What a difference four years makes.
When current San Diego County Board of Supervisors Chair Nora Vargas was first elected in 2020, she was hailed as a pathbreaker poised to shake up county government and, in her words, bring long-overdue attention to “women and communities of color” in her South County district and beyond.
Known by the affectionate nickname “Norita” on the campaign trail, Vargas, who was born in Tijuana and raised in Mexico and the United States, was the first woman of color elected to the Board, the first Latina and the first immigrant. Together with fellow newly elected Democrat Terra Lawson-Remer, Vargas broke Republicans’ longtime hold on the county’s most powerful elected body and promised big improvements in public health, housing, homelessness and racial equity.
Four years later, many voters in her district are still waiting for the improvements. The affectionate nicknames are gone. And some constituents are downright angry. Though Vargas was recently reelected with 63 percent of the vote, some in her district nevertheless regard her as disengaged on issues that matter, inordinately focused on passion projects with little bearing on the county’s most pressing issues and prone to picking head-scratching fights with putative allies.
“Our experience here as citizens in South Bay is that Nora doesn’t care,” said Marvel Harrison, a member of the city of Imperial Beach’s Tijuana River Pollution Task Force. “Nora gives lip service on the subject [of cross-border pollution in the Tijuana River and] interrupts potential routes of progress.”
“I think it’s fair to say folks feel dissatisfied with the response to homelessness,” said Chula Vista homeless advocate Sebastian Martinez. “As an on-the-ground provider, I do not feel supported by the work Nora has done in this area…It feels that rather than being a leader on it, it’s a constant reading of the temperature and then deciding what to do.”
On key issues—homelessness, drug overdoses, affordable housing, the Tijuana River sewage crisis—conditions have worsened on Vargas’ watch. And Vargas is sometimes seen as oddly unresponsive even when constituents all but beg for help.
Harrison of Imperial Beach recalled watching an Oct. 8 Board of Supervisors meeting: “Dozens of South Bay folks had spent hours waiting to speak…regarding the sewage, and Nora rearranged the agenda to go to a baseball game, ignoring community input, completely dissing her constituents…This is degrading.”
Vargas declined an interview request for this story. Instead, her office sent a lengthy statement highlighting her accomplishments during her first term and rebutting claims made about supposed missteps.
The statement pointed to numerous actions Vargas has taken to resolvethe Tijuana River sewage crisis, including being “the first at the County to ever make [the crisis] a priority;” declaring a local state of emergency at the river “for the first time in history;” bringing federal and state public health experts to study health impacts; overseeing the installation of “the first-ever air monitors in South County;” securing $2.7 million in state funding for air purifiers; and directing local air quality officials to create a “monitoring dashboard” that alerts residents when “pollution levels pose health risks.”
On homelessness, the statement said Vargas’ Leave No Veteran Homeless Initiative has “housed 1,200 veterans” since launching last year. The county also has become a state leader in piloting a new conservatorship program that secured psychiatric care for 71 people with mental health challenges, the statement said.
The statement denied that Vargas had rearranged the Oct. 8 Board of Supervisors’ agenda to attend a baseball game. “The chairwoman had a medical issue…which required her to leave the meeting early,” the statement said. The statement also pointed out that the Padres game that day started after the Board of Supervisors meeting adjourned.
Following a public records request, reporters at 10News found no medical appointment listed in Vargas’ official calendar for Oct. 8. Vargas posted an Instagram video from the game later that day. A Vargas spokesperson said that county supervisors are not legally required to include personal medical appointments in their public county calendars.
Vargas maintains a charismatic connection with constituents in her district, and many said they appreciate having Latino representation on the Board of Supervisors. Vargas’ district is 61 percent Latino, according to county statistics, the largest such percentage in the county by a wide margin.
At a recent Election Day appearance at Chula Vista City Hall, where she dropped off her ballot, Vargas chatted with people waiting to vote and toggled effortlessly between English and Spanish.
A man who gave his name as Jorge recognized Vargas and said, “I voted for you!” Vargas broke into a smile. “Can I hug you?” she asked. She gave the man an embrace.
Moments earlier, however, a series of interviews with Chula Vista residents exiting the voting center revealed a pervasive sense that, even among Democrats, San Diego County was not making progress on many of the issues central to Vargas’ first campaign.
Voters ticked through a litany of problems—homelessness, skyrocketing rents, worries about public safety, lack of decent public transit—that they said made it increasingly hard to live in the county.
“We love it here,” said Melissa Gutierrez, a cashier at Costco. “But it’s too much.”
Since 2020, the number of homeless people in San Diego County has risen by more than a third, according to county statistics, including a sharp rise inSouth County. Countywide drug overdoses rose by nearly a quarter. The county’s homeownership affordability ranking plunged by a third, according to federal housing statistics. And sewage from the Tijuana River closed portions of the Imperial Beach shoreline for more than 1,000 days as of this year.
Vargas’ professional background before entering politics was as an executive with Planned Parenthood, and she often highlights herefforts to expand reproductive rights. In October, she announced that the county was establishing a new reproductive justice unit in the health department that, in Vargas’ words, would “improve [reproductive care] access and address the disparities faced by communities of color, low-income individuals, and LGBTQ+ populations.”
Advocates said they applaud such efforts. But many also said Vargas has not devoted nearly as much attention to equally pressing issues, such as resolving homelessness, expanding affordable housingand widening access to drug treatment.
“As someone who has tried to put people in [drug] treatment beds, I know the lack we have,” said Martinez.“There has to be constant pressure to keep the county [moving] in the right direction on homelessness and keep them being empathetic and following best practices.”
One month before the November election, Vargas’ perceived inaction on the Tijuana River sewage crisis prompted the Imperial Beach Democratic Club to take the extraordinary step of rescinding their re-election endorsement of her.
“Her actions really showed a disregard and disrespect for Imperial Beach residents,” said club secretary Sandy Brillhart. “We didn’t make our decision in a vacuum.”
The move brought into public view a long-rumored feud between Vargas and Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre, who chairs the Democratic club and has been a tireless advocate for faster action on the sewage problem.
Aguirre declined to comment on her relationship with Vargas. But she did email a long list of areas where she felt the county’s response to the sewage issue had been inadequate, including lack of “adequate signage throughout the river valley to warn recreationists of the potential exposure to pollutants,” failure to track health impacts in detail across the region, failure to provide air purifiers strong enough to filter the worst pollutants and failure to analyze overall pollution in the area.
“We need more assistance from the county,” she wrote.
Vargas, in an Election Day interview, blamed “the media” for manufacturing a dispute between her and Aguirre and said that, despite Imperial Beach Democrats’ withdrawal of their endorsement, “I love them anyway.”
Vargas also sought to downplay a messy, confusing and very public fight she conducted earlier this year with much of San Diego County’s organized labor movement. Under Vargas’ leadership, the Board of Supervisors abruptly rejected labor’s hand-picked candidate for the county’s top administrative job in April and opted instead to promote a longtime county executive who was not regarded as a lockstep labor ally.
Outraged labor leaders held protests, called out Vargas usingracially charged language, published damagingtext messages that appeared to show Vargas using racist Mexican slang to describe Black women and accused her of exploiting the controversy “for your own self-interest.”
In her statement to Voice of San Diego, Vargas pointed to her “longstanding track record as a champion for labor” and said she was “proud to have support” during her re-election campaign from local labor organizations, many of which ended up endorsing her.
The dispute was one of several incidents this year prompting doubts among Vargas’ constituents about Vargas’ commitment to workers and racial justice. In February, Vargas’ first chief of staff, Denice Garcia,was sued by a former county employee who claimed that Garcia had used anti-Asian slurs against him during a job-related phone call.
That suit was followed in Octoberby a second lawsuit filed by a different county employee who alleged that Vargas had denied him a promotion because, as an Asian, he “didn’t count” as a person of color and Vargas wanted what she described as “a Hispanic or Black” for the job instead.
In a statement following the October lawsuit, Vargas disputed the suit’s claims and denied making any statements “that promote or condone discrimination based on race, ethnicity or national origin.” She said she welcomes an investigation into the matter.
Vargas won re-election with 63 percent of votes counted so far against a Republican with no name recognition who, by his own admission, raised no money and ran essentially no campaign. Her margin of victory was no higher, and in some cases lower, than margins in several prominent local races in her district pitting well-funded Democrats against each other.
The comparatively modest victory led some to wonder whether Vargas’ perceived missteps had created a political opening in a district that had seemed to be trending reliably Democratic.
“If I was a betting guy and anticipating the encroachment of the Republican party, if someone had an interest in taking over this area, they could use [discontent in the district]and run with it,” said John Borja, a Chula Vista insurance broker who formerly served on the National City Chamber of Commerce board of directors. Voters “want to see resources. They want a healthy, happy and great community, which they’re entitled to.”
In the same KPBS interview during which she described being addressed as “Norita” on the campaign trail, Vargas recalled voters vowing to hold her accountable to her campaign promises.
“Folks in the community would say, ‘We’re going to give you a chance, but we’re going to be watching you. Because politicians come here, they ask us for things, but they never come back,’” Vargas said. “That’s the piece that’s really important. We have to deliver for our communities.”
Four years later, voters are following through.
“People are watching and paying attention and done with the theater,” said Borja. “Perception is reality. [Voters] have got to see [improvement] now. That’s kind of the theme that we’re going into with 2025, is action.”
Correction: This post has been updated to correct that county supervisors are not legally required to include personal medical appointments in their public county calendars.
