Morning Report: Escondido Will Put Sales Tax Initiative On Ballot

By Voice of San Diego

July 15, 2024

Escondido leaders voted unanimously on Wednesday to put a 20-year, one-cent sales tax citizens’ initiative in front of voters this November.

This will be the second time Escondido voters will decide on a sales tax increase. Voters rejected a similar ballot measure in November 2022. Before that, city staff unsuccessfully floated a different sales tax measure to the City Council in 2020.

The measure, called the Escondido Community Investment Measure, is projected to bring in around $25 million each year in new revenue and would aim to address Escondido’s ongoing structural budget deficit.

The initiative was started by a citizens’ coalition called Escondido Citizens for Safety, which reportedly collected and submitted 12,000 signatures – more than the required 7,748 – to place the sales tax increase on the ballot.

Escondido council members said they wanted to respect what residents wanted, and since the initiative likely had enough signatures to qualify anyway, the council decided to send it to voters themselves.

According to an Escondido staff report, the county Registrar of Voters likely wouldn’t have made the Aug. 9 deadline to finish verifying the signatures, meaning it would have been pushed to the November 2026 ballot.

The council intentionally didn’t discuss altering any aspects of the ballot measure including the language, the 20-year sunset clause and the fact that it calls for a Citizens’ Oversight Committee to oversee how new revenue is spent. 

Today, we’re hitting you with a trio of op-eds on some of San Diego’s most pressing issues. First up, we have a defense of Proposition 47.

It has become the go-to explanation for San Diego’s, and California’s, most visible public safety problems.

Branden Sigua, a senior policy advocate at the ACLU Foundation of San Diego & Imperial Counties and Geneviéve Jones-Wright, executive director of Community Advocates for Just and Moral Governance, explained why they think you should still support Proposition 47. The law, passed a decade ago, was pitched as a way to reduce the population in the state’s overcrowded prisons and redirect dollars to community programs and reclassified some felonies into misdemeanors.

Sigua and Jones-Wright argue the “law has fostered safer communities for everyone by addressing many root causes of involvement in the criminal legal system.”

But in recent years, politicians up and down California have blamed the law for an increase in crime and homelessness.

Related: Mayor Todd Gloria has endorsed the ballot measure that would undo many of the changes Proposition 47 brought. Even though he had decried the law in his January State of the City speech, he had been unwilling to endorse the measure as the Legislature considered its own alternatives. Those efforts died.

“I think that this is a very thoughtful measure that we will get to some of the issues that we’re experiencing in the community right now,” he told NBC 7 San Diego.

Next up, the youth are sick of the poop: Next up, a group of mostly Imperial Beach students who’ve banded together with local researchers to form the group Youth Climate Advisors, write about the very real impact the Tijuana River sewage crisis has had on their city. The rampant pollution has had detrimental effects not only on water quality, but on air quality in the region.

But despite a years-long crisis and residents’ longtime pleas for help, little has been done to fix it.

“To state and federal leadership that has so far failed to declare a state of emergency to address what is happening here, we want to know: What would it take for you to care about our situation?” they write.

Finally, why developers are cheering the county: Lori Holt Pfeiler, the CEO of the Building Industry Association of San Diego and the former mayor of Escondido, writes in favor of the County’s jettisoning of tougher hurdles to building in rural areas.

Those hurdles, known as “vehicle miles traveled,” were intended to reduce urban sprawl and, as a result, reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses emitted from commutes. Sounds great, right? Not so fast, Pfeiler writes.

The law ended up making it incredibly difficult for developers to build what she says were much-needed units in San Diego County’s urban areas. This new decision not only makes it easier for developers to build, it limits the number of San Diegans who end up moving to places like Riverside and commuting south, Pfeiler argues.

“The county has taken a positive step for our region. Clearing the way for housing in villages is much more environmentally friendly than exporting our residents to Riverside,” Pfeiler writes.

It’s still not clear how the attempted assassination of former President Trump may have changed the Democrats’ calculus about his odds of winning but they were positively panicking last week.

San Diego’s Rep. Scott Peters and Rep. Mike Levin have called for President Biden to give way to another candidate to take on Trump. A group Peters (and Rep. Sara Jacobs) is a part of, the moderate New Democrat Coalition, had a meeting with Biden Saturday that one of the attendees described as a “complete disaster,” according to Axios.

If somehow Peters and Levin and their colleagues calling on Biden to pass the torch somehow succeed, then the delegates to the Democratic National Convention next month will have a much more interesting job than they thought they would have.

We polled them: For the Politics Report this weekend, we talked to half of the 32 delegates heading to Chicago this year about what they were thinking. Most still had the president’s back. But not all

VOSD Podcast: Because we cannot help ourselves but indulge the Biden dropout drama, this week the pod hosts will take another look at how local reps are responding to calls for the president to drop out of the race, and offer their personal predictions on what’s to come (warning: astrology will be discussed).

Also on the pod: We’ll get into why the county’s new vehicle miles traveled exemption matters, the latest on the city’s plans to launch a new shelter and safe sleeping site, and a passionate plea for why San Diego needs a new city flag.

Voice of San Diego is a nonprofit news organization supported by our members. We reveal why things are the way they are and expose facts that people in power might not want out there and explain complex local public policy issues so you can be engaged and make good decisions. Sign up for our newsletters at voiceofsandiego.org/newsletters/.