Will Carl DeMaio eliminate police pensions?

After months of waiting, on Friday San Diego finally got its first mayoral debate featuring all four leading candidates. And it didn't disappoint.

Things started off simply enough, by asking Carl DeMaio whether, in light of steadily improving pension numbers driven by a steadily improving economy, he still felt that police officers should eventually be transitioned to 401k. DeMaio caved on including police officers in his ballot measure, but assured San Diego that he still planned to take away police pensions down the line. DeMaio had a lot to say in response to the debate question, but despite being pressed, refused to answer the question.

No such problem for Bonnie Dumanis, who said that eliminating police pensions would be "devastating." But as the debate continued, DeMaio did manage to clarify his position. He said that he is proud that San Diego's police officers and firefighters don't support him, and went on to guarantee that he would take away police pensions, pledging of all city employees including police officers "I will end their taxpayer funded gravy train."

Meanwhile, the questions barely acknowledged the big news of the day -- dramatic improvement to the city's pension numbers had brought the deficit down to a startlingly attainable $12.2 million a year. This, of course, is extremely bad news for Carl DeMaio, whose several years of campaigning has been centered on a budget deficit that was so dramatically awful that only his plan could possibly fix it. He even repeatedly opposed the steady stream of cuts that now have San Diego on the edge of a balanced budget, leaving him in a bit of a predicament. If the budget is fixed, then the extreme, draconian measures that he's running on aren't necessary anymore. And even worse, he's on the verge of being the candidate who consistently tried to block the ingredients that brought the city back from the brink of financial ruin.

It's an extremely hard record for him to explain now that it's on the verge of working. He voted to send taxdollars to developers. He voted to have taxpayers subsidize law breakers. He opposed $70 million in savings by eliminating vacant city positions. But now the man who said $1.2 million was chump change is looking at the budget and the strategy he's opposed tooth and nail is working exactly how it was promised to work.

In short, Carl DeMaio desperately needs the budget to be broken or else he has nothing left to talk about. He railed at the debate about "unsustainable salaries and benefits," but with the structural deficit just about closed, that sounds more like a perverse sort of wishful thinking by DeMaio than it does sound policy.

And if he isn't going to be guided by the numbers and the data anymore, it's harder to take any of his proposals seriously. It's happened before, like when the San Diego Chamber of Commerce, San Diego County Taxpayers Association, and Mayor Dick Murphy all withdrew support for DeMaio's Citizens Budget Plan citing "wrong information...and inaccurate budget totals." Or when the California Performance Review that DeMaio championed produced wildly inaccurate findings based on faulty math -- so bad that the Governor abandoned the report. At some point this becomes a feature, not a bug.

DeMaio has seized on the economic downturn and fought to lock in current levels for decades to come, setting up policies that would prevent an improving economy from benefiting many working San Diegans. He was open about that at the debate, explaining that his goal was to bring pay "down in line with the local labor market." It must be just a coincidence that he wants to drag down and cap how much city workers are able to earn based on the standard of the worst economy in decades.

But the economy is recovering faster than Carl DeMaio can recover, and the city's economic reality isn't going to change just because it's inconvenient to Carl DeMaio's campaign.