Meet Marni von Wilpert

If you’re from around here, you probably already know Marni.

She’s our Councilwoman and our community’s champion. She fought for safety and justice as a local city prosecutor. And Marni grew up right here in our neighborhood – she graduated from Scripps Ranch High, led our local girl scouts as a teenager and still lives just a stone’s throw from her childhood home.

Leading the city’s Public Safety Committee, Marni is bringing unflinching focus to the task of keeping all of San Diego safe. In addition to her landmark work on gun safety, Marni has fought to hire more police officers and firefighters, and provide better training and better pay for our critical first responders. And she’s leading the charge to step up San Diego’s response on the opioid crisis, with more prevention, enforcement and access to life-saving overdose reversing treatment.

Marni has a well-earned reputation as the go-to taxpayer watchdog on the City Council, where she’s known for speaking out against bad deals for the public and lasering in on the small print that can have a big impact in city contracts. Marni’s has consistently fought to save taxpayers millions, and she’s held city contractors accountable for services they pledged to provide.

Marni’s dedication to service isn’t new – it’s her lifelong passion. 

After college, Marni served in the Peace Corps in Botswana amid the AIDS epidemic in Africa. Graduating law school at the top of her class, Marni again chose public service – she fought for the underserved, founding the Mississippi Center for Justice to combat anti-LGBTQ, racial and gender discrimination. And Marni served as a litigator for the National Labor Relations Board and counsel to the Congressional Committee on Education and Labor, where she wrote federal legislation to strengthen workers’ rights, wages and safety on the job.

But after working all over the world, nothing could keep Marni from coming back to the community she’s always called home and working to make it even better. Prior to her election to the City Council, Marni was a civil prosecutor in the City Attorney’s Office where she cracked down on price gouging of essential goods during the pandemic, held polluters accountable for toxic dumping and went after wage theft that robbed workers of their hard-earned pay.

Marni is a graduate of UC Berkeley and the Fordham School of Law. She is the first Democrat in a generation to be elected to represent District 5, San Diego’s most conservative district. In addition to her service on the City Council, Marni continues to give back by serving on the boards of San Diego Youth Services, and Teen Health Mississippi.