The Secret Subcommittee

D4 grants leave the roll call. Following a procedural maneuver, District 4 Neighborhood Reinvestment Program (~$2,000,000/year) and Community Enhancement Program (~$1,000,000/year) allocations begin to be administered without a Board roll-call vote — roughly $3,000,000/year routed through the supervisor's office without a publicly counted vote.

The dais audit window. MathPolitics audits every recorded vote cast by Supervisor Steppe in this period: 1,070 votes — 1,059 YES (99.0%), 9 NO (0.84%), 2 absent. None of the 9 NO votes are on contracts, single-source procurements, grant acceptances, budget appropriations, or labor agreements; the county approved 35 single-source or A-87 procurement-waiver contracts in the period without a dissenting vote from the majority coalition. All 9 NO votes are on Republican-coded resolutions (voter ID, sanctuary-policy repeal, gas-tax opposition, involuntary-commitment ballot measure, battery-storage siting, and similar).

The lone NO. On the 2025 sanctuary-policy repeal (BOS-25-115), Lawson-Remer abstains and Steppe becomes the sole recorded NO — the only meaningfully solitary NO in the audit window. Eight of the nine NO votes are 3-2 bloc votes alongside Lawson-Remer and Aguirre.

The "small transfer fee" framing. In her State of the County address, Lawson-Remer publicly frames a transfer-tax idea as a "small transfer fee on the top one percent." (The RFQ posted eight months later asks for authority across the entire transfer-tax base — see 2025-12-18.)

The subcommittee is created. The Board votes to create the Ad Hoc Subcommittee on Sustainable Fiscal Planning, co-chaired by Lawson-Remer and Montgomery Steppe.

The $320,000 polling contract. The subcommittee posts a multi-phase contract — economic analysis, polling, focus groups, a public town hall, and a presentation to supervisors in May — to test whether voters would back a county-led sales-tax hike. Budget: $320,000. Exactly one firm bids: Ironwood Public Affairs, led by Victor Aviña, a county Board of Supervisors staffer from 2015 to 2020. The team includes Amplify Campaigns (prior $383,000 county Sheriff jail-measure contract), FM3 (~$673,000 in county contracts since 2021; the Union-Tribune reported Lawson-Remer twice retained FM3 personally for budget and policy polling), Economic & Planning Systems, and the law firm Olson Remcho. Ironwood is directed not to lobby Sacramento.

The 55× lobbyist RFQ. Four days before Christmas, the county posts a request for qualifications for a contractor with "vast political knowledge" to lobby Sacramento for authority to raise the real-estate transfer tax from $0.55 to $30.55 per $500 of value — a 55-fold increase — and for authority to levy payroll taxes. Bids are due Monday, December 22; the contract is to begin January 1.

The RFQ is cancelled. The lobbyist solicitation is pulled after Supervisor Jim Desmond publicly denounces it. Lawson-Remer's office says the supervisor is "now more focused on other tactics," that any tax would still require voter approval, and that a "mansion tax" on $5–10M-plus properties "remains on the table."

The 55× math, flagged. Voice of San Diego reports the cancelled RFQ and the 55-fold scale of the proposed transfer-tax authority.

The home-by-home translation. The Union-Tribune calculates that on a median San Diego County home of roughly $985,000, the proposed authority would add approximately $60,200 to the cost of a sale.

"Out of view of the public.". The Union-Tribune describes the subcommittee as one that "operates out of view of the public," reporting that Voice of San Diego's late-January records request for agendas and minutes had not been fulfilled.

The $56M procedural vote. The Democratic majority authorizes $56,000,000 from county reserves — $24,000,000 for housing and social services, $8,800,000 for the Tijuana River sewage crisis, $23,000,000 for conservation and infrastructure (these three named categories sum to $55,800,000; the itemization is partial/rounded and does not fully reconcile to the $56,000,000 total) — on a 3-2 vote; Anderson and Desmond vote no. The Union-Tribune reports the majority used a procedural approach requiring only three votes instead of four, and that "most spending originated from the subcommittee." The county had $381,600,000 in reserves available and had already drawn $70,400,000 of the $95,400,000 its policy permits in a fiscal year. Anderson, in attributed quotation, called the maneuver "cooking the process" and the reserves a "slush fund."

The transparency push. Voice of San Diego reports on the secret subcommittees and that Supervisor Anderson is seeking a March 24 vote to require public agendas, minutes, and recordings; the county had not produced agendas or minutes for any of three ongoing ad-hoc subcommittees VOSD requested records for.

The rival public panel. Anderson and Aguirre's counter-panel — a "Fiscal Transparency & Accountability" subcommittee — holds its first meeting at the County Administration Center, with recordings.

The transparency vote. A resolution to require ad hoc subcommittees to post agendas, keep minutes, and meet publicly is placed on the Board agenda.