La Jolla, California, Wants to Secede from San Diego

The beachfront community of La Jolla, one of the wealthiest and most spectacular areas of San Diego, wants to secede from the city as a whole, citing incompatible spending priorities and a desire for greater self-governance.

The area is home to one of the most beautiful stretches of cliffside coastline in North America, taking in the famous golf course at Torrey Pines and one of California’s best surf spots (and nudist beaches) at Blacks Beach.

The area also houses the University of California San Diego, including the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and the Jonas Salk Institute for Biological Studies, an imposing concrete bunker overlooking a magnificent bay.

But all is not well in paradise, and as the San Diego Union Tribune reports, residents appear to be organizing for a serious effort to break away from the City of San Diego, which has experienced increasing social malaise:

Efforts to make La Jolla its own city separate from San Diego date back to the 1940s and emerge roughly once a decade. But previous tries have lacked funding, stopped short of proposing specific boundaries and typically focused on one or two issues.

…

This time, they are motivated in part by decaying infrastructure they say San Diego doesn’t have the capacity to fix, neglected amenities like parks and concerns that San Diego’s efforts to spur more dense housing could damage La Jolla’s character.

Supporters of the effort also argue that secession would be better for San Diego, as the Times notes: “Instead of transferring tax dollars and developer fees from La Jolla to underserved areas of San Diego, they say they want to simply remove from San Diego’s to-do list all the infrastructure and maintenance challenges that come with an older neighborhood like La Jolla.”

In order to secede, La Jolla would have to have its plans approved by a special county planning board, and the effort would have to be approved in referendums by voters in both La Jolla and in the City of San Diego.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

Correction: This article previously stated incorrectly that La Jolla was once represented by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA). The effort to achieve independence is nonpartisan.