The Port
Seven commissioners. Zero elections. The waterfront belongs to whoever they say it does.
Part 5 ended at SANDAG — twenty-one mayors and supervisors voting on a regional transit plan that routes around the neighborhoods that needed it most. The Port of San Diego is its own machine. Seven commissioners. Zero direct elections. The waterfront — the cruise terminals, the convention center's bayside wall, the shipyards grinding through Navy contracts, the resort hotels lining Mission Bay on long-term public leases worth more than a billion dollars over the life of a contract — none of it appears on a ballot. None of it ever has.
7 COMMISSIONERS · 0 ELECTIONS
TIDELANDS TRUST · APPOINTED BOARD
Seven commissioners. Zero direct elections. The waterfront — billions of dollars in cruise-terminal, convention-center, and shipyard leases — is held in trust for the people of California. The people of California pick none of the seven.
A trust written for a different century
The San Diego Unified Port District did not exist until 1962. The California Legislature created it that year — Stats. 1962, 1st Ex. Sess., Ch. 67 — and the District is now codified in the California Harbors and Navigation Code, Division 8 [1]. The statutory structure is straightforward: five member cities share one board. San Diego holds three seats. Chula Vista, Coronado, Imperial Beach, and National City each hold one. Each city council appoints its own commissioner or commissioners. Terms run four years. Removal requires a majority vote of the appointing council. There is no recall mechanism — not for individual commissioners, not for the board as a whole.
The older legal spine of the institution is the public-trust doctrine, written into California Constitution Article X §3 [2]. Tidelands — the bay-side lands below the mean high-tide line — belong to the people of California in a legal sense that predates the Port District by generations. The trust is a real constraint. The Port cannot simply sell the bay. It cannot deed Mission Bay to a developer, extinguish the public easement, and walk away. What the trust does not require is any democratic mechanism for selecting the seven people who decide how the trust's assets are managed, leased, priced, and renewed.
That gap — between the public ownership of the land and the private appointment of its stewards — is the structural fact this part documents. The tidelands trust was written for a California where managing the bay meant managing fishing access and navigation channels. It was not written for a California where the bay-adjacent lease economy includes resort hotel portfolios, convention center management contracts, cruise line berth agreements, maritime industrial leases, and parking garages with nine-figure long-term value. The legal framework has not changed. The economy it governs has changed entirely.
The appointment chain is worth tracing precisely because it is the mechanism most readers will not know exists. If you live in San Diego proper — east of the bay, north of National City, west of La Mesa — your three Port commissioners were appointed by your City Council. The City Council is elected; those elections are, in theory, contests you could vote in and candidates you could organize around. But the Port appointment is one step removed from that election. When the Council appoints a Port commissioner, the appointment is a council agenda item at a regular council meeting. It is not a referendum. It is not a hearing with public-comment weighting. It is a vote taken by nine people you may or may not have elected, on a name you may or may not have heard, for a seat whose duties most San Diegans cannot describe.
If you live in Chula Vista, Coronado, Imperial Beach, or National City, your city council makes the same appointment — except your city controls exactly one seat. One appointee, four-year term, single council majority required to change it.
Whose business is the bay's business
Robert Gleason served as Port Board chair until recently. He is the CEO of Evans Hotels — owner of the Bahia Resort Hotel, the Catamaran Resort Hotel, and the Lodge at Torrey Pines. All three properties depend directly on the tidelands lease economy the Port administers. The Bahia and the Catamaran sit on Mission Bay shoreline. The bay access those properties sell — the water views, the dock rights, the ambient character of bay-adjacent hospitality — is a product the Port governs. Gleason, as chair, was one of seven people deciding the terms under which properties like his competitors' and his own sector's exist on public land.
The Evans Hotels family donor network contributed $14,850 across seven donors to Mayor Todd Gloria's 2020 cycle, according to records reviewed by MathPolitics [3].
Frank Urtasun is a current Port commissioner. He is a vice president and lobbyist for Sempra Energy, the parent of San Diego Gas & Electric, which holds infrastructure easements and energy-supply relationships across the Port's territory. Urtasun has chaired the Downtown San Diego Partnership and the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce — two of the four or five civic-board interlocks through which the Port's institutional relationships run. His appointment does not come through San Diego City Council. It comes through one of the smaller member cities, which means the accountability chain runs through a council that most Port observers never watch.
Dan Malcolm, the Imperial Beach appointee, is CEO of Malcolm Properties and sits on the Sharp Hospital system board — a civic-board footprint that spans real estate development and healthcare in a region where both industries have active interests in the Port's land-use decisions.
We are not claiming any commissioner sold a lease. We are not claiming the money caused a specific vote. We are not claiming that civic-board membership equals corruption. What the public record shows is this: the seven people who decide which uses land on the waterfront, at what price, for how long, and on whose terms, are people whose professional and institutional lives are threaded through the industries the Port governs — and zero of those seven seats appear on a ballot. The system did not require anyone to be corrupt to produce this outcome. It only required that the appointments be made the way appointments are always made: through relationships, civic credibility, and the political priorities of whoever holds the majority on five different city councils.
In February and March of 2025, the Port board voted 7-0 to approve a 10-year operating contract with Ace Parking for the Convention Center and Bayfront garages [3]. The vote was unanimous. Not one of the seven seats was up for election before the vote, during the vote's public-comment period, or after. Three of the seven commissioners voting yes shared active civic-board service with figures in the parking industry.
The 7-0 vote is not proof of corruption. It is proof of unanimity, and unanimity on a ten-year lease contract worth substantial public revenue is itself a data point. Contested votes leave dissents in the record. Dissents name concerns. Unanimous votes leave only the record of passage. This vote left only passage.
That is the pattern documented in detail in The Gloria Files, Part 5: The Parking Play [3]. Read it for the full money trail. What matters here is the structure that made the vote possible: a seven-seat board, appointed through five city council chains, making a decade-long revenue decision without a single seat at risk of electoral consequence.
What one appointment changes
The geometry of the Port board is more exposed than it appears. Chula Vista, Coronado, Imperial Beach, and National City each control exactly one commissioner. Any one of those four city councils can replace their appointee — at a single council meeting, on a majority vote — and change the South Bay alignment on lease votes and audit priorities. National City and Chula Vista have historically anchored the board's south-of-downtown voting bloc. A new appointee from either city shifts that bloc.
San Diego's three commissioners are confirmed by the City Council. A 5-4 council majority — the minimum needed to move a vote — can, over a single appointment cycle, change all three of the city's Port seats. Four years is one full term. A city council elected in November with a working majority can have a reconstituted three-seat Port presence by the time any significant lease comes up for renewal.
That arithmetic matters because it means Port reform is not structurally impossible. It does not require a ballot measure. It does not require a charter amendment or a Sacramento bill. It requires attention to the upstream vote — the city council election that determines who makes the Port appointment — rather than to the downstream vote, which happens at a Port board meeting that most residents cannot locate on a map.
The appointment meetings are public. They happen at the five member-city councils, not at the Port. They appear on council agendas as routine business items. The public-comment microphone is open. On most appointment nights, it is not used. That is the opportunity the structure creates and the one most people don't know to take.
Find your seat at the table
The first task is recognition. Most readers in San Diego will move past "wait, this city has a Port?" before reaching the accountability question. The Port is not invisible — it runs a public website, publishes meeting minutes, holds open board sessions at 3165 Pacific Highway — but its governance has no natural entry point for the average resident. You do not vote Port commissioner in November. The name does not appear on the sample ballot your county sends. If you have never heard of the San Diego Unified Port District, that is not a personal failure of civic attention. It is a predictable consequence of a governance structure that was never designed to announce itself.
The way in is through the upstream. Your Port commissioner was appointed by someone you may have actually voted for. Find that person. Find the appointment date. Find the agenda item. Find what the commissioner has said publicly about the industries whose leases the Port governs. The Port's own meetings are open, but they are the end of the chain. The appointment vote — the one that actually determined who sits in that chair — happened at a city council meeting that most Port watchers never attended.
The logic applies across the wiring. The Port is one body. The Airport is the next. Nine voting seats. Three picked by the Mayor of San Diego. Two by the County Board of Supervisors. Four picked by city-mayor caucuses from outside the city proper — one each from East County, South County, North County Coastal, and North County Inland. Plus two non-voting ex-officio seats appointed by the Governor: a Caltrans representative and a state Department of Finance representative. Sacramento has two chairs at the table without a vote. The riders of the airport have no chair at all.
Next: Three Mayor picks. Two Sacramento picks. Zero yours.
Part 7 — The Airport.
Continue →Sources
[1] California Harbors and Navigation Code, Division 8 (Port District Act) — https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaycode.xhtml?lawCode=HNC&division=8
[2] California Constitution Article X §3 (public-trust doctrine) — https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?sectionNum=SEC.%203.&article=X&lawCode=CONS
[3] The Gloria Files, Part 5: The Parking Play — MathPolitics, published. /ca/sandiego/the-gloria-files/