Two prominent South Bay mayors are facing off this month in a special election that will tip the balance of power on the San Diego County Board of Supervisors.
Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre, a Democrat, and Chula Vista Mayor John McCann, a Republican, are competing for the District 1 seat, which represents a large swath of San Diego County’s South Bay.
The five-member board is officially nonpartisan. But in reality, party politics play a major role in decisions it makes on countywide issues like immigration policy, social services and the Tijuana River Valley sewage crisis.
This month’s runoff election will decide which party will hold a majority. Until recently, the Board was controlled by Democrats. But last December, then-County Chair Nora Vargas suddenly resigned leaving the board evenly split between two Republican and two Democratic supervisors.
Earlier this year, Aguirre and McCann emerged as the top candidates in the special election to replace Vargas.
The District 1 supervisor represents the South Bay cities of Chula Vista, National City and Imperial Beach, but not Coronado. It also includes several neighborhoods in the city of San Diego, including: San Ysidro, Nestor, Paradise Hills and South Park.
Voters in the district lean heavily Democratic, with more than 167,000 registered Democrats and just 82,000 registered Republicans. However, the last two elections in the South Bay have seen Democrats cast their ballots at lower rates than Republicans.
Early voting begins this week, and the last day to cast your ballot is July 1. Here’s what you need to know about the race.
Two prominent mayors
Aguirre, the mayor of Imperial Beach, is best known for spearheading the fight to end the cross-border sewage flows that have closed beaches and polluted communities around the Tijuana River Valley for decades.
Since she was elected mayor in 2022, Aguirre has been the South Bay’s leading voice on the sewage crisis. She has also pushed for stronger tenant protections, programs to reduce homelessness and efforts to make Imperial Beach more resilient to climate change.
Before entering politics, Aguirre worked for more than a decade with the coastal and marine conservation nonprofit WILDCOAST, which was then based in Imperial Beach.
Aguirre, 48, first moved to the San Diego region to attend college and pursue competitive bodyboarding. She is Imperial Beach’s first Latina mayor and continues to surf today.
McCann, the mayor of Chula Vista, has been a presence on the City Council for more than two decades. Like Aguirre, he was elected mayor of his city in 2022, pitching himself to voters as the stable choice.
McCann, 57, grew up in Chula Vista and went to high school at Bonita Vista High.
As an elected official, he has led a push to bring more higher education programs to the South Bay and championed the long-awaited Gaylord Resort and Convention Center on the Chula Vista Bayfront, which opened last month. He has also pushed for harsher measures on homelessness, including the city’s encampment ban.
McCann also serves as a commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve and was deployed to Iraq alongside an Army unit in 2009.
In May, both candidates sat down with KPBS to discuss how they would vote on a wide range of issues if elected to the District 1 seat.
Where they stand
Sewage Crisis
Both candidates agree that the county should be spending more on public health measures to support neighborhoods dealing with cross-border sewage pollution.
Aguirre said she is most concerned about what ongoing exposure to air and waterborne pollutants means for people living around the Tijuana River Valley.
She said she would push for the county to invest heavily in public health efforts to better understand the effects of the sewage flows. She wants the county to conduct studies on health monitoring and the economic impact of the crisis.
Aguirre also said she wants the county to look at preventative measures on parts of the Tijuana River where she said infrastructure is worsening the release of toxic gases.
McCann agrees that the county should be putting more funding towards public health measures around the valley.
He said he wants to hold politicians in Mexico accountable for Tijuana’s failing infrastructure, which has not kept pace with the city’s growth and is one of the factors fueling the sewage flows.
Aguirre has more than a decade of experience working on the Tijuana River Valley crisis. McCann has become vocal about the sewage crisis in recent months, particularly after announcing his candidacy for supervisor.
Last month, he joined a senior Trump administration official, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin, for a roundtable discussion alongside a number of other San Diego politicians.
Aguirre’s office said she was not invited to the roundtable.
Immigration
The two mayors have starkly different views on immigration policy.
The Board of Supervisors has taken several steps when it comes to immigration. The county runs the Immigrant Legal Defense Program, which provides free legal representation to people who are in San Diego County and are facing deportation.
Supervisors also recently passed a stronger sanctuary policy, which bars county agencies like the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office from working with federal immigration authorities — except when they have an arrest warrant signed by a state or federal judge.
Aguirre said she supports the county’s new sanctuary policy, although she said she thinks it should have been designed with more collaboration between supervisors and the sheriff’s office.
“I don't want to see in any shape or form our county resources being used to do ICE's work or the federal government's work,” she said.
Aguirre previously told Voice of San Diego that she did not support the policy, citing Sheriff Kelly Martinez’s refusal to comply.
However, she is clear she would vote to continue funding the Immigrant Legal Defense Program. That decision, she said, was about ensuring that everyone in the county has access to legal representation and due process rights — especially amid the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort.
“We're seeing even citizens being deported,” Aguirre said. “Where does that stop?”
McCann opposes the county’s stronger sanctuary policy.
He said he feels that cooperating with federal officials is necessary to stop fentanyl smuggling and human trafficking. He also said he supports deporting immigrants without legal status who have been convicted of violent crimes.
“We want to be able to go ahead and stop those issues as a team,” he said.
McCann said local law enforcement should not be doing federal immigration work, but said local agencies should be able to tell immigration officials if they have someone in custody who committed a violent crime.
He said he supported the U.S. Constitution and the public’s right to due process.
McCann also opposes continuing the Immigrant Legal Defense Program. He bases his decision on the need to balance the county’s budget and find places to cut back on spending.
“I believe that we should be supporting the citizens first over people who are not citizens,” he said.
Homelessness
Aguirre and McCann both emphasized their records on homelessness and agreed that the county should be taking more of a lead on the crisis.
The number of unhoused people living on the street in both Imperial Beach and Chula Vista fell last year, according to the annual homelessness census. It was part of a regional decline in homelessness across the county — the first since the pandemic.
Chula Vista saw the number of unsheltered unhoused people in the city fall by 6.5%, from 503 to 470 people. In Imperial Beach, unsheltered homelessness fell by 15%, from 20 to 17 people.
McCann touts Chula Vista’s construction of the Otay Bridge Shelter, a small transitional housing village. He also said they’ve worked closely with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office to evict people living on state-owned land around highways.
McCann is an ardent supporter of Chula Vista’s camping ban, which restricts where people can sleep or set up tents outside.
“We need that ability to give people help and then also hold them accountable,” he said.
Aguirre said Imperial Beach officials have also worked hard to reduce homelessness under her leadership, including by establishing a task force to provide unhoused people with case management and other services like P.O. boxes where they could receive mail.
Aguirre said it was a difficult decision to support Imperial Beach’s encampment ban in 2019.
“You don't want to take this approach when we don't have enough beds in our county to give our unsheltered residents a place to sleep or spend the night,” she said.
Aguirre said the county needs to do more case work and provide more wraparound services to put people on the road to permanent housing.
Housing
Aguirre has been a forceful advocate for renters and lower-income households. Last year, she pushed for a new housing law that added protections for tenants while trying to balance the priorities of small landlords.
If elected as supervisor, she said her focus would be on adding more homes that are affordable for renters and low-income families. She emphasized that District 1 has some of the lowest household incomes in the county.
“What we need is working-class housing,” she said.
McCann’s focus is largely on home ownership.
In Chula Vista, he said he helped block the construction of two apartment complexes that were proposed for parts of the west side of the city and the Sunbow neighborhood in Otay Ranch.
“You should have the ability to actually have home ownership and have a stake in the community,” he said.
McCann is a landlord himself and owns a real estate company in Chula Vista. He has received endorsements and campaign contributions from landlord industry groups in his bid for supervisor.
In recent weeks, McCann has faced questions over his involvement with that company and whether it has introduced conflicts of interest with his support of massive developments along the city’s bayfront.
Criminal Justice
The two candidates would also take different approaches to overseeing county law enforcement.
The San Diego County Sheriff’s Office oversees the county’s jails, which are among the deadliest in California, according to an analysis by the news organization CalMatters. That means people who haven’t been convicted of a crime are dying in custody, including from overdoses and by suicide.
The Board of Supervisors recently considered granting the Citizens Law Enforcement Review Board (CLERB) more power to investigate medical staff after an in-custody death.
McCann said he feels the Sheriff’s Office is underfunded and said he would focus on hiring new deputies and guards. He said additional staffing would help prevent in-custody deaths to have more monitoring of people in custody.
McCann said he supports having an outside law enforcement agency review the jail system. But he declined to say whether he believes CLERB should have more oversight power.
“I think the number one challenge that they have is hiring more additional deputy sheriffs and more guards to be able to manage it,” he said.
Aguirre strongly criticized the rate of in-custody deaths.
“Nobody should fear death while they're being held in jail,” she said.
Aguirre said the county should be looking at the type of medical services it offers, especially if someone is intoxicated or under the influence of drugs.
Aguirre said she supports giving CLERB more oversight power. But she said that she would work with Sheriff Martinez to ensure that any changes were realistic and that Martinez was prepared to implement them.
“I would support it, but I want something to be effective,” Aguirre said.
County Spending
The Board of Supervisors has looked at several proposals to help balance the county’s budget and fill any gaps left by cuts to federal funding.
Those proposals include asking voters to consider new sales taxes and drawing funds from the county’s financial reserves.
Aguirre said she opposes adding any new taxes but supports leaning on the county’s reserves in order to continue to fund social services.
“This is a full-blown storm that we're living, thanks to Trump and DOGE and Elon Musk,” she said, referring to the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency. “We need to make sure that we don't cut essential public services that people heavily rely on.”
McCann also said he did not support raising sales taxes and touted the health of Chula Vista’s budget, which the City Council adopted last month.
He said he did not support using the county’s reserve funds.
“Those reserves are for when there's an emergency situation or a major economic down crisis,” McCann said. “So if you suddenly get rid of those reserves, you now have no safety net.”
Instead, he said he would look at making cuts to other county services, including the Immigrant Legal Defense Program and a program that allows people in jail to make free phone and video calls.
“I think we need to go through and … use those funds instead for law-abiding citizens,” McCann said.
Other factors influencing the race
Outside spending has already been a significant factor in the race. During the primary earlier this year, outside groups spent over $2 million on Aguirre, McCann and the other leading candidates.
So far, outside groups have spent close to $200,000 on the runoff election between Aguirre and McCann. That’s according to the local political consulting firm Edgewater Strategies, which is tracking the money flowing into the election.
Most of the spending so far — more than $140,000 — has been in support of McCann. It’s paid for mailers, digital ads, yard signs and other campaign materials. Aguirre’s supporters have spent just over $27,000 so far, along with another $15,000 opposing McCann.
The race also comes amid a growing national spotlight on the Tijuana River Valley sewage crisis, which has brought Trump administration officials and members of Congress to the South Bay.
Zeldin, the EPA administrator, has vowed to fast-track a retrofit of the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant, one of the key facilities responsible for processing sewage from Tijuana.
Last week, U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) also toured the Tijuana River Valley and spoke with Aguirre. In 2016, Aguirre worked for Booker’s office during an environmental fellowship in Washington D.C.
McCann has also faced growing criticism over conflict of interest questions around his real estate company and a commutation request he made to President Trump several years ago.
In April, inewsource reported that McCann helped with the effort to convince Trump to commute the sentence of a South Bay business owner who had been convicted of fraud and sent to federal prison.
The outlet reported that the business owner, Adriana Camberos, donated to McCann’s mayoral campaign and his political supporters following her release. Earlier this year, she was convicted a second time on new federal fraud charges.
That’s despite the fact that McCann has pitched himself as a public safety-focused candidate who supports the rule of law.
Last month, Voice of San Diego also reported that moves by McCann’s real estate company, which he co-owns with his wife Myllissa, have raised questions about whether he stands to financially benefit from major bayfront developments he has supported while in office.
