Most local offices are officially nonpartisan though most candidates campaign as partisans these days — even as a third of San Diegans have rejected both major political parties. Once the election is over, our region’s elected leaders — some of them first-time officeholders — should put campaign politics solidly behind them and step up to governing at one of the most challenging times in our history.
Citizens have the right to expect that the cities’ and county’s real priorities should be addressed even as officeholders will confront unprecedented budget challenges likely to last through 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, because unlike the federal government, their budgets must be balanced.
When I ran a state agency, I let competitiveness and objective data guide my decisions. I conducted competitive analyses about the major issues with which my agency contended: tax policy, regulations, workers’ compensation costs, quality of workforce, cost of housing, commute times and more. And I used this data to advocate for our legislative initiatives. I established a regulatory review office in my agency to study the financial impact of new laws on California’s competitiveness, and I cut programs that were not delivering the return for which they were intended.
Luckily I worked for a Republican governor — and a former mayor of San Diego — who was unafraid to buck his own political party to do the right thing for California, which is why he turned a deficit that was one-third of the state’s general fund budget into a sizable surplus by the time he left office. (In today’s , that would be a deficit of more than $45 billion — almost as bad as today, with no potential for a federal bailout.)
From my background in the aerospace industry, I brought “red teams” to Sacramento, and the governor used his own version of them to tackle tough issues with data and deep expertise often not found in government. His Council on California Competitiveness provided a roap to reforms, the majority of which he enacted with from the state’s powerful Democratic leader. My Economic Strategy , an initiative of a long-time Democratic senator and signed into law by the governor, brought these ideas to California’s regions. And both here and in Sacramento, we took “best practices” trips to understand how other places tackled similar problems.
The point is that this is the time to tap into all of the resources our region has to offer. It should not be about politics or we’ll just further promote division, not collaboration.
San Diego is blessed with incredible management and financial expertise — and often these people can be found in our region’s active and retired business leadership, from groups like the retired long-time civic leaders in the Strategic Roundtable. They would welcome helping our elected officials find solutions to tough problems amid an on-going budget crisis. I urge our local officials to create their own “red teams” to help them streamline government functions, get back to their core and essential missions, and tackle the region’s daunting financial problems ahead.
Meier Wright is a retired CEO of the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation.
