In delivering his fifth State of the City address on Wednesday, Mayor Todd Gloria offered a pointed, accurate critique of other local governments and Caltrans for letting San Diego bear so much of the burden in responding to regional homelessness. This is especially true for the county government, which is vested with public health responsibilities for unincorporated communities and cities alike under a 1933 law. While turnover among supervisors has led to a much more responsive attitude, the county can certainly do more.
But on one of Gloria’s other key themes — his confidence that the city can use “resilience, determination and reinvention” to overcome its structural deficits, as it did in the early 1990s — he is unpersuasive.
Here’s why: Earlier this month, it was revealed that pension costs were projected to be $533 million in the coming fiscal year, an amount that is more than 20 percent of the city’s annual general fund budget. Every time leaders decide a pay hike to nearly all workers is “fair,” these costs automatically balloon. This is why controlling compensation funding has long been the key challenge in stabilizing city finances. Under established legal precedents, the pension commitments made to public employees in California when they are hired can never be reduced.
But at a time when advanced technology offers more options to limit this burden, the mayor has never challenged a key tenet of the state’s political orthodoxy: the view that government is not just the provider of needed services but an essential source of well-paying jobs. The 1990s private sector productivity revolution never reached City Hall.
Since then, this revolution has accelerated thanks to stunning advances in artificial intelligence. As the New America institute notes, “Barcelona is using the tech to optimize public transportation speeds, Long Beach is piloting an AI chatbot to help constituents navigate the city’s website, Buenos Aires is applying AI to streamline waste collection and Amsterdam is using AI tools to reduce district energy use.” But using AI to make government cheaper and more responsive is a nonstarter in a city in which employee unions often seem the dominant political force.
The city desperately needs a gutsy “Nixon goes to China” leader — a local Gorbachev — willing to break with this history. This would start with a hiring freeze for nearly all white-collar jobs in which every single time there was a city vacancy, the first response was to see how many of the position’s responsibilities could be handled by AI-boosted technology. It would continue with use of the worker performance/customer satisfaction metrics that have boosted so many industries.
Gloria says the city will examine “every service we provide and how we can make the most of our public assets.” If that’s true, profound change is possible. But is the mayor serious about this? San Diegans are going to find out.
A sentence describing the budget was revised for clarity.
