John Franklin, 45, a Republican, is the mayor of Vista and owns a communications and political consulting firm, and he is running for the Board of Supervisors in District 5.
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Originally from Kansas, Franklin lives in the Shadowridge neighborhood of Vista and with his wife co-owns the firm Franklin Communications.
The San Diego Union-Tribune emailed a series of questions to Franklin and other candidates to help inform voters about their positions, priorities and plans if elected.
Franklin said he did not use AI tools in responding to the Union-Tribune’s questions.
I’m running for supervisor to lower the cost of living. San Diego County is too expensive, and working families need relief. How? By stopping tax hikes that raise the price of everything you buy — including food and rent.I’ll bring the same fiscal discipline I used in Vista when we balanced the budget 12 consecutive times and built our reserve fund to $40.8 million — without raising taxes.
I’m the only candidate running for supervisor who has never voted for a tax increase. Stopping tax hikes is the central fight in this election, and North County needs a proven tax-fighter to stand up to the board majority’s tax-and-spend agenda. Voters can trust me to protect taxpayers’ money and ensure public safety is properly funded.
Housing affordability and cost of living: We must build more attainable single-family housing, not more high-rise, high-density rental housing. As mayor, I fought to build single-family housing, and to maintain our suburban and semi-rural community character.
Homelessness & addiction: We must respond with compassion and accountability, including enforcing our laws. As mayor, I created an award-winning homelessness strategic plan, built a 48-bed navigation center that has helped 180 individuals escape street homelessness by finding permanent housing and used drug and law enforcement to eliminate encampments.
Public safety including crime and fire preparedness: Policing and fire prevention need to be the first priority of county government, not the first budget item to be sacrificed to fund a growing bureaucracy. As mayor, I funded more sheriff’s deputies and firefighters. We increased ambulance service and implemented cutting edge wildfire detection technologies.
I will balance the budget. I’ll introduce a measure to protect funding for public safety, while freezing hiring for non-public safety to eliminate the budget deficit. A balanced budget will eliminate the need for new taxes, saving taxpayers billions.
I will make housing more affordable by eliminating the county’s “vehicle miles traveled” policy, which is the most restrictive in the state, severely limits the growth of low-rise, low-density housing and forces the development of expensive high-rise, high-density rental housing.
I will expand conservatorship and fund Proposition 36 to solve homelessness, prevent hundreds of deaths on our streets each year and clean up our cities at the same time. The county coroner reports hundreds of deaths from overdose among the unsheltered each year. True love and compassion means getting the addicted and mentally ill the help they need, inpatient, not watching them die on our streets.
As mayor, I’ve proven that compassion and accountability are BOTH essential ingredients to solve homelessness.
At my direction, we built one of the first complete by-name lists in California, building a personal relationship with each homeless person, understanding the individual causes of their homelessness. We built a best-in-class Navigation Center, rescuing 180 people from street homelessness by finding them permanent housing.
We’ve also utilized law-enforcement to eliminate encampments. We arrested drug sellers selling into and within encampments. When we did, encampments disappeared. Narcotic addiction is the single largest driver of homelessness. When narcotics become scarce, so do encampments.
When someone is ready to escape addiction and homelessness, we must be ready to help them with treatment beds, housing and a hand up. We must not enable homelessness either. Enforcement is a critical tool to curtail behavior that has tremendous costs in lost lives and the deterioration of our communities.
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High-rise, high-density rental housing did not make New York, San Francisco or L.A. more affordable, and it isn’t making San Diego more affordable either.
Our supervisors enacted the most restrictive housing policy in California, designed to prevent the development of new single-family housing. It has done just that. It forces all new housing to be built in city centers, urbanizing our communities. That may be fine for downtown, but none of us in North County signed on for the kind of problems that high density brings — urban decay, crime, traffic and unaffordable housing. We chose a suburban, semi-rural area of the county to avoid these ills, and we don’t want to see our communities urbanized.Attainable housing can be built in new communities, without burdening existing cities or unincorporated villages. Instead, we are forcing young families to rent or drive to Temecula to find quality housing.
Three San Diego County supervisors voted for a resolution that if enacted as policy will protect illegal aliens who are literally convicted of murder, violent rape and child molestation from deportation. I am the only candidate in the District 5 race who has said clearly the “super sanctuary policy” is wrong, and I will fight to overturn it.
Most of us agree our jails, where individuals have been charged with or convicted of a crime, are the appropriate place for local cooperation with federal law enforcement.
I led Vista’s council to publicly oppose the sanctuary state law in 2018. Even that law did not go so far as to protect serious felons, i.e. murderers, rapists and child molesters. We need fair, moderated policy. Going too far in either direction is a mistake.
To keep San Diego County affordable, our leaders should say NO to the billions in new taxes THEY have proposed. I will. We must also say NO to Terra Lawson-Remer and Kyle Krahel’s call for massive expansion of county-funded healthcare for illegal and non-permanent immigrants.
Local decisions — like investing in new water sources which are two to four times more expensive than traditional water sources — have had a sharp impact on water prices. Some leaders are fixated on investments in toilet-to-tap, which isn’t cost-efficient. Even the more palatable desalination water costs multiples of other traditional water sources. To keep rates low, we should consider more efforts to capture and store available freshwater supplies before costlier investments in recycled water.
California’s gasoline prices are consistently $2.20 more than the rest of the nation. Why? Policy makers prioritize radical agendas over affordability. We must put working families’ needs first!
Between 300 and 500 people die on the streets of San Diego County each year from overdose. This is a clear crisis that spans the health and mental health missions of San Diego County. We must invest more in the powers granted to the county by SB 43 to help addicts into conservatorship. San Diego County utilizes conservatorship less than all other populous counties in California.
I worked to open the County’s first crisis stabilization unit in Vista. I am committed to making psychiatric facilities available to move the mentally ill and severely addicted off our streets into safe, compassionate facilities.
The importance of wildfire preparedness cannot be understated. We must invest in adequate evacuation routes for communities like Valley Center and Fallbrook, which face severe fire threat. Funding for projects like Valley Center’s Mirar De Valle Road extension to provide critical evacuation routes must be prioritized to ensure safety.
Supervisor Jim Desmond must be commended for making fire preparedness a top priority. I will continue his leadership by funding our local fire protection districts and Cal Fire resources, firefighting aircraft and especially wildland fuel management.
The single most important thing we can do to save lives and property is to manage the availability of combustible material. I visited Altadena after the Eaton fire and saw the devastation firsthand that poor land management causes. We must use inspection, mitigation and land management actively and carefully. These policies also ensure the affordability of fire insurance, which has priced so many families out of their homes.
I am the only candidate for supervisor who has never voted for or supported a tax increase, and never will. Rebecca Jones voted for a 1% San Marcos tax increase in 2024 and a ¾-cent SANDAG sales tax plan in 2025.
The county has grown payroll by 13.2% in the last five years while the county population has declined in the same time. Public safety must be fully funded, and non-safety payrolls and hiring should be frozen until the current deficit is cured. Core government services must be prioritized, and new government expansion spending plans must be rejected.
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