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Captive City: How Public-Sector Unions Broke San Diego's Budget

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A guide to San Diego’s brutal budget cuts Investigative Public Affairs Report San Diego, California  |  May 20, 2026  |  Municipal Finance & Labor Exclusive Investigation Why City Hall Won't Admit The Cause As arts centers shutter and libraries cut Saturdays, police and fire budgets rise by $42 million, middle management has exploded 461 percent in fifteen years, and a single pension bill now costs taxpayers more than half a billion dollars annually. Investigative Report  |  May 20, 2026 San Diego City Hall ⬛ Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF) San Diego faces a cascading structural fiscal crisis that is not primarily driven by insufficient revenue—it is driven by the compounding cost of public-sector union contracts, defined-benefit pension obligations, and a management bureaucracy that has ballooned while frontline services remain understaffed. The city's $563 million annual pension payment ...
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Is the Golden Pacific Powerlink an AI Infrastructure Project in Disguise?

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  Investigative Analysis  |  Golden Pacific Powerlink  /  AI Data Centers  /  Ratepayer Risk  |  May 2026 Follow the Load — Investigative Analysis SDG&E flatly denies any connection between its proposed $2.3 billion Imperial Valley–to–Orange County transmission line and the flood of AI data center proposals now targeting Imperial Valley. The facts on the ground tell a more complicated story — and California's own regulators are sounding alarms. May 2026 Sources: CAISO, CEC, Little Hoover Commission, KPBS, inewsource, CalMatters, CPUC Public Advocates Office When Imperial Valley residents pressed SDG&E at its May 2026 open houses about whether the Golden Pacific Powerlink was designed to power AI data centers, project director Erica Martin gave a response that was technically accurate and strategically incomplete: "There's no particular source that's driving the need for th...
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Power Without End: Geothermal Co-Location Changes Everything

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  Weakens the Case for the Powerlink Strategic Analysis — Energy Infrastructure ⟳ Revised: Geothermal Co-Location Reframes the Analysis May 2026 Follow the Power — Revised Analysis The prior analysis led with natural gas as the "honest answer" for AI data center baseload power. That was wrong for Imperial Valley specifically. The honest answer there is geothermal co-location — a model that is actively being built, requires no grid connection, bypasses CAISO entirely, and in doing so significantly undermines one of the primary justifications for the Golden Pacific Powerlink. REVISION NOTICE: This article replaces an earlier version that understated geothermal's role and failed to address the co-location model and IID's independence from CAISO. Both omissions were substantive analytical errors.   May 2026 — Sources: CTR/Baker Hughes, CalEthos/TerraVolt, Rhodium Group, DOE, IID, KPBS, Data Center Frontier, CAISO, IEA ...
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