If you’re wondering why Uptown Planners has become a prime target of City Hall’s war on planning groups, the battle over the unpopular Plan Hillcrest offers a case study.

When the Uptown community first questioned the city’s radical proposal to shoehorn more density into an already congested community, the planning group went to work. After seeing what looked like development overreach — 50,000 new residents, 30-story buildings – they requested public records that might elucidate how this startling proposal was conceived and crafted.

The city responded with a 600-document data dump. Undaunted, Uptown leaders sifted through the pile and zeroed in on several dozen relevant document pages.

That extensive research uncovered a cat’s cradle of highly-paid city employees who are managing highly-paid consultants to sell rampant densification to a public that isn’t buying.

Catering to a state government that rains money on overstuffed housing, the City Hall bureaucracy is spending millions of tax dollars to advance a single political goal: justify cramming as much new construction as possible into unwilling neighborhoods.

To cite one example, records indicate that over several years, 32 city employees have devoted nearly 9,000 hours — over $1 million in staff time — to working on Plan Hillcrest. Much of that staff time was spent overseeing at least a dozen consultants whose city contracts for planning services fall in the range of $10 million.

What exactly did those consultants do? According to the documents, their work included:

• Staging polished multi-media presentations that lavished praise on housing saturation.
• Engineering convoluted public surveys that skewed responses to fit policy goals.
• Developing land use planning components based on generic principles that do not address the unique needs of specific communities.

“A lot of money was spent so consultants could try to sell us a pre-ordained plan and so staff could pretend they valued our input,” said former board member Lu Rehling, who led the data mining effort.

“City policy requires this city government to work in partnership with planning groups like ours,” Rehling continued. “Responding to strong community concerns, we pushed back hard on many aspects of Plan Hillcrest that run counter to the community’s actual needs in areas like infrastructure, transportation, clean air, open space, and most critically, affordable housing.”

“We spoke up, the community spoke up, and it was all in vain. Why do city officials spend all that money on public dog-and-pony shows when they have zero interest in heeding what the public wants?”

In a just society, the due diligence of Uptown Planners in fulfilling their mandate to represent their community would win praise from elected officials.

But this is San Diego, where the only community input that counts is the complacent kind.

At this writing, the City Council seems poised to remove Uptown Planners from their elected seats and replace them with a complacent group proposed by Vibrant Uptown advocacy group. No other San Diego planning group is facing a similar ouster. The council will decide Uptown Planners’ fate on Tuesday, May 21, at 2 p.m.

But there’s a catch. Once seated, the Vibrant group would have to hold public meetings where angry constituents would scrutinize them closely and hold them accountable. And they would have to comply with state and city laws and compete in open elections.

Vibrant is off to a rocky start. One of their leaders has reportedly announced, even before taking their seats, that they’ve bought software to run future elections. Since they could not have deliberated in a public meeting before taking that action, they may have violated the Brown Act. It’s not clear where they got the money for the purchase or how they chose the vendor.

Stay tuned. This could get interesting.

Kate Callen is a former journalist and long-time community activist in North Park who ran for City Council earlier this year.

For more than a half-century, San Diego’s community planning groups have been acclaimed as a national model of local democracy. As the city’s website states, these CPGs elected by their communities have been “formal mechanisms [that] provide citizens with an opportunity for involvement.”

This model of democracy is now under siege.

Mayor Todd Gloria, with the complicity of all nine City Councilmembers, is poised to remove elected CPG members and replace them with unelected members of his own choosing.

That is not democracy. That is autocracy, and it is exactly why we are running as challengers to Mayor Gloria, Council President Sean Elo-Rivera, and Councilmember Stephen Whitburn in the March 2024 primaries.

The rationale given by Gloria and his building industry allies for overturning the CPG elections is that the groups lack diversity. Some CPGs do need greater representation of renters, young people, and people of color. But diversity must be achieved by being inclusive, not by being exclusive. 

We won’t have more diverse planning groups until we can persuade people from every demographic group to run for those seats. For years, all-volunteer CPG leaders have struggled to recruit underrepresented candidates. They have pleaded with City Hall for help in identifying and adopting “best practices” in diversity recruitment. The Mayor and the Council have ignored those pleas.

Disenfranchising people from serving in elected offices because they are the “wrong” age, ethnicity, and/or income group is completely unacceptable. If we are elected, we will fully support the autonomy of CPGs and their crucial role in local democracy.

Today, we call on Gloria, Elo-Rivera, and Whitburn to uphold the electoral process. Current planning groups were chosen by your constituents in communities you serve. As elected officials yourselves who are running to keep your seats, it is in your own best interests to embrace the work done by your planning groups. Please join our good-faith effort to foster their inclusivity and expand their impact.

The authors are candidates in the city of San Diego’s March 5 primary elections: Larry Turner for Mayor, Kate Callen for City Council District 3, and Terry Hoskins for City Council District 9.

Political troubadour Pete Seeger had an apt formula for comparing education and experience: “Education is when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get when you don’t.”

For decades now, San Diegans unschooled in reading the fine print have lost hundreds of millions of dollars to painful experience: the public pension fiasco, the Chargers ticket guarantee fiasco, and more recently, the 101 Ash Street and inflated hotel purchase fiascos.

Each of these scandals began as a City Hall proposal sold quickly to a trusting public. Each erupted when taxpayers learned too late that they should have read the fine print, paid closer attention earlier, and asked tough questions.

And now a batch of stealth government ploys is costing San Diegans two commodities that are as precious and finite as money: public road space and neighborhood open space.

Two consecutive YIMBY mayors, goaded by YIMBY lobbyists with major development funding — nearly 80 percent of Circulate San Diego’s corporate members work in the land use sector — chose to invest millions in bike lanes as a “climate action” mechanism to reduce vehicle pollution.

In theory, a significant portion of the 55.8 percent of workers who commute by driving solo would join the 1.2 percent who commute by bike. But there’s never been any evidence to support that.

In fact, as Voice of San Diego has reported, a city engineer told city planners in 2014 that projections of bike lane usage “were arbitrary — they ‘did not come from anything measurable or related to actual increased ridership.’”

Still, the city persisted. Hundreds of curbside parking spaces across San Diego were removed to install bike lanes. Angry residents and small businesses complained that street parking was already scarce. A widespread public “bikelash” emerged.

Elected officials were in a quandary. They couldn’t risk defying furious constituents. And they couldn’t break with the lobbyists, especially since checking the “climate action” box (on the cheap) is a ticket to higher office in progressive California.

Enter stealth government.

Politicians who shrink from facing public resistance find ways to evade it. They hold town halls where only “pre-selected” questions are answered. And they keep controversial projects out of sight by shepherding them through the underground passages of planning group subcommittees and hand-picked commissions.

That’s what happened with North Park’s 30th Street Bike Lanes, which came as a complete shock to the North Park community when then-Mayor Kevin Faulconer abruptly announced in May 2019 that they were a done deal.

Another stealth trick is to stash radical land use measures in legislative undergrowth. When the City Council rewrote the “granny flat” ordinance last fall, staff said the changes were simply putting San Diego “in compliance with state law.” Buried in the staff report were giveaways to developers that far exceeded state codes: allowances for multiple rental units on single family lots with no required parking, landscaping, or setbacks.

And then there are the dense thickets of budget documents. This summer’s prize stealth gambit was nestled in page 13 of Mayor Todd Gloria’s 21-page “May Revision to the Proposed Fiscal Year 2022 Budget.”

At a time when city funds are tight and bike lane usage is still anemic, Gloria will spend $828,616 in TransNet funds on 12 full-time positions. The new hires “will be responsible for the design and installation of approximately nine miles of new or upgraded bicycle facilities throughout the city per year.” The money seems earmarked for personnel only. It’s unclear if any funds will support actual construction.

Now that you’ve read the fine print, ask yourself how San Diego might spend nearly a million dollars on more urgent transportation needs, like a more robust public transit system to support increased housing density.

Then ask your City Council representative if she or he thinks this cloaked expenditure for a dubious venture will deliver a solid return on investment.

Kate Callen is a co-founder of the SoNo Neighborhood Alliance.

San Diego’s only full-length statue of an actual woman guards the west entrance of Balboa Park. Standing a little larger than life, the bronze figure is holding a blossom and pondering a vision that is etched on a nearby plaque:

“During her life, Kate Sessions created gardens and landscapes for all to enjoy.”

For all to enjoy …  Balboa Park has been a lasting gift from Sessions and other visionaries to all of us — residents and tourists, children and adults, poor and rich. You can spend hours in the park walking through groves and sitting under trees without buying a ticket or paying a fee.

The splendor of this open green space is a great equalizer. People roam freely in a shared serenity. There are no echelons, no haves and have-nots. The city’s crown jewel shines brightly for everyone who visits.

San Diegans are passionate about Sessions’ vision of a park “for all to enjoy.” That’s why so many of us fought the paid parking garage in the unsuccessful Plaza de Panama project. And that’s why so many spoke out against the tone-deaf Balboa Park Star observation wheel proposal.

We understand the frustration of the team that spent time and money on this venture. They made the common mistake — remember the Inspiration Point boutique hotel? — of thinking acquiescence from city power brokers could help them skirt a public reckoning.

(Note to City Hall: The under-the-radar game of shepherding controversial projects through networks that don’t operate in full public view is wearing very thin.)

What we don’t understand are complaints that the park needs help drawing visitors and that opponents of ideas like the observation wheel lack imagination and hope.

We are North Park residents and regular Balboa Park users. Like thousands of other San Diegans, we were thrilled when the park reopened last June after a COVID shutdown kept us out for the first time in memory.

In our frequent trips to the park each week, we haven’t seen any shortage of visitors. In fact, the park seems more popular than ever. It comes alive every day with multi-generational families, exercisers, dog walkers, new mothers pushing jogging strollers, and groups of students.

When we envision a 15-story-high amusement ride smack in the middle of the iconic Plaza de Panama, here’s what we imagine:

We imagine weary parents telling their excited children, “Sorry, kids, but we can’t afford to buy tickets to ride the wheel” costing $16 a passenger (with a whole dollar of that going to the park itself).

We imagine how people who could afford the ride and its deluxe “food and beverage experience” would fare after imbibing cocktails and meals while circulating round and round high in the air.

We imagine how this steel monstrosity would deface the beauty of the park’s Spanish-Renaissance architecture, lush gardens, tiled colonnades and fountains.

And then we imagine and even hope that our city government could someday afford to sustain its crown jewel once it stops squandering hundreds of millions on fiascos like the pension scandal, the Chargers ticket guarantee scandal, and the 101 Ash Street scandal.

If City Hall wasn’t so godawful at managing public finances, it might not be desperate enough to try wringing money out of the park through pay-to-play schemes that cater to high rollers and enrich special friends.

After seeing this happen again and again, we are grateful to the all-volunteer Parks and Recreation Council (PARC) for stepping up with a strong proposal for maintaining Balboa Park’s luster.

Formed in response to the bewildering “Complete Communities Play Everywhere” parks initiative, which remains stalled in City Council, PARC is challenging city park management on numerous fronts, including the need for greater public input and the dangers of commercializing parkland.

As long as San Diegans like PARC’s members dare to speak truth to power, Balboa Park will be a treasure for all to enjoy and not a plaything for a privileged few to co-opt.

Cia Barron and Kate Callen are co-founders of the SoNo Neighborhood Alliance.