After several long months of campaigning, filing donations and speaking at forums, former Mayor Casey Tanaka has conceded to current City Council member John Duncan to be the new mayor of Coronado.
A vote tally update on Nov. 15 showed Duncan with a commanding lead, carrying just under 46% of the ballots. Tanaka trailed with just over 42% of the votes, and current council member Mike Donovan was a distant third with just over 12%.
The votes in all races are still being counted; election results won’t be finalized until the race is certified.
“I’m happy for him, and wish him the best,” Tanaka said to The Coronado News. He added that the difference between their numbers was getting increasingly higher and, mathematically, he probably wasn’t going to overcome that deficit.
“It feels great,” Duncan said. “There’s no way I could have won without the help of so many people.”
And his plans for mayor?
Being present in the community – a face-to-face mayor – is what is really, really important to me.
“Being present in the community – a face-to-face mayor – is what is really, really important to me,” Duncan emphasized.
But, he also has other plans, like continuing his work with the Tijuana sewage crisis, maintaining Coronado’s presence with SANDAG and refining the Cays Park Master Plan – a city project that has been a point of contention for months now.
Duncan, who has been part of the city’s Tijuana subcommittee for over 18 months said he wants to build on recent progress by pushing Congress for more funding to resolve the sewage crisis. He’s also on outside committees like the Tijuana River Valley Working Group and the Citizens Advisory Group with the International Boundary and Water Commission.
“Another part of it is relationships with Mexico, and you know, ensuring their plant is finished as well,” he added.
Duncan, a board member representing Coronado at the San Diego Association of Governments, said the relationship between the city and the metropolitan planning organization is improving.
There has been some leadership change at the agency, he added, so the dynamic has changed.
“It’s very, very different than it was two years ago,” Duncan said.
Within Coronado, Duncan said he wants to trim down the Cays Park Master Plan.
“We’ve gotten to the point now where everybody who was on council and our city manager and everybody agreed that it was just a conceptual plan,” Duncan said. “It’s about scaling it down on each of the items. So, that’ll be a job for the new council and myself as mayor, as part of the new council, to figure out exactly what we’re going to approve or not.
It’s not going to be the $30 million plan that was in the master plan. We’re going to approve something smaller.
John Duncan
“It’s not going to be the $30 million plan that was in the master plan. We’re going to approve something smaller,” he added.
With Duncan’s win for mayor, there will now be a vacant City Council seat that is up for grabs – to be filled is either through a special election or by appointment from the new City Council and mayor.
Duncan said that discussion will probably happen during the first City Council meeting of the year in January.
For Tanaka, he is now 48 and says it’s likely that he would run for a local position again, but he has no plans for it at the moment.
Tanaka served on the City Council from the age of 26 until he was elected mayor at 32 in 2008. He continued to win a second mayoral election four years later, serving two full terms until December of 2016 when Mayor Richard Bailey was elected. He came back to serve on the City Council in 2020.
