’s the normal business getting worked out and it makes its way to city council. This time, the voters got tired of the morass and the nonsense for a decade plus. And they said, okay, here it is. This is what you’re going to go do.
Q: On scooters....
A: Scooters.
Q: How would you have handled scooters differently?
A: So I’d have gone after the scooter companies themselves. They know that their users are using them on sidewalks, are leaving them in the wrong places. This is also a resources question, I think. Uh, if you go after the people making the money on them and you go after them for essentially what are conspiracies to break the law, the vehicle code doesn’t allow them to be on sidewalks except for ingress and egress. Right? You’ve got an [Americans with Disabilities Act] issue. I think there’s a pending lawsuit against the city over that. Don’t quote me, but I’ve heard that’s the case. Uh, I would’ve gone after them for not reining in... They can control all of this by technology. They know where these things are going. They can de-energize them, they can break them, they can make them available. And the other thing is this is touted as part of our transportation plan, right? This is a bridge technology to a cleaner future, which I fully support, not the technology of the cleaner future. But like a lot of things, it was suddenly just dropped. People knew scooters were coming before they just dropped. San Diego was not the first place to get them. And then the community planning groups weren’t brought up to speed. The communities brought in after the fact. So these become pitchfork and torch sessions instead of what’s the best way to roll this out? What does your community want in exchange for accepting this? How will it be? And folks are willing to accept even things they don’t like if they’re part of the process. What they don’t like is being told that you have to eat your spinach. So we can do that. And it starts with transparency. And the transparency is first and foremost a function of the city attorney’s office. It’s this love of secrecy, but not of course when it comes to your secrecy, not when it comes to when you’re driving down the street. That’s fair game.
Q: So one question from our mailbag kind of related to scooters and sidewalks and things like that. Uh, frequently we run stories about settlements being made because somebody ran a bike into a pothole or tripped down the sidewalk and the settlement is this astronomical number. .... Um, does the city fight hard enough for the beneficiaries’ money or do they settle too easily when cases like this arise?
“This is a trust for the benefit of the public. We need to run it that way. And running it that way starts with being completely transparent and not being political.”
— Cory Briggs
A: So without knowing a particular case, I think, I can’t tell you whether they fought hard enough. Settle too easily? I don’t know. I can tell you as a general matter, you know that the city’s infrastructure is like, this is like a 19th century city. Right. And it’s because we have a bunch of problems that we refuse to reckon with. I think [Union-Tribune reporter] Gary Warth reported today that how many more billion do we need just for now for the homeless, for the housing. Is it $1.7, $1.8, $2 billion roughly? Okay. So add that to the $4 or $5 billion backlog on infrastructure. Add that to the $3 billion on the pension. Are we at $10 billion yet? We’re close. Right. Because we’ve not been fully honest with the public about how bad the situation is, what we do is we continually just move money around to take fire extinguishers to fires instead of sending a firetruck, because we can’t afford to send the firetruck. And not only can we not afford to send a firetruck, we send a fire extinguisher because there’s a fire. But if we were smart what we would be doing is spending a little bit of money to do the brush clearing around the house. This is the metaphor you get, right? We don’t do that. We’re not in a position to do it. And we’re not being honest with the public about not being in the position, right? There are lots of different stories about the problems, but you can’t even, even if God forbid a member of the public had to trudge through the comprehensive annual financial report, right? I mean this is a tough document to read. It doesn’t even disclose all of this stuff. What? Where’s the clearing house? Where’s the website? Where’s the one place you can go to to find out these are all the city’s needs and this is the price tag? If I have enough time on Google, I can go check your website and you’ll get me 80% of the stories, and if I spend enough time with all the news, I’ll eventually have 100% of them that are known. Right? Remember the secrecy issue. But the city has been neglected because we’re not honest with where we need to spend money, what we choose to spend money on. We had $5 million for Fifth Avenue Landing so that we might expand a convention center that nobody thinks is ever going to get expanded. Even if the voters approve the tax, no one thinks it’s actually going to happen at this point. So we gave [the Fifth Avenue Landing developers] $5 million. How many potholes could be fixed for $5 million? Or better than that, why don’t we coordinate, which we’re starting to do now, but this is a new thing, this hasn’t been standard operating procedure for long. If we’re going to have to slurry coat a street that we know in three or four years we’re going to have to rip up because we’re going to have to replace the water pipes, why don’t we just plan to fix the water pipes and then repave the street and put down asphalt instead of slurry coat? And then we’ve only done the digging once. We’ve only disrupted the community once.
Q: Sounds like you should have run for mayor.
[cross talk]
A: Okay. So that’s why, I mean I give, I give these folks credit, right? I spoke accurately, but the public has not been told, this is how in debt you are and because you were this in debt, right? I mean it’s like credit cards. You, you basically, you borrow from Peter to pay Paul so that you can make the minimum payment on this credit card so your credit doesn’t get too much worse. And eventually it does, not because you’re late, but because you have so much debt. And if you can, you know, we have to be honest with folks. We should be honest and say this is what we need in one place. Yeah, folks are going to be pissed at first. But guess what? They’re grown ups. They take the bad news. Yes, this is how bad it is. This is how much money we need to raise. These are our options. But it starts with transparency. The city attorney sits on the disclosures committee. We should be telling Wall Street all of this. Why? Because when you go get a mortgage on a house, if you don’t tell them everything, you get in trouble.
Q: Doesn’t that put us at a disadvantage to cities that don’t?
A: You mean does it put us at a disadvantage to compete illegally because we’re not willing to compete legally? I happen to think the public is okay playing by the rules, even if it means that they don’t.
Q: But to be clear though, this was what the city got in trouble for in 2003. Their disclosures to Wall Street have been better since then, right?
A: I’m not saying that they’ve lied to the SEC. What I’m saying is that we’re not being fully candid with the public. It’s too much work. Look, I mean, I don’t mean this to be a test. I don’t even know the answer. I’m adding up the number in my head as we talk. How bad is the city’s financial situation? Just how much cash would we need to fall out of the sky today to be back at zero? I think that’s a fair question for the public to ask. And as the city attorney, I think it’s fair for the beneficiaries to know how much money the trustees have in the bank and how much credit card debt they have run up and even if it’s not credit card debt that’s not yet on the books, have they done things to create liabilities where the chickens are going to come home to roost in a couple of years and this is how bad the bill is going to be? Do I as the lawyer for the trust think that the trustees are obligated to make sure that the beneficiaries have that information so that they can decide whether the trustees are doing the right thing or should be replaced? You bet I do. Which is why as part of... You can go look at the website. Part of what I think is that there needs to be a residents advisory committee looking over the city attorney to make sure that we’re being as fully transparent as we can be. Let’s have people from all around the city flyspeck my work, and say, Cory, how come you... Why are these your prosecutorial priorities? Why did you recommend this? Why did you not do this stuff? I’m not saying that we’re perfect. We’re all humans. We’re going to make mistakes, but I’m not going to do stuff in secret. Right? The cover-up’s worse than the crime. People forgive mistakes. They don’t forgive cover-ups. So let the public see. As much as I can tell them lawfully, right? We’re not going to violate confidences. We’re not going to violate employees’ privacy and things like that. The law allows it to be told, we should tell it. If one of the decision makers says Cory, we need this advice confidentially, great. You’ll get a confidential, not going to out people, but if you want to know on a policy matter that’s going to the city council for input, how many times have you heard them say, “Well, we got a briefing in closed session, I can’t talk about it, but based on what we’ve learned, this is how I’m voting.” Like I want to stick an ice pick in my ear. Can’t believe I’m hearing that. That shouldn’t happen. It wouldn’t happen on my watch.
Q: My last question is about management. Um, what’s the biggest team of lawyers that you’ve managed?
A: Uh, the most employees I’ve ever had at one time is 10. Uh, the biggest team of lawyers, if team would include cases where I’ve been either in charge or near the top of like co-counsel cases, things like that, 20, 25.
Q: Obviously, a scale much larger for the city attorney’s office. So a follow-up question. Do you think that the number of uh, staffers there now is the right number?
A: It probably could be a little less.
Q: Yeah. How much less? Because if we’re talking about resources ...
A: I can think of a couple people who are unnecessary in a legal office. I’m not going to talk about personnel decisions because I don’t want to expose the city to litigation, but I can think of a few people who ought to be in different departments under somebody else’s budget at a minimum.
Q: And why is this because of like a Bob Filner situation or what are you ...
A: No, I mean I’m not going to name names of people who shouldn’t be in the city attorney’s office. You’re recording this, and that’s not fair to those people.
Q: Understood.
A: It’s a law office. It should have legal professionals doing legal work. I can tell you that I don’t need a PR team. The city has a PR team and if there’s anything that the city needs to say, the lawyer can give it to the city’s PR team and they can do that. There are a number of really, really good lawyers in that office and they have institutional knowledge. They’re hardworking and they’re smart, but the way they approach their job is a reflection of the values and the attitude that comes from the top. And you know that in your own experience, right? You’re willing to have a leader who’s not 100% what you’d want, but you share their values, you believe in their work ethic, you know they have your back. You know that they’re willing to say, that one’s on me. That’s who I am. Right? You can disagree with my cases. You can disagree with the way I’ve approached my cases. But here’s what nobody can say. You can’t say any, any of it’s been cloak and dagger. Every single thing anybody can say about my cases, you get out of the court records, it’s all there for everybody to see. When we’ve been accused of things that weren’t transparent and judges have litigated them and adjudicated them, they concluded not true. That’s happened. Those are facts. So if that’s what you get at the top, look, I’m not going to say this is going to be the best law office in the world. It won’t be. But I will say that I’m not afraid to have my peers even outside the office review my work. That’s what litigators do all the time. You write a brief and your opponent peer reviews your work and then the judge peer reviews it. That’s what this is. And when I have really good opponents, that’s when I do my best work. I’d much rather have a really good opponent, forces me to do better. I’ve learned more. The product is better in the end, and we all share a goal of doing justice. That’s the same ethic you need at the city attorney’s office and yeah, I haven’t managed a big firm. That’s true. Uh, but uh, I’m going to try to say this in a way that doesn’t sound, uh, don’t take it self aggrandizing, I mean it matter of factly, I’m a little guy who runs a small firm and yet I’m frequently contacted by the city to find out whether they’re getting good advice and a lot of people in this town don’t like that they get sued by my clients. They don’t want to see my clients and be in court and it’s not because they’re nuisance lawsuits. They could make nuisance lawsuits go away with a few thousand dollars, right? How many years have you been covering me? Nobody’s ever said I’ve been bought off. Nobody’s ever said, ‘this is how you get rid of a Briggs lawsuit.’ What they say is, ‘damn, we have to do a lot of work.’ Yeah, go back to this [intelligent streetlight] contract because this is why I went to school. Some people think it’s boring, some people wouldn’t do it. That’s fine, but the lawyer’s job is to read the fine print. The lawyer’s job is to read the part of the document that literally says benefits of the proposal. I mean, I’m sorry to make an issue out of this, but this is what lawyers are supposed to do for their clients. “Situational awareness. Part of the services we’re providing... These services provide access to media such as photos and video collected from intelligent lighting, sensors along public roadways and parking lots.” Yeah, somebody should’ve said surveillance. “The media may be requested for any available date range starting near real time.” What is starting near real time? It means real time surveillance or pretty darn close to it. “This data can be obtained from a single intelligent light or a group of them to provide valuable insights for city officials and local businesses to enhance their awareness of the environments. Oh, sorry. This should have been caught, this should’ve been brought to their attention. How come my clients and I find flaws in things that upend the apple cart?
“Nobody’s ever said, ‘This is how you get rid of a Briggs lawsuit.’ What they say is, ‘Damn, we have to do a lot of work.’”
— Cory Briggs
Q: Thank you for coming in. Any other questions? I appreciate it. You got a 30-second elevator pitch? You’ve covered a lot of the ground. Your management question kind of fit the bill for that, but....
A: We’re going to disagree on policy things along the way, just as citizens debating what we should do. San Diego, we’re going to have our disagreements. That’s fine. Uh, but we’re on the same team when it comes to transparency. We’re on the same team when it comes to the minimum standards for government. You’re not perfect and neither am I. We’re gonna make mistakes along the way, but you own them and you own them in a way that everybody knows you made them so there’s a mechanism to make sure you don’t make them again. We don’t do that in the city. And it starts with the city attorney’s office, right? Think of how many secrecy issues you’ve been involved in over the years where the city attorney’s office had its fingerprints on it. It’s just the wrong attitude. This is a trust. This isn’t a business. This isn’t a privately held corporation. It’s run like that sometimes for the special interests. That’s wrong. This is a trust for the benefit of the public. We need to run it that way. And running it that way starts with being completely transparent and not being political.
Q: One really quick last question, how would you rank the existing previous city attorneys? There’s only been a handful.
A: Rank them in terms of what?
Q: How you think they did the job, how well you think they did the job? Uh, and there’s four of them, right?
A: Yeah. Look, it depends on your issue when you pick your issue. Uh, Jan [Goldsmith], uh, Jan and I had a rough patch for a while, right? Jan took things too personally, and he made it personal about me. Oh, he shouldn’t let litigators go beat up on each other’s clients and then you go have a drink. Uh, but to Jan’s credit, when the convention center came up the first time, and, uh, they were told that you were gonna need a vote. Uh, to Jan’s credit, he said, you know, you guys are on shaky ground. We need to go do this. He was good about that. Um, on other stuff, like his private emails, not so good. Mike [Aguirre] is a brilliant doctor with a bad bedside manner. Casey [Gwynn], I had just gotten to San Diego when Casey was toward the last couple of years, so I didn’t have as many dealings with him. I’m not really in a position... Nice guy when I met him, but I don’t have any, I don’t have enough professional experience to ....
Q: And John [Witt]. Did you know John at all?
A: John was before my time. John, John was here when I was in law school, but I, I may have, maybe I’ve met John somewhere, but I wouldn’t, I know. Here’s what I know of John. I see his work product. You look at the word product, like it’s just boring legal stuff, but that’s what it’s supposed to be. It’s, you know ... .
Q: That’s the job in many ways. ...I appreciate you coming in.
A: Thanks to all of you.
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