How San Diego Actually Works
Seven bodies. Sixty-two seats. Eight minutes.
You leave the house in the dark. The trash truck has already been — the hauler has a multi-year contract and you don't remember a vote. Your kid's school bus pulls away from a different corner under a different election. The sidewalk in front of the duplex is still buckled; the repair list got cut, again. A plane comes in low over the canyon, the noise envelope a line on a map in a room without public seating. The freeway hum from the on-ramp is the regional plan you didn't vote against because you couldn't. You round the corner to the bench at a stop on Route 944 and the bus is missing — has been, on Saturdays, since September 2022. Seven bodies took the decisions you just walked through. You voted in three.
Section 1
The Missed Connection
The bench at a stop on Route 944 in El Cajon still lists a bus that hasn't run on Saturdays since September 2022. That absence — a woman with grocery bags, a man in a hi-vis vest, a sky going grey to grey-blue, no bus arriving — is what a governance decision looks like from the outside. Part 1 names the geometry: San Diego is governed by seven rooms. You are allowed inside three. The other four are filled by people you did not elect, taking votes that move your commute, your zoning, your water bill, your bench. The September 2024 MTS board vote — which halved planned bus expansion, halved planned trolley expansion, eliminated $4 million for bus-stop improvements, and froze $19.7 million in state SB 125 funds to close a $126 million deficit — was decided in one of the rooms you did not vote in. Part 1 is the way in. The bench is the way to feel what's at stake.
→ [Read Part 1](/ca/sandiego/the-wiring/the-wiring-part-1-the-missed-connection/)
Section 2
The Mayor
The Mayor of San Diego has been a strong-mayor executive since 2010 — one veto pen, with the City Council needing six of nine votes to override. That is the structure most San Diegans already sense. The part they don't sense is the four appointment chains running out of the same office into regional bodies most San Diegans have never voted on: one seat at SANDAG, three of nine voting seats at the Airport Authority (plus the board chair designation under state law), three Port commissioner nominations, and an ex officio MTS seat. Those four chains stay attached to the door regardless of who holds the office. Part 2 documents the Cushman Foundation case — a behested payment, a city appointment, a consulting contract at $24,999 (one dollar below the threshold requiring Council approval), and a reelection fundraising chair, all moving within six days of each other — as the most fully documented example of what one mayor's appointment authority can produce within the law, in plain sight.
→ [Read Part 2](/ca/sandiego/the-wiring/the-wiring-part-2-the-mayor/)
Section 3
The Council
Nine seats, one your district. Five votes pass a routine ordinance. Six votes override the Mayor — a threshold that almost never lands. The gap between five and six is where the donor lists live. In May 2018, a PAC called Community Voices San Diego appeared in FPPC filings under the full name "Community Voices San Diego sponsored by The Lincoln Club." Within months the sponsorship name dropped. The PAC address — 525 B Street, Suite 1420 — matched a lobbying firm run by the Mayor's former communications director and a PAC run by the former Ethics Commission chair, later appointed to the Airport Authority. More than $1.7 million in independent-expenditure spending moved through that address across three election cycles. The Moreno case gives the math a face: a Democratic NO vote on a 50% AMI inclusionary housing override, a committee chair removal five months later, an industry award one month after that, and a YES vote on the weakened 60% AMI version that the Building Industry Association now supported. The system produced the sequence. The math told the donors where to spend.
→ [Read Part 3](/ca/sandiego/the-wiring/the-wiring-part-3-the-council/)
Section 4
The Supervisors
Five seats. Roughly $8 billion annual budget. No mayoral veto above them — three votes is the entire threshold for the body that runs your county courts, jails, public health labs, safety-net hospitals, mental health system, and unincorporated roads. Each supervisor also carries regional appointments without any additional election: two supervisors hold SANDAG seats, two hold Airport Authority seats. Since May 2023, the five sitting members of the San Diego County Board of Supervisors have filed exactly zero Form 803 behested-payment disclosures. In January 2024, the San Diego Foundation Flood Response Fund — promoted through official county channels by then-Board Chair Nora Vargas — received $100,000 from Price Philanthropies (which placed two employees on the advisory council distributing the funds), $25,000 from SDG&E (whose Director of Community Relations took a seat on the same council), $50,000 from the Conrad Prebys Foundation, and $25,000 from the San Diego Padres. Form 803 filings triggered by any of this: zero. The county rejected a 2016 Grand Jury recommendation to establish an independent ethics commission. The city has the commission. The county declined.
→ [Read Part 4](/ca/sandiego/the-wiring/the-wiring-part-4-the-supervisors/)
Section 5
SANDAG
The San Diego Association of Governments is a Joint Powers Authority created by SB 1703 in 2003: twenty-one member agencies, monthly meetings in a downtown conference room, decisions about where the freeway widens, where the trolley extends, and where the bike lane gets paint versus a press release. The vote structure runs two modes: one-agency-one-vote default, or weighted re-vote (triggered by any two agencies) where population determines the math and the City of San Diego holds 50 of 100 weighted points. In December 2021, one week before the SANDAG board was scheduled to vote on its Regional Plan, the vehicle-miles-traveled fee — the funding mechanism for the plan's transit ambitions — was stripped. The plan passed without a funding source. Three years later, Measure G, the half-cent sales tax backfill, failed at the ballot: 51.7% No. In October 2025, the SANDAG board voted unanimously to approve a $50 million sole-source contract with AECOM after a May 2025 independent performance audit had flagged $290 million across 30 vendors over five years. The board reviewed the audit. The board approved the contract.
→ [Read Part 5](/ca/sandiego/the-wiring/the-wiring-part-5-sandag/)
Section 6
The Port
Seven commissioners. Zero direct elections. The San Diego Unified Port District governs the waterfront — cruise terminals, convention center frontage, shipyards, Mission Bay resort leases worth billions over the life of a contract — under a public-trust doctrine written into the California Constitution before any of the current infrastructure existed. Three of the seven seats come from San Diego, nominated by the Mayor and confirmed by the City Council. The other four come from Chula Vista, Coronado, Imperial Beach, and National City, one each. Part 6 names the current board: Robert Gleason, CEO of Evans Hotels (which operates bay-lease properties), served as board chair. Frank Urtasun, a Sempra Energy lobbyist, holds a seat appointed through one of the smaller member cities. In February and March 2025, the board voted 7-0 to approve a 10-year operating contract with Ace Parking for the Convention Center and Bayfront garages. The vote was unanimous. Not one of the seven seats was on a ballot before, during, or after the public-comment period.
→ [Read Part 6](/ca/sandiego/the-wiring/the-wiring-part-6-the-port/)
Section 7
The Airport
Nine voting seats govern San Diego International Airport, distributed as follows: three appointed by the Mayor of San Diego (including, under CA Public Utilities Code §170010(d), the board chair designation); two by the County Board of Supervisors; four by regional city-mayor caucuses from East County, South County, North County Coastal, and North County Inland. Plus two non-voting ex-officio seats placed by the Governor: a Caltrans representative and a Department of Finance / State Lands Commission representative. Sacramento has ears in the room and no vote. The riders of the airport pick none of the nine. In FY2025, 43 percent of the Authority's $434.2 million in operating revenue came from ground-access: parking ($81.6 million), rental car concessions ($85.2 million), and customer facility charges ($36.5 million). The 2019 Airline Operating and Lease Agreement gives airlines a contractual veto over any ground-access capital project exceeding $350 million — which covers any plausible rail connector. No Federal Transit Administration Capital Investment Grant application for a SAN connector has ever been filed.
→ [Read Part 7](/ca/sandiego/the-wiring/the-wiring-part-7-the-airport/)
Section 8
The Bus, Again
Back to the bench. The Metropolitan Transit System board has fifteen voting members: city councilmembers and mayors from San Diego, Chula Vista, Coronado, El Cajon, Imperial Beach, La Mesa, Lemon Grove, National City, Poway, and Santee, plus the County's representative. None of them ran for election on transit. Each holds the MTS seat as a side duty attached to a different elected job. On September 12, 2024, those fifteen members sat down to close a $126 million deficit and set the FY25 operating budget at $448.2 million: bus expansion halved from $54 million to $30 million, trolley expansion from $39 million to $21 million, $4 million for bus-stop improvements eliminated, $5 million for an Otay Mesa border-crossing study eliminated, $19.7 million in SB 125 state funds frozen. The OnTrack process, launched after that vote, engaged a consultancy to map routes facing cuts in the FY28-30 cycle against a forecasted deficit of $120 to $145 million. The next board vote on those cuts arrives late 2026. The bench at the 944 stop is not the last bench. It is the most recent one visible.
→ [Read Part 8](/ca/sandiego/the-wiring/the-wiring-part-8-the-bus-again/)
Section 9
Your Seat
The series ends with the count: fifteen seats you vote for directly — one Mayor, nine City Council members, five County Supervisors. Forty-seven appointed seats making regional decisions this week in rooms those ballots never mentioned. Sixty-two total. Part 9 asks what you do with the map. The donors have been watching these rooms professionally and continuously for decades. MathPolitics is the counterweight: a member-funded SuperPAC, $1-8 per month per member, deliberately under the FEC's $200-per-year itemization threshold and the FPPC's $100-per-year threshold, so members remain unitemized in public filings. Member privacy is a product decision. Members vote on what gets investigated — not on messaging, not on platform positions, on investigations. The first member-vote investigation is queued. Founding members pick it. The bench is not asking for sympathy. It is asking whether anyone is watching when the FY28 deficit math arrives.
→ [Read Part 9](/ca/sandiego/the-wiring/the-wiring-part-9-your-seat/)
Read the full series.
Each part is 1,800-2,400 words. One sitting per part. Or take your seat now.
The Wiring →