San Diegans are already feeling the pain of the city’s $258 million budget shortfall, and the deepest impacts from Mayor Todd Gloria’s budget proposal are still about two months away.
On the chopping block are cuts to police and homelessness services, libraries, parks, rec centers, the arts and more. In the meantime, the city doubled the price of parking meters.
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WATCH HEREThe angry voices have been out in force at city council meetings as well as inside NBC 7’s viewer-tip inbox.
“Why not discuss a cut to the mayor's and city council members’ salary [increases] in the last three years?” a viewer wrote. "That’s where cuts need to be made to lower the deficit."
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SIGN UP San Diegan Mike Cavanaugh is another viewer who reached out, upset over the steep proposed cuts.
“Eventually, the quality of life that we have is just not going to be there,” Cavanaugh said. “And I just like San Diego too much to see it go down. Our streets are just atrocious.”
San Diego isn’t the only city facing a fiscal cliff this budget season. Los Angeles is tackling a budget shortfall of nearly $1 billion. In response, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass announced she will take a pay cut and hold off on scheduled raises for her staff.
Investigations
How much we pay our elected leaders
NBC 7 Investigates discovered that similar cuts to the salaries of elected leaders in San Diego can’t be achieved so easily. In fact, their salaries and pay increases are written into the city’s charter after voters approved a ballot measure in 2018.
Currently, Gloria earns $244,727. That's more than California Governor Gavin Newsom, who takes home $242,295 per year.
San Diego City Councilmembers each bring home $185,545, more than congressional representatives, who bank $174,000.
San Diego leaders are scheduled for another pay raise this summer. And just like the last five raises they’ve received since 2020, this year’s pay bump will come without a public vote or public notice.
The politics of paying our elected leaders
2018’s Measure L was years in the works, and its passage is a point of pride for attorney and community advocate Bob Ottilie. He pushed for a change for two decades and authored the ballot measure. San Diegans overwhelmingly approved it, with 78% voting yes.
“The council had not had a raise since 2002,” Ottilie told NBC 7. “If you lived in San Diego during that same period, you saw so many bad decisions.”
Ottilie said he saw costly and incompetent decisions emerge from City Hall, including the 1987 stadium funding deal for the Chargers.
“It was a total screw up on their part,” Ottilie said. “Cost the city millions and millions. And what frustrated [me] was what low quality of people we had on our city council.”
At the time, the city of San Diego paid councilmembers less than $70,000 a year. More than 3,500 city workers made more than that. In theory, councilmembers could have voted to raise their salaries, but in practice, the move was politically unpopular.
“It was a mess, and it had to be fixed,” Ottilie said. “ThecCity of San Diego is a major corporation … and it needs to be run like a business.”
So Ottilie looked at how elected officials in Las Vegas successfully raised salaries. Measure L connected the pay of elected leaders to automatically align with 75% of what San Diego Superior Court judges were making. When they got an increase, city leaders also got a bump.
Judges’ salaries are increased each year by multiplying their current salary by the average percentage increase for California state employees for that fiscal year.
Measure L also eliminated car allowances and sports-ticket perks, and barred city officials from taking lobbying jobs after leaving office.
“I realized that they made it more attractive to voters by eliminating all those perks that nobody knew about,” Ottilie said. “Ultimately, we sold it to the voters as an ethics package.”
Cavanaugh told us he doesn’t think voters truly understood what they were voting for.
“If you talk to any of the [78] percent of the people who voted for it, ‘Would you have voted yes for that Proposition L had you known what the salaries were going to be over the next several years?’ ” Cavanaugh said, “and I can tell you from just living here and talking to people, there’s no way it would have ever passed.”
Shall the Charter be amended to: (1) restrict benefits for elected city officers; (2) restrict lobbying and campaign activities of elected city officers; and (3) remove the requirement that councilmembers set their salaries and those of the mayor and city attorney, providing instead that their salaries be set as percentages of the salary set by the State of California for Superior Court judges?
2018 Ballot Measure L
“I mean, I don’t know,” Ottile said. “That’s a question. The answer to that question is the same as anything that goes on the ballot.”
Either way, Ottilie believes the measure improved the quality of the candidates who’ve run for and been elected to office. He sees no issue with the amount they’re being paid.
“I mean it’s the least we can do!” Ottilie said. "Quite frankly, I think the number ought to go up."
“Now that you’re getting [$185,545], are we really getting two and a half times better service?” Cavanaugh said. "Are our roads better? I mean, we’re not,.
No changes to salaries unless the voters pass another measure
NBC 7 Investigates reached out to all nine city councilmembers and Mayor Gloria. We didn’t ask them about a pay cut, just whether they would consider not taking their next scheduled raise. The short answer was no.
A couple of councilmember offices questioned whether they could legally forgo the next pay raise, so we asked the San Diego City Attorney’s Office. They got back to us, saying Measure L made elected official salaries part of the city charter.
It is their opinion that it would require a voter-approved amendment to the charter for a councilmember or the mayor to reject increases or give back a portion of their salary to the city.
The city attorney’s salary is also tied to the same salary schedule. That position’s salary increased by a much smaller percentage because the base pay was already much higher than the city council or mayor.
Gloria’s communications director sent us this statement:
“The mayor’s salary will remain consistent with the voter-approved salary setting formula, even as his workload expanded significantly with the assumption of the former chief operating officer’s duties. By assuming this additional executive role, Mayor Gloria relieved the taxpayers of hundreds of thousands of dollars in salary and benefit costs. In addition, he reduced his staff by 10% and effected a departmental consolidation in February that is saving taxpayers $5.3 million annually.”
In addition, the mayor’s office said he’s not considering making any cuts to the salaries of city staff or freezing salary increases.
