Mayor Dismisses Embattled COO And Takes Reins Of City Management

By Will Huntsberry, the Voice of San Diego

February 20, 2025

Following criticisms of Chief Operating Officer Eric Dargan in recent weeks, Mayor Todd Gloria announced Tuesday he was eliminating Dargan’s position of COO. Dargan is out and department executives will now report directly to the mayor.

Gloria announced Dargan’s dismissal as part of a raft of other measures, including merging multiple departments and eliminating empty managerial positions, designed to stabilize the city’s careening budget situation. But that wasn’t the only important context related to Gloria’s decision.

Dargan — and Gloria himself — came under fire earlier this month at a City Council committee meeting. Several councilmembers and the manager of the city’s largest municipal employee union alleged that no one was taking charge to lead the city out of its current $258 million budget deficit.

“Is anybody running this city? Is anybody paying attention to the operations of this city? Anybody?” asked Michael Zucchet, manager of the Municipal Employees Association. “Where is our chief operating officer?”

The allegation that Dargan has not been properly taking the reins of the city has been bouncing around for months. According to widespread lore in City Hall, he fell asleep in critical meetings — including those related to the city’s budget and the recent hiring of a new fire chief.

I put the stories to Dargan in a text message.

“Yes, I’ve heard the same thing,” he responded.

“Is it true?” I asked.

“Not that I am aware of.”

Dargan did not respond to further questions.

Dargan, who previously served as the head of public works in Houston, came to San Diego in 2022. In Houston, he was known as “the pothole man” for fixing the city’s streets, the Union-Tribune reported.

Starting in early 2024, Dargan and Gloria championed an effort that they promised would end the city’s homelessness crisis. They wanted to bring private donations and volunteer-driven work — as opposed to government-led efforts — to the center of the city’s attempt to ease homelessness. Gloria first announced the initiative in January. Dargan also began talking it up.

“My plan is to eliminate my homeless department altogether,” Dargan told the U-T in March.

The idea was for a public-private group, called San Diegans Together Tackling Homelessness, to start working on all aspects of homelessness — from building affordable housing to prevention. But that effort has so far failed.

The group, as KPBS reported, had done nothing more than purchase $2,400 worth of t-shirts for a volunteer clean up event as of last December. It had raised only a small fraction of the money it planned.

“I don’t consider it falling short,” Dargan told KPBS at the time.

Others panned the effort: “Experts and advocates who specialize in homelessness response and prevention, criticized the initiative as unrealistic, unfocused and a potential distraction from better-established efforts in the region,” KPBS reported.

At the council committee meeting this month, councilmembers pointed out that Gloria said he would begin a major belt-tightening effort last December. And yet, at the same meeting, they heard the city had not actually frozen hiring. The mayor had hired several managers since he announced the hiring freeze. City finance staff said some of those hires were vital.

“Here’s my issue right now: Bold pronouncements are made and then the actions don’t match the words,” said Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera at the meeting.

Under San Diego’s strong mayor system, Gloria is the city’s chief executive. Until the COO position was eliminated, Dargan, like other department chiefs, served at Gloria’s pleasure.

Elo-Rivera said he had many productive conversations with Dargan on the city’s various challenges — and the various actions that might make a difference — over the course of his tenure.

“These are all demonstrations of willingness to take action. I don’t know if he didn’t receive direction or didn’t follow through, but I don’t take him to be insincere,” Elo-Rivera said after the meeting.

Dargan does have some supporters in the city.

He has become a regular fixture at weekly meetings held at the Jackie Robinson YMCA for those whose lives were affected by the Jan. 22 floods of last year.

“To his credit, he became a consistent presence at these community conversations even when, many times, the people talking did not have anything kind to say about him or the city,” said Elo-Rivera. “I respect that — him being willing to sit and be in a room when you can guarantee no one in the room is gonna say anything nice to you.”

At a press conference Tuesday, reporters asked Gloria whether his decision to eliminate the position of COO had anything to do with Dargan’s performance.

“I’m not gonna discuss personnel issues,” Gloria said. “Eric Dargan is a good man. I’ve enjoyed serving with him and this is just a decision we have to make that is budgetarily informed.”

I asked Gloria about the criticism from councilmembers that he himself had said intense belt-tightening measures would start taking place in December, but that those measures, from the councilmembers’ perspective, did not appear to be happening.

“I don’t have much of a reaction other than to relitigate the facts,” Gloria said. He pointed to a hiring freeze, a block on discretionary spending and “other actions” he had taken since December. “There’s a lot behind this [work to reduce spending and raise revenues.] Not all of it constitutes council action, so I’ll be forgiving of councilmembers who may be making that observation.”

Gloria said his office has been working to balance the budget on a daily basis, since the gravity of the budget deficit became known.

“That work is not done in one City Council committee hearing. That work is done daily and will continue going forward. Today is simply the announcement of a series of decisions that I want the public to be aware of, but there have been many [decisions] that have pre-dated this announcement today, and there will be many more in the months ahead,” Gloria said.

Zucchet, the manager of the Municipal Employees Association, said Gloria made the right decision.

“A shakeup was needed given the severity of challenges facing the city, and the mayor deserves credit for making this move,” he wrote.

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