Nicole's Plan

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As a Chief Deputy City Attorney, Nicole led the team that built San Diego's nationally recognized Gun Violence Response Unit, and worked to protect children from gun violence, prosecute hate crimes, and represent domestic violence survivors. She will:

• Fully staff and train firefighters for wildfire response and prevention
• Fully staff police to improve response times
• Support legislation keeping illegal guns out of our neighborhoods

The City needs $248 million a year to bring roads up to national standards but spends about a third of that. Sidewalk repairs can take up to 8 years, and roughly 6,000 of the City's 55,000 streetlights are broken. Nicole will build a funded, publicly tracked one-, five-, and ten-year infrastructure roadmap for District 2 and work with County and State partners to close the funding gap.

Safe Routes to School: Citywide, principals have flagged 107 school-related safety concerns, from missing crosswalks to poor lighting and unsafe drop-off zones. Nicole will:

• Set a fixed completion date for every outstanding District 2 school safety request
• Support the City's school-zone speed limit reductions and push for more where crash data supports it
• Prioritize crosswalks, countdown timers, and lighting near District 2 schools first

Fixing what's broken:

• Potholes: Create a published District 2 repaving schedule 
• Sidewalks: capital funding to cut the 8-year backlog on a public timeline, prioritizing school routes, transit stops, and the heart of our communities
• Sewers/storm drains: replace aging pipes in District 2 before failures, funded partly through state and federal grants
• Streetlights: fully staff repair crews and clear the ~6,000-outage backlog, starting in District 2's darkest corridors

Pedestrian and bike safety:

• Fix District 2's entries on the citywide "Fatal 15" dangerous intersections list, including Rosecrans Street in Midway
• Real enforcement of under-12 e-bike rules, paired with the existing SDUSD/police education program

Nicole has managed government budgets and secured grant funding throughout her career. She knows fiscal discipline and quality services go hand in hand.

Auditing contracts: A full audit of City contracts to ensure fair pricing, not cuts. San Diego and Carlsbad use the same janitorial supplies vendor and contract, yet Carlsbad negotiated a 50% discount on its most-used supplies. San Diego didn't.

Scrutinizing leases: Roughly a quarter of City leases are in expired holdover status, likely below market value. The Fairbanks Ranch Country Club golf lease, signed in the 1980s and last renegotiated in 2016, runs until 2056 and costs the operator just $25,000 a year. Nicole will review the full lease portfolio and hold tenants to fair terms.

Pursuing every available dollar: Direct City departments to compete more aggressively for federal and state grants for roads, parks, public safety, and housing, funding other major cities already capture more of.

San Diego's current approach to density has let predatory developers and corporate investors crowd out the families this city is supposed to serve. Nicole will fight for housing policy that puts residents first, not developer profit margins.

• Rein in reckless ADU development. Current policy has let developers cram oversized complexes with undersized units onto lots with no regard for parking, trash service, or neighborhood character, leaving families without sufficient space to raise their children, residents to deal with overflowing trash cans and neighborhoods with gridlocked streets. Nicole will push for real accountability: enforceable parking and waste standards, and consequences for developers who ignore them.
• Stop corporate investors from buying up our neighborhoods. Nearly a quarter of San Diego housing is now owned by investors instead of the families who actually live here. Nicole will end tax incentives that reward large companies for scooping up residential housing, and impose a 100-day waiting period so local families get the first shot at buying a home.
• Build homeownership opportunities that work for real families, not developers, by prioritizing gentle density like townhomes on existing land and preserving onsite parking requirements that ADU policy has stripped away.

The natural beauty of District 2 is one of its greatest assets, but it’s under pressure. As your next Councilmember, Nicole will fight to protect our beaches, bays, and canyons from threats like pollution, overdevelopment, and illegal dumping. Her priorities for preserving our environment include:

• Protect the coastline, Mission Bay, Mission Beach, Point Loma, and Ocean Beach for families, surfers, and seniors
• Hold polluters accountable and ensure development respects bay and coastline health.
• Explore cost effective ways to process stormwater to keep our beaches and bays blue
• Preserve District 2's canyons as open space for air quality, wildlife, and recreation

Neighborhoods should be where our residents thrive. In San Diego, there are almost 6,000 entire-home short-term rentals that sit empty roughly half the time. That vacancy presents a real threat to small businesses, hotels, and schools. 

When we allow entire homes to become hotels full-time, we send families packing and force our teachers,  nurses and firefighters into long commutes far from communities they serve. We have already seen the consequences. The loss of permanent residents in neighborhoods saturated by these short-term rentals has been tied to declining school enrollment and even school closure. Short term-rentals also overburden our first responders, costing tax payers and increasing emergency response times. As your Councilmember, Nicole will fight to keep neighbors in our neighborhoods by: 

• Pursuing common-sense reforms to improve the lives of long-time residents, such as extending San Diego’s current two-night minimum stay to match standards set by cities across our nation. These policies will encourage owners to convert these entire-home rentals back into long-term housing that local residents can afford.

As Chief Deputy City Attorney, Nicole helped create the City's first comprehensive outreach and support program for its most vulnerable residents. She will:

• Partner with the County on behavioral health services for residents facing substance use and mental health disorders
• Support expanding shelter beds and homelessness prevention measures
• Build public senior care and housing on government-owned land; seniors on fixed incomes are the fastest-growing group entering homelessness in San Diego

• Expand homeownership opportunities and keep rents affordable through community-centered projects near schools, jobs, and amenities
• Partner with the San Diego Housing Commission on housing programs and subsidies for seniors and working families
• Support programs connecting families and seniors to childcare, healthcare, and essential services

 To get to a bus stop, with infrequent service, from her home in Clairemont, Nicole has to walk over a mile through a canyon with no sidewalks or streetlights; An unreasonable trek for families with young children or seniors getting groceries. She will prioritize safe, reliable transit access for residents who depend on it, especially in neighborhoods currently cut off by unsafe walking routes to transit. 

Drawing on her career upholding the Constitution, Nicole will ensure all residents, regardless of immigration status, race, or identity, retain full due process and equal protection. 

• Opposes contracting with companies like Flock. On the Council, Nicole will work to ensure that all residents are afforded their full constitutional rights, including equal protection under the law and due process. For this reason, Nicole is opposed to the City contracting with companies like Flock, which have been proven to not securely store sensitive information and to allow access without judicial oversight. Nicole also does not believe public safety should be handed over to a private, for-profit company. Flock's business model depends on expanding data collection and access across jurisdictions, decisions residents never voted on and often don't even know are being made. San Diego can invest in real public safety without sacrificing our residents' privacy and constitutional rights to a private vendor operating outside judicial oversight
• Strengthen San Diego’s Sanctuary City Policies.  An attack on one of our constitutional rights is an attack on all of our constitutional rights. What we are watching happen right now, people detained without a hearing, without a lawyer, without ever seeing a judge, isn't a gap in the system. It's a deliberate attempt to remove the checks that are supposed to be there. Nicole will defend due process and ensure local law enforcement is never used for ICE operations that violate residents' Constitutional rights
• Defend LGBTQ+ and Women’s Rights. Ensure that San Diego remains a safe and welcoming community for all members of the LGBTQ+ community and that San Diegans can safely access reproductive health care