San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
GASPAR, LAWSON-REMER OFFER DIFFERING VISIONS FOR COUNTY
Winner of District 3 supervisor seat to play pivotal role
The 2020 election has provided a lot of high-profile contests in San Diego County, but few may be more impactful than the District 3 seat on the Board of Supervisors between incumbent Republican Kristin Gaspar and Democrat Terra Lawson-remer.
At stake is the political balance of the five-member board that controls a $6.5 billion budget and touches so many facets of San Diegans’ lives.
From determining spending on social services, law enforcement and housing to building transit and setting environmental policy, the Board of Supervisors is arguably the most important government agency in the region.
Although county supervisors are technically nonpartisan, the board has been controlled by a Republican majority that prided itself on fiscal conservatism for decades. The major political parties are also usually involved with the campaigns, and have particularly come out in force over the last five years.
District 3 includes part of San Diego and the cities of Encinitas, Escondido, Solana Beach and Del Mar.
“You have this one district that is basically going to decide control of the board,” said Brian Adams, professor of political science at San Diego State University. “If you think of all the local races in San Diego, that is the one that has the biggest partisan impact.”
Incumbent seeks re-election
A longtime Encinitas resident alongside her husband Paul, Gaspar’s career in public office began when she was first elected to the Encinitas City Council in November 2010. She then quickly rose through the ranks of the coastal community, getting appointed deputy mayor 13 months later and then elected mayor in 2014.
In 2016, she ran for the District 3 supervisor seat and made her way into the November runoff by railing against the scandals of the then-incumbent Democratic Supervisor Dave Roberts
and campaigning as a moderate who was critical of “taking hard party lines.”
Despite Roberts’ flaws, the race was up in the air — a credit to Roberts’ incumbency advantage. Also Gaspar’s moderate pitch took a hit the night of the primary election when she revealed she had voted earlier in the day for Donald Trump to be president, telling KPBS, “I think it’s important that we have someone that moves forward with the Republican principles.”
Ultimately Gaspar won in a close contest, and her first term has focused primarily on mental health services.
As board chair in 2018, she called a conference titled “Caring for People in Psychiatric Crisis in San Diego” where supervisors heard from healthcare providers and other experts about the systemwide issues facing San Diego. She was also one of the major players earlier this year in brokering the county’s deal with Oceanside’s Tri-city Medical Center to create a 16-bed psychiatric unit.
Gaspar has also been in the public eye this past year because of her role on the board of the San Diego Association of Governments, where she has opposed a $177 billion plan to expand mass transit proposed by the head of SANDAG.
During a recent interview with the Union-tribune she criticized SANDAG’S plan as being “all wrong” for San Diego primarily because it relies to heavily on highspeed rail and can’t be paid for without a tax increase. She added the economic strain caused by the pandemic only makes the plan even less palatable.
“We’re in the middle of an economic crisis, it is time we stop introducing plans we can’t afford,” Gaspar said. “It’s about time we take a much more balanced approach to our transportation for this region, especially in light of the circumstances, and actually create something we can implement.”
The first term supervisor said her focus in a second term would be aiding the region’s economic recovery in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. She added her other priorities would continue to be mental health, affordable housing and juvenile justice reform.
“These are things we have not given enough attention to for decades in this region,” Gaspar said. “For me, it is about laying the framework that can be built on.”
Progressive challenge
A San Diego native who moved back home in 2014, Lawson-remer is economist, attorney and community organizer currently living in Encinitas with her daughter Eevkai.
After graduating Yale University and New York University, she worked as an economist with the World Bank and the United Nations and then as college professor before becoming a senior adviser in the Obama Administration’s Treasury Department.
Throughout her life Lawson-remer has also been involved with social and environmental justice groups as well as other community groups including working just a few years ago as one of lead organizers in the Flip the 49th campaign that helped oust former Rep. Darrell Issa and replace him with Rep. Mike Levin, D-san Juan Capistrano.
Now Lawson-remer says she wants to bring her broader, unique experience to the board and help address some of the region’s biggest challenges.
“My life has always been driven by service and looking to see where’s the work I can do to bring my talents and skills to bear and make the contribution where it is needed most,” Lawson-remer said. “I think that moment right now is at our county. We have the opportunity to be a much better county, a much better region, on so many levels.”
If elected, she said her first priority would be helping the region recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, adding that a turnaround starts by reducing transmission and the county needs to invest more in public health. Beyond that, she highlighted housing, protecting the environment and addressing climate change as priorities.
She said the county could reduce the costs housing developers face while waiting for a permit to be approved, and suggested enticing developers to build more affordable housing by allowing those constructing such homes to jump the line during the permitting process.
She also suggested the county could help reduce building costs by putting in place some model plans that have already been pre-approved, similar to what the county launched last year by providing pre-approved plans for “granny flats.”
On the environmental front, Lawson-remer said the county could also work with homeowners and businesses to retrofit their properties to be more energy efficient, as well as partner with employers to increase teleworking and reduce traffic. She also was critical of the board for its repeated efforts to maintain a county Climate Action Plan that does not comply with state standards.
The county has spent more than a $1 million in legal fees over the past several years defending its climate plan. After the state Supreme Court ruled against the county earlier this year, supervisors opted to begin developing a new plan.
“Current supervisors, including my opponent, have continued to vote to waste taxpayer money to appeal those lawsuits,” Lawson-remer said. “It is lunacy. We should have a climate plan that is protecting our planet for future generations and protecting San Diego’s beautiful ecosystems and coastlines.”
State of the race
The District 3 seat is truly up for grabs.
Gaspar had an edge in fundraising during the last reporting period and her campaign had almost twice as much cash available as Lawson-remer’s as of Sept. 19, $360,385 and $184,887 respectively.
However, independent spending will factor mightily into the race. The local Republican Party and the conservative Lincoln Club are investing significantly to support Gaspar, with the Lincoln Club reportedly spending about $100,000 on Gaspar’s behalf just in September.
Similarly, the local Democratic Party and most of organized labor have lined up behind Lawson-remer and invested on her behalf with unions making a $100,000 digital ad buy on her behalf in late September.
Endorsement-wise, things have fallen largely as expected with prominent Republicans like San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, Sheriff Bill Gore and Supervisor Jim Desmond backing Gaspar and prominent Democrats like Supervisor Nathan Fletcher, State Senate President Pro Tempore Toni Atkins, Gov. Gavin Newsom, and all of San Diego’s congressional delegation backing Lawson-remer.
Two notable San Diego figures who have not weighed in on the race, though, are longtime Supervisors Dianne Jacob and Greg Cox, both of whom are Republicans.
During the primary, Gaspar captured the top spot with 42.8 percent of the vote, but Lawson-remer still captured 31.2 percent of the vote — and that was despite the presence of fellow Democrat Olga Diaz on the ballot taking almost 26 percent of the vote.
Meanwhile voter registration favors Lawson-remer with 150,694 registered Democrats, 110,751 registered Republicans and 106,820 registered no party preference voters calling District 3 home as of Oct. 1.
Adams, the political science professor from SDSU, said the race will probably be decided by those independent voters who don’t care about partisanship, which could prove more of a challenge for Gaspar given her record.
Gaspar presented herself as a moderate when she first ran for office in 2016 and is trying to present herself as a moderate to voters now. She stated in a ballot statement that she works with everyone from Trump to Newsom and Fletcher and saying in public forums she “doesn’t have the luxury of only working with people who are popular.”
Fletcher has adamantly disputed the notion that he and Gaspar have an even remotely good working relationship, which has been part of a back and forth in the Fletcher and Gaspar camps in the past week.
Regardless, Gaspar has cast several high-profile incidents that many would regard as partisan.
She’s appeared with Trump at the White House on multiple occasions and in 2018, Gaspar led the board’s effort to join the Trump Administration’s lawsuit against California over the state’s sanctuary laws. Then a year later Gaspar was the lone member of the board to oppose the county suing the Trump Administration over its mishandling of asylum seekers, an issue that forced that county to intervene.
Gaspar was also one of two supervisors to oppose a proposal from the Registrar of Voters to provide satellite registrar’s offices during the March primary.
And during one of the most emotional board meetings in recent years, Gaspar was also one of three supervisors who pushed the county to oppose Assembly Bill 392. That bill, authored by Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, was signed into law several months later and put stricter standards on police use of force.
“This is a swing district, yet you have an incumbent who has really tacked right and hasn’t tried to moderate at all,” Adams said. “That is unusual. Gaspar hasn’t really tried to appeal to those moderate voters and that is why the race is so difficult for her.”
Lawson-remer in some ways faces a similar challenge. Not only does she have to moderate her tone and grapple with lower name recognition, she also has to fend off attacks from Gaspar as being “too radical” for the district.
“She can’t appear to be too far left in this district, but she also doesn’t want to abandon her liberal allies either,” Adams said.