In San Diego County Supervisor District 4 — which includes much of central San Diego, La Mesa and Spring Valley — the Union-Tribune Editorial Board endorses former La Mesa Councilmember Kristine Alessio. In her campaign, the attorney has spoken out against Board of Supervisors Chair Terra Lawson-Remer and her call for a potential county tax hike of $1 billion, urged supervisors to be prudent about spending and called for the county to do much more to prevent an encore of the devastating 2024 floods in South County communities. The UCSD graduate is seen as an able business advocate with an independent streak — a Republican with a planning background who is a moderate voice on such issues as La Mesa’s climate action policies.
This endorsement may surprise some, given the editorial board’s past comments about incumbent Supervisor Monica Montgomery Steppe, who is also an attorney. Last September, we praised her for her success in winning approval for more independent oversight of county jails where inmate deaths have been far too common since at least 2009. In 2023, we endorsed her bid for an open supervisor seat, saying she had shown “courage and independence” representing her constituents on the San Diego City Council.
There is also the fact that District 4 voting won’t be held until November, as there are only two candidates. But in our view, the Board of Supervisors has gone seriously off track over the past five months, with Montgomery Steppe joining with Lawson-Remer and Supervisor Paloma Aguirre to make two truly awful decisions. We hope our early endorsement puts a spotlight on these mistakes.
Some background is in order. Under state law, reserve funds are only supposed to be used by local governments to ensure they are able to continue to provide basic services during economic downturns, natural disasters or unforeseen emergencies — and then only with the approval of a super-majority of governing boards. Beginning last spring, in response to looming cuts in federal aid orchestrated by Republicans in control of Congress and the White House, Lawson-Remer said it would be necessary to tap into county reserve funds.
Yet with Lawson-Remer unable to get Republican board members Joel Anderson or Jim Desmond to be a fourth vote to tap reserves — they don’t believe the county faces a true emergency — she appeared to be stymied. This led her to undertake a power play with a stunning twist. In December, Lawson-Remer and fellow majority Democrats Monica Montgomery Steppe and Paloma Aguirre used what was widely seen as an “accounting scheme” to approve dipping into reserves on a simple majority vote of the five-member board, instead of the previously required four votes.
The twist: They did not use the reserves to backfill a program that had lost federal funding. Instead, they tapped the emergency reserves to pay one-time bonuses of about $1,000 to most county employees. The Dec. 9 decision signaled the county board had become a mirror of the San Diego City Council: a body that cares much more about its employees than its constituents.
This abuse of power was obvious and alarming. Yet in some ways, it was an unsurprising tactic in a state where public employee union power is so entrenched.
But what happened on April 21 was ominous and bizarre, not conventional. At Lawson-Remer’s behest, the board took initial steps to seek support for an overhaul of the county charter that used ballot language that creates the impression that the ballot measure “set” supervisor term limits when it actually weakens them by allowing board members to seek a third term. The language would ask voters to approve term limits for the county’s district attorney, sheriff, treasurer and assessor “where allowed by law” — without mentioning that such limits are not allowed under state law. So why bring it up in the ballot language? The only logical conclusion is that board majority members want voters to think an anti-term limits measure that would allow them to seek a third term is actually pro-term limits.
This is not akin to the “bait-and-switch” used by San Diego City Hall to get voters to approve imposing trash fees on single-family homes — telling voters in 2022 that the fees would be far lower than those eventually adopted last summer. It is vastly worse: elected leaders openly attempting to deceive voters to get them to approve changes that will benefit those elected leaders.
The U-T Editorial Board has no desire to feud with Montgomery Steppe. But it is hard to detect any “courage and independence” on display in her actions on Dec. 9 and April 21.
Alessio is a sharp critic of both the misuse of reserves and the term-limit gambit. We urge county District 4 residents to take a stand for transparency and honesty by voting for her.