San Diego City Council members are calling for fundamental changes to the city’s 4-year-old opportunity fund, which funnels money to recreation centers in low-income areas where community donations tend to lag.
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While council members praise the fund for reviving many rec centers and helping to boost citywide neighborhood equity, they are criticizing how money from the opportunity fund gets allocated.
Their primary concern is that the allocation formula punishes rec centers with large bank balances that city parks officials haven’t managed to spend on facilities upgrades or activities.
And that has led to a second important concern: Why aren’t city parks officials spending those large balances at rec centers, even when those centers have conspicuous repair and renovation needs?
“This process is absolutely flawed,” said Councilmember Vivian Moreno, who represents many lower-income neighborhoods in the city’s South Bay region. “The way this is being handled is not equitable. This is not what the intention was for these opportunity funds.”
Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera, who represents City Heights and nearby areas, said an equity policy is useless if it only exists on paper.
“When we create equity policies and those policies don’t create equity on the ground, it makes us look like we are just full of it,” Elo-Rivera said. “People care about what’s happening in their communities, not about the paper we’re pushing around.”
The demands for change come at a time when the opportunity fund is significantly growing in size, thanks to rising city fees for field and room permits and a settlement with Surf Cup Sports.
The opportunity fund is rising to a record $555,000 during the new fiscal year that begins July 1, a 38% jump caused primarily by a sharp hike in city fees for field and room permits in spring 2025.
In addition, the city’s new agreement with Surf Cup — which leases city parkland near Del Mar — requires the company to contribute $100,000 per year to the opportunity fund starting next January.
Moreno is frustrated that, despite the increase in funding, the rec centers she represents in District 8 are slated to get only $70,000 in the coming fiscal year — far less than the rec centers in Districts 4 and 9.
The rec centers in District 9 are slated to receive $243,000, and the rec centers in District 4 are slated to receive $242,000.
There were similar disparities between those three lower-income districts in fiscal year 2026.
“This is two years in a row District 8 has been left behind, and I’m not going to stand for it,” Moreno told her council colleagues Tuesday.
Parks officials explained to Moreno that a key cause of the disparities is that her district’s rec centers have an overall bank balance of $1.2 million, which works against them in the opportunity fund allocation formula by making them appear less needy.
“It just happens there’s been more money accumulated in the District 8 locations than the others,” Andy Field, the city’s director of parks and recreation, told Moreno. “We’re all-in as far as trying to address this as best we can.”
But Moreno said her rec centers have huge needs, citing the lack of a scoreboard at Montgomery-Waller and inadequate dugouts at Memorial’s ballpark.
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She said it’s “mind-boggling” that Montgomery-Waller has a $302,000 bank balance but that city officials haven’t managed to fix a scoreboard they estimate will cost $34,000 to repair.
She said it’s similarly frustrating that city officials haven’t upgraded the field at Memorial despite having enough money to do so.
“How do I look at a kid at Memorial and tell him, ‘You can’t play baseball because staff didn’t spend the money’?” Moreno said. “The math’s not mathing.”
On Tuesday, the council rejected the proposed opportunity fund allocations for the new fiscal year and requested city officials come back June 29 with a new set of proposed allocations.
To avoid needing to reduce proposed allocations in District 4 and District 9 in order to raise them in District 8, city officials said they may use some of the new Surf Cup money sooner than they had planned.
Councilmember Kent Lee, who represents neighborhoods unaffected by the opportunity fund, suggested the city adjust the allocation formula to eliminate bank balances as a criterion.
Khota Zaiser, an aide to Mayor Todd Gloria, committed to solving the problem of unspent fund balances.
“Let’s get the dollars out the door,” he said. “I think the task for Parks and Rec is to figure out our work plan to get these dollars out quickly, so we don’t end up in the same situation next year.”
Councilmember Henry Foster, who represents District 4, said he’d like to see timelines for spending the cash balances and suggested that tracking those balances become a formal part of the city’s budget monitoring process.
Elo-Rivera, who represents District 9, said the opportunity fund has made a real impact on some rec centers, particularly one in Stockton near state Route 94.
That center now has Zumba classes, seminars for seniors, financial literacy classes, youth lunches and a variety of other programming.
“This is in a community where the rec center was starved for resources to the point of barely having a pulse,” he said. “It’s one of the few places where the community can feel safe and enriched. It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing.”
Council President Joe LaCava said growing pains are understandable for new programs.
“The opportunity fund is just a few years old — it was built from scratch,” he said.
But LaCava said the fund’s policies appear to be vague in many areas.
“It’s time to re-look,” he said.
The opportunity fund has steered $1.7 million total to more than a dozen rec centers since it was created in 2022.
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