A prominent Golden Hill business owner is pleading with San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria to intervene in an increasingly familiar battle over how San Diegans are allowed to gather, teach, perform and build community in the city's public parks.
Cam Fomby, longtime owner of Counterpoint, the neighborhood bar and bistro at 830 25th Street, posted a heartfelt video this week directed at Gloria over the uncertain future of Daniel "DJ" Hernandez's increasingly popular Friday evening DJ sets at nearby Golden Hill Park.
Hernandez, who performs as Daniel Joseph, has spent recent summers setting up speakers and playing free sunset sets in the park at the end of 25th Street. What began with roughly 10 friends eventually exploded through social media into gatherings of hundreds, drawing people of different ages and backgrounds to sit on blankets, bring their dogs, watch the sunset and listen to music.
Fomby says he has attended every one of this summer's gatherings and believes the City risks extinguishing something unusually wholesome.
"They're lovely," Fomby said in the video, addressing Gloria directly. "At a time when everybody is financially stressed out of their minds, on a global scale, we're all kind of existing in a state of what the fuck, and this young man, as much to my mind, deserves to be an ambassador to the city."
Fomby argued that the appeal has little to do with whether someone shares Hernandez's taste in music.
"We're away from screens, we're out of our houses. It costs nothing. And the music's great," he said. "But that's not the point to me. The point that touches my heart is young people, old people, dogs, blankets, people laughing and smiling and happy to be with each other."
And Fomby's concern is not unfounded. Hernandez has now publicly shared an email from the City informing him that officials anticipate his next event exceeding the capacity of Golden Hill Park and that his permit for Friday, August 21 is consequently undergoing additional review.
"Well looks like the last permit for next Friday is now 'under review' and I have a gut feeling the city is going to cancel the permit for the 21st so this Friday will be the last event at the park," Hernandez wrote on Instagram.
In an accompanying video, Hernandez stressed that the August 21 event has not actually been canceled.
"I just got an email from the City of San Diego basically saying that next week's permit is now under review due to overcapacity," Hernandez said. "I'm not saying it's absolutely no, but I do know that last permit's getting reviewed."
The City's email, which Hernandez also posted publicly, explains that an "overcapacity" event requires a Reservation of Space application and additional review. The City instructed Hernandez to submit the application within 24 hours because of the time necessary to complete that process.
For Golden Hill Park specifically, the City currently lists the site as available for permitted weddings and picnics involving up to 250 people. In other words, the free neighborhood gathering may now be confronting a peculiar problem: it has become too popular for the permit that helped save it in the first place. Fomby had already heard that trouble was brewing.
"I don't know why he's having to fight the city so hard on this," Fomby said. "He shouldn't. It's not reasonable."
He then asked Gloria to personally intervene.
"I'm asking you to exert some executive privilege. I'm asking you to make a phone call," Fomby said. "Word on the street is, they're gonna pull it after this week. Don't."
But Fomby's public appeal is notably not coming from someone predisposed to criticize Gloria. In comments provided directly to SanDiegoVille following his video, Fomby said he has known Gloria for nearly 20 years and recalled an encounter that helped shape his opinion of the politician long before Gloria became mayor. Fomby said they met at an event during Counterpoint's first year in business that raised money to help disadvantaged families buy Christmas presents for their children. Gloria, then a councilmember, attended.
"Todd showed up no press, no photos, just hung with the kids, and I fell in love with him then as a politician," Fomby told SanDiegoVille. "I believe that's a character issue and I can't be convinced that's not who he is and I'm hopeful he both gets this, and represents the community on it."
That history makes Fomby's plea less an attack on Gloria than an appeal to the public servant he believes Gloria to be.
"I do not know what the issue is," Fomby said. "I do know I've seen nothing but a family atmosphere, period. Seems a no brainer to me, and I find it frustrating Daniel has had to fight - last year and this one - to get something so simple, wholesome, generally good approved."
The controversy adds another chapter to what has already been a lengthy tug-of-war between Hernandez's rapidly growing community gatherings and San Diego's regulatory requirements for activities in public parks. Hernandez, a fourth-generation San Diegan with deep family roots in Golden Hill, began DJing at age 14 and originally started the park gatherings casually with friends. By summer 2025, a social media post announcing one of his Friday sets went viral, drawing approximately 200 people within days and eventually crowds estimated in the hundreds.
That growth changed the City's treatment of what had started as an informal gathering. In 2025, park rangers stopped Hernandez from continuing without permits. Hernandez subsequently learned that continuing the increasingly large gatherings would require him to navigate the City's permitting process, with costs he said initially approached $1,300 per event.
The shutdown generated considerable public backlash, but Hernandez eventually managed to hold another permitted event with outside financial assistance. Then came an unlikely encounter with the mayor himself.
Hernandez has said he ran into Gloria at PopUp Bagels in La Jolla in December and approached him about the difficulty of keeping the free events alive. Gloria directed him toward City staff, and Hernandez subsequently worked with Parks and Recreation on a path toward bringing the gatherings back. This summer, the City publicly acknowledged helping make that happen.
"After learning about the permitting questions related to Daniel's DJ events, Mayor Todd Gloria's office connected him with the appropriate City staff and provided guidance on the permitting process," a City spokesperson told ABC 10News in July.
The City said Parks and Recreation worked with Hernandez on parking, amplified sound, cleanup and other operational considerations. Hernandez has said the cost was ultimately reduced from approximately $1,300 to roughly $250 per week. Meanwhile, he signed with San Diego music label Maison Sonics, which stepped in to help cover the permitting costs.
The Friday sets returned. Then people kept coming. That success appears to have created the latest problem.
The City's rules governing permitted park uses include requirements intended to address issues that can accompany large gatherings, including insurance, emergency access and other operational concerns. Those requirements serve legitimate purposes when hundreds of people converge on a public space. Fomby, however, believes the City should be looking just as closely at what is actually happening once those hundreds of people arrive.
"It's what we need. It's what parks are for," he said.
Hernandez has repeatedly asked visitors not to bring alcohol, to obey parking laws, not to engage in unauthorized vending and to generally behave responsibly.
"This young man's been making post after post not to promote himself, but to beg people: no alcohol. Mind your parking. Don't sell things," Fomby said. "We have to be on our best behavior if we want this to continue. And you know what? They are."
Fomby went further in his comments to SanDiegoVille, offering a firsthand account of what he says he has witnessed throughout the summer.
"To be clear, I've seen people on perfect behavior, zero open alcohol, people were bringing trash bags and policing the area pretty thoroughly," Fomby said. He also said attendees appeared to be parking farther away and walking into the park.
"I just can't see what the problem is, from a city perspective. I just can't," Fomby said. "But, then again, I am not a City expert, but logically, sensibly, I see only good good things. Only good things."
That distinction matters. Nothing publicly released thus far suggests the latest review resulted from disorder at the gatherings. The City's communication to Hernandez instead specifically cites anticipated attendance beyond the park's permitted capacity. But the park has been known to be the setting to large-scale events, including San Diego Reader Tacotopia, which took over a large portion of the park with thousands of attendees for many years.
The controversy also arrives against an already complicated backdrop involving San Diego's regulation of gatherings in public parks. Most notably, the City became embroiled in litigation after enforcing regulations against yoga instructors teaching groups in shoreline parks and beaches.
Yoga instructors Steven Hubbard and Amy Baack sued, arguing the City's prohibition violated their First Amendment rights. In June 2025, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals handed the City a significant defeat, concluding that teaching yoga constitutes protected speech and that San Diego's prohibition was content-based and failed strict scrutiny. The appeals court ordered the lower court to enter a preliminary injunction protecting Hubbard and Baack's classes while declining at that stage to resolve their broader facial challenge to the ordinance.
The Golden Hill controversy is legally different. Hernandez uses amplified music and attracts crowds numbering in the hundreds, presenting legitimate questions involving capacity, parking, sanitation, emergency access and impacts on nearby residents.
But the philosophical question is strikingly familiar. How much regulation is necessary to protect public parks before regulation begins defeating the reason those parks exist?
Fomby has operated Counterpoint in Golden Hill for nearly 15 years and lives in the building behind the restaurant. His establishment has long been a neighborhood gathering place, particularly for San Diego hospitality workers, giving his appeal a distinctly local dimension. He doesn't claim to know all of the City's logistical challenges.
"I don't pretend to know your job," Fomby told Gloria. "I don't pretend to know the intricacies of the challenges."
But he called preserving the gatherings "low hanging fruit."
"Not allowing this to happen, not allowing a park to be used for the purpose for which it's intended - it's a bridge too far," he said.
Perhaps the most compelling aspect of Hernandez's events is how little they require of attendees. There is no ticket. No velvet rope. No minimum purchase. People can sit down, dance, bring a blanket, watch the skyline and leave whenever they want. To Fomby, that simplicity is not incidental. It is precisely why he believes the gatherings matter.
"I believe in community down to my toes," Fomby told SanDiegoVille. "I believe it is a near biological imperative, and I think what this young man is doing is the medicine we as a community, as a culture, need, want, crave. I think he should be celebrated. It's awesome. If you haven't seen it, you should. He's doing everything right."
Hernandez himself has described the gatherings less as performances than an extension of his neighborhood. Before playing, he walks through the crowd introducing himself and thanking people for coming. He has said he wants to dismantle the stereotypical image of an inaccessible DJ separated from the audience by a booth and attitude.
"I'm a neighbor more than anything," Hernandez recently told the San Diego Union-Tribune. "I'm part of your community."
And as the possibility of losing the final event became public, Hernandez sounded more grateful than angry.
"Thank you San Diego - what a summer," he wrote Friday. "I met so many amazing people and the support you all give means the world to me."
He also articulated an argument that goes beyond DJ sets.
"San Diego is expensive and we all know it," Hernandez wrote. "We need more free spaces in this city and I hope we can figure something out to bring more to the community since we pay so much to live here."
There is an almost absurd circularity to Hernandez's predicament. He started playing music for friends in his neighborhood park. People came. More people came. The City told him he needed permits. He pursued the permits. The mayor's office helped connect him with City staff. The City worked with him on a path toward compliance. His record label helped pay the fees. Hernandez repeatedly asked his growing audience to follow the rules. And now the permitted gatherings may have become too successful for their permits.
Fomby sees something larger than a permitting problem when he looks across Golden Hill Park on Friday evenings.
"It's incredible," he said. "It is truly incredible at a time when we can't get past who's loving who and how they're loving and what they look like. It's just community."
SanDiegoVille has contacted Councilmember Stephen Whitburn, Mayor Todd Gloria's office and the City of San Diego seeking clarification regarding the August 21 permit, the City's overcapacity concerns, whether officials believe the gathering can continue through another permitting mechanism, whether any complaints or public-safety issues have arisen from the events, and whether the City is considering a longer-term solution for Hernandez's recurring free community gatherings.
For now, it is important to distinguish what is known from what is feared: the City has not canceled the August 21 event. Its permit is under review. For Fomby, though, the request to City Hall is much less bureaucratic. Go to Golden Hill Park on a Friday evening. Look around. See what is happening.
And find a way not to kill it.
Originally published August 14, 2026.
