GUEST COLUMN
By David A. Myers

La Prensa San Diego has reported that Chula Vista City Attorney Marco Verdugo quietly placed his former boss, ex–San Diego City Attorney Mara Elliott, on the city payroll as an Assistant City Attorney back in September.

According to the reporting, no public announcement was made. Staff were told to refer to her by her initials or as “outside counsel.” She works from home in apparent excess of the city's two-day remote-work cap. Her California Bar listing and her LinkedIn profile both still describe her as the San Diego City Attorney — a position she left in December 2024.

If even half of that is accurate, it should end the conversation about whether Mara Elliott belongs in the California State Senate.

I spent thirty-three years in the San Diego Sheriff's Office. I know the difference between a personnel decision that's merely awkward and one a public agency is actively hiding. You don't instruct your staff not to say someone's name out loud unless you already understand that the public would object if they knew. The cover is the confession.

And it isn't a small cover. Elliott is not a junior hire. She is a former two-term elected city attorney from the largest city in the county, currently a candidate for State Senate District 40, who, the reporting says, has been functionally running important decisions through Verdugo's office while drawing a Chula Vista paycheck and immediately vesting into a second public pension on top of more than 24 years of prior public service. Chula Vista taxpayers are entitled to know the senior lawyer advising their elected City Attorney. They were not told.

Some readers will shrug. Politicians hire former colleagues. That part isn't the scandal. The scandal is who Mara Elliott is when it comes to the public's right to know what its government is doing — because the Chula Vista arrangement is not an outlier in her career. It is the pattern.

Consider the record.

In 2019, while serving as San Diego City Attorney, Elliott personally sponsored Senate Bill 615, a bill carried by then-Senator Ben Hueso that would have weakened the California Public Records Act by adding a “meet and confer” requirement before the public could sue an agency that ignored or stonewalled a records request. The bill drew opposition from the San Diego Union-Tribune editorial board, Voice of San Diego, the First Amendment Coalition, and ultimately a unanimous San Diego City Council — her own client. Even former Mayor Kevin Faulconer's office opposed it. The bill died.

But the following year, sworn deposition testimony from Elliott's own chief of staff revealed that he had asked a Hueso staffer to delete an email about SB 615 after a public records request was filed seeking that correspondence. Her office then asked a judge to keep those depositions sealed. The judge refused.

Consider the Smart Streetlights program.

Beginning in 2016, Elliott's office defended a $30 million contract with a General Electric subsidiary that installed thousands of camera-and-sensor units on city light poles — a contract that, the public would later learn, gave the vendor sweeping rights to the data those sensors collected. Elliott's own Form 700 disclosed she owned between $10,000 and $100,000 in General Electric stock. When former City Council President Georgette Gómez and former Councilmember Monica Montgomery asked her in writing to recuse herself and hire outside counsel, citing the appearance of conflict, Elliott refused.

The program was eventually suspended after public outcry, but only after years of police use without a governing surveillance ordinance — use Elliott's office defended throughout.

Consider 101 Ash Street.

Elliott was sworn in as City Attorney on December 12, 2016. Seven days later, her office signed off on the 20-year lease-to-own agreement for an asbestos-riddled office tower the city has never been able to occupy. Under the City Charter, no contract is valid without the City Attorney's signature. She had the authority to refuse. She did not. San Diego taxpayers have since spent more than $200 million on a building real estate experts say is worth less than the cost to demolish it. Years later, Elliott attempted to rewrite the story by characterizing the deal as having been “approved” before she took office — but the binding signature was hers to give or withhold, and she gave it.

Along the way, her office controlled the outside investigations, fought disclosure of audit findings critical of her own performance, and at one point threatened to prosecute a reporter for asking about confidential audit reports.

Three debacles. One thread. Whether the issue is a state records bill, a surveillance contract she had a personal financial interest in, or a $200 million real estate disaster her own signature made binding, Elliott's instinct under pressure has been to narrow the public's access, protect the institutions she's defending, and discipline the people — reporters, staffers, councilmembers — who try to pry the doors back open.

And now, by La Prensa's account, the elected city attorney of Chula Vista — her former deputy, her endorsed candidate, a lawyer whose own firm wrote the controversial Burke memo on Ash Street — is hiding her current employment from his own city's elected officials and staff.

This is not a partisan complaint. I am a Democrat. I was a Republican until the GOP made clear it had no place for me as a gay man, and I have spent the years since arguing that accountability is not the enemy of public service — it is the foundation of it. Mara Elliott is a Democrat running in a swing district her party badly wants to win. I understand the political math.

I also understand that the party that asks voters to trust government to expand healthcare, defend democracy, and confront climate change cannot keep recruiting candidates whose record on basic transparency is this bad. Voters notice. They should notice.

Chula Vista's City Council should demand a full public accounting from Verdugo: when Elliott was hired, under what authority, with what duties, on what work schedule, and why her employment was concealed from elected officials and staff.

The San Diego County Civil Grand Jury should examine whether the arrangement complies with the city's personnel rules and the Political Reform Act. And voters in Senate District 40 should ask themselves a simple question before June: if this is how she behaves when nobody's looking, what makes anyone believe Sacramento will be different?

David A. Myers is a retired Commander of the San Diego Sheriff's Office with 35 years of service..