Look familiar? We pulled this post from the Morning Report. Our daily newsletter is the best way to stay up to date on San Diego election results. Subscribe here.
Editor’s note: We’re expecting the San Diego County Registrar of Voters to update the unofficial election results today at 6 p.m. To get the results directly to your inbox, subscribe to the Morning Report.
One of the San Diego Unified school board’s most defining qualities over the past decade has been its near-perfect unanimity. Important decisions almost always sail through with 5-0 votes and few dissenting opinions. That could be about to change.
Sabrina Bazzo, an incumbent board member backed by the teachers union, leads Crystal Trull by a little more than 300 votes. When the first updates came from the Registrar of Voters that gap was wider. But as new ballots have been counted, Trull — who lost to Bazzo by more than 20 points in 2020 — has narrowed the gap.
Should Trull eke out a victory she would be the first person to topple an incumbent on the board since 2014, as our Jakob McWhinney wrote. Trull would also almost certainly bring a dissenting voice to some of the board’s decisions.
Two major tax measures are also too close to call. The city of San Diego is set to face a roughly $200 million deficit next year. City leaders had set their sights on a one-percent tax increase that would have closed the deficit plus given officials more added money that they had promised to spend on infrastructure improvements.
That tax measure, Measure E, hangs dangerously close to the edge. It trails by roughly 1.5 percentage points.
Measure G, a countywide half-cent sales tax increase, faces an even steeper climb. The “No” vote is currently ahead by more than two points. Measure G would have generated roughly $350 million that would have been earmarked for public transit and infrastructure.
Our Tigist Layne wrote about some voters who weren’t very excited about the tax measures on Tuesday. They said the cost of living in San Diego is already high and they don’t want to add to it with an additional tax burden.
“Rent is high, everything is high and now they want us to pay more?” one voter said. “What more do they want from us?”
Reminder: In the coming days, the Registrar of Voters will continue to update its webpage as it counts mail-in ballots. The next vote dump is scheduled for Thursday at 6 pm. You can check countywide results here.
It is truly sickening to see Democrats line item vote by party, even to the detriment of those less fortunate. No one in their right mind should support higher sales taxes with the waste in spending that we have now.
No incentive for government to reign in wasteful spending when the electorate coughs up more revenue, projected to exceed the budget deficit. It’s a shame that households have to make ends meet with increasing pressure from government-stimulated inflation and supply-chain shut-downs, while the politicians simply ask for more without re-thinking their spending. If my kid doesn’t take care of her soccer cleats, she shouldn’t get a new pair.
You know the politicians are lying when they use this year’s disaster – storm drains – in their election pitch for more taxes. We aren’t billions in the hole because of the flood – we’re billions in the hole due to decades of politicians conning the taxpayers into thinking their taxes were spent on maintenance, when actually they were spent on the politician’s pork barrel projects. It’s time for a day of reckoning in the halls of local government!