Campland lobbyist showers cash on Dems and GOP on city council

UCSD uses Union-Tribune ad and story (natch) to brag

Campland convinced the city council to renew its controversial sweetheart lease on city-owned Mission Bay land in June

Both sides now

A key lobbyist for Campland, LLC, the bayside resort which convinced the city council to renew its controversial sweetheart lease on city-owned Mission Bay land in June, is raising money for both Assemblyman Todd Gloria and his fellow Democrat, city councilwoman Barbara Bry, in their battle to become mayor of San Diego. According to the firm’s amended second-quarter disclosure statement, filed August 20, Gloria’s May 9 event, sponsored by Southwest Strategies chief Chris Wahl, came up with $7650. A June 10 fundraiser for Bry, also conducted by Wahl, did a bit less well, collecting a total of $4780. Wahl and wife Jennifer, daughter of company founder Alan Zieguas, between them, gave a total of $150 for Bry but maxed out for Gloria with $1150 each, the filing shows. Campland head honcho Michael Gelfand has endorsed Gloria’s bid to succeed Republican mayor Kevin Faulconer, another Campland booster.

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Campaign cash makes restaurateur and city council aspirant Noli Zosa smile.

Wahl further covered his bets for a lobbyist-friendly post-election city hall by throwing a $4700 event on June 14 for city attorney Mara Elliot’s reelection bid and held a $3700, June 13 fundraiser for District Seven council candidate and Dirty Birds restaurant chain proprietor Noli Zosa, whose opponents include gun-control advocate Wendy Wheatcroft...Meanwhile, this year’s city council president Georgette Gomez has been collecting cash for the San Diego Equality Awards by means of a $5000 behested payment made by the San Diego & Imperial Counties Labor Council, per an August 19 disclosure.

Story follows ad

Full-page advertisements are becoming ever harder to come by for the San Diego Union-Tribune, like all newspapers facing online competition. But on Sunday, August 18 it was the University of California San Diego to the rescue with an entire-page self shout-out on page A-5 for its fundraising drive, the Campaign for UC San Diego. “The youngest university in the nation to reach two billion,” the advert proclaimed. “This has fueled an intellectual, cultural, and physical transformation.” As if to show that U-T scribes were paying attention to all the good news, the very next day the paper’s front page featured the headline “UCSD tops $2B mark 3 years ahead of schedule.”

Possibly still stung by his 2016 firing, former UCSD fundraiser Steve Gamer can only manage this weak smile.

A cornucopia of campus improvements enabled by the money was reported in the story, with nary a word about high-profile bullying charges against Chancellor Pradeep Khosla, the costly 2016 firing of chief fundraiser Steve Gamer, or burgeoning La Jolla traffic pileups resulting from all the new development. “A Target store is being added this summer. A Whole Foods might follow. A bowling alley is being considered. The school’s lonely arts district will be spruced up. And UC San Diego is creating a grand front entrance that’s meant to welcome not only students but the community at large.”

The city’s latest Daddy Warbucks, billionaire Democrat, and Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs won glowing praise for donating $75 million to finance the Jacobs Medical Center. “Jacobs chuckles when he thinks of the center,” per the story, “saying, ‘Do you know who the first person was to be operated on there? I was.’”

King ColRich

Word that three principals in Otay Mesa developer ColRich anted up a total of $6900 this year for the 2020 reelection drive of Democratic incumbent City Attorney Mara Elliott, first reported here August 8, has been followed by news that the company has filed its first-ever lobbying disclosure report. Dated August 14, the statement says the firm’s Rita Mahoney and Jason Shepard are lobbying directly for “approval of tentative map and accompanying entitlements” of a project “located at the Cactus Road and Airway Road intersection within the Otay Mesa Community Plan area.” Ten “lobbying contacts” were made with unnamed city employees during the 60 days previous to the registration.

Mara Elliott

ColRich employees have long flooded city politicos with money, for a total of $59,594 since 2011. Besides Elliott with $7950, other big beneficiaries include GOP mayor Kevin Faulconer ($10,600); Republican councilman Chris Cate ($5895); and council Democrat Vivian Moreno ($5849). Besides its own recent lobbying activity, as disclosed by its August filing, ColRich also has employed the influence-peddling shops of the Atlantis Group and Sheppard Mullin, per city records.

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