The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board interviewed all eight candidates in the San Diego City Council District 1 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. 2, 2019, interview with Will Moore, who is running to succeed Barbara Bry in a district that represents residents in Carmel Valley, La Jolla, University City and other communities. 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: Thank you for joining us.
Will Moore: Glad to be here.
Q: Tell us a little bit about why you decided to run for office and why this year.
A: Well, I’ve been active in this community for a long time. I’ve done a lot of work with nonprofits, helping small businesses in District One, which is the Carmel Valley, La Jolla, University City area. And San Diego is a city with a lot of massive advantages. We’ve got, you know, obviously the sunshine 300 days a year. We’ve got an international border, which is a huge opportunity for us that I don’t think we’re allowed to use as much as we would like to, given the current federal situation. We have fantastic industries with our, uh, biotech and uh, electronics. Um, but we also have let those advantages cover up a lot of deficits in how we run the city. And the most important one that I’ve seen for the past several decades is the fact that we haven’t built enough places for people to live in the city of San Diego and I have been, I spent the past year going door to door talking to folks in Carmel Valley, La Jolla, University City and they’re very concerned about whether their kids are going to be able to stay here after they graduate from college in high school.
I’ve got a 10th grader at Torrey Pines and I’m concerned about that for him. A lot of them, one couple I spoke to, I actually went, I knocked on their door. I interrupted a kind of low level argument they were having about whether they were going to be able to stay in San Diego. Two PhDs. I saw their condo, it was a little two bedroom, but not that great to be honest with you. And they were telling me they were going to have to move out of town just to be able to afford to live. And when you’re in that sort of situation, you have a crisis and it hasn’t been dealt with in this town for a very long time. And I think it does need to be dealt with. And I’m not saying it’s an easy crisis to deal with, but I think it does require the aggressiveness and seriousness and a break from the way we’ve traditionally done things in the city. And I’ve seen, I’ve seen what I think is a long-term failure of aggressive leadership and I think it’s time to, time to step up and, and address that. I think I’m, my record shows that I’m the person to do that.
Meet the other candidates for San Diego City Council District 1 below.
These are the candidates for San Diego City Council District 1 in the 2020 primary election.
Q: With housing, how would you solve that? Obviously a pretty intractable problem, but, you have ideas?
A: If we look for one solution, we’re not going to find any solutions. So we’re going to have to do a lot of things. We need to make sure we build housing that’s affordable at all income levels. Um, we had a, uh, inclusionary ordinance, uh, that passed and got vetoed last year, not last year, last month, just a couple of weeks ago that, uh, failed because we didn’t manage to get all of the interest groups at the table at the, at the right point. And I know that, um, council member Gomez tried very, very hard and really was aiming for about where I would aim. But we need to make sure that when we try to mandate affordable housing, we don’t prevent housing from getting built Because sometimes you can say, well, I insist that we do things X, Y, and Z way, uh, but now nobody can actually accomplish it that way. So we need to make sure we get all of our stakeholders at the table. And, uh, where that particular negotiation broke down, uh, I believe was over whether we were going to average out the, a average out the, the affordable rate at 60% AMI or have some mandated at 100 and some mandated at 30. Uh, and that’s the sort of problem that looks zero sum when you get to the end of the negotiation.
“I’ve seen what I think is a long-term failure of aggressive leadership and I think it’s time to time to step up and, and address that. I think I’m, my record shows that I’m the person to do that.”
— Will Moore
But when, but you, you have to figure out some other way earlier in the process to figure out what people’s interests are. I have been, uh, aside from my role in public life in San Diego, I’ve been a business lawyer negotiating small business deals and midsize business deals for many years. People come to my office after they’re already not getting along very well. And I ask them the following question: I say, “What do you really want? What are we, what are we really trying to accomplish?” And I find that if you ask that question enough times, you can get beyond the, uh, I’ll put it in my business context. “I want to sue somebody.” Well, you probably don’t, you probably want something else. You want the apology, you want your money back, you want X, Y, or Z. And if you find out what that thing is, you can have a better process. And I think the folks who want affordable housing, folks who want to build, the folks who want to take care of our climate and not make people commute to Temecula, um, I think they’re all on the same side. And I think we need to recognize we’re all on the same side, even though the culture of our political coalitions in this town has been, has put them on different sides for many, many years. And I think it’s time to have a new approach and focus trying to solve the housing problem with everybody on the same team.
Q: SB 50 is a lightning rod for a lot of people. Where are you on that?
A: I think as SB 50 is a strategic mistake. Um, and here’s the reason. If SB 50 says if you have high frequency transit, whether it be, um, a high-capacity bus line or a trolley line, uh, you have an automatic increase in certain entitlements around for a half mile or a quarter mile around that stop. What we’ve seen on the local level, what prevents things from getting built is neighbors organize and say, “Hey, we don’t want that change.” Right? Um, and we get a little bit of that when we try to put in a bus line or a trolley line in the first place. What SB 50 does, and the reason it sounds nice to make something automatic, but all you do then is say every time you want to put a trolley line in, you get that same opposition doubled because you get the same folks opposing both trolley line and the housing. So now you’ve created a situation where you can’t run a bus line or do a trolley line either. So I think that’s a strategic mistake. I think there probably will have to be some amount of intervention from the state, uh, to help us out to, to smooth out the processes. But I think when you tie transit and housing together as a necessary matter, I don’t think it’s politically longterm, very smart.
Q: But doesn’t that tell you something about the people you’re asking to vote for you? I mean, they’re obviously are quality of life issues that they’re talking about.
A: Absolutely.
Q: You don’t get them marching out to build new houses. You get them marching out to stop these projects. So how do you convince them?
A: Well, you get some people marching out and we were talking about this a moment ago. You get some people marching out to stop new housing. Um, but a lot of those people are, you know, the same cast of characters a lot of the time. Uh, and you know, I respect that we have our neighborhoods and we moved into the neighborhood cause we liked the neighborhood. I love Carmel Valley. Um, you know, La Jolla is a fantastic place. I’ve been living in Carmel Valley for the past decade and a half and I do enjoy the neighborhood, but I’m also concerned, as are many of my neighbors, about what’s going to happen when our kids graduate from high school and college. And I have been to, I’ve had thousands of conversations with folks in this district. And those folks who are the folks that always come out to oppose are not necessarily representative of the folks in our community that really do recognize that we need to make a change. And indeed, a lot of those folks that have long said, “Hey, I’m, I’m concerned about this new development going on in my neighborhood. I’m concerned about this or that.” Those folks have started to realize that we can’t just have a city where half of people, where a lot of people pay the half of their income and rent. Um, because a lot of those, a lot of those folks have, um, you know, very public minded values. They care a lot about their communities and their neighborhoods. And they recognize that when somebody pays half of their income in rent, that sounds like a, a different expense, a little bit, just another budget item. But what it does is it takes away your ability to save. And so if you do that for a couple of years, you’re in a situation where when you get that $400 car break down, it’s really hard to pay. When you lose your job or one of your jobs for a lot of San Diegans. Uh, and you can’t get another job for just another month or so, you’re not even long term unemployed. You just miss a couple of paychecks, you could end up on the street. And so we have a situation in San Diego right now where our middle-class housing in this town is: drive in from Temecula. Just a long commute is how we do our middle class housing. Our low income housing in San Diego right now is people live in their cars and we just can’t sustain a community like that. And even the folks who have long wanted to preserve their individual neighborhoods, just the way they are starting to realize that we have other values at stake as well. And we need to do something to allow this city to accommodate just working people, people who have jobs go to work, play by the rules. They need to be able to pay their rent, send their kids to school and enjoy their life.
Q: But the NIMBYs aren’t nearly as big a problem as the unions, which use CEQA as a tool to get what they want. And two years ago, we had this UC Berkeley professor who was leading housing official in the Obama administration saying, it’s break-glass time. We need to start doing things radically different in California. If we want to do something about the housing problem and two years later we’ve got almost nothing done. So I just think that any Democrat who talks about NIMBYs needs to also talk about unions because unions are the key opponents to SB 50 as much as anybody else because they see it as diminishing their best tool. CEQA. We’ve got six governors in a row call for CEQA reform. So what we need is Democrats to agree to CEQA reform and not just for stadiums.
A: Well, four of those six governors were Democrats, as I recall. Um, at least three of them were, I might be miscounting. Okay. Um, so I think that we are ultimately going to have to do right. I think we are ultimately going to have to do CEQA reform. I disagree that the people who work on projects are the problem. I don’t think that’s the case. I think that we put folks on position where they have to negotiate, uh, there they used the levers they have to negotiate the deals, the best deals they can get for their people. And I think what we need to do is figure out a way to, uh, get people, you know, paid for their labor while at the same time building our housing. But those, those NIMBY levers are things we need to get people -- because those delay projects a lot -- but we need to get folks to trade those away for a benefit. And so we need to get everybody at the table and you know, and the, the developers and the unions in this town have been fighting with each other for a long time. And I’ve been having this conversation with both of those sides and I sit up late at night trying to figure out how to pull those ropes together. Um, and it is, it is difficult cause we have some longterm just kinda cultural reflexes where folks, [say], you know, “I’ve been fighting with this guy for the last 30 years. Uh, you’re going to tell me we’re going to stop fighting now?” Well I’m going to tell you, you’re going to have to and we’re going to have to figure out a way to accommodate both of those interests because both of those sets of people have an, along with climate activists, with young people who pay rent, uh, have an interest in more housing getting built in this town and we can get those folks on the same team
Q: And does anybody have, cause this is where I think you actually have more faith in this narrative than I do. Like how much, I’d like to see the numbers. If we add this many units, that will affect rents because I think if people have more faith in the public good, maybe they would make that trade, but kinda like building another lane on the highway. So its a big investment, certainly the right thing to do. Does it help commuting? No. No way. It helps for a little bit and then it fills, right? Isn’t that really what’s going to happen if we build more housing? How is that really going to, I get the idea, but I don’t really see what that number would be or whether you can get there from here. You know?
A: That is a, that is a very good point. And I do want to talk about the lane on the highway thing. Okay. Big deal. Um, but you know, if you build one more apartment complex, it’s not going to change anything. The study we had, uh, from Professor Reiser coming out of Point Loma was that we needed 17,000 units a year approximately, which is far more than we’ve been building recently. Um, but if you have a short, small change in demand, you build one more apartment complex, you’re not going to accomplish that goal.
Q: 17,000 houses a year, like there’s something like a million houses units now...
A: Yes 17,000 a year is a huge number and it just kind ...
Q: So in 10 years we triple the size. Is that really what people want? Is that the thing when you ask, well what do you really want.
A: That’s a hundred thousand in five years, but we’re talking about 11,000 a year through 2050. Um, and it is a large number and it does kind of focus the mind on the aggressiveness that’s required. Cause if we do, if we do ones and twos and, uh, tiny things, uh, we’re not going to accomplish this goal. And so when folks come out and say, “Why are you trying to build this one thing in my neighborhood, it’s not going to do any good.” And we had that, and we had that in Carmel Valley when they, when they built One Paseo, 607 units, that’s not gonna break rents down. And I pay rent in Carmel Valley and I can attest to you, it did not bring rents down. Um, and so why are, and so in the individual neighborhoods have a legitimate complaint, “Why are we bearing the brunt of this?” Which is why you need, uh, a real change in how we arrange our coalitions. Because the truth is we do need to get the folks who have an interest in building on the same side. And we do need to pull off some of our, uh, some of the constraints we’ve had that looked like they were good ideas for environmental reasons back in the 90s. But we see the effects have been that we haven’t been able to build.
Q: But what if the, what if the problem is that we’re emphasizing building. Prefab homes are so cheap. In Britain, they’re increasingly embraced and they’ve been embraced in Japan forever and ever. You can go on eBay and buy a prefab home for $40,000. And so why is it popular in California? Once again, because we’re pulled by the unions that, no, you have to build homes. It’s a quality of life issue. So if prefab homes and dormitory type buildings in which people shared kitchens and bathrooms, it seems like such an obvious solution. So why aren’t we getting there? Because the power of California remains with those who like the status quo. And I just, I’m just, it’s so frustrating to hear anybody talk about housing without acknowledging that the status quo is what people in power want.
A: Well I would disagree with that prefab homes are a major solution to our housing crisis. Cause we need a lot of units. We’re going to have to build up a little bit. Um, and prefab homes don’t generally go more than one story. And I’ve looked at it, they don’t ever go more than two stories because they’re, they’re structurally unfit for that. So our opportunities in the city of San Diego are in our, our denser neighborhoods. We are going to be able to do some work with the ability to do ADUs and that sort of thing. Uh, maybe made Carmel Valley look a little more like the nice little walkable village like they have them down in La Jolla where they had a lot of success with ADUs in La Jolla. Uh, that’s granny flats for anybody who’s listening. Um, and you’d walk around La Jolla and you look for, and I walked these neighborhoods all the time and I’m looking for a 1602 Draper Street and I see 1600 and 1608. And I have to spend five minutes looking for 1602 in somebody’s backyard, uh, which is a little bit awkward, but it creates a nice dense urban walkable village, which is what we all say we want. Um, I don’t think that, uh, but I think a lot of our solutions are gonna have to be with apartment complexes and places that are a little taller. We have a couple of buildings going up right behind you right here. Um, and prefab is not going to get us the the kind of units we need.
Q: Why not just dropping a prefab as a granny flat. Why? Why isn’t that an obvious solution as opposed to something that you disdain? I don’t get it. A prefab was a shipping container. I mean, these things cost under a hundred thousand dollars.
A: I think it’s going to be tough to convince, uh, folks in Carmel Valley to put shipping containers in their back yards...
Q: Especially 17,000 of them every year. So, wait, maybe we should, I mean, this is isn’t getting anywhere, maybe we should move on to other topics.
Q: Well, one, one more please related housing topic. Democrats obsessed with subsidized housing that amount of housing lotteries that benefit a tiny fraction of people, Toni Atkins is leading the fight in the state Senate and, and city council members believe that this is the approach. This costs over $400,000. This is not affordable housing. So once again it gets back to why is affordable housing so costly? Because the state compels the use of union labor. So I just, I’ve just wish Democrats would own up to their role in this crisis as opposed to saying, Oh, other people are doing it. No, your allies are doing it.
A: Well affordable housing is for some reason more expensive than, for a lot of reasons more expensive than a market rate housing and,
Q: Yeah, that’s not good.
A: And no, it’s, it’s not, it is a real problem. But one of the problems with affordable housing is when you try to put together an affordable complex or an affordable project -- and I’ve spoken to a lot of affordable housing developers about where this problem comes from -- it’s very rare that you can get one source of funding. So you get the source of funding from here and source of funding for here and a source of funding from here. They all have little strings attached, that all say you’re going to have three disabled people, well now all of your units now have to have specific, uh, disability requirements and now all of your units have to have specific fire requirements cause that’s what this other nonprofit is concerned with. And so we don’t have a unified funding sources that don’t, that get us past those requirements. So that is something we do need to look at. Um, but I, I disagree that the people swinging the hammers are the problem.
Q: That’s the flip side of the housing question is the homelessness issue. Kevin Faulconer is getting some credit up and down the state and in other publications for doing things more that have shown some results, maybe that might be greater than Los Angeles and San Francisco, but I gotta do is walk out of here and realize that homelessness is a huge problem. Uh, what do you think of what the mayor and this current council have done and what would you do different?
A: I think that, I think they’ve done better in the last couple of years since they’ve realized that it’s a major problem, uh, than they did in the, in the years before while it got out of control. Um, but our, and I’ve talked to a lot of homelessness advocates about this. Um, our homeless problem has a couple of different tiers to it. We have the chronic homelessness, uh, folks with disabilities or addictions or mental health issues and the sort of thing that keeps you on the street and really makes it difficult to, to sustain economically, so you end up housing. And that’s about a third of our problems. And the other two thirds of our problem is very much housing related, folks that end up on the street after a short amount of economic distress. And, and it’s just hard to get back into the system. We have a lot of people that live in their cars, as I mentioned earlier. Um, and so the homelessness problem and the housing problem are very closely related to one another. Uh, and so if we can, if we can be aggressive enough to lower rents, well that’s great. Uh, that’ll help us in the long term. But we have to get people off of the street when they end up on the street. So if you, if you lose your job, you’re out for a couple of months and you miss a rent payment and you end up on the street, we need to figure out a way to get you back housed before the street starts to eat at you. Right? Cause we used to have this culture of, well, you go and get yourself together and you know, quit whatever your problems are and, uh, we’ll try to get you some housing. And I don’t know if anybody in this room has ever had, uh, had or known anybody with issues with, you know, depression, anxiety or, or addiction, living in the canyon doesn’t help. Right? So we need to figure out a ways to get people, uh, housed. I think we’ve made a couple of missteps with housing. I think we had a bad attitude towards, um, towards homelessness for a very long time. We had the rocks under the bridge. Everybody remembers that debacle. Uh, we have the navigation center, which I just fundamentally don’t believe in. Um, and uh, we paid, I think it was $17 million to some Delaware LLC, we don’t even know who owns it, uh, to build, uh, to buy a facility that I have no idea what that thing’s going to do. Uh, we have bridge housing that doesn’t go anywhere. I’d call that pier housing. Um, and we have, uh, a navigation center that we don’t know where we’re going to navigate people to. So it comes back to the facts. Since 1990, we have not built enough housing in this town. We need to find the resources to do so. I’m not saying that’s going to be easy, but we have to find the resource to do so. Cause we’re not just choking off these people who end up homeless. We are making our entire economic scale all the way up to folks who, you know, like me. I’m a, I’m a lawyer. I do OK. I’m paying probably a thousand more than I should, a month in rent. Um, if we had just built adequate housing since the ‘90s, because that affects all of us. Uh, and it’s a real constraint to our businesses and to our citizens because if I’m opening the business in San Diego that makes widgets of some sort and I got a competitor in Scottsdale, uh, who doesn’t have this problem, he can pay his employees less for a good quality of life than I have to pay mine just to keep them housed in town. Right? And so it’s a, it’s a drag to competitiveness at every level and quality of life here in San Diego.
Q: In San Francisco the problem has gotten so bad that the mayor, who is very liberal, talked about, we need to change the definition of conservatorship and go after the 1% to 5% of homeless people who caused the most problems and actually physically take them off the street. And this has led to a classic San Francisco fight between the liberals and liberals over this, and there is just some outraged over this. But it does seem like we’ve reached a point where you should start considering extreme things because it is true that a tiny handful of the homeless are, are the most costly by far. So are you ready to entertain ideas like that or does that still go too far?
A: No, I think it’s, I’ll say this, I don’t think we’re there yet as a matter of just agreement among people in our society about what really is the ethical solution to that. But I think it’s time to start having the conversation about how would we set up such a system where we do what’s necessary for both those people who are not helping themselves out on the street, maybe aren’t competent to make decisions, uh, that won’t get abused. Because we used to have that system in California and, uh, Gov. Reagan actually took it away, uh, because it was being abused and cause it was dangerous. And, you know, how can you, how do we decide that, you know, because you and I have opinions about things that we’re not the next in the conservatorship. So, um, I don’t think we as a society had that conversation because I don’t think we have an agreement on the morality of that. Um, but I do think that’s a conversation we need to start having. Um, I’m not, we’re a long way from implementing anything like that, um, because until we have an agreement on some safeguards other then I think it’s way too dangerous. But that is something our community needs to talk about a little bit.
Q: Big housing issue, short term vacation rentals, in your district, also in the city, city council hasn’t done, has done a lot but it hasn’t done anything. Both those things are true. What uh, what would you do? What, what proposal do you support?
A: Well, I would say that after analyzing this issue from a lot of different angles, we need to cut back on the vacation rentals. Um, the only thing I’ve looked at that seems enforceable is primary residence. You can rent out your primary residence for a certain amount of time or room for as long as you want. Um, but yeah, this comes back to the housing question. If we are, if I’m staying up nights, having anxiety attacks about how to get everybody on the same page to build more housing and we have a massive leak in that boat where just the units become hotel rooms, we’re not doing our job. And so we need to take away this situation where, you know, out of town LLCs are coming in and just buying property after property and taking things off the market. So my preferred solution would be a restriction to whole home, I’m sorry, primary residence. A whole home for a certain period of time because it’s not your primary residence if you’re written it out all the time. Uh, and, but I would make a carve out for a neighborhood that has been short term vacation rentals since before the internet existed, which is a Mission Bay, Mission Beach because there’s, for a couple of reasons. First of all, it’s always been like that since you had to do it by mail in the ‘50s. Uh, it’s been that kind of neighborhood. And second of all, it’s ties into some of our climate issues. The eastern half of Mission Beach, of the Mission Beach neighborhood, is less than two feet above sea level. And I think it would be irresponsible to sell a family a 30-year mortgage in that neighborhood at this point because that’s going to be underwater by the time it’s yours.
Q: What about the theory that the answer is just enforcing city law as it’s written?
A: I think any time you’re not enforcing city law, you got, you got real problems. Um,
Q: It’s just strange that this is out there and it just has never been brought to a head. If this is what city law says, then why aren’t city laws being enforced?
A: I think that’s, I think that’s an excellent question. Uh, the reason we’ve gotten is that there, that would require a lot more resources than we have and that, you know, the truth is we never enforced all the laws that ever exist. Um, I might’ve driven faster to this meeting than might have been permissible as was literally every other person on the road around me. Um, so yeah, if we have a law, we should enforce it. We don’t have the resources to enforce it, I’m told, uh, but if we can’t do a reform, especially if the folks at the short term vacation rental companies, the Airbnbs and such, uh, continue to obstruct our ability to implement any regulations at all, then that is definitely something we should be more aggressive about.
Q: Another friction point with industry in the city is the scooter situation, thoughts on how the city has handled that and what you would do differently?
A: Well I think the scooter situation is classic failure of leadership from the outset. The scooters came to town and it was obvious -- a couple of things were obvious very early on. First of all, these were interesting and useful things that could help us with a lot of our urban problems. Getting people, you know, the last mile problem and that sort of thing. And the second and third were people shouldn’t be able to ride them on the sidewalks and scare the hell out of people and run them over. And the boardwalk was not an appropriate place for something going 15 miles an hour that the person riding it is maybe intoxicated and probably doesn’t know how to ride cause they’re a tourist. Uh, and if we had said, and that’s 90% of the problem, boardwalks and sidewalks. And if we had said from the outset, we’re gonna fix this, we’re going to take this 90%. We know it’s not the whole problem. We know it’s not everything, but we’re going to take this off the table right now. Ride them on bike lanes, ride them where you ride bicycles, either limit the speeds or take them off the boardwalk entirely. Then a lot of the kind of cultural anger, the kind of uh, you know, yes team and no team, uh, problem that we’ve had around scooters would have been mitigated. But now, we left it, so now, you know, when you leave a big problem, people start to see smaller problems and those become impediments to get everybody on the same page and making a deal. Um, I think the scooter regulations they did eventually pass do, which just took effect I think on July 1st, uh, do make up for a lot of the problems. They, they do solve a lot of problems. And I will say that what we see at the, at the kind of visible level among the public debate is a lot more vitriol than I get from people when I go door to door, uh, in, uh, in the district. I have had in 1,500 conversations. I have had two people in that whole set call for a scooter moratorium. And then it’s like, really, we just need to get rid of these things entirely.
Q: Temporarily or permanently.
A: Well, a moratorium.
Q: Why is your current council woman for it?
A: Well that’s, that’s what she thinks is the, is the best idea. So...
Q: Scooter anger is high, I’m out of touch.
A: Um, but the scooters, there are a lot of people concerned about scooters, like the number of people concerned about that is, is significant. The number of people that are not willing to entertain a solution where scooters still exist in town is very small. And, uh, we, we saw last week the number came out of the complaints that have been made to the city system for the past three months, 85% of them were from 10 people. Uh, and so and so that’s the sort of, you know, one of the always political questions that you face when you’re trying to get folks together is: how many, how, how many people on the side are overrepresented themselves. How many folks are just, Oh these are the folks that are very motivated and show up and are really angry about this issue. And that’s where I think that failure to solve the initial part of the issue that was kind of obvious from the outset generated those, that high level of people who’ve made this now their thing, they’re anti scooter people. And once somebody adopts an identity that are anti something, they’re anti that thing and it’s too late to get that resolved.
Q: So you don’t support a moratorium?
A: I don’t support moratorium. I don’t think that’s wise because it is a useful thing. And we should be adults enough to figure out how to make a useful thing work in a big innovative, modern global city without just saying, you know, “Shut it down until we figure out what’s going on.”
Q: Let me ask you, before I go into detail on some of these, just off the top, do you support yes or no? Um, the convention center proposal?
A: I do support the ballot initiative on the convention center. Um, I, and this is something that I think our, our leadership in San Diego needs to, needs to do a little bit better job on. I might not have written that exactly the same way, uh, but this is what we can get done. And if we don’t do it, it’s going to be awhile before we actually get anything done. So let’s, let’s get it done and move on.
Q: Are you worried that it’s vulnerable to a single subject challenge?
A: A little.
Q: I don’t see how someone, this seems like a hanging curve for somebody who hates the idea to go after.
A: Yeah, I have a, um, I, I think that my reading of the law is that it would pass that since the single subject is the big increase, um, because otherwise no increase that was tied to what you do with the money would pass single subject. Um, but would I, do I think if somebody brought a case against that they would win? No. Do I think if somebody brought a case against that, they would be sanctioned for making a frivolous argument? Also no, right. So that’s a, it’s a bad argument that isn’t a ridiculous argument.
Q: But we live in a city that’s been seeing these tax increases for years, sometimes going for what they say they’re going for, sometimes not going with for their saying their going for. Do you think that the electorate is jaded now? Do you think, are gonna ever approve any tax increase in San Diego anymore?
A: Well, I think, I do think they, if you present something to the voters that they believe in and want to do, that they will vote for it. I don’t think we’re off the table. Um, I think that one mistake we make is we promise things that we’re not gonna do sometimes. Uh, we’ve seen this problem with our, um, our, uh, school boards where we’d say, “Oh, we’re gonna float a bond and we’re gonna fix all the lead in schools.” And then we don’t do that because we’ve hired or over-hyped the amount of threats the lead was in the water or that was just the thing that polled best and we held it for the next bond measure. And I think that’s unwise. And I think when you implement, um, the vote of the people, then you need to make sure you do what you said you were going to do. Not just on the, not just on the black letter of the, the ordinance that nobody actually read, but in your little YouTube ad where you, you know, put a scarf on a guy and said, we’re going to do all this stuff with, uh, with whatever this ballot initiative says. That’s, those advertisements are part of your contract. And if you don’t respect that, then people will get jaded and stop voting for you.
Q: The Housing Federation’s affordable housing measure, do you support that?
A: I do support that. I have. My only qualm about that is because it’s $900 million. My only qualm about that is the amount of housing that would get built doesn’t seem high enough to me. Um, and I’ve had a lot of conversations with the folks who are supporting that measure and they say, listen, we, if you get the $900 million, we can leverage money from other sources of state, federal, uh, nonprofit. Um, and if you try to bond more money to solve more of the problem, then we’re not going to be able to get those matching funds. That’s kind of the rate at which we can get these things built. Um, and so that was my major qualm that it wasn’t big enough. We’re going to promise people we’re going to fix this homelessness thing and then get to 2,500 people a year off the street. That might not fix the problem and then you’re really over promising and under delivering. But I think if we, if we sell that measure to voters as something that will help, because there’s not a silver bullet, we’re running the marathon here. We’re going to have to run the first mile at pace, the second mile at pace. We’re not going to hit any five-run home runs. How many sports analogies so far?
Q: But as I understand the project, it doesn’t call for dormitories. I mean come on, can’t we follow what Tokyo did? I mean there are existing ways to deal with this problem that we’ve simply never even tried - 20 seconds cause we don’t want to go down that housing rabbit hole again.
A: No, I will. I will tell ya. Yes. Okay. Yes, we, that we have no more SROs downtown. We have eliminated our ability to do very small, uh, and dorm style, uh, housing. Uh, we have really shot ourselves in the foot by insisting that everybody have a deluxe apartment. Um, and I think that, you know, economically that’s, that hasn’t been wise. So I would agree with that.
Q: Another measure that looks like it’s going forward is a subpoena power for citizens review board. Where are you on that? Have you always thought that way? And then generally what do you think of the job that the chief has done since coming on board?
A: Well, I think that, well, any discussion of law enforcement needs to acknowledge at first that we are the safest large city in America and this is the safest crime wise that America has literally ever been. Uh, so we are the safest large city in the history of the United States, which is a...
Q: That’s quite a statement.
A: Well, anybody that would tell you the chief’s doing a bad job, you should, you should mention that. Um, I think that the citizens review board and the community and the Police Officers Association have very different views of this obviously. Um, but what we have is we have communities in this town that don’t have the level of trust that you need to call the police and have the law get enforced. And I grew up in a neighborhood where the police did not come when you call them, but came lots of other times and they were not there to help you. They were there to lock you up for some reason. Um, and I have not lived in that sort of neighborhood since I’ve been in San Diego, but I do know that the community feels those neighborhoods exist. Uh, I think a subpoena power would give people more confidence in the police review board. So I would support that. Um, I think that other police review boards such as the one that the county implemented that very effectively. And so, uh, the answer is yes. Uh, I, I think they should have that power. I don’t think you should pretend to have a police review board where you don’t have the ability to investigate something with, uh, some power to get information that has to be complied with.
Q: And generally on the chief though. You said any conversation should start with our safety?
A: Note, that, yeah, we’re doing a pretty good job.
Q: We’re also one of the most heavily surveilled cities in the country, I think up in the top five or something. I forget the exact number. How do you feel about the street cameras and use of them?
A: Let me do this. Hey, Siri. (Beeps). So if that’s listening, when you say,” Hey, Siri,” it is listening to the rest of the time too, right? Um, we are a, in an era where we are all heavily surveilled in pretty much everything we do and we carry our own surveillance items around with us. Um, I think that, um, we do need to have accountability when we have, uh, law enforcement and government, uh, doing that because listen, I went and bought this phone, put it in my pocket. That was all my choice. I get that. Uh, when you have uh, unannounced, uh, or unnoted, uh, surveillance equipment on, you know, streetlamps and government property that creates real civil liberties questions, especially if those things are being used in criminal proceedings.
Q: I think like the California law now requires that you can get access to your, uh, the data held by a technology or cell phone company. You can’t get access to the things that government is, is uh, collecting on you in San Diego. That seems like a little bit of a problem.
A: It is. It is a problem. But also, uh, how would you know what government is collecting on you if you just have cameras walking down the street? Cause the only way to do that would be to figure out, to get facial recognition. And we really do get, we are past slippery slope at this point. We are at the point where we really need to think hard about these things. And that is, that’s something that came out and started happening without a lot of public discussion. And so, uh, we, and unfortunately it’s one of those issues that reduce crime, increase safety, how much do we want the law actually enforced? Do we want to be able to go buy a hamburger when you should be on a diet? ... Um, and so we do, we do want to be careful with how much surveillance we have in our society. We already have, I think, too much. Um, and that starts to cut into our freedoms. And even if the people who run the system now are folks we trust, we always need to think about what happens when somebody who doesn’t like us quite as much takes over. So I think we need to be really careful.
Q: But I’m a libertarian, I share all these concerns, but the fact is this is an elite issue. 80% of the public doesn’t care about this. They don’t see it as an issue. They say safety is a good thing.
A: 80 percent of the public doesn’t know about, I think I would say 95% probably don’t know.
Q: But by and large, when there’s polling on this, people don’t care.
Q: SDSU West?
A: SDSU West, I mentioned when you do a ballot measure, your advertisements are part of the contract. That’s really what I was talking about. You probably got that from the fact that I mentioned the scarf. Um, I don’t think that major land use decisions should get done with a competition between who has the better YouTube ad. I don’t think that’s wise, I oppose both of those ballot measures, um, because I think that’s something that we should elect intelligent and thoughtful representatives to work out for us. Uh, who we, whoever in our trust. Um, the SDSU West initiative is notoriously vague. Uh, there are a lot of things that need to get done. But the next level, the next step is making sure we get fair value for the land. And that is something they talked about a lot in that campaign or we’re paying fair market values of the land. We’re going to pay for it, we’re going to have all these amenities, and now I see a movement kind of away from that to say, well we’ll, and it’s, it’s legal under the under the initiative that you can get a discount for tearing down the stadium. You can get a discount to this and get a discount for that. Um, but I think we need to fulfill what’s the, fulfill the promise we made to the actual people who voted, who didn’t read every bit of that initiative and make sure we do get fair market value.
Q: But former deputy city attorney Hal Vanderhaug came to talk to us a few years ago about San Diego High. So on the one hand the city is giving away San Diego High School. It’s not expecting a return. On the other hand, it’s playing by the letter of the law on this one. It just strikes me as a discordant and no one ever brings it up. Why are the one hand you’re giving away land? Why on the other hand, are you gonna go the full way and say give us every last penny.
A: Well I can, I can pull out a pretty important difference right off the bat. The San Diego State development isn’t just for San Diego State. There’s a lot of commercial development, housing development that has nothing to do with educational purposes there. Uh, and so a high school that’s been there for a long time, the lease happens. How long was that lease that came back up. It was 50. Um, they gave them another 50, I think. Um, and that’s, that’s a use that’s been important part of San Diego for a long time.
Q: But if city law says you have to get this back because city law was written because there’s so many shady things going on where people are giving away city assets because they know the people in power. It just seems you can’t logically to me make exceptions even if it’s a good cause, either the law means something or it doesn’t.
A: But I think that we can, we can say it is an important governmental purpose for a high school to be in this location. We can say that we have the power, uh, democratically to say that, it doesn’t violate any laws and we’re fine. Um, for SDSU West, we’ve all been sold an initiative that says you’re going to pay fair market value. And then to hear some folks back that off just because they’re, you know, closer with one developer than another. Uh, I think that’s troubling. And so I think if we, if, if y’all said you were gonna pay and you told the people who were ultimately the taxpayers in the city that you were going to pay, you should pay,
Q: And what’s the council’s role in that? You know, that’s an issue that’s come up before. Is that something that the mayor and and his staff can take the lead on and say, here, council, you know, green light this or should the council have a seat at the table?
A: Well, I think there’s, I think having a mayor, I mean, we have a strong mayor form of government for a reason. I think we should be able to trust the mayor to engage in those negotiations, but that’s ultimately going to get approved by the council and the mayor needs to, you know, count noses and see if he’s got five or six to make sure it actually gets done. And uh, if I’m one of those five or six, that’s what I’m going to be telling them.
Q: Are you done with your checklist, Matt? Cause I was gonna ask about climate action plan.
Q: Yeah, no, that’s next on my list. So ask away.
Q: The climate action plan, we’re supportive of it, I think always will people think it’s a huge problem, but the idea that the city actually believes and has committed in writing that 18% of commuters in Sorrento Valley and large swaths of the city are going to use, bicycles just seems to me to be such a pointless exercise in fantasy that how does it actually help solve the problem, especially with an aging workforce? So do you really believe that in the 20th, you know, 15 years from now that 18% of people in large parts of the city are going to use bicycles, to commute to work?
A: Well, Chris, I went to the doctor a while back and he told me I had a cholesterol of something like 400. Um, and he said, that has to be 250. You got to get that down. You’ve got to eat some oatmeal and go running. And I remember thinking, is that a plausible thing to do? Uh, but he was very convincing. He said, well, if you don’t, you’re going to die. And uh, does 18% sound easy? No. Does it sound like something we’re likely to hit? Probably not. Is it a good goal that tells us where our goalposts are to meet our climate challenges? Yeah, I think it is. And I want to get into transit and alternative solutions to getting people around. See we have spent 70 years building a city for cars. And this is the entire West Coast has really done this. But, uh, we in San Diego has, have spent 70 years building a city for cars and that has been done not with a giant master plan of cars, of roads being laid out all at once in 1940. That didn’t happen. Uh, what has happened is we’ve taken a step every year to make the city more car friendly. And we have realized over the past several years that more lanes just make more traffic. And that’s not just the city planners. The city planners have known that for decades. But I’ve noticed that Carmel Vallians, people in University City and La Jolla now know that expanding highways doesn’t get us around faster.
Q: This is a matter of bitter dispute among traffic analysts and The Cato Institute and Reason magazine, have, in my mind, completely debunked it . Phoenix, Arizona, has an abundance of roads and it has less traffic problems.
A: The only way to reduce traffic is to have a recession and I’m not in favor of that. Um, what we need to do, we’ve asked how can we reduce traffic? What we need, and it’s the wrong question. What we need to do is ask, and this is, you know, just like I do, “What are you actually trying to accomplish?” When I asked people about their transit woes, they say, “Wow, it’s just, I just hate the way I have to get around.” I ask them a couple of questions and whether their perspective is more conservative, more progressive or whatnot, uh, it always comes back to the same answer: “I personally spend too much time alone in my car.” And almost everybody in this community feels that way regardless of what they think their solution is. And I think, uh, transit advocates have made a mistake over decades when they just lead off by saying, “Oh, it’d be great if we all got out of our cars. And it was like New York City and we were able to take transit everywhere” because, A, that’s not practical. That’s not going to happen next year. We’re not going to be able to get that done in any sort of timeframe. But it makes sense as a something a single politician should ever try to advocate. B, people don’t live in Manhattan in San Diego. People live in San Diego and they choose to live in San Diego. And I tell you what, the housing prices, we could all afford to live in Manhattan for exactly the same price. C, the solution that lends itself to is an all or nothing. So either we do 18% of people on bicycles or we’ve failed. Uh, if we set a goal of 18% and we get 9% of the people in the city commuting on bicycles, then that is a great success. That would be more successful than if we set a goal of 9% and hit 6%. Right. Um, but ultimately whatever the goals are, we need to ask the question with our next year of funding, two years of funding, five years funding, how are we going to take the baby steps necessary -- just like we did to build the road city -- to build the city that asks, “How do we get you and me where we want to go when we want to get there more effectively?” And right now we have a, a transit advocate culture that says, “Oh, we need to all take transit all the time.” We have a culture that says, “If you’re driving around, there’s something wrong with you.” Well, if I’m driving around in Carmel Valley, it’s because there’s no bus anywhere in Carmel Valley. I’d have no opportunity to take even one out of 10 trips or one out of 20 or one out of any number because there’s no access whatsoever. So we need access to the places that will allow us to make a choice. Because right now most of us don’t have a choice. We have to get in the car. And people want choices.
Q: So what’s your opinion of the SANDAG plan for the grand central station and the airport connectivity?
A: I think that the broader SANDAG plan is a good idea. I think that is the sort of vision we need to lay out to make people alert that we will eventually get to a place where you can take transit a little more. And we need to have an aggressive plan to get us, uh, outside of our car dependence, so we do have options. As far as the, the grand central station idea, uh, I’m still a little bit on the fence about this. Um, I’m not certain that the most useful investment of our next transit dollar is to get people on occasional trips to the airport rather than where they go every day. I don’t think that builds up habits. Atlanta has had MARTA to the airport for the past 30 years and nobody takes that transit system for anything else. So that kind of theory of “Oh you get used to taking transit,” I don’t think works. Um, the grand central station idea. I think, uh, our problem in San Diego is coverage and frequency. So it’s tough to get a bus from one part of town to another. I once did a long training run, I was training for a marathon once I ran from University City all the way to Point Loma and it took me half as long to get back home as it took to get there on foot cause I took the bus back. Um, and when that stops being the case, people will start riding transit and more often. And I think our priority needs to not be as much on big signal projects, which is something San Diego has gotten distracted by frequently over the years, uh, and needs to be on asking the question, what gets people around the best.
Q: But the if you build it, they will come theory is completely undercut by reality. The New York Times had a story last year about how, uh, use of transit is down by and large across the nation. Los Angeles times had a story about how, uh, the use of transit has gone down significantly in the last seven or eight years. So we’re adding this capacity and the public still says, no, that seems to me to be an insoluble problem. If, if the message of climate change isn’t getting through to people, uh, I don’t know. It just seems like, uh, the, the, the business of politicians is proposing solutions that people will actually embrace. So is there a solution if people are turning away from transit at a time and everybody in the world is saying, Hey, we’ve got to use more transit.
A: I don’t think people are turning away from transit. I do think that our transit options are not what they should be. A lot of the transits that gets taken throughout the country happens in a couple of, in a few of our big cities. Uh, D.C., New York being the most conspicuous where their transit systems have just not received the investments they should. And if you tried to get around New York City recently, you’ll see it’s really kind of a nightmare. They’ve really led that system decay. Um, people aren’t resistant to taking transit. They’re not going to go take transit because they care about climate change. Some people are gonna do that. Some people are going to, “I’m going to do the hour and a half long commute that I could otherwise do it in 45 minutes. Uh, because I’m committed to my green values.” And people, we... If that’s what we’re, how we’re expecting to solve this problem, we’re going to fail. We need to provide an option that is better for people to get around. And when we do that, they take transit and we don’t, they don’t.
Q: Hasan Ikhrata has made this argument, but I keep thinking back to this letter we had on Andrew’s page, about five or six months ago for a woman who said, here’s my transit reality. I get on the bus, there’s crazy people on there yelling and screaming every day.
A: Safety is a major problem. It is.
Q: And, and so it just seems like it’s all been all, it’s all tied up with homelessness, but I don’t know, it just seems to me like, uh, it’s tough not to be grim.
A: Well, we don’t have that option. I think that, um, I understand skepticism. I think it’s warranted. And I think that, that, that skepticism is something that’s healthy and we have to ask those questions. Uh, I speak to people all the time. Who, well, women mainly are resistant to the idea of getting on the transit. I used to take the trolley around here downtown. My office was over at One American Plaza and I, on several occasions, had to go physically stand behind someone who was harassing and in stand between someone who was harassing, someone and the person they were harassing. Um, and you know, that’s something I can do cause I’m a largish guy, right? Uh, but if I was the, the lady who was on that trolley that had a choice probably would not have taken the trolley the next day. And I have, uh, another friend who is always on Facebook talking about this guy was being crazy on the, on the bus today. Um, and so we do need better security. Uh, but the fact that the system which we have not invested hard in for a very long time, or at least not sufficiently, uh, is never going to work; the fact that it doesn’t work now doesn’t mean it’s ever gonna work and we can do better. And the critiques you’re raising are valid. They are, they are meaningful and valid, but the fact is the roads don’t fix the problem and we need to ask how we get you and I been around better. And once we start asking that question, we get better solutions.
Q: Let me ask you that. Uh, one last question. Uh, did the increase in council salary pay factor into your decision to run at all?
A: I was running well before that. In fact, I will say, I think almost all of my opponents were too, so I don’t, I don’t think that factored into it.
Q: The writing was on the wall and Bob Ottilie was pushing to that. Right?
A: You know, I actually didn’t know what the raise was until I read your article about it. So, um, and I had actually gone, I was going to have to move into a different place and I’d look for a place with salary, with a rent that I could pay that was in District One. And there was like a couple of complexes on, on one side of University City that I might’ve been able to squeeze into. But that was about it.
Q: Well, appreciate your time. Last thoughts you want to leave us with? Give us your elevator pitch.
A: Well, uh, I am a small business lawyer, longtime advocate running to address our climate crisis, our housing crisis, encourage small businesses increase, uh, and, and address our stagnant wages we’ve had for 40 years. I think we’re entering a new era in San Diego politics in the 20s. Uh, we’re going to have, uh, we’re going to like five new council members an entire new majority, and we’re going to have to do things a new way to solve the major problems that have accumulated in the city for a number of years. And I think that, uh, you know, my perspective and my relationships with, uh, folks within my community and throughout the city are going to prove, prove a real advantage.
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