After spending $3 million to position San Diego as the design capital of the world, Mayor Gloria has committed perhaps the biggest flip-flop in his political career

San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria, in 2024, flanked by members of the World Design Capital team

We’re again hearing that sucking sound that Ross Perot popularized — this time, it’s the sound of silence, of Mayor Gloria washing his hands of San Diego’s arts and culture community, turning it – if he gets his way – into a ghost town. The spark of creativity ignited within our children and nurtured by the community is being diminished, their powerful voice muted by an ambitious, lame-duck mayor.

As you may know, Gloria took his Elon Musk-styled chainsaw to the budget, proposing that arts and culture spending be reduced from $13.8 million to $2 million. This draconian cut would eliminate 100 percent of the city’s grant funding for local arts organizations. An additional $8 million would be cut from parks and recreation and library funding.

Arts and culture on life support

But it’s okay – it’s not a vital organ, we’re told. Our surgeon in chief remains resolute, even, dare I say, prideful about cutting out, with calculated precision, the very soul of the city.

Compare the severity of his proposed cuts with his reluctance to significantly cut the “deep state” bureaucracy that he expanded over the years. Also, safeguarding every penny of SDPD’s budget doesn’t by itself make us safer, though it may make Gloria’s political future safer, by immunizing him from future “soft on crime” attacks.

One of the mayor’s legacies will be not just this brazen act of bureaucratic cruelty but also his prolific spending, including a massive hiring spree. Mayor Gloria essentially built his own army of bureaucrats, each “middle manager” receiving a taxpayer-subsidized salary of up to a quarter-of-a-million-dollars. This jobs category has skyrocketed from 70 managers in 2015 to roughly 400 today. Mayor Gloria has justified this expense by essentially arguing that San Diego needed to shed its small, Midwestern city mindset.

So, let me get this straight: He’s criticizing San Diego for being provincial while he tosses arts and culture into the wastebasket. Who’s provincial?

The Exodus:

Leaving San Diego – it’s a theme you see throughout our history – creative talents feeling compelled to flee to LA and other cities to advance their career. Examples: From Tom Waits to Stone Temple Pilots to talented art photographer John Mireles. This is one of the costs for cities that don’t invest in arts and culture infrastructure.

It’s time to get real about what it takes to be a great city.

What does it take?

Well, as recently as a year ago, Mayor Gloria and the City Council told us that being a great city means having a vibrant arts and culture community and infrastructure. What we’re seeing, then, is an enormous flip-flop, one of the biggest I’ve seen locally in recent memory.

The Flip-Flop: From ‘All About Art and Design’ to ‘Fuhgettabout Art and Design’

To really appreciate the enormity and significance of said flip-flop, rewind to 2024. That year, San Diego was awarded what was said to be a prestigious title – World Design Capital, which it held with Tijuana. They spent the year promoting the important role art and design plays in the binational region, and Gloria himself said the title and yearlong events, far from being fluff, would give the city an international stage to promote binational design.

Being selected as a World Design Capital, the first city in the U.S. to receive the title, spoke to our new identity, the way we wanted to position San Diego to the rest of the world, an image based not on sunshine and sand and Sea World but on art and design, we were told.

Initially, Gloria assured us that the WDC would be self-sufficient. But when its leaders asked for support, Gloria and the City Council handed over $3 million. (Read my expose on this subject HERE). Part of that was allocated to PR agencies, paid to contact reporters around the U.S. and throughout the world to urge them to write articles proclaiming San Diego as the design capital of the world. Another part of their budget was spent traveling around the world to show other cities how they too could become a World Design Capital.

Some critics termed the WDC a vanity project for the mayor, while others suggested it was essentially a series of fancy events for fancy people to talk earnestly about design and art.

The city countered that the $3 million would stimulate not just tourism but also economic development and foreign investment in the binational region. (One thing it wasn’t, was fluff. It’s only fluff when Gloria says it’s fluff. Otherwise, it’s essential for our economy.)

From essential to non-essential * From “all about” to “not about”

The WDC wrapped things up the first part of 2025. Not even two years have passed and San Diego’s once-essential arts and culture community, celebrated, initially, with great enthusiasm by the mayor, is now being re-characterized by him as non-essential.

Discarding community-based arts and culture organizations that provide the infrastructure to build the very vision for San Diego that he espoused—and, indeed, spent $3 million espousing. Was it all just empty rhetoric? Local art and culture organizations are feeling a range of emotions, from betrayal to abandonment to double-take confusion.

Equity vs Elitism

Many San Diegans and some City Council members believe strongly in equity, and hold the view that the city’s cultural and educational offerings should be enjoyed by all San Diegans, regardless of zip code. Gloria’s proposed cuts would make San Diego a more elitist and less equitable city, disproportionately hurting organizations and families south of Interstate 8. As UC San Diego economist Jeffrey Clemens told Cal Matters: “We should be worried that when cuts are being considered, the cuts will be to things that don’t have voices among well-organized stakeholder groups, that are the easiest, from a political perspective, to pull back on.”

Another irony related to the democratizing of art: one of the WDC’s talking points was the importance of taking design and art out of academia – “design for the people.” Yet Gloria’s proposed budget and near-elimination of arts funding and grants will have the effect of making art less visible and accessible to the people – putting it back in its elitist box after spending millions preaching to us about art and design for the people.

Show me the money!

Gloria is conveniently ignoring the evidence that creative cities attract cultural tourism. (These days, arts leaders sound more like MBAs, talking about the ROI of cultural tourism, producing economic impact reports to show its impact on the city’s bottom line.) And while the economic-impact argument would appear to be very persuasive, it doesn’t appear to be persuading Mayor Gloria — even though it’s the same argument he and the City Council employed to support their expenditure of $3 million for the World Design Capital festivities.

What could explain this disconnect? Gloria is a politician in transition. He’s still mayor for a couple more years but he’s still shedding his old self and reinventing himself as a tough-love pragmatist mayor willing to make tough, unpopular decisions. The resistance he is encountering helps establish his bona fides as a tough leader.

I hate to use this word to describe our own mayor, but I’m convinced he’s a philistine. How else to make sense of his reckless proposal and the lack of value he assigns to arts and the artist community. How to make sense of his policies that seem intent on regulating and ripping out the soul of our beaches? The philistine bureaucrat has already tried to turn OUR beloved Balboa Park into a revenue generation machine to finance his rapidly growing bureaucracy. Once “for the people,” Balboa Park is now, in a practical sense, for tourists and wealthy elites who can afford to pay parking fees. His vision for the future is that most people will live in tall high-rise apartments and, presumably, rarely see or talk to each other. His approach to “cleaning up” downtown involved dehumanizing homeless people and trying to sanitize the area rather than making it cool, funky, vibrant, or interesting. And now, he’s throwing the artist community under the bus while flaunting his support of the police. Someone seems a little insecure about his masculinity.   

I don’t want to use the word philistine inaccurately, so I’m going to check the def and will be right back….

…Okay and here we are with a definition: “A philistine is a person who is indifferent, hostile, or smugly unreceptive to art, culture, and intellectual pursuits, often focusing entirely on materialistic interests.”

I think it fits. I’m sure he’d prefer words like practical or pragmatic. If he’s not a philistine, then there’s just something soul-less and bureaucratic about him. While we can all appreciate the need to balance a budget and keep the people safe, there is something very wrong with weaponizing arts and culture; it’s almost as if he’s running against it. He wants the fight. He wants to show his new friends at the U.S. Conference of Mayors, where he now presides as VP, that he’s a different type of Democratic mayor. Bad optics is the point; he no longer wants to look good. He wants to look tough.  

If you look at the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ website, you’ll see a list of important issues that they believe mayors should be addressing. There’s zero mention of arts and culture. I’d fathom that his fellow mayors – and of course, Gavin Newson – have greater sway over him at this point in his career than San Diego’s community-based arts organizations.

In less than two years, Gloria has gone from art rules to art sucks, from art is not a want but a need, to who needs art?

The final opportunity for public input on Mayor Gloria’s proposed FY 2027 budget is June 9, 2026. The City Council will hold a final budget hearing and vote on that date.

Key Dates:

May 18, 2026: Public input hearing, 6 p.m., City Hall.

June 5, 2026: Final Budget Review Committee hearing.

June 9, 2026: Final City Council Vote.