San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria allegedly paid back San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) for investing in his political campaign by ensuring the utility was awarded a 20-year electric and gas franchise agreement, according to an attorney who sued over the matter in San Diego Superior Court.
“SDG&E put thousands of dollars in Mayor Gloria’s campaign right at the end paying for ads that compared Barbara Bry, his opponent, to Donald Trump,” said attorney Michael Aguirre. “They ran a smear campaign against her, and that was instrumental in getting Mayor Gloria elected. So, it was payback. Mayor Gloria is beholden to SDG&E for doing that.”
Bry, an Independent, is a former city of San Deigo council member; Gloria is a Democrat, according to Ballotpedia.
Aguirre is representing San Diego resident Kathryn Burton who filed a lawsuit alleging that the City Council of San Diego violated the open meetings law.
“They excluded the public from the meetings in which the council members made up their minds together, and that was all done behind closed doors and it was done through the intermediary and partly by the mayor himself,” Aguirre told the Southern California Record.
The new franchise agreement was approved by the City Council in a 6-3 vote on June 8, according to media reports.
“The six people we sued are very erratic, chaotic, uncoordinated in making mistakes and trying to clarify the record but are making it more ambiguous,” Aguirre said. “They've just been falling all over themselves struggling with trying to make something look like it was an honest deal when it was a dishonest deal.”
The council members named as defendants are Stephen Whitburn, Marni von Wilpert, Chris Cate, Raul Aampillo, Sean Elo-Rivera, and Council President Jennifer Campbell, but Aguirre said he didn’t think they would face consequences.
“Right now, political wrongdoing doesn't seem to be high on any prosecutor's list,” he said.
Chris Chan, director of council communications for the city of San Diego, and council president Jennifer Campbell told the Southern California Record that no city council members responded to requests for comment. Mayor Gloria, who is not named as a defendant, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Mayor Gloria did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
“He is not on the legislative body that actually adopted the ordinance so he doesn't have the authority to undo the ordinance,” Aguirre said. “The three council members who voted against the franchise agreement are carrying the banner of San Diego.”
The plaintiff, through her attorney Aguirre, is asking the court to set aside the franchise agreement.
“A do-over would be that they would put together an honest invitation to bid, they would make a legitimate good faith effort to beat the bushes and find as many bidders as they can and then to award the bid to the legitimately lowest bidder,” Aguirre said.
A competitor that could potentially benefit from a set-aside, Aguirre added, is a consortium.
“It's not going to be the typical looking institutional investor-owned utility,” he said. “We only have three in California. and they're a monopoly. One of the possibilities would be to study how the city might do better in creating a different set of relationships using a much different group of suppliers so that there'd be instead of one franchise agreement, there might be 25 franchise agreements.”