The daughter of the top adviser to San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria was awarded a summer internship inside the Mayor’s Office — a plum resume-builder for a soon-to-be college senior with eyes on a career in public service.
A spokesperson for the mayor said the young woman won the job without any help from her mother, Gloria’s chief of staff Paola Avila. The placement complies with all city employment policies, because the intern does not report directly to her mother, the Mayor's Office said.
But at least one expert said the hiring raises questions about nepotism and suggested the City Council may want to revisit its employment practices and broaden the way opportunities at city hall are promoted.
The job is funded through a state program aimed at exposing underserved youth to potential careers in public service.
Simona Ruderman, a political science major at Northeastern University in Boston, began working in the Mayor’s Office last month.
She is working about 35 hours a week and is paid up to $21 an hour — the same salary all city summer interns are paid — to answer phones, respond to constituent emails and perform other tasks as needed, a spokesperson for the mayor said by email.
Ruderman said she has long wanted to work in politics and volunteered for campaigns throughout high school and college. She said she has admired Gloria for years but initially resisted seeking a job in his office.
“I would have applied earlier, but I had reservations because I didn’t want my work or accomplishments to be attributed to my relationship,” Ruderman wrote in an email. “I looked into various internships for my final summer in college, but this was the one I really wanted.”
The mayor's intern said she told her mother she planned to seek the job.
“She didn’t want to stand in my way but made sure I knew she wasn’t going to help, which is what I wanted,” Ruderman wrote. “This internship has helped confirm my goals of working in local government in the future.”
The job is temporary, of course. Ruderman will return to school in the fall and is expected to graduate next spring.
Mayoral spokesperson Rachel Laing said Ruderman won the job "through the normal process" by applying through the city's internship coordinator, who reports to the mayor's deputy chief of staff. She also said similar positions are still available in the Mayor’s Office and elsewhere at city hall.
Laing also said the placement complies with city nepotism rules.
“The city has no policy prohibiting relatives from working in the same office,” she wrote. “The code of conduct addresses favoritism, and both the hiring process and supervision of this intern fully adhere to the policy.”
The Mayor’s Office said it received a total of 38 applications for its summer internship program. Almost two dozen of those qualified for interviews based on their level of schooling, their major and their motivation for applying.
But the office has had trouble filling all its openings. So far, just 16 students were offered positions, although other applications remain under review, Laing said.
Across City Hall, hundreds of college students are awarded internships every year under a program Gloria introduced in 2022 called Employ and Empower. The Mayor’s Office announced last month that it recently hired its 1,000th intern under the work initiative.
Generally, the city relies on its own website to advertise internships at City Hall, Laing said.
Officials also promote the jobs in the city newsletter, through story pitches to reporters and on a jobs application favored by college students called Handshake, among other strategies.
“Interns also learn of opportunities through college instructors, word of mouth from former interns or by visiting the websites of their elected officials,” Laing said.
The Employ and Empower project was funded through an $18.5 million award the city received in 2022 from California Volunteers, a program based in the Governor’s Office that also oversees the state AmeriCorps effort.
According to the city of San Diego’s website , the Employ and Empower program is designed to target young people who might be less likely to land a job at a workplace like city hall.
“Priority will be given to applicants from communities of concern who are low-income, unemployed, justice-involved, in foster care, or have experienced substance use or mental health issues,” the Frequently Asked Questions section of the program states.
The Mayor’s Office did not respond to questions about whether Ruderman meets that element of the Employ and Empower qualifications.
Carl Luna, the Mesa College political science professor who also directs the Institute for Civil Civic Engagement at the University of San Diego, said hiring the daughter of the mayor’s chief of staff for a position in the Mayor’s Office is certainly not the worst example of nepotism he has seen.
But “this reflects a basic principle of human behavior, which I in my humbleness call the Luna Maxim: People make decisions to benefit people like themselves,” he said.
“This does represent a broader problem in our society, where the children of the leadership and professional class end up getting advantages and opportunities which allow them to join this class — opportunities which are simply not equally distributed across our society,” Luna added.
City policy does not prohibit married couples, relatives or parents and their children from working together — even in the same office.
Instead, the code of conduct says supervisors “cannot participate in or recommend the appointment of an immediate family member or a person with whom the employee has a close personal or business relationship.”
The policy also says supervisors may not “directly supervise” immediate family members, “influence the approval” of any employee reward for immediate family members or recommend or influence any contractor or business “to employ a member of their immediate family.”
Like many large employers that allow spouses, siblings or other close relatives to work in the same organization, the city of San Diego has numerous employees with direct ties to one another.
Dozens of city workers have complained to The San Diego Union-Tribune in recent years that department heads and others too often hire brothers, sisters or cousins of current employees.
But the majority of those complaints did not involve immediate family members working in the same office — or in the direct chain of command — of a senior San Diego city official.
Luna said children of city employees should not be denied opportunities that are open to everyone, but he also said officials are obliged to make sure that insiders are not selected for prime positions any more often than outsiders.
“If an internal audit of the intern program finds that awardees are disproportionately related to city employees, then application guidelines should be reviewed and opportunities for city internships more broadly publicized targeting under-represented populations,” he said.
Asked whether Gloria signed off on Ruderman’s internship, Laing wrote that the mayor "has no involvement in the hiring of interns, including in this case.”
This story originally appeared in San Diego Union-Tribune .
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