Leading Oceanside: Deputy Mayor Ryan Keim

OCEANSIDE, CA — Deputy Mayor Ryan Keim spent much of his career serving Oceanside in capacities including as a lifeguard and policeman. He was appointed to the Oceanside City Council in January 2019 to represent District 3. He won election to a full term in November 2020 and was appointed Deputy Mayor.

The Patch reached out to Deputy Mayor Ryan Keim for his vision for Oceanside in 2022 and beyond.

Your Twitter description says you are attempting to solve Earth’s problems one council meeting at a time. Can you tell us more about that?

I think that’s an important reminder. There are so many crucial issues out there, but for my job, I am one-fifth of the governing body for the city of Oceanside. You have to put that in perspective and understand what you have control over and focus on that to really be effective.

I think our job on the council is very specific because we have to provide the critical core services that a city provides in the best way possible to benefit our city. Then you break it down further into strategic goals over the short term.

Obviously, the unique situation the last couple of years with coronavirus and the challenges has been the number one goal. In 2022 it’s become more about how do we adapt and provide those core services within an ever-changing environment. Whether it’s more workers out with COVID or restrictions on our businesses or record-high inflation, which is higher than we’ve seen since the late 70s.

When you have a very uncertain future, how do you still provide those core services in time and in a fiscally responsible manner? We have to position our city against any uncertainty to come. We have to make decisions that will account for inflation now or a recession in five years or another wave of the pandemic.

The challenge is what decisions do we make now so that we’re positioned successfully for future uncertainties and continue to keep the quality of life in our city.

Yes, it’s challenging and at times as stressful as it can be, but this is important. It’s more rewarding to deal with these challenges and to come up with solutions to very unique problems.

When the pandemic started we saw the impact it was having on our restaurants and other small businesses and we actually got to be really useful. You’re sitting down with the businesses, the employees, the Chamber of Commerce, and you’re figuring out their specific challenges. What can we as a city do to be nimble and creative and help get you through this?

I gave myself a lofty goal at the beginning of COVID to not lose a single business due to the pandemic, even if that was unrealistic. But I think you start with that and do what you can to use common sense to get our businesses and residents through it.

And we did some good things. I’m proud of our city, our city staff, and our businesses working together to actually find these creative solutions. Especially once we recognized early on that a lot of the federal help was going to be so slow in coming. In the meantime, we have businesses that are on the cusp of failing, right? So we said we have this gap and what can we do to bridge that and get businesses to survive until federal funding comes through.

We had one of the very first grant programs in the county and it worked out great because we’ve been reimbursed for money and it gave that needed bridge that got businesses over that gap.

I think we were nimble and creative and used common sense. I think for a crisis like this throughout the country people dug in we had to learn from our failures quickly. I learned it from law enforcement. Every day you do a critical incident debriefing and figure out what works and you fix it for the next day. So that’s something our city has focused on and we evaluate our response daily and adjust to the ever-changing pandemic.

Once we’re out of crisis mode, how do you transition into addressing things like the sand issue, which has been lingering for decades with no real results?

These issues didn’t go away during COVID and now as we get our staffing levels back up and things open we can get more focused on other issues. It’s time to ramp up our efforts on our longstanding problems.

We did a community survey and the two issues that stood out above everything else were sand and homelessness.

Homelessness and rising crime rates will be ongoing challenges in the years ahead of us, More so because of policy failures on the state level that we are now dealing with at the local level. These failures weren’t an anomaly that happened overnight. It was poor decisions that took years to see the results and now we’re seeing it.

We knew it was coming, especially as a police officer, I watched it in Assembly Bill 109, which is the realignment of prisoners to local jails. Then also prop 47 to 57 which was reclassifying many felonies and misdemeanors really hampered local government’s ability to deal with crime and the issues that surround it. We lost so many tools to keep our community safe. I think it’s one of the biggest challenges that we’ve been presented with and one of the worst policy failures at a state level.

That’s the frustrating part for me. I think this is important to highlight that this was always going to be a problem. We’re seeing the early indicators of this already, this is a disaster. Now we’re at this point where we’re seeing a generational rise in crime and violent crime and it’s not just California either. We’re up to 30% in big cities across the country, a 30% rise in homicides. This is after decades of crime reduction that took a lot of work and building trust with the community and innovative policing techniques and so many different things that went into that.

Then we get to this point where crimes down, so we just stopped doing all the things that worked for us in the past. I think it was pretty easy to predict that we’d be in this spot we’re seeing now. I just hope that our residents realize the policy failures and who’s responsible and they start addressing that when they’re voting. We’re at a tipping point right now if we don’t address this very quickly it could have serious impacts on our quality of life.

So what needs to be done to address the problem?

To start we need to address props 47-57. I’ll use one example, it used to be if you stole over $450 it was a felony. Then if you also stole under that amount it was a misdemeanor. But, if you did that twice, that was a felony. Since a lot of this is drug-related, it gave the criminal justice system the ability to force someone into substance abuse treatment or treatment for other mental health issues. Now we don’t have that anymore.

There was a common misconception that because you were arrested for drug possession you went to prison and that’s how prop 47 was sold to the voters. We needed to clear the prisons from low-level drug offenders and use treatment instead. That was the fallacy, but that wasn’t happening. Before what it did was give the criminal justice system the ability to mandate treatment for someone, so they could actually get to the real problems of addiction and mental health. Now we don’t have that ability. Now an officer of the court can give someone a ticket and ask them if they want to get into treatment. But of course, that is very rarely successful.

Now you’re seeing these organized retail thefts just exploding across the state because we don’t have any tools to prevent it.

Right now, I don’t see a solution in the works. You’re seeing a lot of rhetoric from politicians that caused this problem, but you’re not seeing are any solutions from them. They’re not giving an answer on how to fix it or what we need to do and making those hard decisions.

When you combine this with the unprecedented staffing issues of law enforcement it’s tough to get anybody that wants to join the profession right now. It’s completely understandable, you have a split-second decision where you’re trying to do the right thing for the right reason and you make a mistake because things happen fast in a tense environment and not only can you lose your job, you lose your house, you can go to jail. And when we don’t have that support it’s a challenge. When law enforcement doesn’t have the tools to address this rising crime. They don’t have the legal tools and they don’t have the people to do it. I don’t want to be overdramatic, but we’re in dire straits to address it. I think that’s one of my biggest concerns and I think we have some tough years ahead of us because of it.

As a local leader, what I can do is begin the conversation and what I can control. In Oceanside, we’re not going to defund the police. I’m going to advocate for more resources in the police department. I want to hire the best officers we can find. I want to provide them the best training. I want to provide them the best equipment and the best supervision and culture so that we have an effective and trustworthy police department keeping our city safe. I think it’s important to highlight that people underestimate how fragile our civil society is and how much work it takes to keep our quality of life.

How closely do you feel that the homeless situation and the increase in crime are tied together?

Let me put it in perspective. In the county of San Diego after taking over a lot more of the state prisons we were at almost 100% capacity. So when COVID happened they released thousands from the local jails and suddenly you have all these inmates, many of who were on daily psychiatric medication or they have substance abuse issues. Many of these inmates don’t have a support system and overnight they’re released without their medication, without therapy without any social services or any social net to help them. And now they’re on the street without any resources. You could have predicted this and yet many people still think it’s a mystery why we have this increase in homelessness and crime. So that’s our challenge. We have to provide good services for the people who will accept them and continue to do whatever we can to get others to accept them.

However, it doesn’t mean that we don’t enforce our laws and address crime when it happens, homeless or not. We can’t tolerate violent crime and that’s not a zero sum game, those are not mutually exclusive. We can do both at the same time, we can provide these services at the same time be very proactive in addressing crime.

The City of Oceanside released the homeless update for 2021 and it states that the hotel voucher program exceeded expectations as far as getting people off of the street, would you agree with that analysis of that program?

That is just a basic analysis of getting someone from that voucher program into long-term supportive housing. The percentage is still low, just because it’s higher than the standard doesn’t mean it’s acceptable. I think the bar is pretty low with that. But again, if we can get some of the people into permanent housing that we take off the street at this point that’s a success. But it’s nowhere to stop. I mean that’s not the target, but it’s a step and it also allows us to enforce many of our quality of life city codes and make sure that’s not impacting our businesses and residents.

It is at the point where there is more focus on the criminals that we completely forget about the victims. I just wrote a letter to the governor opposing the parole of a suspect who murdered his girlfriend with a hammer here in Oceanside in 2005. The parole board recommended him for parole and I couldn’t disagree more. As a police officer when you help victims of crimes and see the impact it has on their lives and their families. At the end of the day, if we’re only focused on how that makes the guilty feel, that’s a failure.

We need to be better advocates for the victims and their families and that’s something that’s very important to me.

You mentioned that the sand issue is one you are passionate about. Can you share what the city is doing?

Apparently, they’re going to do a study about it. Of course, this is not a new issue. We’ve been dealing with it since the Camp Pendleton Boat Basin was built in the 40s and disrupted the sand flow from north to south. So it’s been a challenge for decades. The beaches get built up by two major things. One is cliff erosion and the other is alluvial flow from the rivers and then the ocean currents bring it down the coast. But, we’ve blunted both of those sources.

Now we’re trying to deal with planning decisions about manmade structures that were built decades ago. Trying to come up with a solution to mitigate those is a huge challenge and one of our biggest responsibilities.

Let’s put aside for a moment all the tourism Oceanside depends upon. Our beach is the number one recreation activity for those of us that live here.

I want to make sure people understand this. For most of us, it’s one reason I’ve never wanted to leave the city. I’ve grown up here and I plan on staying here and raising my family here. My daughter and wife and I go three or four times a week in the summertime. We go in the winter. It’s a staple of our recreational activity in the city.

Right now 2/3 of our beaches are not dry. There’s no dry sand and even more unfortunate that the majority of the beaches that Oceanside locals and residents use are the ones that don’t have sand anymore. Especially in my district 3, which is south of Oceanside boulevard. That’s where we spend our time, those are the family beaches. It’s critical at this point that we do something and that’s the challenge we’ve had for years.

Everyone just assumes that the Coastal Commission is going to say no or the Army corps wouldn’t fund the sand study and we didn’t have the money. So we just didn’t try. I traveled to Washington DC with our executive team for the city’s annual lobbying trip and met with Army Corps staff and they had zero interest in moving our project forward. That set off alarm bells for me. There is no time to wait for someone else to do it. We have to take control of our future and get our beaches back because people outside our city are not interested in helping.

How is it that Encinitas got $30 million for sand replenishment and all Oceanside got was $1.8 million for a sand study?

That’s a great question, isn’t it? I wish I had the answer. Not to take away from Encinitas. They have needs as well. I don’t want them to lose. I just want us to get our sand back, too.

During the recent KOCT Sand Forum you pushed back when Mayor Sanchez said we can’t do many of the suggested proposals because we won’t get approval. Why do you disagree?

This has been the attitude of our leadership for the past 20 years. That’s a failure of leadership for those 20 years. Instead of working with us to come up with a solution that works for every city and advocating for it, she has failed to do that, and that concerns me.

I am sensitive to the impact that a jetty and these different sand features can have on cities to the south of us. I can assure you we’re not going to approve or push forward a project that negatively impacts our neighbors or causes them to have the same issues we have. But Carlsbad has six and they have huge beaches. So it’s easy for Carlsbad to criticize our preliminary proposal because they don’t have anything to lose. There’s no incentive for them because they have beaches and so it was really disappointing when they opposed our project without us even having a project yet.

We haven’t presented a complete proposal, we’re still waiting to figure out what we can do, and then we will have outreach and partner with other cities. So preliminarily to just say no to anything, was very disheartening. I’m looking forward to working with them in the future.

We are all in this together and I’m confident that we can sit down and actually devise a solution that increases sand to everyone’s beaches.

That’s our goal and if we do this right, it will increase the sand flow, because we’re going to tap into all that trapped sand north of the harbor. That’s the goal. But we didn’t even get a chance to work on that together without them taking action to oppose any project we propose.

it’s important to me that we work with our neighbors and we have a positive working relationship. We’ve been partners for decades and we’re going to continue to be. I hope we can go back to the table and work together as good neighbors and get our beaches back to usable order. I’m very confident we can do it without any negative impact.

That’s my responsibility to reach out and make sure that we have an open dialogue and dissuade any concerns about the impact going forward. But we have to do something. When you think about it our beaches are used by the entire region. Vista, San Marcos, Escondido and even Temecula. We have the most beautiful beaches in San Diego County and so this is a critical issue that we have to get done. From our own quality of life to our tourism economy the beaches are a resource that we have to preserve for generations to come.

With any big project, you want to figure out your end goal and work backward. Otherwise, you can end up going in wild directions and you get an outcome that you didn’t want and doesn’t work. But if you define where you want to end up by creating a mission statement for the sand project like,

We want an environmentally sensitive project that creates more sand for every city in San Diego County, using a science based approach with regional consensus.

Then we do everything to facilitate that. I think it’s realistic, we just have to focus our efforts.

What do you think are some of the short-term goals that can get accomplished in Oceanside?

Providing those core services during this health challenge and responsibly using the tax dollars to improve the quality of life, and deal with that on a daily basis.

While we have complex issues like sand and homelessness, this is not a complex job in understanding we have these critical services that we’re responsible for providing and you have to use the available resources to provide those services that our citizens expect every day.

That’s what we do, whether it’s our recycled water project for water independence or paving our streets and making the most of our limited dollars. Oceanside is one of the lowest median-income coastal cities in San Diego County. So how do we give our residents what they deserve and keep our city running smoothly with the money we have available and solve all those other issues? That’s our job.

What’s one thing that you want people in Oceanside to know about you?

I hope people understand I’m an Oceansider. I’ve been here almost my whole life. I’m here because I enjoy it and love it. I chose to raise my family here and I hope people understand that when making decisions, it’s not just thinking about the impact on their families but the future of my family, as well.

I don’t take these things lightly and there’s a lot that goes into the decisions. You’re trying to see 5, 10 steps ahead and consider what’s really best for the city.

Ryan has been an Oceanside resident for over thirty years and lives in District 3 with his wife and daughter.

Get more information about Councilmember Ryan Keim and the Oceanside City Council.

Related article:

Leading Oceanside: Councilmember Peter Weiss
Former Oceanside Mayor, City Manager and current Councilmember Peter Weiss shares his top priorities for 2022.

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