Private jet ferries mayor's aide to Phoenix homeless shelter

When ex-PR man Kevin Faulconer and his staffers undertake something, even looking for a solution to the city's festering homeless issue, they do it in style, courtesy of his ever-generous campaign boosters who stand at the ready to pick up a big-money tab for the Republican mayor.

Take the case of the mayor's Senior Advisor for Housing Solutions Stacie Spector, a former staffer in Bill Clinton's White House and ex-UCSD public relations maven now representing Faulconer's high-profile campaign to rid the city's streets of unsightly homeless-camp blight.

On February 16, the $175,000-a-year mayoral aide was whisked from San Diego to visit the Phoenix Human Services Campus for the Homeless last month from Lindbergh Field's Signature Flight Support private terminal on a Cessna Citation Jet 3.

From there she was ferried about Phoenix in a vehicle furnished by Zetian HRC car service, according to a March 17 Payment to Agency disclosure report filed by the mayor's office with the city clerk.

The $2000 tab for Spector's excursion was furnished by Rancho Santa Fe denizen and ritzy restaurateur Dan Shea, a longtime professional sports advocate who of late has joined an effort by Padres megamillionaire managing partner Pete Seidler — whose taxpayer-subsidized ballpark often finds itself in a sea of homeless — on a rich man's crusade to sweep the sidewalks clean, though Shea denies any ulterior motives.

"He’s just a compassionate human being,” Shea said of Seidler in a March 18 Union-Tribune story.

“Knowing Peter as well as I do, I know that’s his motivation. It’s not about, ‘Clean it up, because it’s the Padres.’"

According to the U-T, Shea and Seidler have become virtually bonded at the hip to Spector, who “talks or emails with Seidler and Shea almost daily," reported the paper. “They’re all in,” Spector was quoted as saying of the two men. “They’re not just all in with their brains, they’re not just all in with their commitment, their hearts are all in.”

Seidler has also been to Phoenix, according to the U-T feature.

"The scene furnished a visual roadmap to Seidler, along with proof of what’s possible when a societal problem tests human decency and threatens to choke a system. All that warmth and life-altering will, sprinkled among some discarded cigarette butts, within the distance of a healthy throw on a baseball field."

Per the story, "In San Diego, Seidler launched a standing Tuesday meeting in his second-floor office at Petco Park. The gatherings simmer with confidential, no-holds-barred conversations about the obstacles standing in the way of emergency beds for the city — and the size of the machete required to cut through potential political and societal paralysis."

In addition to Shea, the U-T reports that the group includes professional soccer’s Landon Donovan, who also happens to occupy a prominent role in another Faulconer-endorsed Seidler effort, the Padres owner’s controversial multimillion-dollar petition drive to obtain the current site of Qualcomm Stadium for a private development complex known as SoccerCity.

Whether by coincidence or not, Seidler's big bucks Mission Valley development campaign neatly dovetails with his Petco Park homeless mission.

"Chargers Park, for example, is being discussed as part of a potential deal with the SoccerCity group that hopes to develop the Qualcomm site in Mission Valley," says the U-T's account of Seidler's plan to acquire both the Qualcomm stadium land as well as the football team's soon-to-be-vacant training complex owned by the public in nearby Murphy Canyon.

As the homeless problem has grown, so have calls for more tax money to be used by projects that would shovel the cash to an array of the city's well-heeled hotel, real estate, and development interests, many of which are spending heavily to influence San Diego politicos, especially Faulconer, who will ultimately divvy up the funding.

Shea furnished a total of $6000 to Faulconer's mayoral campaigns of 2013 and 2014, city records show. But Shea’s political beneficence has come with other, not so welcome costs.

In May 2010, his Donovan’s Steak and Chop House agreed to pay a $2230 fine to the California Fair Political Practices Commission to settle charges it violated state law by failing to report $27,101 of 2008 political contributions, including $5400 to the San Diego Restaurant and Beverage Political Action Committee and $4901 to the county Republican Party.