SAN DIEGO (FOX 5/KUSI) — Mayor Todd Gloria spoke Wednesday as the City of San Diego faces a $258.2 million budget deficit.
Gloria announced city leaders will have to make some tough decisions moving forward.
The following is what the city plans to do to help mitigate the deficit:
- Freezing all but the most essential hiring;
- Suspending all non-essential overtime;
- Pausing non-essential spending such as expenditures on travel and training halting the Civic Center Revitalization process;
- Reviewing all projects in the city’s Capital Improvement Program to ensure that projects currently under construction are prioritized and construction of new facilities is limited;
- Evaluating office space leases, including the potential for early termination or renegotiation;
- Exploring the opportunity to monetize city facilities such as Golden Hall and adjacent parking structure, as well as other revenue-generating measures for the general fund.
“Measure E would have stabilized the City budget for the foreseeable future and allowed us to build on progress we’ve made with record infrastructure investments in recent years,” Gloria said. “Without these additional funds, next year’s budget process will be difficult, but we’ll use this as an opportunity to reimagine how the City operates, with a focus on delivering core services: repairing roads and other critical infrastructure, building more housing, addressing homelessness, and keeping San Diegans safe.”
Council President Pro-Tem Joe LaCava echoed the mayor about the difficult decisions.
“The council will work to protect all city services, but the outlook tells us that will not be possible,” LaCava said.
The city says public safety is a stop priority, but reductions in the department are imminent as discussions with Chief Scott Wahl have already begun.
As for the issue of homelessness, the mayor will ask all cities in the county to step up.
“Those other cities should follow our lead and take vacant parking lots and turn them into safe parking lots, open up shuttered city facilities and make them shelters as we have done here, all of us have a role in solving this problem and this budget situation will make that even more clear,” Gloria said.
The mayor cited this deficit is a result of an imbalance between revenues and spending that’s accumulated over several administrations and has gotten worse because of inflation. He says his goal is to address this deficit in the next six to 18 months, not several years.
FOX 5/KUSI’s Juliette Vara contributed to this story.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
