Part of it may be these agencies don’t get the same scrutiny as City Councils and county Boards of Supervisors. But a lot of it is also a sense of insulation from consequences. The larger, more important special districts are run by political appointees from member city governments who face heavy groupthink pressure to conform and not make waves.

In San Diego County, this mindset is evident in two of the pettiest, low-rent scandals you’ll ever see. The CEOs of both the Port of San Diego and the San Diego Convention Center engaged in blatant nepotism.

Really? In 2014?

Really.

In the first case …

Port of San Diego CEO Wayne Darbeau is already under a lengthy personnel review for obtaining his son a summer job with Pasha Automotive, a major port tenant with whom the port was negotiating significant business deals.

Now, it turns out, Darbeau’s son’s best friend got a job there, too.

 In the second case ….

The son of the San Diego Convention Center’s president and chief executive was hired — and promoted — by the organization even though his primary work experience was in dance.

CEO Carol Wallace’s daughter-in-law also is employed by the convention center.

Wallace declined to be interviewed about the employment status of her son, event coordinator Earnest Wallace, or her daughter-in-law, convention services manager Gerrica Gray-Johnson.

Both stories are from the U-T San Diego.

But when it comes to obliviousness/indifference to opinion, nothing will ever top the actions of the biggest special district of them all: the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which supplies water to 19 million customers of special agencies from Santa Barbara to Riverside to the Mexican border.

The MWD not only attempted to spike the pension formula for all its nearly 2,000 employees in 2009 — long after concerns about pension sustainability had emerged. It also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for a PR campaign to try to grease the path to approval of its insane proposal. It did so at a time it was imposing massive rate hikes on its clients.

But the Los Angeles Times didn’t think it was news.

Special districts deserve at least as much media scrutiny as City Councils and county supervisors. Those government bodies are actively watched by community activists, at least for the most part. But the folks providing water, sewage service, vector control, etc., often operate in the dark — which they like.

This isn’t just the media’s fault. The government agencies that appoint officials to these districts’ boards are often indifferent to their behavior.

Proposition 26 requires politicians to meet the same vote requirements to pass these Hidden Taxes as they must to raise other taxes, protecting California taxpayers and consumers by requiring these Hidden Taxes to be passed by a two-thirds vote of the Legislature and, at the local level, by public vote.

But this hasn’t stopped California politicians from attempting to get around its restrictions. In San Diego, authorities seeking to fund a costly expansion of the convention center so it could continue to attract Comic Con came up with a novel approach raising hotel room taxes in tiers based on how close they were to the convention center. It won approval from a trial court judge.

San Diego leaders were warned plan was risky

Then it ran into an appellate court that understood that Prop 26 was intended to thwart maneuvers just such as this. Here is the KPBS account:

The Fourth District Court of Appeals overturned a 2013 ruling by Superior Court Judge Ronald Prager that approved a hotel room tax to be used to finance the $520-million expansion. That tax was voted on by hoteliers, not by voters.

A state law [actually, the California Constitution] says increasing taxes requires approval by two thirds of voters.

San Diego city officials tried to get around that requirement by forming a district of hotel owners who voted instead, saying the vote was only required by the people who own the land on which the hotels sit. 

They did so despite an explicit warning from San Diego City Attorney Jan Goldsmith that the strategy was legally risky.

Today, city leaders will try to figure out what to do next. They missed the deadline to put the matter before voters in November, which is what Goldsmith recommended in the first place. Voters aren’t nearly as hostile to taxes on visitors as they are to taxes they pay directly, so that’s still the logical approach.

Goldsmith is now warning city leaders that an appeal to the state Supreme Court is a long shot.

I think he’ll be heeded this time around.

Prop 26 has teeth!