Von Wilpert Claims Stewardship as San Diego Residents Hit Potholes and Sue Over Trash Fees

San Diego City Councilmember Marni von Wilpert is running for Congress on a record of local stewardship. Her record on the council, the auditor’s books, and the city’s crumbling infrastructure challenge that claim.

Von Wilpert chaired the City Council’s Active Transportation and Infrastructure Committee—the panel that oversees streets, stormwater, and public works. During her tenure, the city’s own auditors documented a slide in basic services: worse pavement, a billion-dollar repair gap, pothole trucks that were inoperable, and utility bills that blew past what voters were told they would pay.

RNC spokesman Nick Poche summed up her tenure: “The Marni von Wilpert record is crappy services, higher costs, and insiders getting paid while taxpayers get hosed. Von Wilpert can’t deliver for people on city council, and she has no business running for Congress.”

San Diego’s Pavement Condition Index fell to 63 from 71. A City Auditor report found $1.9 billion in street repair need against $645 million in identified funding, a $1.2 billion hole the city has no plan to close. 

The same office found crumbling pavement is now costing the average San Diego driver about $800 a year in extra vehicle repairs. 

A separate audit found the pothole-patching operation breaking down: four of nine patch trucks were out of service for repairs more than 20 percent of the time over a 15-month span, even as residents filed more than 28,600 pothole complaints in a single year.

Despite her leading the committee, Von Wilpert could not even steer projects into her own ward. At a May 2025 vote on the city’s Mobility Master Plan she admitted, “There’s not a lot in here for District 5, and it makes me very sad,” noting that of 377 projects citywide, only eight touched her district.

The same years that roads deteriorated, the trash bill exploded. Voters in 2022 were told a new trash fee would run $23 to $29 a month. Homeowners instead faced charges as high as $47.59 a month—nearly double the pitch—and, starting July 1, 2025, roughly $523 a year for pickup they had not paid as a separate bill before. 

The California Globe reported last year that San Diego was already failing to collect millions from private haulers even as residential bills spiked: $4 million uncollected in one fiscal year and about $25 million since 2010, against a city budget already in the red.

In another concerning display of her stewardship, Von Wilpert voted in July 2023 for a $40 million, 20-year state loan to build the Miramar composting facility. That loan raised the city’s total payout from $77.2 million to $95.3 million, at an all-in interest rate roughly double what the city pays on comparable state water and sewer loans. 

Homeowners sued, alleging the fee violated Proposition 218 by charging more than the actual cost of service. In April 2026 a Superior Court judge refused to dismiss the case, finding plaintiffs had raised legitimate doubts about the city’s cost projections. 

A proposed rollback toward $29 a month did not end the fight on the council’s first pass; the dispute later produced a costly legal defense and a political settlement that still left residents paying more than the original campaign promise.

Water and sewer ratepayers absorbed their own avoidable hit. The city’s flagship Pure Water San Diego program suffered flooding at a pump station caused by an erroneous groundwater analysis, adding at least $20 million in cost and threatening delays to a $200 million pipeline and a $350 million treatment facility. 

The committee that was supposed to watch the pipes was the one von Wilpert chaired.

While those bills mounted, she helped negotiate and voted for a policy that raised the threshold for required council approval of consulting contracts from $1 million to $3 million and quintupled the cumulative cap on consultant fees before the council had to sign off. 

The practical effect was more six- and seven-figure professional-services deals with less public scrutiny, while streets scored a 63 and trash pickup became a lawsuit.

This is not von Wilpert’s first collision with the consequences of her own decisions. 

The Globe reported that during her council tenure San Diego rents rose more than 30% while she opposed measures to expand housing supply, including tighter ADU caps that drew a warning from the state housing department, and led a council vote to sue ICE. She has said she is “not waiting ’til I get to Congress to start fighting ICE.” After net immigration dropped and local rents later eased off their peaks, that record is now campaign fodder in CD-48.

The Globe has also detailed her alignment with sanctuary-state limits on police-ICE cooperation, her Emerge California pedigree, and votes to squeeze police overtime while expanding alternative responders, the same period when core public works lagged. 

When Dr. Anthony Fauci took the Fifth before the Senate this summer, the Globe revisited von Wilpert’s record as co-chair of San Diego’s COVID-19 Response and Recovery Committee: prolonged shutdowns, sports bans for kids, and a double-down on mandates long after the evidence of harm piled up.

San Diego’s mismanagement is no longer an abstraction. La Jolla residents have pushed to break away and form their own city over the condition of municipal services. That secession talk is what happens when pavement scores fall, trash fees double, and the councilmember who ran the infrastructure committee tells her own district there is “not a lot” in the mobility plan for them.

Von Wilpert’s campaign biography includes a move from Washington, D.C. to San Diego to avoid Donald Trump, and a heavy emphasis on DEI programming. 

Constituents who bounce through potholes and open a $47 trash bill are now being asked to send that same management style to Congress.