By Karen Pearlman
San Diego County has a new legal tool to go after some of the region’s most persistent problems — and the woman leading the charge knows her way around the law well enough to make a major impact.
Lemon Grove Mayor Alysson Snow was just named to lead County Counsel’s newly created Consumer Fairness and Public Protection unit, a division designed to help residents and small businesses fight scams, hidden fees, unsafe products, unfair insurance denials and pollution.
And Snow says she’s already started prioritizing three targets: predatory social media platforms, ghost gun manufacturers and polluters behind the Tijuana River sewage crisis.
The CFPP will rely on California’s Unfair Competition Law — legal authority that, until now, only the San Diego County District Attorney and the California Attorney General could wield.
Snow said the group’s potential reach is “wide open” and would also include issues like calling out landlords who withhold security deposits, neglect repairs or charge market rent for substandard housing.
Named Consumer Advocate of the Year by Consumer Attorneys of San Diego in 2019, Snow brings more than 20 years of consumer protection experience to the role.
She most recently served as a professor in practice at the University of San Diego School of Law, where she founded and directed the Housing Rights Legal Clinic. Before that, she led the Consumer Protection Division at the Legal Aid Society of San Diego, handling predatory lending and consumer fraud cases and representing more than 1,000 clients in litigation, trials and appeals.
“I am coming with a really unique background in having been in the trenches,” Snow said. “My information comes from the day-to-day people who are seeking help, and I will continue to maintain that connection between local legal aid units and nonprofit legal services folks and law enforcement, and work together to identify and spot trends to help figure out what is the new fraud that’s flooding our towns.”
Snow mentioned a plan to build a public complaint database modeled on a tool she says was one of the most valuable innovations to come out of the 2008 financial crisis. Snow recalled working the subprime mortgage crisis as a Legal Aid attorney when the Federal Trade Commission lacked the data to act on the fraud she and colleagues were seeing firsthand.
“We would reach out to them and say, ‘Hey, look, this is going badly. We are seeing a lot of predatory loans… just pure fraud.’ And they would come back to us with, ‘Well, we can’t act on anecdotal evidence. We need data,’” Snow said. “But they were the ones in the position to collect the data. They were not collecting the data.”
The creation of the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under the Dodd-Frank Act later established exactly that kind of database, logging company names and the specific violations alleged against them — data Snow said proved essential both for building legal cases and for identifying repeat offenders.
She said standing up a similar reporting tool locally is one of her first goals in the new role.
Still the mayor
Snow continues to serve as Mayor of Lemon Grove while taking on the county position, a dual role she said requires strict separation between the two jobs.
“I make sure that everything’s separate… I don’t mix the two things,” Snow said. “If there’s a potential conflict of interest, I get pulled off from those things at the county level, and then at the city level, I recuse myself if there’s something that I need to vote on that might have conflict of interest issues.”
Snow noted previous Lemon Grove Mayor Racquel Vasquez held a job with the City of San Diego while in office, establishing precedent for elected officials in the city holding outside public-sector positions.
“Any time something comes up where we have a conflict of interest, it’s our duty to explain that, express it, and then if we need to recuse ourselves,” she said.
Not everyone has been convinced by Snow’s rise to the new county role.
Kenneth King, a frequent critic of Snow, shared some thoughts on the Facebook group Lemon Grove Current Events and Politics. King questioned the timing of her appointment in a recent post, suggesting it followed her support for the low-barrier homeless encampment in Lemon Grove some residents opposed. King has repeatedly challenged Snow’s decisions as mayor on the page.
Snow framed the new unit as a local response to what she described as the erosion of federal consumer protections.
“It’s been really devastating to watch the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is one of the only regulatory agencies that’s really been protecting normal people, just everyday people,” Snow said. “There’s not one of us that doesn’t have a credit card or a bank account. There’s not one of us that hasn’t experienced identity theft or known somebody who has.”
She said the unit’s mission is ultimately about restoring fair competition to the local economy, not targeting businesses broadly.
“We’re not out here to attack good businesses,” she said. “I’m all for good businesses, but for the bad ones, there needs to be accountability, and this is one of the ways that we can drive accountability in a very effective, meaningful way.”
Given the size and scope of San Diego County’s economy, she said, the unit’s work could be far-reaching.
“This is the fourth largest county and the fourth largest economy in the world,” Snow said. “There’s a lot of capacity for this group to be able to foment a lot of change throughout the economy, and we’ll be partnering up with other similar county agencies, city agencies, statewide agencies and national agencies to make sure that we’re fighting for all of us.”