How San Diego’s deal on Balboa Park parking, trash fee came together

The path to the agreement that cuts San Diego’s deeply unpopular trash pickup fee and eliminates the paid parking program at Balboa Park began weeks ago on the other side of the country, with a tap on the shoulder.

The tap came from City Council President Joe LaCava. The shoulder belonged to Kevin Faulconer — former mayor, ex-councilmember and current head of the Lincoln Club, a pro-business group that had mounted a signature-gathering drive to put a measure on the fall ballot to repeal the fees.

Both were in Washington, D.C., as part of the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce’s trip April 26-29 to lobby Congress. That encounter was the start of an unusual, weeks-long sequence of meetings and talks that led to the final deal. 

There were numerous phone calls, closed-door council sessions, even a meeting one night at LaCava’s Bird Rock home with Faulconer and Lincoln Club Chairman Scott Bedingfield. 

Hammering together a deal involved not just Faulconer and LaCava but also Michael Zucchet, the influential head of the city’s largest labor union — himself a former councilman and one-time political rival of Faulconer nearly a quarter-century ago.

That trio was joined by Mike Aguirre, a former city attorney whose lawsuit against the city seeking to reduce the fees was about to get underway when LaCava and Faulconer began talking. 

And when the first proposed settlement was rejected by the council, it was Councilmember Stephen Whitburn who negotiated the structure of the final deal with Faulconer and Zucchet.

Councilmembers on Wednesday approved a settlement to eliminate paid parking in Balboa Park by the end of the year and slash the city’s monthly trash fee to $38.75 by July 2027. The deal is expected to cut city revenue by about $2.2 million in the upcoming fiscal year and by about $14.4 million in each of the two following fiscal years.

And while the agreement came in the middle of the trial, LaCava said that the lawsuit was not the reason he initially reached out to Faulconer. 

Instead, it was the looming threat of the Lincoln Club ballot measure — and the potentially devastating impact it could have on the city’s already wobbly finances if voters approved it.

Signature gathering was underway. City officials had warned a successful repeal would blow a $150 million hole in the city budget, inevitably leading to deep cuts in services across the city.

“My focus was really on the ballot measure,” LaCava said in an interview. “And that’s what really motivated me, that there was this looming threat that everyone acknowledged but I wasn’t seeing any kind of movement on.” 

After returning from Washington, he invited Faulconer and Bedingfield to his home. It was a week before the trial in Aguirre’s lawsuit was set to begin.

After an initial exchange of deal points and more meetings over the next two days, by Thursday the shape of an initial agreement emerged. 

Under those terms the monthly trash collection fee would be dropped to $29 for two years, then boosted to $43 maximum. The current fee is just under $44, and was set to rise to $55 next July. 

The $29 represented the maximum amount the city estimated the fee would be when voters approved the charge in 2022.

The agreement also called for the city to handle the billing, instead of the costs being attached to the property tax bills of homeowners, as is the case now. Billing through tax bills was another source of anger among many city residents.

With the deal in hand, LaCava — whose talks with Faulconer were known to only a few people — moved to bring it to the full council at a May 11 closed session. 

When Zucchet learned the details of the deal in a call from LaCava over that weekend, he was strongly opposed. Zucchet began contacting councilmembers urging them to reject it. 

Both the $29 fee and bringing the billing into the city were deal breakers. The new fee would cost the city at least $50 million less revenue per year, because it did not factor in the rise in inflation since 2022, when the fee was set.

Bringing the billing in-house would cost about $10 million per year as the city set up and maintained its own billing system. By contrast, the city would pay the county about $25,000 per year to levy the fee through property tax bills.

By the time of the closed session, Zucchet had made his opposition clear to other members of the council, “I know Mike was not shy about sharing some heartburn about the deal,” LaCava said.

LaCava countered that while the deal had a “hefty price tag” for the city, it provided certainty. It eliminated the potentially catastrophic ballot measure. And by this time Aguirre had been apprised of the deal, and a settlement would also mean that suit would be dismissed. (The lawyers would collect their legal fees, which have not yet been determined.)

But by a 5-3 vote the council rejected the deal at a closed session on May 11.

With that, Aguirre’s trial got underway the following day. LaCava stepped back, thinking a “cooling-off period” would be helpful. He told Faulconer he was still available “to share my perspective of what the council might want, and see if there is some meeting of the minds.”

But when a deal seemed dead, Councilmember Stephen Whitburn — who was among the six members of the council who approved the trash fees a year ago — stepped in. He and Faulconer began discussions that ranged over that week, according to two sources.

Whitburn declined a request for an interview “out of respect for the other participants,” a staff member said in an email. 

Zucchet also was part of this second round of negotiations. After several intense days a framework emerged: the monthly fee of $38.75 starting in July 2027, inflation-adjusted from the $29 original top-end estimate. And crucially — no direct billing by the city. 

Also, Whitburn and Faulconer came up with an unexpected sweetener: eliminate the paid parking at Balboa Park. The park is in Whitburn’s district, and he had voted against imposing paid parking when the council approved it in September.

On Sunday evening, as Aguirre was preparing for the last days of the trial, Faulconer called him and said Balboa Park parking could be part of the deal. The lawyer was skeptical. “I thought to myself, ‘Kevin, that’s a bridge too far,’” Aguirre said. 

Zucchet, who declined to comment for this story, called LaCava and told him there was a new deal on the table that “might be more palatable” to council members, LaCava recalled.

It was. The council unanimously approved the settlement in another closed session Wednesday. By noon Aguirre’s lawsuit was put on hold. (It will be dismissed after the council gives its expected approval in an open session on June 8).

At a news conference later that day, Zucchet said the settlement included compromises from all sides. “No one up here is getting everything they want,” he said as Faulconer, Whitburn, Aguirre and his law partner Mia Severson stood behind him.

Mayor Todd Gloria’s role in the talks is unclear. The communications office did not respond to inquiries this week, one when the mayor was dealing with the aftermath of the mass shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego. The mayor issued a statement after the news conference saying the agreement was “not perfect or ideal” but protects the city from potential drastic cuts.

“The settlement is a compromise that resolves multiple existing threats that could have forced more than $150 million in additional cuts,” he said.

LaCava wouldn’t comment on Gloria’s role, saying he was “reluctant to speak about other elected officials, where they were or weren’t.” But he said he told the mayor about the first agreement and there was “some level of support” for a deal from Gloria. 

In an interview Faulconer praised the two councilmembers who he said “brought a problem-solving attitude to this,” and said Zucchet’s role was critical. 

“He’s smart,” he said of the union leader. “He is an extremely hard worker and he has a ton of integrity. This positive result would not have happened without his involvement.”

But the decrease in revenue from the fees could pose problems for the city budget next year, especially. The council is about to approve a budget for this coming year that is expected to include deep cuts to arts funding, libraries and parks and some staff reductions in order to close a $146 million deficit.

LaCava, however, said that could partially be closed by the city deciding not to add on trash pickup features that were planned to go into effect next year and would have raised the fee. Those services include weekly recycling pickup and bulky item collections.