San Diego City District 10

My Heartfelt Case for a District of Our Own

San Ysidro deserves its own seat at the table. That’s not a talking point for me — it’s something I feel every time I drive to a City meeting, every time I explain to a neighbor why our streets get fixed last, and every time I watch how far our voice has to travel before anyone downtown hears it.

Right now, San Ysidro is part of San Diego’s City Council District 8. On paper, that sounds fine. In practice, District 8 stretches across Barrio Logan, Logan Heights, Sherman Heights, Southcrest, Grant Hill, Memorial, Otay Mesa, Nestor, and the Tijuana River Valley — a huge, sprawling patchwork of communities, each with real and legitimate needs of its own. San Ysidro is just one voice among many, competing for attention inside a district that was never built around us.

We Are Geographically Cut Off From Our Own District

Here’s something that says it all: to reach a City Council meeting downtown, or to attend most District 8 events, I have to drive through two entirely different cities — Chula Vista and National City — before I ever set foot back in the City of San Diego. Think about that. San Ysidro is legally part of San Diego, but getting to the seat of our own city government means leaving San Diego altogether and passing through two other jurisdictions to get there.

That’s not a district that reflects how our community actually lives, works, or organizes. It’s a line on a map that technically connects us to the rest of District 8, but practically isolates us from it.

San Ysidro Is Different — and That’s Exactly the Point

San Ysidro isn’t just another neighborhood filling out a district. We are the busiest land border crossing in the Western Hemisphere. We are the Gateway to the Americas. Every single day, an enormous volume of trade, tourism, and commerce moves through our community on its way in and out of the country — and with it, enormous sums of tax revenue tied directly to our port of entry and the economic activity it generates.

Yet how much of that revenue translates into visible reinvestment in San Ysidro itself — in our roads, our parks, our public safety, our infrastructure? When our community is folded into a much larger district, it becomes far too easy for our specific needs, and our specific economic contribution, to get lost in the shuffle.

We are a border community first. Our challenges — traffic and cross-border congestion, aging infrastructure, environmental impacts from the port of entry, housing pressure, and public safety needs shaped by our unique geography — are simply not the same as the challenges facing Barrio Logan or Otay Mesa. We deserve a district built around those realities, not one that treats us as an afterthought attached to someone else’s.

Why a District 10 Matters: Accountability and Transparency

This isn’t about taking something away from our neighbors in District 8. It’s about giving San Ysidro what every community deserves: a representative whose full attention, full accountability, and full transparency belong to us alone.

When a Council district covers this many distinct communities, no single representative can be everywhere or know everything. That’s not a criticism of anyone who has held that seat — it’s math. A dedicated San Ysidro district would mean:

• A representative who lives our reality, who drives our streets, whose kids may go to our schools, and who understands firsthand what it means to be a border community.
• Genuine accountability, because a representative answering to San Ysidro alone can’t hide behind the needs of a dozen other neighborhoods when it comes time to explain a vote or a budget decision.
• Transparency about where our tax revenue goes, so our community can finally see, clearly, whether the money generated at our border is being reinvested where it’s earned.
• A stronger voice in citywide decisions, because right now, San Ysidro’s priorities have to compete for space inside a much larger district’s agenda.

This Is Personal for Me

I didn’t come to this issue as a policy exercise. I came to it as a wife, a mother, and a school mom who has lived the daily reality of what it means to be geographically and politically disconnected from our own city government. As your elected San Ysidro School Board Trustee, I see every day how much stronger our community becomes when there is a direct, accountable line between the people who serve and the people they serve.

San Ysidro built its identity around being a gateway — a place where two countries meet, where families cross every day to work, to shop, to visit loved ones, to build lives that stretch across a border. We should be proud of that identity, and we should have a City Council district that reflects it, rather than one that erases it into a much larger, disconnected whole.

It’s time for San Diego to consider a City Council District 10 — a district built entirely around San Ysidro, for San Ysidro. We’ve earned it, we’ve paid for it in tax revenue that flows through our port of entry, and most of all, we deserve the same accountability and transparency every other San Diego community already has.