Will San Diego’s Zombie Convention Center Get Another Chance?
It’s baaaack! (Maybe)
The closed portion of today’s City Council meeting will include a presentation from the City Attorney’s office advocating for retroactively changing the vote threshold of ballot Measure C, defeated by the voters in the March 2020 primary election.
Whether or not the City Council agrees to go forward with litigation, the ballsiness of Mara Elliott even asking to change an election result more than seven months after the fact is stunning. And there are legitimate questions about what purpose would be served if the city eventually won its case.
Alliance San Diego, a local non-profit, has submitted a letter through its legal counsel objecting to any action to retroactively change the vote.
Disregarding what the voters have been told and changing the vote threshold for Measure C after the election has concluded will just breed more cynicism and disrespect for the City and the City Council, at a time when the voters’ faith in our institutions of government is at an all-time low and needs to be renewed.”
The Backstory...March 2020’s Measure C* asked voters to approve an increase to the city’s hotel tax, promising to dedicate revenue toward expanding the San Diego Convention Center, improving streets and related infrastructure, and funding programs to reduce homelessness.
(*A question with the same designation before the voters on the November ballot is unrelated.)
The ballot language clearly stated that a ⅔ majority was required for passage. Here’s a snip from the City Clerk’s certification of election results:
What the City Attorney is proposing to do is to change the approval threshold to 50%, which would mean the measure passed.
The imagined legal basis for doing so is a court ruling on a San Francisco ballot measure (also called C), which held that the ⅔ standard applied to government-initiated measures and citizen-sponsored questions simply required a majority.
In September, the state Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal challenging the 50% threshold, freeing up $492 million for housing and homeless services.
From the Mission Local:
Today’s move by the state Supreme Court was not surprising, considering the three-judge panel from the First District Court of Appeals affirmed the ruling in the city’s favor by citing two precedent-setting state Supreme Court cases.
“Following two California Supreme Court cases interpreting other language from Proposition 13 and Proposition 218, we construe the supermajority vote requirements that these propositions added to the state constitution as coexisting with, not displacing, the people’s power to enact initiatives by majority vote,” read the ruling.
This is germane because Prop. C was a citizen-generated initiative — and not placed on the ballot by city government.
BUT….there’s one huge difference between San Francisco’s measure and San Diego’s, namely that the Bay Area city’s ballot language for voters stipulated that a simple majority vote would enact the ordinance.
https://twitter.com/guerreroandi/status/1318352471077527552?s=20
Once again, the San Diego March 2020 Measure C language said a ⅔ majority was required.
The City of Oakland has pursued a lawsuit just like the one our City Council is being asked to consider. A seeming defeat of their Measure AA was overturned by an Oakland City Council vote claiming that a majority of votes was sufficient.
The Oakland Superior Court ruled against the move, saying that allowing Measure AA to be enacted with less than two-thirds of the votes would constitute “a fraud on the voters,” because of what was stated on the ballot.
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Aside from the “changing the rules after the fact” part, why would San Diego even want to proceed with a convention center expansion?
For those who may have missed last spring’s news coverage on March 2020 Measure C, making more room for convention goers was the real point of the proposition. The future of Comic Con was at stake, we were told, and what would Fifth Avenue look like without drunk conventioneers careening from one joint to the next?
Money for fixing roads and homeless services was added to the proposal because polling showed those were things that San Diegans were willing to see taxes raised for.
Local politicians and downtown hoteliers have been trying to get a convention center expansion underway for the better part of two decades. Their ideas for funding have been stymied twice, once by voters and once by the courts.
Last spring’s ballot measure was supported by a broad coalition of local interests who thought they finally put together a package voters would approve of. After all, who could be against more Comic-con, better streets, and helping homeless people?
They didn’t count on Michael McConnell, a local philanthropist who’s made advocacy for homeless humans his main cause. He claimed the funding promises made in the measure were insufficient to address the need and that it’s legalese allowed for funds to be diverted. He dumped about $400,000 into ads opposing Measure C, just enough to create doubts on voters’ minds.
A lot has happened since March 3, 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted every sector of the economy, none more so than the convention business. And despite optimism coming from those who create and cater to conferences, it’s becoming more apparent that the good old days are gone.
The 15,000 people who descended on Los Angeles for the Adobe MAX conference in 2019, with tickets listing for more than $1200, are being replaced this year with tens of thousands more registrants at no charge for a virtual event.
One of the new features being rolled out by Adobe is free(!) software for tablets and phones allowing users to create and share immersive experiences in Augmented Reality, without the need to code.
I’ll be the first to grant that Zoom and its competitors leave a lot to be desired when it comes to meetings. But I’m certain that by the time a vaccine for COVID-19 is mass distributed, the conference industry will have found better and more cost effective ways to engage their clientele. Some of the stuff I’ve seen in augmented reality beats the heck out of sitting in a drafty auditorium cheek-to-cheek waiting for insight.
Finally, we have to face the coming probability that the area surrounding the convention center is going to be subject to the impact of rising sea levels. Maybe if we have less people flying to conferences in jets we can put that off a bit.
The one thing that augmented reality/ high grade video production can’t replace (for now) is the human connections that get made in larger focused gatherings.
I posit that smaller, more regionalized in person gatherings may fill this need/want in the future. And we don't need a bigger convention center for that.
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