Padres Put Money in Politics

A few weeks ago, at a forum, San Diego City Councilmember Henry Foster said he was going to take on the status quo and one business in particular. 

“I’m going to take on the Padres. The Padres have not been willing to come into our community, to beautify our community,” he said. 

The Padres seem ready to take him on too. 

The team has given nearly $50,000 to the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce’s Political Action Committee. The Chamber is doing lots of things, including supporting City Council candidate Richard Bailey, and a committee run by the California Apartment Association that is opposing Foster. 

The Padres gave me a statement: 

“The Padres have a longstanding relationship with the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce. This contribution reflects our continued support for local candidates and policies that promote job creation and economic growth in San Diego.”

This seemed to be coming for a while: When city of San Diego leaders were discussing a new minimum wage for workers at hotels and large event spaces, the Padres’ CEO Erik Greupner felt targeted and disrespected. The team seemed to warn it may need to get involved in politics soon.

Then last year, the Padres did their own polling, including on this question: “Regardless of the minimum wage issue, suppose there was a candidate for local public office that you generally disagreed with and opposed. If the Padres organization endorsed that candidate for local public office, would that worsen your opinion of the Padres organization or would that make no difference to you?”

Midway Rising Is a Go? 

After last week’s unanimous approval of the Midway Rising project at the city’s Land Use and Housing Committee, things seemed kind of uneasy. The Committee had insisted Midway Rising could not be a receiver site. If another developer in some other part of the city was required to build affordable housing, they couldn’t just pay Midway Rising to do it. 

But we had not yet actually heard what the leaders of Midway Rising and the mayor thought of that. They’d just spent four years negotiating the deal and had clearly decided not to include a restriction on some of the 2,000 units of affordable housing being some that were by other projects. 

Now we have heard from both: Midway Rising’s Brad Termini provided a written statement: “We were surprised that the City raised this issue at the final stage of a four-year negotiation process, particularly given the City Council’s reaffirmation of its commitment to the offsite receiver program this past January. Nevertheless, we remain unequivocally committed to delivering 2,000 affordable homes at Midway Rising and working collaboratively with the City to find a solution that moves this transformational project forward as quickly as possible.”

It seems like their main point is it was the city’s decision to let developers build their required affordable housing at other sites. Letting that happen at Midway Rising, would potentially make it easier for housing to go up in other parts of the city. 

But the statement does not confirm they are fully on board with the committee’s amendment. If they want to “find a solution” then they don’t think what’s going forward is the solution. 

The mayor’s team said he’s all on board with the Council’s direction. “We’re going to implement the language and move it forward and we feel good about how it’s looking for Nov. 9,” said Christopher Ackerman-Avila, the mayor’s senior policy advisor.

Data Center Scramble

Mayor Todd Gloria had a rough one. For weeks, he and his staff had been working on a plan to regulate data centers. It was easier under city code to build a data center than some housing. He waited for the city attorney to sign off on his plans. He’d have the Council put an immediate moratorium in place and then they’d work on changing the land development code. 

Then we broke the news that the Manchester Financial Group was considering a data center at its massive development opportunity at the NAVWAR site. Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera jumped on it and ended up inviting Gloria to his rally. Elo-Rivera and Congressmember Scott Peters were quicker to jump on the issue.

The city has few options to stop or shape what the Navy does. But Gloria added a clause to his plan to ask the federal and state representatives to do what they could. 

One Reason People Don’t Like Data Centers

On the podcast this week (which seemed like a good one), Jakob McWhinney made a point about data centers that I have been thinking about since he said it. 

Data centers are nothing new. We’ve been using them for decades. Voice of San Diego would not exist without data centers. Every tweet or Instagram post rallying against data centers generates more demand for data centers. The more people that read these words, the more energy we ask data centers to pull.

But we are in the middle of a historic surge of market demand for compute power and data centers and thus electricity and other resources. That’s because of AI. The accompanying surge of investment is a classic capitalist mania that will likely leave us all enduring a painful recession when investors stop investing in it.

As San Diego’s Paul Kedrosky put it recently in a New York Times debate, it’s got all the signs of previous important advancements.

“And we’re building it out like we were the railroads, like we were electrification, like we were the canals, like we were the interstate highways. And every one of those moments has led to overbuild,” he said. 

But if it’s a bubble, it has not yet burst. And it could be a while. 

As the Manchester Group tries to figure out how it can build the Navy a beautiful new headquarters for NAVWAR, it’s obvious, in retrospect, that they would consider data centers. Nothing is as likely to invite investment as that. Not a casino, not housing, nothing.

As with everything, it’s about AI.

It’s been a slow boil but it’s worth stepping back and realizing just how much of our public conversation AI dominates. And I mean just in San Diego. Data centers, mass surveillance (Flock), driverless vehicles, price setting, schools and even fake campaign ads. 

That’s just the local conversation. Nationally, AI agents are going rogue (into banks!), they’re solving puzzles mathematicians struggled with for decades (leaving them weeping and purposeless) and they may, someday, wipe out humanity.

Even if you’re enthusiastic for it, it’s a lot. It feels like it’s rapidly getting out of our control. That’s in part because the people building it are telling us that it may soon get out of their control. It’s all very unusual. 

And that was Jakob’s point. There are legitimate concerns about power and water demands and noise and just whether that’s the best use of land. But there’s something deeper.

“There are so few things that people can control about AI. Data centers are a physical space that exists within communities. It is like the one thing that people who are already freaked out about this gigantic, fast-moving phenomenon of AI, it’s the one thing that they can put their hands on and potentially put their bodies in front of,” he said. 

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