Kent Lee

The Sign Lie: How a Yellow A-Frame Hides a $30M Police Raise Published

San Diego doubled parking meter rates in January 2025 and sold it as deficit relief. The Independent Budget Analyst confirms $18.4M of the resulting revenue reimburses the General Fund — $8.6M of it to Police. The Police Department's General Fund grew $30.5M in FY26 to fund labor agreements Mayor Gloria signed in June 2023 and June 2024 — long before he proposed the rate hike. Sworn officer count fell 9.88 over the same period. The visible $1.8M repair allocation — the part with the yellow A-frame sign on it — is 6% of the take. Three of five Grand Jury accountability recommendations were ignored entirely; the fourth (community-planning-group governance) was inverted. He signed the raises first. He sold the rate hike second.

The Trolley Question, Part 2: Paying to Say No Published

Two SANDAG board members vote against the trolley extension. One has $14,100 in donations from her board's vendors. One has zero. The bought chair and the unbought suburban mayor both keep the trolley off the beach. The board geometry is the rot — and it is older than any check.

The Meter Play: How a $17 Million Contract, a Rigged RFP, and a Punished Whistleblower Built San Diegos Parking Meter Empire Published

Mayor Gloria expanded IPS Groups $17M parking meter empire into residential neighborhoods to backfill a $258M budget deficit. IPS Group (owned by Windjammer Capital PE) benefits from every expansion while communities lose both free parking and their share of revenue. A MathPolitics Special Investigation.

The Committee Chair Published

Traces $618,112 in campaign support to Kent Lee, maps the routing mechanisms that keep the biggest development beneficiaries off donor rolls, and documents how one freshman council member's committee assignments reshaped housing policy for an entire city.

The SDMEA Machine Published

How a Union PAC Built a Council Bloc and Protected Its Investment

The Gatekeeper's Ledger Published

The Price of No Published

Raul Campillo took $14,779 in post-election donations from lobbyists and developers — then voted against their interests on the biggest deals in San Diego. Three weeks after his dissenting votes, the Council President removed him from the committee where those votes were cast.

On Saturday The Library Is Closed: How San Diego Chose The Budget Crisis Published

The Gloria Machine Published

The machine changes party but not behavior: the same lobbyists and developers, now operating through Democratic officeholders.

The Madaffer Axis: Two Firms, One City Hall Published

The Policy Pipeline Published

The Airbnb Play Published

One disclosed $100,000 behested payment to build a skate plaza in Encanto sits inside a $3.8 million Airbnb campaign to defeat a San Diego vacation-rental tax that would have raised up to $133 million per year. The payment was legal, the disclosure proper — the math is the scandal.

The Question Nobody Had to Ask Published

Henry Foster III was fired from the City of San Diego in 2016. Nine years later, as Budget Chair, he co-architected the elimination of his former supervisor's position. The city's ethics framework had no mechanism to surface the connection.