It’s (Almost) Special Election Time!

District 4 Voters Will Be Replacing Nathan Fletcher

Ballots will go out in a few days so roughly 700,000 voters in County Supervisor District 4 can begin the process of replacing the missing cog in the County’s elected wheel. The position is open because former Supervisor Nathan Fletcher resigned in May after being accused of harassing a Metropolitan Transit System employee.

The District 3 Supervisor’s race, which will feature incumbent Tara Lawson-Remer facing former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer (and whoever else enters) has been in the news this week. It’s not taking place until 2024, so I’ll get around to covering it after the first of the year.

First up, lots of voters don’t know what Supervisor District they live in. (See pink area in map above) D4 encompasses Central San Diego, including much of the neighborhoods of  Clairemont, Bay Park, Mission Valley, Hillcrest, University Heights, North Park, Normal Heights, Kensington, College area, City Heights, Rancho San Diego, and Encanto as well as the cities of La Mesa, and Lemon Grove. 

The County has created a tool so voters can confirm that their address is in D4.

With four candidates running for the seat, it’s entirely possible nobody will get more than the 50% needed to win. If that’s the case, a runoff between the top two candidates will occur on November 7. The victor will be in office for the remainder of Nathan Fletcher’s term, through January 2027.

This election is important for San Diego. After years of all-Republican Boards of Supervisors, Democrats worked to gain a 3-2 majority. Changes in policy and governance were not far behind.

Fletcher’s departure from the (technically non-partisan, not really) board, left the panel with a 2-2 split, and some important decisions to be made concerning:

• Expansion of behavioral health programs

• Participation in a pilot county for a state program to mandate psychiatric care for people deemed unable to make decisions independently.

• Cutting climate impacting emissions to net zero in coming decades.

• Expanding shelter space

• Building affordable housing on surplus county land.

Last, but not least is recruiting a new chief administrative officer — its top staff position. This is where rubber meets the road in terms of policy administration.

I’ll give an example of how this works. Once upon a time, lower income households were forced to go through an in person inspection to qualify. I happen to know from personal experience that the presence of anti-war or hippy posters was cause for denial. Nowadays, the county wants applicants to meet financial requirements and a thing or two otherwise that make sense.

Under Republican rule, the County did a great job of socking away surpluses–which are still higher than needed. The focus was on protecting the system rather than serving the people with the healthy and welfare programs expected by the State.

What a GOP shift on the Board means is that policies toward homeless humans will be based on the assumption that individuals have erred in some fashion to have lost their home. “Treatment first” will be mandated, meaning somewhere over half of those coming into the system will be forced to choose abstinence from substances they do NOT actually consume.  This “personal responsibility" ethic allows its believers to ignore the overwhelming evidence of what ails people living unhoused and the real causes of homelessness.   

A Dem shift on the Board will continue programs underway that both treat and shelter people. It means an acknowledgement that systemic reasons have an outsized impact on why people end up on the street. (Trust me, the Fletcher board wasn’t doing enough, but they were headed  in the right direction.

For stats and facts about homelessness, see Cory Doctorow’s essay. 

So, as I said a couple of paragraphs back, this contest is important, especially since local Republicans have twisted the inclusion of housing as a goat, with Democrats being accused of inflicting “Housing First” on San Diego. The message comes with a snarl, in social media messages from GOP Supe Jim Desmond..

Housing First, like the Critical Race Theory not being taught in K-12 schools, is a real concept. It’s just not in use here, in part because it’s physically impossible unless one has a magic wand capable of instant homes.

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Short Snips About the Candidates… Although Supervisor elections are technically non-partisan, they’re not. (I’ll have more to say in the week prior to election day: I’m going on vacation next week.)

The Democrats who have declared their candidacy are: 

San Diego City Council Member Monica Montgomery-Steppe
Website - Facebook

Two quick facts you need to know about Montgomery-Steppe.

• She is a progressive and pragmatic Black woman who beat the local establishment’s choice, then-incumbent Council person Myrtle Cole in 2018.

• The police unions in San Diego are scared to death about her desire for oversight and ability to wade through the copaganda to see the bigger picture about law and order. 

Montgomery-Steppe - “Violence is not biological. It has not been solved with over-policing, and it has not been solved with more funding, and until we address the root causes of violence and crime, we will continue seeing the exact same issues in our city and in our systems.”

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Vet Voice Foundation CEO Janessa Goldbeck
Website - Facebook

• She’s an out and proud Ex-Marine who served during the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” era. Her first venture into electoral politics was a losing effort to replace Congresswoman Susan Davis.

• Her candidacy is supported by a passel of big name Democrats, like Rep. Scott Peters. Unfortunately, she’s also going to be the beneficiary of a smear campaign funded by the law enforcement establishment. Will they (as an independent entity) say her Democratic opponent is supported by a global Jewish conspiracy (code word: George Soros)? Who knows? They’ve dipped their toes in that water before.

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There are also two Republicans vying for D4 Supervisor.

Re-Open San Diego founder Amy Reichert
Website - Facebook

• Reichert was soundly defeated (64.6% to 25.4%) by Nathan Fletcher in 2022. Her claim to fame was/is the assertion that voters supported her “common sense” approach to changing the direction of San Diego.

• The fact that TV station KUSI has a crush on her should tell voters all they need to know about her stances.

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Medically retired Marine veteran Paul McQuigg
Website - Facebook Not Available

• He works for the Census bureau, collecting economic data. He thinks we are already in a recession, despite declining unemployment and inflation and an ascending stock market. (Reference–Dude, Where’s My Recession? by Paul Krugman)

• His first suggestion in a Union-Tribune interview is a 500-bed inpatient psychiatric/drug abuse hospital dedicated to the homeless population in the county. Great stuff. Except what are those homeless humans supposed to do for the three to six years it takes to build a facility?

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News Clips Atop My Inbox

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We're All Mice Trying to Chew Through a Trillion Dollar Tree

• If you consider, on the one hand, a successful Hollywood screenwriter, and on the other hand, a struggling Amazon warehouse worker in Staten Island, you might assume that the two had few common interests. Wrong. From the perspective of a $1.36 trillion company, both the screenwriter and the warehouse worker are just tiny inputs to be controlled. They are each a small mouse trying to chew their way through a redwood tree. Understanding this is not necessarily demoralizing—a trickle of water carved the Grand Canyon, and mice can chew through a redwood tree. If you are one of the workers who is in one way or another employed by one of these gargantuan companies, and you do not believe in the concept of working class solidarity across geographies and job descriptions and organizations, you are a fool. But as you walk the picket line, gnawing on the trunk of that tree that extends up as high as the clouds, you will come to the conclusion: We need a lot more fucking mice.

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. press dinner explodes in war of words and farting Via Page Six at the the NY Post. 

• The room, which included a handful of journalists as well as Kennedy’s campaign manager, former Rep. Dennis Kucinich, was stunned, seemingly unsure about whether Dechert was farting at Haden-Guest personally or at the very notion of global warming.

• (Regrettably, we may assure readers that there was no room for doubt that the climate changed in the immediate environs of the dinner table.)

• The candidate maintained a steady composure in the face of the crisis.

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An over-the-counter birth control pill is here. Where's the pro-life movement? In Jill Filipovic’s Substack.

• The truth is that the “pro-life” movement generally opposes contraception and has already taken steps to limit access to it, but the savvier national organizations — National Right to Life, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Americans United for Life — refuse to state any position on contraception, because they realize that Americans will see through the incredible hypocrisy of claiming to oppose abortion while simultaneously opposing the most effective tools to prevent much of the need for abortion. 

• Americans generally do not believe contraception is abortion, because contraception isn’t abortion. But the anti-abortion movement has gone to great lengths to conflate the two, because the anti-abortion movement is less concerned with preventing abortion than with reestablishing traditional gender roles and ensuring that women’s freedoms are radically scaled back. It’s not about preventing abortion. It’s about putting women back in their place.