On June 2, in a primary that turned out more Republicans than Democrats, San Diego city voters did something they almost never do. They put first-time outsiders ahead of well-funded city hall insiders in three of four council races.
They pushed a sitting council member to a 249-vote margin on election night against a nurse who had never run for anything — and in this city, only two incumbents have lost a council re-election bid since 1992. And they rejected a new tax outright.
That is not background noise. It is a verdict. And the county Board of Supervisors majority needs to read it before November, because they are about to ask the same electorate for a great deal more.
The message from June is not complicated. Working families are done being nickel-and-dimed by governments that plead poverty out of one side of their mouth and reach into residents’ pockets out of the other. Trash fees. Paid parking at Balboa Park. Water and sewer rates that climb every year. A budget crisis with no plan — only new charges.
City hall felt the heat so plainly that it retreated on the trash and Balboa Park fees mid-campaign, as ballots were already in voters’ hands. You don’t reverse course on something people like. That reversal was a confession.
Here is what should worry every supervisor who put a tax and a charter rewrite on the same November ballot: that anger does not stop at the city line.
This fall, the board’s three-member Democratic majority — Terra Lawson-Remer, Paloma Aguirre and Monica Montgomery Steppe — is asking county residents to approve a sales tax increase of roughly $360 million a year. A sales tax is the most regressive tool in government’s kit. It does not fall hardest on second-home owners. It falls hardest on the working family buying groceries, school clothes and a car battery — the same family that just told city hall its patience is gone.
To ask that family for $360 million more, from a county government that a recent poll found 57% of residents believe is on the wrong track, is to misread the room in the most expensive way possible.
But the tax is only half of it. On that same ballot, the majority placed a charter amendment package — and how they built it tells you everything.
Voters are not anti-accountability. They are hungry for it. The package contains real reforms worth having: an ethics commission, a program auditor, an independent budget analyst. These are exactly the checks an oversized county government needs, and they have cross-aisle support — Supervisor Jim Desmond has said plainly that he backs them.
Those reforms could go to voters tomorrow as clean, standalone measures and earn an easy yes. So why didn’t they?
Because the majority bundled those reforms with a provision extending supervisor term limits from two four-year terms to three — a change that conveniently lets the very supervisors who wrote it stay in office longer. Accountability for everyone else; a career extension for themselves.
And the package pointedly declines to set term limits on the sheriff, the district attorney, or other powerful officers. The minute accountability started applying equally, the carve-outs appeared.
That is not reform. It is reform used as packaging for self-interest — the kind of insider arithmetic that asks voters to swallow self-dealing to get the oversight they actually want. It reeks of exactly the collusion residents are voting against.
So here is the warning, offered as a Democrat who wants this party to govern well, not just to win: unbundle it.
Split the charter measure. Put the ethics commission, the auditor and the independent budget analyst to voters as the clean, standalone reforms they deserve to be, and let the term-limit extension rise or fall on its own merits, in daylight. Trust the public to judge each on what it is. That is what accountability looks like.
The alternative — forcing residents to choose between oversight and self-dealing bolted together — is a bet that voters won’t notice. June should have ended that bet.
Yes, the returns are not final, and a primary is not November. The majority will be tempted to dismiss the warning as a fluke and coast on registration math. They should not. The electorate that nearly unseated an incumbent and rejected a new tax in June will be larger this fall, not smaller — and it will be watching whether the Board hears it or hopes it forgets.
Silence is not neutrality. Silence is authorization. The supervisors have a choice: give voters clean, honest choices, or hand them one more reason to believe their government answers only to itself. Hear the voters — or accept the consequences of choosing not to.
David A. Myers is a retired commander in the San Diego Sheriff’s Office with 35 years of service. He served as director of safety and security at Jewish Family Service of San Diego from 2023 to 2025.
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