County Budget Muscles into Supervisor Race
Exactly what should be done with county reserve funds is becoming a critical issue in the special election for the Board of Supervisors.
The San Diego County budget leaped to the forefront of the race to fill a vacant South County seat on the County Board of Supervisors on Wednesday.
Chula Vista Mayor John McCann, the Republican in the race, staged an early morning press conference to decry a recent proposal by board Democrats tap up to $355 million in rainy day funds to prepare for possible federal cuts to Medicaid and other programs.
McCann said the Democrats’ proposal, which comes at time when the county already faces a $140 million budget deficit, “turns our emergency fund into a slush fund…We need to stop ignoring the real problem, which is too much spending.”
McCann and Republican Supervisor Jim Desmond, who also spoke at the press conference, identified several county programs they’d target for elimination before tapping reserves: A $7.5 million expenditure on free phone calls for jail inmates, a $5 million program providing free legal services to undocumented immigrants and the county’s recently created Office of Racial Equity and Justice.
Board Democrats Terra Lawson-Remer and Monica Montgomery Steppe have emphasized that their reserve proposal is intended only to prepare for future budget emergencies, not power new government spending.
But McCann and Desmond said the proposal shows Democrats are not being prudent with taxpayers’ money. “Instead of spending on pointless projects, we need to prioritize the county’s core services,” McCann said. “Reserves [are] meant to fight wildfires and respond to true emergencies, not for political issues.”
The Trump card: McCann’s Democratic opponent, Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre, immediately slapped back at the call for cuts with a sharply worded statement accusing McCann of “doubling down on the Republican MAGA plan to slash funding for Medi-Cal and children’s nutrition programs South County families rely on most.”
The slam echoed previous efforts Aguirre has made to tie McCann to unpopular Trump administration policies. But McCann said he has never proposed cutting either Medi-Cal or child nutrition spending and called himself a “strong advocate” for both programs. He reiterated his support for fully funding both, he said, as recently as an April 30 Head Start event in Chula Vista.
Asked to explain the Trump link, Aguirre’s campaign consultant, Dan Rottenstreich, acknowledged that, in fact, it was county budget staff who proposed reducing the number of county employees who enroll people in state healthcare and food programs, not McCann.
But Rottenstreich argued that McCann’s opposition to Democrats’ budget reserve proposal, along with a related proposal to delay the budget vote until after the Supervisor election, amounted to implicit support for the Medi-Cal staff reduction.
Divergent priorities: The clash over the reserve proposal highlighted the sharply divergent views at stake in the supervisor race.
McCann said that, under Democratic leadership, the Board of Supervisors had strayed from the county’s core mission, piling up extraneous programs and running the county into a budgetary ditch.
“Everyone wants government to do everything,” he said. “But…local government needs to focus on core services.”
McCann said he had kept Chula Vista’s budget balanced for years without staff or service cuts by “focusing on the core mission of the city and not going off on all these other issues that cost money.”
Aguirre on Wednesday framed the problem in opposite terms. “The county doesn’t lack for resources,” she said. “It lacks the political will to take action.”
Aguirre said tapping the county’s reserves would enable long-needed investment in parts of the county that had been ignored for years. The county, she said, “has done next to nothing to end chronic neglect of our community. And it’s not putting tax dollars where they’re needed most – fixing the [Tijuana River] sewage crisis and helping people afford to live here.”
