Kevin Faulconer and the committees supporting him for county supervisor have zeroed in on a blunt message lately. “Terra Lawson-Remer Doesn’t Show Up for Work,” claims a mailer about the incumbent. That’s a variation on a frequent theme from the Faulconer political camp. However, the accusation is simply not true when it comes to attendance at Board of Supervisors meetings. Even data produced by the Faulconer folks suggest the reality is far different from the claim. But Lawson-Remer does not dispute that she has never personally attended a panel of the Regional Task Force on Homelessness, which Faulconer has teed off on. Lawson-Remer is vice chair of the RTFH Continuum of Care board and said she has sent a staff member as a proxy in her stead to the meetings, which are held about every other month. Her county predecessors on that committee, former Supervisor Nathan Fletcher and current Supervisor Nora Vargas, personally attended at least some of the meetings. At times, the Faulconer camp has simply called the committee the “Regional Task Force on Homelessness.” That’s confusing because there’s a separate RTFH board that Lawson-Remer does not sit on. Citing that, Lawson-Remer has claimed Faulconer and his folks are “lying.” The Continuum of Care committee she’s appointed to is federally-mandated and deals with issues such as federal funding for homelessness and the annual homeless point-in-time count. Not surprisingly, the Faulconer criticism doesn’t mention that Lawson-Remer was represented at those meetings.  Still, policy aside, the optics of Lawson-Remer not attending meetings that deal with homelessness, an issue of high voter concern, aren’t good in the final weeks of the campaign. Making an issue out of an opponent’s attendance record, if there’s some truth to it, can be an effective campaign cudgel. It’s a simple concept to get across and voters tend to care about. Questions have been raised recently about Mayor Todd Gloria, Faulconer and others over the years not attending regional board meetings, though they, too, often had people representing them. Unlike some regional boards and commissions, no alternative members or proxies can sit on the Board of Supervisors and city councils and cast votes. The political message about missing meetings is clear, but how the numbers are portrayed can tell a different story. Further, numbers alone don’t reveal what effect missed votes may have had on policies. One mailer says Lawson-Remer has “missed more meetings than any other county supervisor.” That may be. But the actual numbers don’t make it seem so bad. The Homelessness Crisis Response Committee Supporting Kevin Faulconer for Supervisor 2024 compiled attendance records for Lawson-Remer at eight different boards and task forces. The committee says there have been 255 Board of Supervisors meetings since Lawson-Remer was elected in 2020 and she has missed 14 of them. The committee also says there have been 2,252 votes cast by the board and Lawson-Remer missed 190. That’s pretty close to confirming Lawson-Remer’s contention that she has attended 95 percent of the board meetings and cast 92 percent of the votes, though the numbers the supervisor provided were a bit different than the Faulconer committee. The Faulconer camp lists several other regional boards and task forces where they say Lawson-Remer’s attendance was spotty. The Faulconer folks didn’t initially provide information on what any of the votes were about, or list any specifics in mailers. When asked to provide details about some, Aimee Faucett, who works with the Faulconer committee, wrote in an email that Lawson-Remer missed a discussion and vote as a member of the Air Pollution Control District board regarding emissions rules pertaining to warehouses. The Lawson-Remer campaign has responded to the attacks on her attendance record in a number of ways. She cites a KPBS story in 2016 that said then-Mayor Faulconer missed 84 percent of the board meetings at the San Diego Association of Governments, the region’s transportation agency. She also said he barely attended any meetings of the San Diego Metropolitan Transit District board. As an aside, KPBS recently reported Gloria, who is up for re-election, had missed many SANDAG and MTS meetings in recent years. The story noted Gloria pledged in his campaign to improve the region’s transit and overall transportation systems — and noted that he had criticized Faulconer for not attending such meetings. Lawson-Remer has also attacked what Faulconer portrays as perhaps his biggest accomplishment — that homelessness went down when he was mayor. He has numbers to back that up, while she points to data that homelessness increased during some of the years he was in office. Lawson-Remer’s campaign frequently mentions the hepatitis A outbreak that occurred during Faulconer’s watch, which killed 20 people and sickened nearly 600 and was particularly brutal on the homeless population. She also rarely fails to mention, even in fending off the attendance criticism, the Faulconer administration’s ill-fated real estate transaction to obtain the 101 Ash St. office building that is costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, or that he backed then-President Donald Trump in the 2020 election. “Kevin Faulconer is lying to voters to distract attention from his own terrible record as mayor,” she said in an email. Attacks about attendance have a notable place in San Diego politics. In the 2012 mayoral election and again in the 2013-14 mayoral special election, Fletcher was defeated in the primaries amid an onslaught of criticism from opponents about missed votes when he was in the Assembly. Polling conducted by a committee supporting Carl DeMaio in the 2012 mayoral primary showed 81 percent of Fletcher supporters were less likely to vote for him once they heard about his absenteeism, according to the Voice of San Diego. That history is not lost on anyone who has paid close attention to local politics since.