WILL MAYOR GLORIA MAKE SANDAG SHAPE UP?

An insight touted by psychologists, ethicists and leadership gurus alike leaps to mind when reviewing the shoddy history of the San Diego Association of Governments — the region’s primary transportation planning agency, with a massive $1 billion-plus annual budget. It holds that when no single party in a large organization bears primary responsibility for ensuring positive outcomes, such outcomes are less likely — because no one feels responsible when bad things happen.

This is the default flaw in SANDAG, which is very loosely governed by a board consisting of local mayors, council members and supervisors. Under a 2017 state law, SANDAG was forced to change to weighted voting rules that base clout on population. This gave the city of San Diego a dominant say on SANDAG’s future. The changes were billed as obvious “reforms” — not just a power play to stymie elected Republicans cool to transit-centric spending — that responded to years of scandals in which SANDAG knowingly trumpeted grossly false claims about how many projects it could afford to build.

But while the scandals forced longtime SANDAG Executive Director Gary Gallegos to resign — and led to his replacement by Hasan Ikhrata, a veteran transportation executive — the “reforms” resulted in zero change in an internal culture that is indifferent, then and now, to the need for consistency and competence. Yet after decades of dysfunction, many board members still don’t seem to grasp that if they don’t hold staff responsible, no one will.

This was on ample display in the Dec. 3 UnionTribune Watchdog report about the fallout from the abrupt recent firing of SANDAG finance director Lauren Warrem — and her lawsuit alleging it was retaliation for her demanding a stronger agency response to evidence that up to 45,000 local drivers have been billed for using a South County toll road they did not use. The vendor and sub-vendor involved in the fiasco continue to receive millions and appear to have faced no real consequences.

SANDAG officials seem certain to challenge some of Warrem’s claims. But how much credibility do they have? As Watchdog reporter Jeff McDonald detailed, the agency has continued its years-long pattern of not disputing audits that show the agency accepts sloppy, costly work from consultants. It provides little transparency on how it responds to serious claims of malfeasance. Its oversight rules are so lax that they invite vendors to collude to delay projects and increase payments coming their way. SANDAG also violates federal standards with poor record-keeping on multimillion-dollar contracts and routinely awards contracts without competitive bidding. Reviews also showed 44 recent occasions in which managers did not inform the board, as required, when they extended work orders worth more than $100,000. An audit found some vendors ended up getting millions of dollars more than the modest amounts in initial contracts. This is the sort of governmental Petri dish from which corruption routinely emerges.

But there’s more. Scandals also include appalling disclosures in 2020 that Ikhrata had essentially given away hundreds of thousands of dollars in severance payments to departing employees without informing the board or ensuring the workers were legally entitled to receive the payoffs.

Yet is this history why Ikhrata (annual pay: $414,149) is leaving his post on Dec. 29? Nope. He’s moving on primarily because he pushed board members too hard on policy decisions, starting with his arguably premature embrace of an unpopular per-mile fee on drivers to make up for tax revenue lost as electric vehicles become more common.

The search for his successor is expected to take months. Here’s hoping the single individual with the best chance to right the SANDAG ship — San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria — realizes he must assert his city’s clout by demanding Ikhrata’s successor be a tough, disciplined manager who leaves huge policy calls to the board. If that doesn’t happen, it’s hard to imagine county voters ever agreeing to raise their own taxes to pay for the bold transportation projects that Gloria and most Democrats believe are needed to respond to the climate emergency. Without a revolution in SANDAG’s internal culture, that trust gap won’t — and shouldn’t — go away.