Supervisor Race Pits Different Visions for County’s Future

One Friday evening last month, commuters at the Palomar trolley station in Chula Vista might have seen a small group of adults and children gathered around a makeshift altar on one side of the station platform. 

The altar consisted of a photo of a smiling young woman surrounded by votive candles flickering in a brisk ocean breeze. A few adults at the gathering gave short speeches while their children scampered around and stole glances at the photo. 

There was a moment of silence. Then the crowd released 18 lavender balloons they had been holding into the sky. The balloons leaped away in the breeze and soon vanished in the evening dusk. 

The photo at the center of this small memorial ceremony was of an 18-year-old Chula Vista resident named Jaylin Perez. Two months earlier, Perez’s lifeless body had been discovered at the Palomar station after lying motionless near the platform for more than five hours while commuters stepped around her. 

A homeless drug user, Perez most likely died from a fentanyl overdose, her mother, Jeannette Gallardo, said. That chilly March evening, Gallardo and a group of fellow parents who lost children to drugs gathered not only to commemorate Perez’s short life but also to call attention to what they said was a systemic failure by county health officials to provide basic services to homeless drug users. 

“People always say help is available,” said Susan Shipp, whose son, Kyle, died of a fentanyl overdose in 2019 because, Shipp said, there were no treatment options in San Diego County his family could afford. “It isn’t.” 

The small protest, mostly unnoticed amid the noise and hustle of rush hour, was just one of countless recent moments in San Diego County when the seemingly abstruse and technical decisions made by county government leaders suddenly became bluntly real for everyday San Diegans. 

The parents at the protest were not wrong about the county’s lack of affordable drug treatment. Even as the number of homeless people and drug deaths has risen in San Diego County, county health officials have opened just 100 publicly funded detox beds for people seeking help with drug addiction and continue to struggle to provide short-term shelter for homeless people and affordable long-term drug treatment options. 

County leaders’ decisions led to the shortage. In recent years, county supervisors have voted to delay or scrap shelter plans, postponed implementing new state conservatorship rules, prioritized less coercive forms of drug treatment and fumbled a proposed mental health treatment partnership with a UC San Diego hospital. 

Those decisions, some made years ago, continue to be felt by families like Jaylin Perez’s when they search for county services that don’t exist. 

On July 1, residents in San Diego County’s southernmost cities and neighborhoods will make their own decision about the county’s future. Residents of supervisorial District 1 will vote to choose a replacement for recently departed Supervisor Nora Vargas, who resigned abruptly for unexplained reasons late last year. 

The two candidates vying to replace Vargas, Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre and Chula Vista Mayor John McCann, have staked out sharply different visions for county government. Aguirre is a Democrat. McCann is a Republican. Whichever of them wins will cement their party’s control over the Board of Supervisors. 

Residents like the families at the Palomar trolley station last month will feel the effects of July’s election. 

Voice of San Diego has been talking to the candidates and voters around South County. We identified four issues of top concern in the region: Homelessness, the cost of living, public safety and a looming county budget deficit, which, along with possible federal funding cuts, could affect a wide range of county functions. 

We asked the candidates to lay out their vision for county government and spell out their approach to these four important issues. Here’s what we learned. 

Homelessness 

Like the families at the Palomar memorial ceremony, both candidates criticized the county for failing to provide enough shelter space and affordable drug treatment for people struggling with homelessness and drug use. 

Aguirre identified several solutions. First, she pointed to a new city housing department she helped to create in Imperial Beach, which fields an outreach team that meets with every homeless person it can find in the city, identifies needs and connects people with services. Centralizing that work in one department, she said, makes it easier to coordinate efforts. 

At the county, Aguirre said she would prioritize hiring up to 18,000 behavioral healthcare workers and seek to provide “a ton more behavioral health beds.” The county has been attempting to provide such services, but Aguirre said the process has been too slow. “The county hasn’t stepped up,” she said. 

She also said she would seek to duplicate efforts she made in Imperial Beach to prevent mobile home parks and other existing forms of affordable housing from being replaced by market-rate developments. 

McCann’s vision is different. He said he would seek to replicate what he calls Chula Vista’s “tough love” approach to homelessness. In recent years, the city has fielded a homeless outreach team of police officers and case workers (known as “the HOT team”) and opened a tiny-home shelter near the Otay River run by a faith-based organization headquartered in Long Beach. 

The outreach team, like its equivalent in Imperial Beach, seeks to meet with homeless people and direct them toward shelter or services. Chula Vista’s shelter, however, requires residents to remain sober and work toward self-sufficiency with the help of case workers and other service providers. 

The “tough” part refers to what happens when homeless people turn down offers of help. McCann said he led the city to adopt “one of the strictest homeless encampment bans in the county.” Homeless people who refuse to leave encampments or accept help need to face consequences, McCann said. 

“When they’re defecating, stealing, essentially committing violence towards others…we need to decide to hold them accountable,” he said. 

McCann said he would conduct a thorough review of county homelessness spending and eliminate failing efforts. “The county has spent millions and millions of dollars on homeless programs, and we need to find out what has been effective and what has not,” he said. 

Cost of Living 

Aguirre said one of the primary drivers of high costs in San Diego is the lack of affordable housing, an issue on which “my opponent and I agree more than disagree.” 

Like McCann, Aguirre said the primary way to lower the cost of housing is to build more homes working San Diegans can afford. 

“In Imperial Beach, we’ve approved every [housing] project that has come our way,” Aguirre said. “We approved seven if not more projects, each with multiple units and amenities and benefits.” 

Aguirre pointed with pride to what she described as an 86-unit apartment complex on Holly Avenue that, with help from a city-awarded “density bonus,” gave up a portion of its land to be developed into a community park – the first public park in that part of the city. 

Aguirre said she also led the City Council to adopt a tenant protection ordinance earlier this year that makes it harder for landlords to evict tenants for remodeling projects. 

McCann agreed that more home construction is essential for lowering costs. Unlike Aguirre, who favors high-density infill projects geared toward working class families, McCann is a strong proponent of what he called “middle class” housing that maximizes opportunities for home ownership, which he said is one of the primary ways families can gain financial security. 

McCann pointed to Chula Vista’s track record of building multiple master-planned communities on the city’s east side with options ranging from entry level multi-family complexes to million-dollar single-family homes. 

He said one project currently under construction, called Sunbow II, was originally slated to be apartments. “I said no,” McCann said. “And we were able to get them to do a hundred percent of the project as for-sale entry-level homeownership.” 

McCann said that, unlike Aguirre, he opposes a county policy that factors commute times into housing permit decisions, making it harder to build on the county’s undeveloped fringes. 

And he said he would seek to change what he described as an anti-development ethos in county housing policy. 

“When you look at other counties, they’re issuing thousands” of housing permits, McCann said. “When we’re under a housing crisis, we should be looking for ways to streamline the processes and decrease the costs so we can provide quality housing at an affordable rate.” 

Public Safety 

Aguirre said she and McCann also mostly see eye-to-eye about the best ways to ensure public safety. 

“My record is strong here in Imperial Beach,” Aguirre said. “I’m the only one of the two [candidates] who has a working relationship with sheriff’s deputies and the Sheriff’s Department for the last six years.” (Imperial Beach contracts with county sheriffs for police services. The union representing deputy sheriffs has endorsed McCann in the Supervisor race.) 

Aguirre said she voted to increase deputies’ pay in Imperial Beach and recently approved the purchase of a new $800,000 fire truck for city firefighters. 

“Imperial Beach is one of the safest coastal cities in the county,” she said. “The biggest issues, deputies will tell you, once we eliminated gang activity, is people worrying about getting their bike stolen…I want to make sure that [public safety record] is expanded to the entire district.” 

McCann pointed with pride to Chula Vista’s police department, which has expanded during his tenure as mayor and occupies a gleaming headquarters across from City Hall. The City Council recently voted to begin studying the possibility of building a new police substation on the city’s east side. 

McCann he would prioritize ensuring deputy sheriffs have wages, equipment and other resources necessary to make it easier to recruit new deputies, an ongoing challenge for many law enforcement agencies. 

“I want to make sure we fully fund the sheriff’s department and give our deputy sheriffs everything they need to do the best job they can,” McCann said. “I’ve always been pro-law enforcement, and I’m not a fair-weather friend.” 

McCann said that, during his time in city leadership, Chula Vista has become one of the safest big cities in California. “The number one issue is public safety,” he said. 

County Budget 

Aguirre said that, as a Democrat, she would “fight back” against what she described as the Trump administration’s recent “threats of cutting $880 billion in Medicaid.” 

“Over 900,000 residents in San Diego County depend on that for survival,” she said. 

Aguirre said she would seek to close an anticipated $140 million county deficit not by cutting services or raising taxes, but by tapping the county’s $3 billion reserves, roughly $700 million of which is available to cover immediate shortfalls. 

“We have a massive amount of reserves that have been governed by very old-school conservative policies of the past,” Aguirre said. “The fact that South County, District 1, has not had as high a quality of life as other districts in the county is because we were an afterthought when Republicans led the Board of Supervisors.” 

Aguirre did not rule out a tax increase, especially if one is approved by voters. But she said the county should rethink its reserves policy before raising taxes. 

“Our focus needs to be on lowering costs for working families, period,” Aguirre said. “That starts by investing our county’s massive reserves back into the communities.” 

McCann’s views on the county budget are the exact opposite of Aguirre’s. He said it would be foolish to tap rainy day funds to cover what he described as irresponsible budget decisions made under Democrats’ leadership of the Board of Supervisors. 

Pointing to Democrats’ creation of whole new county departments and awarding raises to an expanding county workforce, he said the county needs to tighten its belt before raising taxes or raiding reserves. 

“As mayor of the city of Chula Vista, we have passed a balanced budget with fully funded reserves, and we’re one of the few cities in the county that haven’t had any layoffs or cuts in city services,” McCann said. “I want to bring that budgetary knowledge to the county and work to make sure we fully fund law enforcement and the sheriff’s office and look for opportunities to slash the budget in other areas.” 

As one example of what he described as wasteful spending, McCann said, “The county spends $7 million dollars giving prisoners free phone calls, whereas before, they did not have that. I believe that there are other low-lying fruit options to be able to help streamline and cut waste, fraud and abuse at the county.” 

San Diego “was an incredibly fiscally responsible county” before Democrats became a majority on the Board of Supervisors, McCann said. “I will look for solutions and not partisanship.”