Arena Shortcuts and Golf Course Giveaways: The Public-Land Reckoning
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San Diego's city auditors have put stark numbers on the table. The city owns eight leased golf courses covering more than 800 acres of public land — an area roughly the size of Balboa Park, and some of the most valuable real estate in Southern California. In fiscal year 2025, the private operators running those courses generated $34 million in gross revenue. The city received $3.5 million in rent for calendar year 2024. That works out to roughly ten cents of every dollar flowing back to the public treasury from its own land. The audit stops short of alleging wrongdoing — the leases were legal and the city signed them — but the fundamental question it raises is whether San Diego is extracting fair value from assets that belong to its residents.
The City Council now faces a spectrum of options: renegotiating lease terms at renewal, restructuring the revenue-sharing model, or the most disruptive path — declining to renew leases and reconsidering how 800 acres of publicly owned land should be used. None of those choices is simple, and each involves tradeoffs between existing golf course users, operators who have invested in the facilities, and a broader public interest that the audit suggests has gone underserved.
The Midway Rising arena project is navigating its own public-accountability tension through a different mechanism. The City Council formally repealed Measure C — the 2021 ballot initiative that removed the 30-foot coastal height limit in the Midway-Pacific Highway corridor — on August 25th after a court order. Simultaneously, State Senator Akilah Weber Pierson is expected to lead a gut-and-amend process on existing legislation, replacing its text with provisions that would exempt Midway Rising from California Environmental Quality Act review. Proponents argue CEQA timelines would effectively kill a project the city genuinely needs; critics counter that bypassing environmental review on a coastal mixed-use development of this scale is precisely the kind of shortcut that generates unforeseen costs after construction begins.
The gut-and-amend path also carries a democratic cost that the efficiency argument tends to obscure. Environmental review is one of the few formal mechanisms through which residents, neighborhood groups, and advocacy organizations hold a legally recognized right to participate. Stripping that process removes not just regulatory friction but a structured feedback channel — a distinction that matters on a site with specific geotechnical and coastal characteristics that don't disappear simply because the paperwork does.
On immigration enforcement, the County Board's 3-2 vote on August 18th to terminate ICE and CBP training access at Otay Mesa and Camp Elliott prompted a subsequent move by Sheriff Kelly Martinez, who used her independent authority to carve out a CBP exception covering roughly 1,700 officers' recertification while cutting off ICE access entirely. The episode revealed that sheriff's operational autonomy runs further than the board's resolution assumed. The policy fight remains charged by July arrest data showing nearly 2,000 arrests across San Diego and Imperial counties — roughly 50 percent more than June's approximately 1,300 — with about 60 percent of those arrested carrying no criminal conviction and no pending criminal charge.