When Dianne Jacob arrived on the San Diego County Board of Supervisors in 1993, she received a less than warm welcome from the incumbent supervisors and entrenched county bureaucrats.
A Jamul resident and former Spring Valley elementary teacher, Jacob had jousted with the county for more than a decade, objecting to a few development projects in East County. She also campaigned as someone who would challenge the status quo and bring more accountability and community focus to county government.
She laid out two initiatives during her first address at a board meeting: one, to bring a citizen-based budget approach to a county that was on the verge of financial ruin and, two, to shutter the El Cajon jail nicknamed the “Styrofoam palace” and instead reopen the East Mesa jail, which was sitting vacant while costing the county about $2 million a year.
Tension among members of the San Diego County Board of Supervisors sometimes reached a fever pitch in 2020.
Faced with a global pandemic and a divisive election year that would determine the political balance of the board, disagreements among the county’s five supervisors often played out in public.
Despite those conflicts, the board was able to navigate some of its biggest challenges in 2020, including becoming one of the first counties in the country to declare a local emergency in response to COVID-19 in February and later passing a $6.5 billion annual budget the largest in county history.
While every board member deserves some credit for that, one board member most often functioned as the board’s peacemaker: Supervisor Greg Cox. Cox chaired the board during a year unlike any other in his 26-year tenure on the board.
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The first women to hold top elected offices in San Diego County local governments after women in California got the right to vote weren’t chosen at the ballot box.
It was a pattern in the early years. Soon after California gave women the right to vote in 1911 and the 19th Amendment enfranchised women nationally in 1920, many of the groundbreaking women in San Diego County politics got a foothold in the top tiers of government when powerful men chose them to fill seats vacated by incumbents.
One of them was Mildred Greene, the first woman to hold elected office in San Diego County, in 1918.