With a budget deficit of more than $258 million, the city of San Diego is pinching every penny it has. In his State of the City address last month, Mayor Todd Gloria didn’t mince words.
“The task ahead … is to right-size our city budget,” Gloria said. “Not just for this year, but for the long-term. It is my expectation that we handle this structural deficit this year. No gimmicks, no Hail Mary passes.”
What hasn’t helped the city’s coffers: spending on emergency projects to repair crumbling infrastructure. Last week, the Active Transportation & Infrastructure Committee ratified the contracts on 29 of those projects, to the tune of $52,208,454.
La Jolla storm drain repair
The list includes fixing collapsed storm drains, eroded roads and broken braces on the Crystal Pier. The city also paid nearly $3 million to clean out and repair clogged stormwater channels after the disastrous flooding in January 2024.
Unlike most infrastructure projects, which go through lengthy planning stages, emergency projects are rubber-stamped without a competitive bidding process. One council member conceded those pricier contracts aren’t ideal.
“Of course, none of us love emergency projects,” Marni von Wilpert said. “In an ideal world, we get to vet them out, get the lowest bid, but when things collapse, we have to fix them.”
NBC 7 Investigates pulled emergency repair records for the last three fiscal years. The city spent 84% more on emergency repair contracts in Fiscal Year 2024 than in FY2022.
The increasing repairs have become so common that city staff is now planning for them, setting aside money to cover pricey Band-Aids when critical infrastructure inevitably buckles.
NBC 7 got a firsthand look at one of those Band-Aids in September 2023 at one of the city’s stormwater pump stations in Pacific Beach; two big orange boxes installed by a private contractor when the actual pump station didn’t work. At that time, the price tag was $22,000 a month.
Stormwater Pump Station G
Those private pumps were among the $28 million spent on emergency repairs throughout the city that fiscal year. It was money the stormwater director said his department couldn’t afford to spare.
“There’s a big deficit between what the funding looks like today and what we need,” Todd Snyder told NBC 7 in 2023. “Last year alone, there were 20 emergencies relating to flooding due to failing storm drain systems … public dollars taken away from other city programs to fund stormwater repairs.”
NBC 7 reached out to three council members for an interview for this report. All three declined our requests.