Don't Waste Your Time — It's Kabuki Time at City Hall

 Opinion · Civic Affairs

They're Not Listening

The arts community will show up to San Diego City Hall next month by the hundreds, with flutes and French horns and earnest two-minute testimony. The decisions that matter were made months ago, in rooms they'll never see.

By Pseudo Publius · April 21, 2026

The makeshift orchestra at the Civic Center Plaza on Monday was touching. Musicians answered a 48-hour call, brought their own instruments, and filled the downtown concrete with "Eye of the Tiger" and "I Gotta Feeling" while arts nonprofit directors prepared their two-minute remarks for the council inside. It was democratic, spirited, and, by the architecture of the San Diego budget process, almost entirely beside the point.

Mayor Todd Gloria's proposed Fiscal Year 2027 budget, released April 15, cuts arts and culture funding from $13.8 million to roughly $2 million — an 85 percent reduction. It also closes library branches on additional days, reduces recreation center hours, cuts park rangers, eliminates the Office of Child and Youth Success, and lays off about 130 employees, all to close a $146 million deficit. Police and fire each get substantial increases. The $563.2 million record pension payment due July 1 is, predictably, untouched.

The City Council will hold budget hearings May 4 through May 8, with an evening public input session May 18 and final adoption June 9. Hundreds of residents will speak. The council will make modest amendments. Some portion of the arts cut will probably be restored.

And none of it will matter, because none of it touches the structural problem.

Where the Decisions Actually Get Made

The Ralph M. Brown Act — California's open meetings law — is often invoked as though it were a guarantee that public business gets done in public view. It is no such thing. The Brown Act applies only to meetings of a "legislative body," which means a quorum of the council. It does not apply to the mayor's office. It does not apply to the CFO or the Department of Finance. It does not apply to one-on-one meetings between council members and the administration. And it carves out explicit exemptions for closed-session discussions of labor negotiations (Government Code § 54957.6), pending litigation (§ 54956.9), personnel matters (§ 54957), and real property negotiations (§ 54956.8).

Add those exemptions up and what you have is a process in which essentially every meaningful input to a $6.4 billion budget can be, and is, finalized outside public view.

Consider the actual timeline of how the document that landed on April 15 came to exist:

November 2025. The mayor's office released the Fiscal Year 2027–2031 Five-Year Financial Outlook, forecasting a $120 million baseline deficit. Drafted entirely by executive-branch staff. No Brown Act application.

December 2025. The Independent Budget Analyst released its review (Report 25-36), flagging that anticipated deficits would run $90 million to over $100 million annually through at least FY 2028, with the pension payment as the single largest swing variable. Submitted to council in writing. Discussed briefly at one committee hearing.

January 2026. Council members submitted budget priority memoranda — individually, to the IBA. Not in joint deliberation.

February through April 2026. Department heads, the CFO, the mayor's labor negotiator, and outside actuarial consultants assembled the proposal. Simultaneously, labor negotiations with the Municipal Employees Association, the Police Officers Association, the firefighters, and Local 127 produced the 10 percent raise-and-furlough package embedded in the budget. All of that bargaining happened under the labor negotiations exemption. The MEA's Michael Zucchet endorsed the package on April 15, the same day it was released to the public. You do not achieve that kind of coordination accidentally.

April 15. The proposal was released in substantially its final form. The arts cut, the TOT diversion, the $44 million in "new revenue" (including the pension backfill accounting maneuver), the layoffs, the department consolidations — all locked in before any public comment occurred.

By the time residents testify on May 4, they are commenting on a document that was six months in the making and that can only be amended at the margins without blowing up the balanced-budget requirement that Mayor Gloria has already fenced the council into.

The Serial Meeting Workaround

The Brown Act does prohibit "serial meetings" — a sequence of one-on-one conversations or intermediary communications used to develop a collective concurrence outside of open session. In principle. In practice, the statute is almost never enforced against city budget negotiations. Courts require proof that a majority of the legislative body used the serial communications to reach a "collective concurrence" on a specific decision. Council members meeting individually with the mayor's staff to discuss "priorities" in the abstract, without explicit vote-counting language, skates under the bar that a prosecutor would need to clear. Everyone involved knows this. The conversations happen anyway.

Add to this the practical reality that the Independent Budget Analyst's review of council member amendments is not released until May 13 — the same day as the mayor's May Revise — giving council members roughly three weeks between receiving the professional analysis they need to evaluate tradeoffs and casting a final vote on a nine-figure document. That is not a schedule designed to produce deliberation. It is a schedule designed to produce ratification.

The Theater of Restoration

A fair objection to the argument I am making is that last year's budget process did, in fact, produce restorations. On June 10, 2025, the City Council voted 7-2 to approve a budget that brought back Monday hours at 16 of 37 libraries, restored recreation center hours, saved the Midway homeless shelter, preserved beach fire rings, and restored some arts funding that Gloria had put on the chopping block. Councilmembers Henry Foster III, Joe LaCava, Sean Elo-Rivera, and Kent Lee led the push, publicly identifying "additional projected revenues" to cover the additions.

This looks, on the surface, like the system working. Read more carefully, it reveals something else.

Independent Budget Analyst Charles Modica told the council directly that the restoration budget relied on "optimistic figures." The "new revenues" identified to fund the restorations included paid parking at Balboa Park and the San Diego Zoo (not yet approved, and now being challenged at the ballot), digital billboard advertising (legality still under investigation by the City Attorney at the time of the vote), credit card fees on parking meter transactions, and accelerated debt payoffs. Two council members — Jennifer Campbell and Vivian Moreno — voted no. Campbell said plainly she was not convinced the budget was balanced.

The mayor's office issued a remarkable statement the same night, through spokesperson Rachel Laing: the council had "added tens of millions of dollars in new spending and changes" that "concerned city budget analysts and attorneys," and the administration would "closely review the Council's amendments." In plain English: we don't think your numbers work, and we reserve the right to treat your amendments as aspirational.

This is the pattern. The mayor proposes a budget that cuts visible, politically painful items. The public erupts. Council members, who have to face voters, negotiate restorations funded by one-time maneuvers, optimistic revenue forecasts, or revenue streams that haven't cleared legal review. Everyone claims victory. The structural deficit widens by exactly the amount of the optimism gap, and reappears in the next Five-Year Financial Outlook as a larger problem.

Last year's budget solved, by the mayor's own claim, roughly 85 percent of the long-term structural deficit. This year's deficit came in at $146 million. The math of "optimistic figures" catches up quickly.

What the Hearings Cannot Touch

The three largest drivers of the deficit are not on the agenda at any budget hearing, and cannot be put on it:

The pension payment. The $563.2 million ARC due July 1 was set by the SDCERS Board of Administration on March 13, 2026. SDCERS is a separate legal entity governed by its own fiduciary board under the City Charter. The council cannot vote to pay less. The mayor cannot propose to pay less. The only lever available to the city is a multi-year actuarial assumption change — which SDCERS itself will consider in September 2026, and which cuts both ways. If the board revises investment return assumptions upward, the payment falls; if downward, it rises. The decision happens in a board room public testimony cannot reach.

The workforce. The San Diego County Taxpayers Association's April 7 fiscal review documented 461 percent growth in middle-management positions since 2011 — from 70 to 393 — against a general population growth rate under 0.5 percent per year. The mayor's budget eliminates 48 management positions. At that pace, the 2011 baseline is more than six decades away. Any serious reduction beyond this level would require renegotiating memoranda of understanding with at least four employee bargaining units. Those negotiations are closed-session under § 54957.6. You will not hear them debated at a budget hearing.

Proposition B obligations. San Diego voters approved pension reform in 2012 by 66 percent. The California Supreme Court invalidated it procedurally in 2018. A San Diego Superior Court formally struck it down in 2021. The city has since paid millions to reinstate defined-benefit pensions for successive tranches of employees — white-collar, blue-collar, roughly 1,000 police officers at $7.5 million in July 2025, a "Phase 3" group of 204 workers at $2.2 million, with $11 million more in pending litigation over police academy pension credit. The total cost of the Prop B reversal, compounded into future pension payments, is in the hundreds of millions. The voters have no remaining mechanism to affect this outcome. The courts have spoken. The council is simply executing the judgment.

These three items, taken together, explain the deficit. None is subject to public comment. None is negotiable at a budget hearing. And the administration knows it, which is why the hearings proceed on the items — arts, libraries, park rangers, rec center hours — that are visible, emotionally resonant, and ultimately marginal to the fiscal picture.

Where Pressure Can Actually Bite

None of this is an argument for civic disengagement. It is an argument for directing civic energy toward the mechanisms that actually move outcomes.

The ballot box is one. Measure E, the 2024 sales tax increase, failed. The trash collection fee and Balboa Park parking fees are being challenged at the ballot now. Whatever one thinks of those particular measures, they alter the revenue envelope the mayor has to work within the following year — which is an actual structural change, not a line-item shuffle.

Litigation is another. The San Diego County Taxpayers Association, the First Amendment Coalition, and individual residents have standing to sue over Brown Act violations, TOT expenditure practices, and questionable revenue mechanisms. These cases are slow, expensive, and unsatisfying, but they occasionally produce rulings that constrain the administration's options in ways that no public comment ever will.

Charter reform is a third. The current process — strong mayor, six-month executive-branch drafting, a compressed six-week council review, closed-session labor negotiations, and an IBA whose amendment analysis arrives three weeks before a mandatory adoption deadline — is not constitutional inevitability. It is the result of specific charter provisions that voters could, in principle, change.

And sunshine is a fourth. Each violation of the Brown Act's spirit, each serial-meeting workaround, each closed-session decision that surfaces only in leaked statements to reporters, is a data point that cumulatively matters. Journalism that documents the gap between the procedural form and the substantive reality is itself a form of civic pressure. Voice of San Diego, the Union-Tribune, and the Inside San Diego newsletter have done more to illuminate this budget's actual mechanics than the public hearings will.

A Suggestion to the Orchestra

By all means, show up on May 4. Testify. Bring the flutes. Make the council explain, on the record, why the arts community must absorb an 85 percent cut while the middle-management cohort — the one the city's own watchdog just documented as having grown 461 percent — absorbs a 12 percent trim. Make them account for the TOT diversion that breaks the Penny for the Arts promise the council itself made in 2023. Make them put numbers to the "optimistic figures" that funded last year's restorations and explain where the equivalent gimmicks come from this year.

But do not mistake being heard for being heeded. Do not confuse the procedural form for the substantive outcome. The mayor's office, the labor unions, and the pension actuaries have already had their meetings. What you will experience on May 4 is the ratification ritual that follows. If you want to change the result, the time to apply pressure is in November at the ballot box, in the next round of charter reform proposals, and in the public conversation that shapes what the next outlook looks like eight months before it becomes a budget.

Saving the arts grant for one more fiscal year, funded by one more round of accounting optimism, is not a victory. It is an invitation to repeat this conversation, with larger numbers, next spring.

Pseudo Publius writes on civic affairs from San Diego.

Verified Sources

1. California Government Code § 54950 et seq. (Ralph M. Brown Act), including §§ 54956.8, 54956.9, 54957, 54957.6 (closed session exemptions).
2. California Attorney General, "The Brown Act: Open Meetings for Local Legislative Bodies" (2003 edition and subsequent). https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/the-brown-act.pdf
3. First Amendment Coalition, "Can employment negotiations be held in closed session?" https://firstamendmentcoalition.org/asked-and-answered/can-employment-negotiations-be-held-in-closed-session/
4. City of San Diego, "Fiscal Year 2027-2031 Five-Year Financial Outlook," November 2025. https://www.sandiego.gov/sites/default/files/2025-11/fy2027-2031-five-year-financial-outlook-and-attachments-general-fund.pdf
5. City of San Diego Office of the Independent Budget Analyst, "IBA Review of the Mayor's FY 2027-2031 Five-Year Financial Outlook," Report 25-36, December 15, 2025. https://www.sandiego.gov/sites/default/files/2025-12/25-36-review-of-the-mayor-s-fy-2027-2031-five-year-financial-outlook_2.pdf
6. City of San Diego, "Fiscal Year 2027 Draft Budget." https://www.sandiego.gov/finance/draft
7. City of San Diego, Budget timeline and process page (Council District 6). https://www.sandiego.gov/citycouncil/cd6/budget
8. Inside San Diego, "Understanding the City of San Diego's Budget Process." https://www.insidesandiego.org/understanding-city-san-diegos-budget-process
9. Center on Policy Initiatives, "Breaking Down the San Diego City Budget." https://cpisandiego.org/breaking-down-sd-budget/
10. Lisa Halverstadt and Scott Lewis, "San Diego City Council Avoids a Whole Lotta Budget Cuts, for Now," Voice of San Diego, June 10, 2025. https://voiceofsandiego.org/2025/06/10/san-diego-city-council-avoids-a-whole-lotta-budget-cuts-for-now/
11. NBC 7 San Diego, "San Diego City Council restores recreation center and some library hours in budget," June 10, 2025. https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/city-council-decision-fiscal-year-2026-budget-deficit/3844266/
12. City of San Diego, "Fiscal Year 2025 Mayor's May Revision to the Proposed Budget," May 2024. https://www.sandiego.gov/sites/default/files/2024-05/fy2025-may-revision-report_final.pdf
13. Drew Sitton and Jennifer Vigil, "Mayor's budget proposal protects police, fire spending, but cuts arts, parks, libraries to plug $118 million gap," Times of San Diego, April 15, 2026. https://timesofsandiego.com/politics/2026/04/15/san-diego-budget-deficit-police-fire-arts-parks/
14. David Garrick, "Mayor Gloria Proposes the Worst Budget for San Diego Since Jerry Sanders," San Diego Union-Tribune (via OB Rag), April 15, 2026. https://obrag.org/2026/04/mayor-gloria-proposes-the-worst-budget-for-san-diego-since-jerry-sanders/
15. Julia Dixon Evans, "San Diego Mayor's proposed budget slashes arts and culture funding," KPBS Public Media, April 20, 2026. https://www.kpbs.org/news/arts-culture/2026/04/20/san-diego-mayors-proposed-budget-slashes-arts-and-culture-funding
16. National Today / San Diego Today, "San Diego Pension Board Approves Record $563M Annual Payment," March 13, 2026. https://nationaltoday.com/us/ca/san-diego/news/2026/03/13/san-diego-pension-board-approves-record-563m-annual-payment/
17. San Diego County Taxpayers Association, "Fiscal Analysis of the City of San Diego," April 7, 2026. https://www.sdcta.org/studies-feed/2026/4/7/fiscal-analysis-of-the-city-of-san-diego
18. Jeff McDonald, "Independent Review Exposes San Diego's 'Bloated Bureaucracy' of Middle Managers," San Diego Union-Tribune (via OB Rag), April 13, 2026. https://obrag.org/2026/04/independent-review-exposes-san-diegos-bloated-bureaucracy-of-middle-managers-and-insufficient-spending-on-infrastructure/comment-page-1/
19. Boling v. Public Employment Relations Board, 5 Cal.5th 898 (2018) (invalidating Proposition B for procedural Brown Act / meet-and-confer violations).
20. Andrew Bowen, "San Diego County Judge Invalidates Prop B Pension Reform," KPBS Public Media, January 6, 2021. https://www.kpbs.org/news/2021/jan/06/san-diego-county-judge-invalidates-prop-b-pension-/
21. Police1 / San Diego Union-Tribune, "San Diego required to pay $7.5M into officers' pensions in legal fallout over ill-fated voter proposition," July 2025. https://www.police1.com/retirement-planning-resources/san-diego-required-to-pay-7-5m-into-officers-pensions-in-legal-fallout-over-ill-fated-voter-proposition
22. Times of San Diego, "Council Recommends City Reinvest Nearly 10% of Hotel Tax Revenue into Arts, Culture" (Penny for the Arts resolution), December 5, 2023. https://timesofsandiego.com/arts/2023/12/05/council-recommends-city-reinvest-nearly-10-of-hotel-tax-revenue-into-arts-culture/