San Diego could cut equity grants program before it ever started

Just three years after creating an Office of Race and Equity, San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria now wants to slash the department’s budget — including cutting funding for grants to community-based organizations.

Gloria’s proposed budget would not just remove $1.5 million for the grants next year, but also would cut $3 million in current funding that was never doled out to organizations — effectively eliminating what’s known as the Community Equity Fund. The money would instead be moved to the city’s general fund to help address a $170 million deficit.

The race and equity office had aimed to award grants to as many as 10 organizations focused on improving disparities in employment, child care and education.

Community groups have voiced frustrations over the proposal. Laila Aziz, director of operations at Pillars of the Community in southeast San Diego, told the city’s Budget Review Committee last week that it’s “heartbreaking” to see this money taken away.

“This is unfair,” she said. “Equity does not mean we have a hundred percent of the burden of the budget when everyone else is sharing a percentage. That is inequitable and it’s heartbreaking to see what’s going on.”

What is “equity”?

According to the city of San Diego, equity occurs when institutional racism and systemic disparities are eliminated, and everyone is given fair access to opportunity and resources to thrive, regardless of where they live or how they identify. Reaching equity, according to the city, “takes an intentional, strategic, thoughtful approach,” and is a form of fighting racism, inequities, and injustice in all its forms.

Rolando Charvel, the city’s director of finance, told the committee the cuts to the office were necessary to balance its $2 billion budget in accordance with the law. 

Gloria’s office also tried to balance the budget by asking city departments to take a 2% reduction, but that still wasn’t enough to eliminate the deficit. Charvel said staff’s approach included identifying cash balances — “not specifically targeting anything that had to do with equity.” 

He said the alternative to Gloria’s proposed cuts is laying off hundreds of city employees.

“It was really anything, any sort of cash balance that was sitting in funds that we could tap into and reduce and try to mitigate temporarily,” Charvel said.

Charvel added that voters could add more money to the budget after November. That’s when San Diegans will decide whether to approve two new taxes: one for flood prevention and another for public transit. 

The mission of the Office of Race and Equity is to “address all forms of disparities experienced by individuals in San Diego” by dismantling any unfair policies, procedures and budget decisions that perpetuate systemic racism, according to an office presentation.

Among the office’s work: training employees on race and equity; working with other departments to review disparities in how resources are distributed; and making recommendations on council policies. 

In 2022, for example, the department helped shape policy revisions to prioritize infrastructure projects in the city’s historically neglected neighborhoods.

Kim Desmond, the city’s first-ever chief race and equity officer, said the department started with just three staffers to serve the agency’s 12,000 employees. It has since grown to seven employees and some interns.

Desmond had planned on accepting grant applications this summer. She said her team spent much of the past few years working with other city departments and developing an “internal infrastructure” for the program — all with equity at the forefront of those discussions.

“Those are all dialogues that take place that are intentional,” Desmond said. “That has not always happened in this ecosystem.”

In addition to eliminating the Community Equity Fund, Gloria’s budget also proposes cutting the Cannabis Social Equity Program and youth drop-in centers, both of which had been transferred from other city departments to the race and equity office. 

The city’s Office of the Independent Budget Analyst noted in its report on Gloria’s proposed spending plan that the cuts may cause “unintended consequences that create disproportionate inequity” for San Diego’s most under-resourced and neglected communities. 

Council President Sean Elo-Rivera said during the committee meeting that he doesn’t blame Desmond for the cuts — especially since Desmond had asked for more funding and had been rejected. Instead, Elo-Rivera pointed to the mayor and the finance department, saying he didn’t understand why they had put these equity programs “on the chopping block.”

“I understand the budget situation that we are in, but after all the work that went into making these funds possible, these programs possible, after the multiple decisions made by multiple city councils to fund these programs, it’s hard to digest that these are the things that needed to go,” he said.

Matt Yagyagan, Gloria’s director of policy, told the committee that while the decision to cut from the race and equity office’s budget was “absolutely painful,” there’s a possibility that officials could restore the funding later in the year or in the next budget cycle.