Morning Report: Three City Things To Watch

By Voice of San Diego

May 19, 2025

This week, on the podcast, it was just Scott Lewis and Bella Ross but they got into the latest updates on the bleak city of San Diego budget.

The city of San Diego has a lot of unresolved questions right now. Here are three big ones to watch.

Budget: Over the next few weeks, city politicians are going to have to agree on vast cuts or new ways to raise fees or other sources of income to close the deficit. (Just pick a section of the independent budget analyst’s review of the mayor’s budget, it’s bleak. Parks are already a mess but brace for them to get even worse.) City Councilmembers seem to be displeased that the mayor is not as interested as they are in focusing cuts on wealthier areas of the city or cutting middle management jobs. But they are not talking about huge amounts of money. If Councilmembers have a significantly different vision, they haven’t outlined it.

Trash fees: The mayor told Michael Smolens, from the Union-Tribune, that he anticipated the fee the City Council tries to put on property tax bills for trash collection at single-family homes would be lower than his staff proposed last month. But it came with a subtle threat or warning to residents that the service the city provides is going to be bad. “You get what you pay for,” the mayor told Smolens.

Some people are outraged and spreading the word about how to protest the fee via mail.

To approve the final new fee, the City Council just needs a majority vote. But city officials want to save the money involved with billing and collecting the fee so they plan to put it on property tax bills. That means they need six votes on the City Council and a few City Councilmembers have made clear they do not support the fee at the level the mayor’s staff proposed. So something has to give. Maybe they’re just bluffing or hoping for a chance to vote no — but let it still pass — but there’s a lot at stake and not much margin.

If they don’t pass the full fee as proposed, they’ll have to cut something else.

Minimum wage for tourism industry: Hotel interests were circulating a poll last week gathering voters’ opinion on what we know about the San Diego City Council’s push to raise the minimum wage for the visitor industry. The obvious conclusion is they’re gauging the viability of a referendum if the city does implement a higher minimum wage for the tourism industry.

The city attorney is still working with councilmembers on the proposal’s specifics and it’s being pushed back later in the summer. But it’s still alive. How exactly the city decides to draw the line around the industry is a big question. Does it include the Zoo? (Zoo workers are not happy lately.) SeaWorld? Petco Park?

Stay tuned.

More: A San Diego City Council committee voted to roll back a controversial backyard apartment incentive that, activists said, was abused by some property owners and developers. (Union-Tribune)

The Council’s Land Use and Housing Committee voted 3-1 on Thursday to cap the number of backyard apartments, or ADUs, per unit and required builders to pay infrastructure fees and provide parking on properties not near public transit.

The rollback now heads to the full City Council for approval in June.

This year, the California Bar Association tried a new approach to its annual State Bar Exam.

The Bar Association hired a new testing company, Meazure Learning, to design a new exam that included a remote test-taking option, with some questions developed by an educational company called ACS Ventures.

The result: “A complete disaster in every sense of the word,” said Zack Defazio-Farrell, a University of San Diego Law School graduate who took the test in February.

Defazio-Farrell had trouble signing in, the test kept freezing or crashing, keyboard strokes seemed to vanish or drag. Calls to test administrators did little.

Defazio-Farrell described his test-taking woe to our Deborah Sullivan. He wasn’t alone. Thousands of other test takers had similar or worse experiences. The capper: Some of those test questions developed by ACS Ventures turned out to have been written by an AI bot.

The State Bar has launched an investigation, sued Meazure Learning and is still figuring out remedies for test-takers.

Also in the Sacramento Report this week: How state lawmakers are grappling with California’s budget deficit, which got $12 billion bigger.

Read the Sacramento Report here.

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