San Diego Taxpayers Releases Watchdog Report Showing That City Hall Staffing Has Grown Substantially Faster Than the Rest of the City
The San Diego County Taxpayers Association recent released a watchdog report showing that San Diego City Hall office staff has grown at a rate that is substantially faster than both the city’s population as well as overall city employees.
This new Taxpayers report asks a simple question: before cutting essential neighborhood services and raising fees and taxes on San Diegans, has City Hall looked hard enough at itself?
Over the last six years, San Diego’s population has marginally changed. Yet the offices that set the City’s policy agenda, including the City Council, Mayor’s Office and City Attorney, became significantly more expensive. Nowhere is that growth more striking than in City Council offices. Since Fiscal Year 2021, Council offices added 51 positions, increasing staffing by 47 percent, and grew annual costs by $9.68 million. Taken together, Council offices employ a staggering 160 people and consume $22.5 million in annual budget. They now cumulatively represent a larger budget than many City departments responsible for delivering public services. In fact, the growth in Council staffing alone is larger than the entire staff of eleven City departments.
At a time when San Diegans are being told they must accept shorter library hours, fewer recreation programs, reduced park maintenance, cuts to arts and culture, the elimination of support for small businesses and our oldest communities, closed public restrooms, deteriorating streets and crumbling infrastructure, taxpayers deserve to know why City Hall’s elected offices have grown so dramatically before asking residents to absorb even more reductions in the services they rely on every day.
“With a nine-figure budget deficit, everyone at the city needs to do more with less, and that includes City Council offices,” said Taxpayers president & CEO Mark Kersey. “It is outrageous that services residents depend on are being cut while City Hall offices grow unchecked.”
Key Findings
1. Council offices grew 4.5x faster than citywide staffing. The Council added 51 net positions and $9.68 million in annual cost since FY21 — a 47 percent headcount increase and a 72.8 percent budgetary increase from FY21 actuals to the proposed FY27 budget — for the same nine districts and the same constituent base. Incredibly, even with a $118 million structural budget deficit, Council office budgets in the draft FY27 budget were only reduced by six percent from FY26 and are still over eight percent higher than they were just two years ago. One Council office (District 9) is not facing an overall office expenditure reduction at all (other than the token $100,000 reduction in CPPS funds that every office is giving up) and is actually budgeted for an additional position in FY27, increasing it to nearly 18 full-time equivalent employees and representing the largest staff among the nine Council districts.
2. The Mayor’s Office, even consolidated, costs more for fewer people. Comparing apples-to-apples (FY21’s Mayor + COO + ACOO + CFO + boards and commissions + government affairs versus FY27’s consolidated Mayor’s Office), staffing is down 9.8 percent but the budget is up 35.3 percent.
3. The City Attorney’s budget grew 49.8 percent, faster than its workload. Headcount grew only 9.8 percent (in line with the citywide number), but the office’s annual cost increased by $31.6 million.
4. The city’s population is essentially flat. From the 2020 Census (1,386,932) to 2025 Census estimates used in the mayor’s proposed budget (1,404,452), San Diego grew 1.3 percent — about a third of one percent per year.
5. The FY27 deficit is being closed on the constituent-facing side of the ledger. The Mayor’s Proposed Budget mitigations are concentrated in arts grants, library and recreation hours, parks maintenance, and small business & community support. For context, the Council and Mayor’s offices combined are $12.26 million higher in FY27 than just six years ago – an amount that by itself makes up for the Arts, Culture & Community Festivals (ACCF) budget being eliminated.
Recommendations
There are several options for policymakers as they go through the budget process. These include:
· Reducing Council office staffing until the structural deficit is resolved
· Requiring public justification for elected-office budget and staff increases
· Requiring the Council, Mayor’s Office and City Attorney budgets to be reviewed publicly during annual Budget Review Committee hearings, with the same level of scrutiny expected of all City departments
· Directing the Independent Budget Analysis (IBA) to compare staffing to peer cities
· Redirecting Council office savings toward restoring resident-facing services
Conclusion
The mayor’s press release describes the FY27 budget as making “tough decisions now… to protect the services San Diegans rely on.” However, according to the data in the Independent Budget Analyst’s review of the proposed budget, the services San Diegans actually rely on are taking the brunt of the cuts — including public libraries, recreation centers, restrooms in parks, arts grants, small business support, and homelessness response. Residents can be forgiven for believing that these cuts are designed to inflict maximum pain on public-facing services while sparing the offices of the City’s elected leaders.
The full report is at: https://www.sdcta.org/studies-feed/2026/5/18/city-hall-staffing-study.
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