It started five months ago when Mayor Jerry Sanders attempted to eliminate a youth swimming program and slash funding for the homeless.  Today apparently, a deal was brokered between Sanders and the two ranking members of the San Diego City Council to, effectively, give Sanders everything he could possibly want.  Come flip out on the flip.

Council President Scott Peters and Council President Pro Tem Tony Young hammered out the deal with Sanders which, in effect, ensures that Sanders can’t cut the ENTIRE government without approval.

The temporary agreement, which runs through the end of the fiscal year in June, requires Sanders to notify (not get approval from) the City Council if he decides to eliminate “any program or service affecting the community.”  Further, it caps budget cuts at 10% or $4 million per department before the mayor needs to get Council approval.  And even then…would this City Council have the interest in standing up to his budget cuts in a real way?

So essentially, the City Council has decided to grant the mayor power to, if he wants to, cut 10% of the city budget between now and June with absolutely no oversight.  This doesn’t sound like an agreement that protects anything from an “Only Mayor” form of government.  And it sure as hell wouldn’t do much to protect youth swimming programs or funding for outreach to the homeless.  But at least councilmembers will get a memo about it as they watch their authority float away.  It’s like they haven’t been paying any attention to the ENTIRE Bush Administration.

Sanders said of the deal “If we had been locked up in an endless battle then the citizens would have been the ones who suffered from that.” I’m not sure from where he gets the impression that caution when cutting governmental services or responsible legislative oversight is detrimental to the people, but he’s apparently well stocked with enablers in the City Council.

Ben Franklin stuck that in Poor Richard’s Almanac 250 years ago.  These days, with both the literal water well and metaphorical financial well drying up in San Diego, Mayor Jerry Sanders is letting us know the worth of water.  And guess what? It’s apparently worth much more in your house than it is at your office.

The Center on Policy Initiatives has released a (pdf) study analyzing the mayor’s new proposal to raise the cost of water in the city.  This proposal is currently flying through its council appointment and shows little signs of being held up, much less stopped.  This is, primarily, because nobody disputes the goal of the measure- raise water prices to fix an antiquated and dangerous sewer system.  As is so often the case though, the devil is in the details.

Mayor Sanders has proposed raising water rates across the board to all types of property.  However, when all is said and done in these adjustments, CPI’s analysis reveals that residential customers will be paying 30% more for their water than business customers.  In the process, it would target its rate hikes specifically on residential customers:  11.75% hike for single-family homes, 18.5% hike for multi-family buildings (apartments, etc.), and just 2.42% for businesses and industry.

So on the one hand, it’s just working families getting the shaft in a city that’s been giving them the shaft forever.  The upper class won’t miss a beat, industry is fine, but low and middle class families get hit hard.  Aside from the urge to just write it off as Sanders being a jerk (he is, but that’s several other stories), why does this make sense for him and/or the city?

San Diego has spent the past decade throwing itself headlong into luxury development.  Expensive high rise condos downtown, McMansion developments stretching for miles, luxury hotels on the coast to match the snazzy new convention center…they all conspire to push low income residents further out and suck in businesses who smell green blood in the water.  Jerry Sanders was ushered into office largely on his promises to speed up this sort of development, and he’s done a pretty good job of delivering on that promise.

But now the real estate bubble is deflating, new condos have gone from the upper 200s to the upper 100s in a matter of six months, and the tax boost from new money is tapering off.  You’ve got people locked into the houses and condos they’ve bought recently, and they’re much less apt to pack up and leave town during a downswing than are businesses who have profited from the economic boom.  The more stable (or trapped if you’re a pessimist) side of the water biz is the residential side.  San Diego in general, and Mayor Sanders in particular, are no slouches when it comes to doing backflips for business interests.  There are grand designs for the interior extension of 125 that imagine it becoming a major industrial and manufacturing center for the region, with corporate jets flying into the refurbished airport and buckets of new revenue to bail out the fiscal disaster that is the San Diego budget.

San Diego is more than happy to take advantage of its working class because of the presumption that it’ll always be there one way or another.  The cynical reality that nobody in the government wants to admit to is that as long as there’s a never-ending supply of Mexicans coming across the border legally, illegally, or as commuters, the working class of this city and county is always going to be taken for granted.  The new water rates are just one more reflection of the skewed priorities in San Diego’s government.

ED: Corrected 18.75% increase for multifamily residential to 18.5%

On Monday, the San Diego City Council voted 5-3 to require the mayor (at the moment, the increasingly autocratic Jerry Sanders) to get City Council approval before making cuts to the budget which would affect the level of service provided to residents.

Councilwoman (and two-time almost mayor) Donna Frye laid into Mayor Sanders, reminding people “‘It wasn’t because there was too much public process’ that the city got into its current financial problems, … ‘It was because there was too little public input.'”

Jerry Sanders, for his part, is a bit nonplussed about the whole sharing of power thing, and demonstrated that he isn’t above claiming to be the only useful elected official or throwing around allegations of impropriety as long as it never turns out that the recipient is rubber and he is, in fact, glue:

I will ask voters a relatively straightforward question: Which do you prefer, a mayor intent on implementing reforms and maximizing tax dollars, or a city government that fights reforms and is controlled by special interests?

For a bit of context, San Diego has Proposition F on the books, also known as the “strong mayor” prop.  This was passed in 2004 in response to the pension funding crisis, and mostly because Jerry Sanders came in promising to fix everyone’s problems if everyone would just stay out of his way.  With ethics scandals, the pension crisis, and the resignation of Mayor Dick Murphy, people were happy to give up 70 years of the mayor as more of a manager.  So Jerry Sanders got his way, and is, as a result, pretty used to getting his way since.

But now, even those who voted against this measure aren’t too pleased with how things are working out.  Two of the ‘no’ votes came from Council President Scott Peters and Councilman Kevin Faulconer, who like the idea but not the specific measure.  “‘One of the things Prop. F did create was a strong-mayor form of government, not an ‘only-mayor’ form of government,’ Peters said.”

Now, this is going to likely end up being a protracted and ugly fight.  Sanders won’t sign this legislation, and the 5-3 vote isn’t enough to override him.  If the City Council were to override, the mayor has already started talking about putting it on the ballot if he doesn’t get his way.  On the other hand, if Peters and Faulconer get language that they like, there would be seven votes in favor of dialing back mayoral power.

Sanders, for his part, is rolling out all sorts of straight-from-the-home-office scare tactics, admonishing those who would deign to have an actual public process that the fire department wouldn’t be able to respond to big fires without council approval, because service would be impacted too greatly.  Quite frankly, if that’s the best he’s got, I look forward to him talking about more.  Lots more.  In the meantime, at least the city council is starting to stand up for functional, participatory government.

Update: I almost forgot, hat tip to the Center on Policy Initiatives for reminding me in their email that I wanted to write about this.