Will Mayor Gloria restore $12 million?

“Phones off please.” We’re at Correia Middle School in Point Loma for the San Diego Youth Symphony’s season-ending concert to support our trombone-playing son. Concert’s about to start.

But first, Kate Battenfield, the youth symphony’s still-new executive director, informs a packed audience of predominantly first-generation Americans/San Diegans that its city funding is being, in her words, “zeroed out.”

The nearly $12 million cut, which will affect more than 20 local organizations, adds an additional layer of emotion to the afternoon: worry and concern imposing on joy and celebration. I’ve been reading — and writing about — Mayor Gloria’s dismantling of the city’s infrastructure of support for arts and culture, but being there is different. It’s not theoretical or on a spreadsheet – I’m experiencing it first-hand. When you look across the stage and see the smiling, beautiful students, their families’ beaming faces in the audience, as they are greeted by the glorious sounds emanating from the instruments – it becomes more real, the sense of loss, more profound.

What is and isn’t essential is a subjective determination. While the San Diego Youth Symphony loses its city funding, parking enforcement is being expanded…can you say, cha-ching! Plenty of mayors disagree with Gloria. They believe support for arts and culture is not just an economic driver but a foundational value for their cities.

Gloria comes across as a Cold Bureaucrat: Someone willing to give the homeless a kick in the butt, make the artists cry and keep the police union happy.  And that, I fathom, is by design, is the political niche he’s trying to carve out for himself, for his political future, a reaction, perhaps, to the GOP’s effective caricature of big city mayors.

Because he’s a lame duck mayor, Gloria doesn’t have to put on the pretense that he’s “for the people.” He seems more concerned with his political narrative: The practical, pragmatic leader who can make tough decisions and isn’t in bed with the “woke left.” He seems to be following the lead of Pete Buttligeg, the Bloomington, IN mayor later appointed by Joe Biden as director of the Department of Transportation.

Restoring the almost $12 million would make San Diego’s arts and culture advocates happy, so what’s holding him back? Now that the battle lines have been drawn, is he concerned about being perceived as a loser, a weak mayor who caved to arts advocates? (If he wanted, he could be a hero).

Meanwhile, young men are becoming alienated and untethered from their families and communities. Kids who can’t find a path to a productive life after high school may end up living rootless and destructive lives. Caring about student outcomes is not trivial or non-essential. We pay a high cost when the city signals that our kids’ needs are not important.  We pay a high cost when we deny them opportunities to shine.

We can’t be just the chamber of commerce city that Mayor Gloria wants us to be. We need a soul. The city needs to help nurture this talent if San Diego is to become the city the mayor himself envisions – a city worthy of the design capital of the world moniker, towards which he spent $3 million.

Back to the San Diego Youth Symphony. The village has an interest in making sure that every kid who wants to play an instrument has that opportunity. Or who wants to dance or write or paint or sing or act….these are enduring parts of our culture…our children need more of these opportunities.

When the city starves the San Diego Youth Symphony and other programs like it, of their resources, it does serious damage to the pipeline that transports these leaders of tomorrow into the future. Helping to fund and foster programs that promote positive outcomes in our youth is precisely what our tax dollars should be spent on.  

Oh, one last thing, gotta plug Adam Jr…nice job doing the trombone thing, kid. ?

This is part one of a two-part series.