It was an everything-is-awesome speech.
San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria yesterday delivered his annual State of the City address before a crowded Balboa Theater in downtown. Drawing inspiration from his tenth-grade algebra teacher, who told him to show his work, he kicked off the evening by showing how he is addressing the city’s greatest challenges.
The speech featured a long list of accomplishments from miles of roads repaired to housing reforms.
Gloria was most emotive and passionate when he conveyed a tough-on-crime message and reviewed the city’s efforts to improve public safety and recruit and retain police officers.
He claimed the days of cops leaving for other cities and counties are over and now they’re leaving those places to come here.
We may need to fact check that.
The biggest news of the night: Gloria came out as a critic of California’s Proposition 47 and said he would support a statewide initiative to reform it.
There must be consequences: Proposition 47 reclassified certain crimes — theft and drug-related crimes — as misdemeanors instead of felonies. Gloria said he plans to support amending Prop 47 because while it made sense at the time that voters approved it, criminals are taking advantage of the reform.
“We should be locking up criminals, not laundry detergent,” Gloria said. “We will not accept this as our new normal.”
Why it matters: Proposition 47 has become a go-to reference for conservatives describing the fundamental flaw of progressive political leadership in California. They argue a lenient approach to property and drug crimes left police without a tool to force people into drug treatment or face prison time. And because of that crime has festered and led to open-air drug markets and organized theft rings.
But Proposition 47 was part of several responses to the crisis of prison overcrowding and a system of mass incarceration that itself helped trap people in cycles of crime. Defenders of the law point out how it transferred resources from jails to community services and say prosecutors can still crack down on organized retail theft. It’s just a scapegoat of people looking for something easy to blame for bigger systemic failures.
So it’s a big deal for Gloria, a Democratic leader of a major city, to join those who say Proposition 47 is the source of major problems and needs to be changed.
On Homelessness: Gloria wants the city to deliver at least 1,000 additional homeless shelter beds by early 2025, a total his team said would be “above and beyond” existing beds that the city needs to relocate. The mayor said the new shelter options – specifics TBD – will be at new sites including H Barracks near Liberty Station.
- He said the city plans to create additional shelter spaces and hundreds of homes for low-income and formerly homeless San Diegans at the old Central Library downtown. The site is set to shelter homeless women in the meantime, though that operation has been on pause for the past six months.
- Gloria launched a new campaign to allow San Diegans to financially support the city’s homelessness efforts. He’s calling it San Diegans Together Tackling Homelessness.
Here’s a copy of his prepared speech.
Related:
Lincoln High’s Grad Rate Inches Up While Test Scores Get Worse
Sometimes, holding two concepts in your mind at once can be difficult. That’s the way it is with Lincoln High School’s test scores and its graduation rate.
The school’s graduation rate of 85 percent isn’t bad compared to the rest of the state. Its test scores, however, are far below the rest of the state and district.
The most recent data shows that just 11 juniors met the state standards in math.
What’s even more baffling: The school’s test scores have been dropping, even as its graduation rate has increased.
Our Jakob McWhinney dug into the disparity.
Many district officials told him that test scores are biased and not an important metric for understanding what’s really happening in a school.
Lincoln’s co-principals were more willing to admit that the scores are worth understanding.
“Test scores are one metric that indicates how students are performing and we do acknowledge them as one way to understand how our students are doing,” the principals wrote.
Read the full story here.
Student Board Members Get Paycheck, But What About a Vote?
San Diego Unified voted last month to become the first school district in California to pay its student board members. Student board members will now receive $1,700 a month.
This was a big deal for one of San Diego Unified’s student board members, who until now had also been holding down a job. The demands of her job and her work as a board member were too much, she said. Now, she’ll be able to quit the job and focus her attention on representing students.
San Diego Unified’s student board members only briefly paused to celebrate. They’re now pushing ahead to the next issue. When can we vote?
As of now, student board members votes don’t count. That, according to many in the district, counts as disenfranchisement. Quite a few legal barriers and technicalities will need to be overcome to make way for voting rights for students, but a growing movement is pushing for the change.
Read the full story here.
In Other News
The Morning Report was written by Andrea Lopez-Villafaña, Will Huntsberry and Lisa Halverstadt. It was edited by Scott Lewis.
