San Diego’s budget debates too often feel like a municipal version of “The Hunger Games.”
Neighborhoods fight over crumbs. Libraries defend hours. Parks ask for maintenance. Residents plead for smoother streets, working streetlights and safe sidewalks. City workers are asked to stretch aging equipment and tired facilities beyond their breaking point. Then, when the numbers do not add up, City Hall reaches for the same old menu: cut services, freeze positions, raise fees or ask families to pay more.
That cannot be the only playbook.
I am a Del Cerro resident, small business owner, parent and public policy consultant who works on government infrastructure and labor issues. I see the cost of deferred maintenance in ordinary neighborhood life: the dark streetlight, the cracked sidewalk, the park bathroom in disrepair and the road patched so many times it looks like grandma’s quilt.
San Diego does not need another round of neighborhood budget warfare. It needs a smarter way to make public assets work for the public.
The city owns land, buildings, rights-of-way, digital infrastructure and public spaces with real value. Before asking working families to pay more, San Diego should exhaust every reasonable opportunity to make those assets produce revenue for neighborhood repairs.
Here are three places to start.
First, fix our broken approach to major-event signage. During Comic-Con and other major events, large companies already turn downtown buildings into giant advertisements. Too often, fines become just another cost of doing business. Instead of pretending the practice does not exist, San Diego should consider a tightly regulated signage pilot in limited high-traffic areas, with strict design rules, community protections and one simple requirement: money generated in a neighborhood should help fix that neighborhood.
Call it boring if you want. I call it streetlights.
If a company wants to use San Diego’s skyline as a billboard during a global event, the public should get more than a code violation and a shrug. Revenue should be dedicated to visible basics: smoother roads, safer sidewalks, better lighting, trees, medians and stormwater work.
Second, San Diego should deploy secure, automated equipment lockers and reserved storage or parking spaces at high-demand beaches, lakes, parks and ballfields. Residents and visitors could store kayaks, surfboards, bicycles, sports equipment or other recreational gear, creating recurring micro-lease revenue while making outdoor recreation more accessible.
This is not flashy. That is the point. City budgets are not fixed only by big speeches. Sometimes they are fixed by finding value sitting in plain sight and asking why it is not producing more for residents.
Third, San Diego should use long-term ground leases and air-rights partnerships more aggressively while keeping public land public. The city should not rush to sell land it can never get back. But it can responsibly partner on underused sites, including opportunities above libraries, community centers and other civic buildings.
The right deal can preserve public ownership, create affordable housing, improve aging facilities and generate ongoing revenue for long-term maintenance. The wrong deal can become another civic “101 Ash” regret. Every proposal should therefore be transparent, competitively bid, independently analyzed and tied to measurable public benefits.
None of this replaces fiscal discipline. San Diego still needs to audit contracts, reduce waste, maintain fair labor standards and be honest about the true cost of services. New revenue tools are not an excuse for sloppy government.
And let’s be equally honest: asset revenue and restructuring alone may not be enough to close every gap created by decades of deferred maintenance. Taxes and fees should not be the first resort, but responsible leaders should not pretend they can always be taken off the table either. If additional revenue is ever needed, residents deserve to know that the city first squeezed value from its own assets, cut waste, improved operations and showed exactly what the money would fix.
A modern city should know what it owns, what it costs to maintain, what value it can responsibly generate and how that value will be returned to residents. Every dollar raised through these ideas should be tracked publicly and directed to the basics people can see: roads, sidewalks, parks, streetlights, storm drains and neighborhood facilities.
That is the bargain residents deserve.
Not gimmicks. Not hidden funds. Not another budget scramble where communities compete against each other for basic services.
San Diego has real assets. It also has real needs. The next step is to connect the two.
Before asking families to pay more, let’s make the city’s own assets work harder for the neighborhoods we call home.
Mat Kostrinsky is a Del Cerro resident, small business owner and public policy consultant specializing in government infrastructure, labor relations and legislative advocacy.
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