City Council Opens Budget Season While County's ICE Vote Triggers a Sheriff's Revolt
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The San Diego City Council opens its fall legislative session Monday morning at 10 a.m., with the FY 2027 Statement of Budgetary Principles as its first substantive item. The document formally launches the city's next annual budget cycle — establishing the guiding principles that will shape every departmental funding request through the winter and spring before culminating in a full budget adoption. A separate 2 p.m. session is scheduled for discussion items and non-agenda public comment.
Also on Monday's council agenda is the court-ordered repeal of Measure C, the 2021 ballot measure that removed the 30-foot coastal height limit in the Midway-Pacific Highway area. A Superior Court issued a writ of mandate requiring the city to act, and the council's response carries downstream implications for the Midway Rising project's environmental exemption push currently working through the state legislature.
The county's most combustible governance story of the past week, however, unfolded at the Board of Supervisors. On August 18th, the board voted 3-2 to terminate license agreements allowing both ICE and Customs and Border Protection to train at two county-run firearms facilities — the Otay Mesa range and a site at Camp Elliott near Miramar. Board Chair Terra Lawson-Remer and Chair Pro Tem Paloma Aguirre led the vote, framing county facilities as an inappropriate platform for federal immigration enforcement. CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott publicly called the decision 'reckless, irresponsible, and ignorant.'
Within hours of the board vote, Sheriff Kelly Martinez used her independent operational authority over the Otay Mesa range to carve out an exception — specifically for CBP, not ICE. Her reasoning: approximately 1,700 CBP officers require firearms recertification at the facility, and she was unwilling to let that lapse on public safety grounds. The result was a partial override of a board policy by an independently elected official acting within her own legitimate authority.
The conflict illustrates two separate democratic mandates in direct friction. The supervisors who voted for the terminations ran explicitly on limiting cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. The Sheriff ran on operational independence. Neither can claim a clear legal hierarchy over the other in this collision, and the practical outcome — CBP stays, ICE goes — reflects the Sheriff's judgment call, not the board's. The ten-day implementation clock on the terminated agreements is now running, meaning the legal and operational picture could shift again by early next week.