The San Diego City Council’s vote June 10 to approve a budget reversing Mayor Todd Gloria’s proposed cuts to recreation centers and beach fire rings was largely in line with sentiments expressed by Ocean Beach community leaders.
The 7-2 vote approved a compromise $2.15 billion general fund budget for the 2025-26 fiscal year that starts Tuesday, July 1. The decision culminated months of debate and public protests prompted mostly by Gloria’s proposals to shut down all city libraries on Sundays and Mondays and significantly reduce recreation center hours to help cut a deficit projected at up to $350 million.
Gloria also proposed to eliminate all 184 fire rings at city beaches to save money on maintenance. The Parks & Recreation Department lists a total of nine rings in Ocean Beach.
The approved budget leaves the proposed Sunday library closures in place but restores full Monday hours at 16 of the city’s 37 branches, many of them in low-income neighborhoods.
The Point Loma/Hervey Library, which currently is open daily, is one of the 16 branches on the list to keep its Monday hours. The library now is open from 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays, 11:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. Mondays and Tuesdays and 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays.
The Ocean Beach Library branch already is closed on Sundays and currently is open from 11:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. Mondays and Tuesdays and 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays. It is not on the list to maintain Monday hours.
The budget completely restores all proposed cuts to recreation centers, restores money for many public restrooms at city parks and beaches and uses county money to restore funding for fire rings at least through summer 2026. It also adds funding for brush management to help prevent wildfires and clear a backlog of flood channel cleanups.
City Councilwoman Jennifer Campbell, whose District 2 includes Ocean Beach and Point Loma, was ed in opposition to the approved budget by Councilwoman Vivian Moreno.
Campbell said she has major concerns about the reliability of new city revenue proposed by her colleagues.
“I am not convinced that the entire list of things can be paid for in this particular budget,” she said. “I don’t want us to get into a situation where we are spending much more than we have.”
The Ocean Beach Planning Board on June 3 unanimously endorsed a resolution recommending that the city retain the beach fire rings and adopt dynamic scheduling for libraries and recreation centers to offset the impact of any reduced hours.
Dynamic scheduling would allow local libraries to determine their own hours of operation based on the community’s needs instead of universally closing on Sundays and Mondays.
Campbell’s Ocean Beach representative, Manny Reyes, relayed her concerns about the deficit.
“We don’t like to see the cuts, but we have to make cuts somewhere,” Reyes said. “So if we say bring back the library hours, then we have to come up with a cut [elsewhere].”
But Planning Board Chairwoman Andrea Schlageter urged that the Ocean Beach Library remain open under dynamic scheduling on Mondays because many students go there directly from OB Elementary School across the street to continue studying after school lets out.
Board member Barb Guerra-Jankowski asked whether people could step forward to plug gaps in library staffing to help maintain hours there.
Gloria’s District 2 representative, Randy Reyes, Manny’s twin brother, replied that groups like Friends of the Library already fill such roles to an extent, but the scale required for the library system likely would be overwhelming for volunteers.
“I don’t know how many people would be willing to volunteer at the capacity we need them to,” he said.
Under Gloria’s proposed budget, city recreation centers would cut their weekly operating hours from 60 to 40.
Planning Board Vice Chairman Kevin Hastings wondered why the city couldn’t allow community nonprofit organizations to run their athletic and other programs at recreation centers if volunteers were willing to fully staff the activities.
“It’s liability,” Randy Reyes said. “So then who’s responsible for the building? Volunteers?”
Reyes raised the question of removing city-provided fire rings in Ocean Beach because many residents in nearby Mission Beach, particularly on the south end, want fire rings removed since some s burn illegal items in them, such as tires and mattresses.
“In south Mission Beach, the homes are right on the beach. So all of this black smoke is coming through their homes. They want them out for that reason,” Reyes said.
Hastings said coastal OB residents also have complained about smoke from beach fires but that the community is more concerned about illegal fires on the sand than legal fires in rings.
“I think the bigger question is, does removing [fire rings] deter illegal and dangerous fires or does it bring more?” Hastings said.
Reyes said the San Diego Police Department’s Northern Division, which includes coastal areas such as Mission Beach, Pacific Beach and La Jolla, told him that enforcement against illegal beach fires is more effective when fire rings are removed.
“If there is no fire ring, they’re able to easily enforce,” Reyes said. “You’re basically doing a fire in a prohibited area. If there’s someone burning a mattress in the fire ring, that’s harder to enforce because it’s in the fire ring.”
Hastings also argued that priority should go to preserving what he called vital beach infrastructure, referring to proposed cuts to public restrooms at city parks and beaches.
That issue generated much discussion until Manny Reyes said such reductions were targeted at locations with high concentrations of restrooms, such as Mission Bay Park.
“I know the bathrooms in Ocean Beach are not being cut,” he said. “But we still are looking to have all of them restored because we think that’s a sanitary thing we should keep along all of our shoreline. So that means cutting somewhere else.”
Schlageter suggested future discussions on ways to increase city revenue that don’t rely on taxes to avoid similar controversies when the 2026-27 budget is drawn up next year.
As an example, she pointed to structures built into the concrete around New York City parks that are leased to vendors such as snack retailers.
Randy Reyes indicated that expansion of the city’s corporate sponsorship program could be the best avenue, highlighting a current project in which automaker Toyota exclusively provides all lifeguard vehicles for marketing and branding privileges.
“We’re having a conversation with the [city] Economic Development Department to figure out how we can better strengthen our corporate sponsorship program,” he said. “Things like having corporations have the opportunity to sponsor infrastructure, like the OB Pier is the Coca-Cola Pier or whatever. It could be comfort stations, bathrooms, lifeguard towers … like Lake Jack-in-the Box instead of Lake Murray. It could be anything.”
The primary sources of new revenue to help cover the newly approved budget restorations total about $10 million and include plans to start charging for parking in Balboa Park and at the San Diego Zoo sooner than expected, charging credit card fees at city parking meters and allowing digital billboards in the city.
The city’s independent budget analyst, Charles Modica, also expressed concern to the council about the funding restorations as well as new spending, warning that many of the expected new revenues are uncertain and based on optimism.
Modica said the budget makes San Diego particularly vulnerable to an economic recession, which would shrink tax revenue and force immediate cuts or significantly deplete the city’s roughly $200 million in remaining reserves.
The restorations also rely on $2.7 million in cuts to management positions, including two communications officials and program coordinators and deputy directors in several other departments.
The management cuts aggressively target the mayor’s office, including a confidential secretary position budgeted at $133,000 and two deputy chief operating officer jobs budgeted at $400,000 each in total pay.
Deputy City Attorney Leslie Fitzgerald said it’s unclear whether the council has the power to be so precise about job cuts.
“Under the city charter, the council has the authority to set the budget, including funding or defunding certain positions,” she said. “However, the charter does not give the council the authority to direct the mayor to fill positions or fire employees in those positions. That authority rests solely with the mayor.”
Gloria said after the council vote that the new spending and related moves made him unsure whether he would sign the budget as ed.
The mayor can use his line-item veto power to eliminate new spending and make other changes. But the council can override such vetoes with votes from six — one fewer than approved the new budget.
The main architects of the compromise budget — council Henry Foster, Sean Elo-Rivera, Joe LaCava and Kent Lee — said the last-minute changes will help prevent damage to low-income areas.
“This budget is not only responsible but it meets the needs of our community at an incredibly trying time,” Elo-Rivera said. “We are asking visitors to this city to chip in when they are visiting a treasure like Balboa Park, to no longer treat our city like a free playground. While we’re not restoring everything we’d like to restore, this is a giant step forward.”
