Commentary: What working with Sacramento has bought Encinitas

Rimga Viskanta’s campaign for mayor rests on one line: “I believe in more than local control. I believe in local action.” It’s a good line. The question is what action she means.

Her own words answer it. She told The Coast News she would rather work “collaboratively with legislators” to reform state housing law “rather than try to change things through lawsuits.” Californians have heard that promise for a decade. We know what it produces.

In 2021, more than 240 cities asked Gov. Gavin Newsom to veto SB 9, the law that lets single-family lots be split and built out to four units. He signed it. In 2023, Encinitas Mayor Tony Kranz joined five other coastal mayors asking for a veto of SB 423, which fast-tracks apartment projects. Newsom signed that too, and that fall he signed 56 housing bills in a single day. Even when a bill died, as SB 50 did in 2020, its central idea, upzoning near transit, came back five years later as SB 79.

That is what “working collaboratively with legislators” means in practice. Cities object, the Legislature passes the bill, and cities comply. Collaboration takes two sides willing to give. For a decade, only the cities have given. Whatever Viskanta intends by the phrase, she is offering more of the same.

To her credit, she names the right problems, among them that the city “cannot count on large-scale private developers” to solve affordability. I agree. But a diagnosis is not a plan, and a request is not an action.

Encinitas has tried both compliance and challenge. Under then-Mayor Catherine Blakespear, the city chose compliance. On her watch, the city went to court to exempt its housing plans from the public Encinitas vote Proposition A requires; in 2021, a judge refused, ruling that “only the voters have that authority.” It listed site after site for high-density housing in plans adopted in 2019 and 2021. Blakespear summed up the approach this month: “my job is to stay compliant with state laws.”

Here is what compliance set in motion. The city’s own March 2026 status report lists five apartment complexes on sites designated in those plans: Solaris, Moonlight Apartments, the Encinitas Boulevard Apartments, Clark Avenue and Quail Meadows. Together they hold about 1,240 units.

Fewer than one in five is set aside as affordable, and Solaris’s own advertisement counts a single person earning $97,950 as low income. None was built to be owned. We keep the traffic, the parking challenges and the impossible evacuation routes.

In 2024 voters changed course. The current council, led by Mayor Bruce Ehlers, a principal author of Proposition A, inherited those sites and the rules that come with them. When it approved Quail Meadows’ 448 units last year, Ehlers put the reason on the record: the city acted “under duress” because the state left it “no choice.” Then it went to court, asking a judge whether 199 apartments on Clark Avenue could be served by a street too narrow for fire access.

Viskanta is not running alone. She shares a slate with Brad Lefkowits, who says Encinitas “has to comply with state law” and opposes “spending taxpayer money fighting state housing laws without a realistic path to success.” Both, with Arielle Golden, are endorsed by the county Democratic Party and by Encinitas Action, whose members include Kranz and former Councilmember Allison Blackwell, both defeated in 2024.

The group faults the current council because it “approved every development brought to a vote.” Of course it did. The housing plans that made those approvals all but mandatory were adopted in 2019 and 2021. And it calls challenging the state a “futile approach.” The record above shows which approach has been futile.

Asked by that same group to name one decision by any Encinitas council that was wrong, Viskanta declined. Encinitas needs leaders who look forward, she wrote, “rather than relitigating the past.” But the past is not behind us. It is under construction on Encinitas Boulevard and Clark Avenue.

Planning for the next cycle begins in 2027, and she has not said whether she would put that plan before voters, as Proposition A requires, or ask a court to set the vote aside again.

Challenges do not always win, but they move Sacramento. When five charter cities, including Del Mar, sued over SB 9, a judge ruled in 2024 that the state had not shown the law would produce the affordable housing its own text promised. Within months, the Legislature rewrote the law’s purpose.

Ballots are in mailboxes now. This election decides who holds the pen when the next housing plan is drawn: leaders who will write Sacramento another letter, or leaders who will make Sacramento answer to voters at the ballot box and to a judge in court. Encinitas has seen what collaboration buys.

Local action that ends at Sacramento’s door isn’t local action. It’s another letter.

Mike Lewis is a longtime Encinitas resident and co-founder of California Stewardship Alliance