San Diego City Wire

A projected $124 million shortfall for the upcoming city of San Diego budget year is being blamed on COVID-19 but a former candidate for San Diego City Council District 5 said the coronavirus is an opportunity to streamline city services and save money in the process.

“When we are facing a budget gap, it is a great time to reconsider and reimagine how we deliver city services,” said Dinsmore attorney Joe Leventhal. “It gives us an opportunity to think about how to rely on technology more. For example, we were forced to do that with COVID in terms of the city permitting process. We can find other ways to make the city more user friendly and deliver certain city services better.”

Leventhal lost his campaign last year for a seat on the San Diego City Council.

Joe Leventhal | Dinsmore

“If we weren't dealing with the significant decimation of city revenues because of COVID, I think we would likely still be in a very solid financial position where we could continue to grow the city budget if that's what city leaders wanted to do,” Leventhal told San Diego City Wire. “That's part of this year's problem. I really wished last year's council had started to make some cuts and reimagine how we deliver city services.”

California has 2,816,969 confirmed cases of COVID-19, resulting in 31,654 deaths, as of Jan. 15, according to the state COVID-19 dashboard. The number of COVID-related deaths increased 1.8% from the prior day total of 31,102. In San Diego alone, there are 201,578 coronavirus cases and 1,952 fatalities.

“I proposed when I was running for office that elected leaders should lead by example and cut their own staff,” Leventhal said in an interview. “City council staff budgets have grown every single year. They're not standardized. One council office has a much higher budget than another one, which may be a drop in the bucket but when you're making hard decisions about city services. Saving a few million dollars can actually make a difference in someone's life. There are things I think they are overspending on.”

Among Leventhal’s proposals are to take advantage of state-imposed coronavirus restrictions by introducing reduced hours at public libraries and drive-by pickup of books.

“We could have things like pickup days where people can order their books online and actually pick them up from their local library, which requires perhaps less financial resources, but frankly improve city services,” he said. “It would reduce the cost of staff and library. Hours would be cut back but it wouldn't necessarily limit people's access to the catalog itself.”

Special interests, however, are an obstacle to innovative ideas that could lead to job loss.

“There are a lot of people advocating for a lot of different budget priorities, and I don't begrudge any of them advocating for their particular interests," he said. "But it's really incumbent upon our elected leaders to dig deep and represent the individuals that elected them to make sure they are prioritizing things in the budget that everyday San Diego residents want to see, need to see and expect from their city government.”