Larry Turner, a San Diego police officer and former Marine, is running for San Diego mayor. To help inform voters, the San Diego Union-Tribune asked both candidates a series of the same questions about their priorities, positions and campaigns. Their emailed answers have been lightly edited for clarity. Why are you running, and what makes you the best candidate? I am a lifelong independent, running for mayor. My wife, Cynthia, and I live in Ocean Beach with our two young children, and we love San Diego. After serving 23 years in the Marine Corps leading our nation’s finest through combat and humanitarian relief missions, I returned home to San Diego and traded my camouflage lieutenant colonel uniform for SDPD blue and serve today as your downtown community relations officer. For years, I have listened to our local businesses, community leaders and our most vulnerable citizens in crisis. After working with our elected officials, and particularly Mayor Todd Gloria, I became disappointed by their lack of care and responsiveness to the needs of San Diego. I’m not a career politician and I refuse to become one, but I know what good leadership is and how a government is supposed to function — it’s not currently working in San Diego. What are the top 3 issues facing the city? Homelessness: Todd Gloria is responsible for San Diego’s homelessness issue becoming a full-blown humanitarian crisis. Since his election, our homeless population has surged by 45%, and the city’s budget allocated towards homelessness has ballooned more than 800%. Infrastructure: A basic expectation of San Diegans is that the city provides reliable infrastructure — stormwater protection and safely lit streets and sidewalks.  The city’s 5-year infrastructure funding gap has more than TRIPLED in four years from $1.27 billion to $4.8 billin. Nowhere is Mayor Gloria’s failure more apparent than the Jan. 22 flooding. Public safety: While overall reported crime decreased in San Diego by a scant 3% since last year, violent crime had increased every year since 2018 until last year and violent crime is up by 25% downtown this year alone. We all see and experience an unsafe San Diego and know that crime is underreported. What are the first 3 things you would do in office if elected? Homelessness: I will prop up the current Band-aids in place while strategizing their replacement by appointing a centralized homeless task force and experienced point person. We will create a shelter strategy, including size, locations and needs serviced, then seek locations with community input. Performance objectives will be set and reported out monthly. Infrastructure: I will audit special revenue funds for potential reallocation to infrastructure funding and prepare a new budget that prioritizes city core services, including infrastructure — especially stormwater, roads, sidewalks and streetlights. Public safety: I will hire more 911 call takers, as well as non-sworn behavioral health experts and investigative personnel to respond to calls from the public that do not require an armed presence. This will shorten officer response times which will rebuild trust between officers and community members at a time in our society when we can least afford to damage trust. Do you support a 1-cent city sales tax increase? Why or why not? I do not support a 1-cent city sales tax increase because this mayor has not demonstrated he can be trusted with more of our hard-earned tax dollars with poor decisions such as the $348 million 101 Ash purchase, $1.1 billion Kettner & Vine shelter and $500 million a year in increased payroll spending. The city’s independent budget analyst has warned that next year’s budget cycle could be difficult absent a new revenue stream. Between that warning, the city’s infrastructure funding shortfall and its ongoing pension payments, what should the city do? Where should services be cut, and/or where should new revenue be sought? Todd Gloria’s spending has left San Diego in a desperate financial crisis which requires true leadership and tough decisions to fix. I will perform an immediate budget review to ensure money is only spent on core services of homelessness, infrastructure and public safety. I will perform a class and compensation survey of all city salaries to reduce the $500 million a year that Mayor Gloria has added and ensure the city abides by its own budgetary principle that NO one-time revenues shall be used to fund ongoing expenses which hogtie our city’s financial future. Polling has shown housing and affordability to be a top issue for San Diegans, and city leaders and candidates have raised concerns about San Diegans being priced out and stressed the need for more homes that middle-income people can afford. What more should the city do to combat its housing affordability crisis? While housing permits have increased, they have primarily been for market-rate, rental properties which have driven rents up in San Diego by 25% during Todd Gloria’s term — no low-income units have been constructed. We do not have a housing shortage, we have an AFFORDABLE housing shortage! We need to preserve naturally-occurring affordable units, and we need to require 10% of all new projects be affordable, with no outs. We also need to eliminate a bonus ADU program that has driven up property values and produced only a few affordable units at the expense of destroying neighborhoods. Proposition 33 would allow cities to enact rent control beyond what they can now, but it’s drawn concerns about how it could curb new housing construction locally. Do you support Prop. 33? Why or why not? Beyond the specifics of that measure, do you support expanding local rent regulations more generally? If so, how so? I do not support Proposition 33, nor expanding local rent regulations in general. Every economic study performed on rent control shows that it disincentivizes investment in new housing construction, pushes property owners to take rental properties off the market, and hurts seniors and those living on fixed incomes by reducing the housing supply available to them. Prop. 33 and rent control would only worsen San Diego’s affordable housing crisis and lead to a higher cost of living for all our residents. How would you evaluate the record of Proposition 47 in the decade since voters enacted it? Should voters scale it back by passing Proposition 36? Why or why not? As an SDPD officer for the past 9 years, I have seen first-hand the impact of Prop. 47’s contribution to increased theft and drug crimes which now primarily go unreported. Contrary to reports of reduced crime, we all see more aisles locked up at our local stores due to theft and feel less safe in our daily lives. Prop. 36 will provide a tool to allow rehabilitation as a preferred option to jail in drug crimes which will help us reduce one of the main drivers of homelessness. San Diego has too few shelter beds to accommodate the homeless people who need them and stands to lose more soon, but a proposal for a large congregate shelter lease has drawn scrutiny. How should the city act quickly to ensure everyone who wants it has shelter or housing? How should it balance this urgency with the need for due diligence? With 614 more shelter beds scheduled to be lost by the end of 2024 due to Todd Gloria’s Band-aid approaches to homelessness, San Diego will now have fewer shelter beds than at the start of this mayor’s term. It is imperative that we stop thinking short-term and immediately form a task force with a single point person to strategize the specific number of shelters, size, locations and needs serviced at each, then seek locations with community input and due diligence performed at each shelter location to make sure it works.