Kevin Faulconer
Kevin Lee Faulconer is an American politician who served as the 36th mayor of San Diego, from 2014 to 2020. A member of the Republican Party, Faulconer served as the member of the San Diego City Council for the 2nd district from 2006 to 2014.
Faulconer was born in San Jose, California, and grew up in Oxnard. He entered politics in the 1990s to work on the campaigns for then-Governor Pete Wilson; he began to run in San Diego City Council elections to represent the 2nd district in the early 2000s. He was elected in a 2005 special election and was re-elected in landslides in 2006 and in 2010. In late 2013, he announced his candidacy for the mayorship of San Diego which he later won. He was sworn in on March 3, 2014. He was re-elected in 2016, but he was not eligible to run in the 2020 election due to term limits.
Faulconer is considered to be a moderate Republican, holding fiscally conservative and socially liberal views. He announced his candidacy for governor of California on February 1, 2021, and was one of the main candidates in the 2021 gubernatorial recall election, placing third in a field of 46 replacement candidates.
Early life and education
Faulconer was born in San Jose, California to Jim and Kay Faulconer, an assistant city manager of Oxnard and an instructor at Oxnard College and Ventura College, respectively. He grew up in Oxnard and learned Spanish while in grade school. Faulconer graduated from Oxnard High School in 1985. He later enrolled in and graduated from San Diego State University with a degree in political science. While at San Diego State, Faulconer served as student body president as a fifth-year senior and was a member of Kappa Sigma fraternity.Early career
After college, Faulconer won a fellowship with the Coro Foundation and worked for Solem & Associates, a public relations firm based in San Francisco. He later helped work on the campaigns for California Governor Pete Wilson.San Diego City Council (2006–2014)
Elections
Faulconer ran in the 2002 city council election for District 2 but lost to Michael Zucchet in a hotly contested election. After Zucchet resigned in 2005, a special election was held that November. There were 17 candidates and none got a majority, so a runoff was held on January 10, 2006, between the two top vote-getters, Faulconer and Lorena Gonzalez. Faulconer won the runoff with 51.5% of the vote.Faulconer was elected to a full term in June 2006 and re-elected in June 2010; in both cases he won an outright majority in the primary and so did not have to run in the November general election. He was ineligible to run for re-election in 2014 per city term limits.
Tenure
Although Faulconer was once a supporter of alcohol being allowed on public beaches in San Diego, he changed his opinion after winning the city council election. Following an alcohol-fueled riot at Pacific Beach in 2007, he persuaded the city council to pass a trial one-year ban on alcohol at the beaches; the next year the ban was made permanent by a citywide vote. The ban has not been challenged since with the community generally approving of cleaner beaches and fewer emergency calls, and lifeguards and police said it has made their jobs easier. However, the long-term economic impact, claimed by one individual to be a 160,000 person reduction in attendance on holiday weekends and a 50% drop in revenue for beach businesses, has not been studied.In the fall of 2006, over 30 bars and restaurants in Pacific Beach agreed with one another to limit the offering of discounts on alcoholic drinks. Faulconer supported the price-fixing agreement and spoke at the press conference announcing the agreement.
He campaigned against a proposed sales tax increase in 2010. He promoted the North Embarcadero Visionary Plan, a project seeking to redevelop the San Diego bayfront. He pushed for several years for an ordinance limiting the parking of oversize vehicles on the streets; the ordinance finally passed the city council in July 2013.
Faulconer was chair of the council's Audit Committee, which is charged with clearing out an audit backlog and restoring the city's credit rating. He was vice-chair of the Rules and Economic Development Committee and a member of the Budget and Finance Committee.
Mayor of San Diego (2014–2020)
Elections
In September 2013 Faulconer entered the special mayoral election that resulted from the resignation of mayor Bob Filner. He was endorsed by the local Republican Party and by former mayor Jerry Sanders, now president of the San Diego Chamber of Commerce. He campaigned both in English and Spanish.In the election held November 19, 2013 Faulconer received 43.6 percent of the vote and advanced to a runoff election against fellow city councilmember David Alvarez on February 11, 2014. In the runoff, Faulconer was endorsed by former San Diego City Attorney Mike Aguirre, a Democratic mayoral candidate who had placed fourth in the first round of the election. Faulconer was elected mayor with 54.5 percent of the vote in the runoff. He was sworn in on March 3, 2014.
In 2015, Faulconer declared his intention to run for a full term in 2016. His opponents in the election were former state assemblywoman Lori Saldaña and former San Diego City Council member Ed Harris. Faulconer won re-election in the June 7, 2016 primary by garnering 58.2 percent of the vote.
Faulconer endorsed Marco Rubio in the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries. After the primary, Faulconer stated he would not vote for then-candidate Donald Trump in 2016. After the 2020 election, he stated that he had voted for Trump in that year's election.
Faulconer had been urged by state Republican leaders to run for governor in 2018, and polls showed him as the leading Republican candidate. Faulconer consistently said he would not run, and in June 2017 confirmed it, saying his top priority was finishing out his term as mayor.
Climate action plan
In 2014, Faulconer released San Diego's first Climate Action Plan. The plan outlined Faulconer's proposed strategy for the city to meet State goals for the city to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In 2018, Faulconer proposed pursuing a city-run Community Choice Aggregation program to meet the plan's goal of purchasing 100 percent renewable energy by 2035. By September 2019, Faulconer had convinced four other nearby cities to join San Diego's CCA through a joint powers authority.Minimum wage
In August 2014, Faulconer vetoed a measure passed by the City Council which would incrementally increase the minimum wage in San Diego to $11.50 per hour from the $9.00 statewide minimum. The Council overrode his veto by a vote of 6 to 2. However, implementation of the measure was delayed by a successful signature drive led by business groups, forcing a public referendum before the measure could go into effect. On June 7, 2016, the ballot measure passed with a 63.8 percent majority vote, allowing the measure to go into effect.San Diego Chargers
A major issue during his first term was a bid by the San Diego Chargers to move to the Los Angeles area. Faulconer campaigned to keep the Chargers in San Diego and proposed that the city build a new stadium, financed in part by the city and county governments. Faulconer later endorsed a ballot measure sponsored by the Chargers that would raise the hotel tax to pay for a stadium. The ballot measure failed with only 43 percent of the vote in favor. In January 2017, the Chargers announced that they would be relocating from San Diego to Los Angeles.Convention center expansion
In 2017, Faulconer put forth a measure that would fund the expansion of the San Diego Convention Center by increasing the hotel tax, but the City Council declined to call for a special election. In 2018, Faulconer supported a citizen's initiative that would accomplish the same thing as his original measure. The measure qualified, but too late to be included on the 2018 ballot. In April 2019, the City Council approved a proposal by Faulconer to move the election from the November 2020 general election to the March 2020 primary election by a vote of 5–4. The ballot measure, titled Measure C, got 65% of the vote in the March election, just short of the two-thirds majority needed to pass per the language of the measure. However, the City Council amended the language certifying the election to not say it needed a two-thirds majority. This allowed litigation to continue which could potentially lower the threshold to pass from two-thirds to a simple majority.Housing and homelessness
Faulconer has been an outspoken opponent of the "Not In My Back Yard" mentality. He has called for scrapping restrictions on housing development, such as building-height limits near public transit and parking requirements, as well as various restrictions on dense housing. He has called for streamlining of the approvals process. Faulconer said these reforms were needed to combat San Diego's housing crisis, reduce homelessness and improve the environment.In both his 2018 and 2019 State of the City addresses, Faulconer vowed to reduce the growing number of people who are street homeless in San Diego. Faulconer's efforts included a 40 percent increase in funding from 2018 to 2019, the opening of shelter tents, the creation of safe parking spots, a storage center for the homeless, and successful advocacy for more funding from the State.
Just a month before the end of his term as mayor, Faulconer put a package of affordable housing proposals before the San Diego City Council called Complete Communities. The package incentivizes building to reduce homelessness while banning the use of said buildings for short-term rentals like Airbnb. It also creates an "ongoing funding stream" for public transportation via fees on more suburban developers, and prioritizes improvements in parks in low-income areas. The City Council approved Faulconer's Complete Communities plan on November 9, 2020.