Soft-Spoken ‘Granddad’ Image Helps Bailey Get Things Done

George Bailey, says a colleague on the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, is a political praying mantis.

When Bailey, the 66-year-old former mayor of La Mesa, speaks in a low, gravelly drawl and dodders slowly through the halls beneath his trademark silver crew-cut, he can’t help but remind folks of their aging grandfathers.

“But then Zap! and they don’t know what got ‘em,” Supervisor Brian Bilbray says with respect for Bailey’s powers. “He’ll have them roped and tied and gagged before they know what happened.”

After three months as a county supervisor, Bailey has become known as hard-working, astute, and savvy. But most of all, people say, Bailey has a knack for getting things done quietly, and without worrying about who takes the credit.

“He doesn’t grandstand,” said an aide to one supervisor.

“He has the smallest ego of any politician I’ve ever seen,” said another.

Two decades as a city official in La Mesa and years more on two dozen regional planning boards have left the retired aerospace industry manager with little to prove.

“He’s a very secure man,” said Dorothy Migdal, the San Diego Chamber of Commerce’s vice president for government affairs. “He’s made his place in the community and with his colleagues. He’s very comfortable with who he is and what he’s doing.”

What George Bailey is doing is quickly making people forget Paul Fordem, the crusty, conservative banker who preceded Bailey as La Mesa’s mayor and East County’s supervisor. Fordem cited health reasons for bowing out in the face of a tough Bailey challenge last fall.

While Fordem was identified with the fundamentalist Christians who helped elect him, Bailey is a moderate Republican who rarely lets his partisan stripes show. Fordem was said to be inaccessible; Bailey loves to mix with constituents. And while some saw Fordem as vengeful, Bailey has a reputation as a man who doesn’t take himself too seriously.

“You can call him a damn fool and not think he’ll be mad at you for the rest of his life,” said A.L. Meyer, a longtime Lakeside resident and frequent critic of the county board.

Since taking over from Fordem in January, Bailey has set his sights on solving some of the major, long-range problems he believes beset his constituents.

He is eager to help his district develop an economic base to rival the blossoming North County area. And Bailey has hired an aide for long-range planning who is studying, among other topics, the ills that have plagued the county’s rural fire districts since their funding was slashed after Proposition 13.

At the same time, Bailey comfortably shifts his focus to other, day-to-day problems that may be small in the county’s scheme of things, but loom large in the lives of those whom they trouble.

So Bailey has spent a good deal of time on the supervisors’ dais questioning the county staff about matters affecting the people who live in Lakeside and Descanso, Alpine and Jamul, where votes are scarce but worries abound.

He has studied the traffic conditions at the intersection of Melody Lane and Granite Hills Drive, and he has asked about the need for a flashing yellow light to help students on their way home from Vista Grande Elementary School.

In land-use matters, Bailey, though pro-business and an advocate of property rights, has taken steps to win the hearts and minds of rural residents, the most vocal of whom believe the county’s backcountry is too rapidly being cut up by the bulldozer’s blade.

When a 214-unit mobile home park proposed for Lakeside’s Blossom Valley came before the board, Bailey opposed it, and it was defeated. And Bailey tried to stop the controversial Jamul development known as Honey Springs Ranch--an issue that has attracted statewide interest--only to be on the losing end of a 3-2 vote.

Bailey’s appointments to the county Planning Commission came from Descanso and Jamul, two unincorporated East County communities. Both of Fordem’s appointees were from cities, where the county has no land-use powers.

In March, Bailey brought a measure before the board calling on the Planning Department staff to enforce the county’s grading restrictions more stringently. Knowing that the only penalty will be a tardy notice to cease the grading, many builders freely clear their land without permission, Bailey said, adding that he wants the practice stopped.

Even when he supports a development that is fought by nearby residents, Bailey does so in a way few find offensive.

“If I were living in Alpine, I’d probably be up here making speeches, too,” Bailey said before explaining that he favored the construction of a mobile home park because it fit a county policy encouraging low-income housing.

Because of his advanced age and his low-key demeanor, Bailey seems the least political of the five supervisors. But he has shown no aversion to the kind of quiet, behind-the-scenes approach that is often needed to make progress in the county’s volatile political environment.

A comparison of the appointment calendars of Bailey and Supervisors Susan Golding and Brian Bilbray, who also took office in January, shows that Bailey spends much more of his time in briefings with the county’s staff, culling information and filing it away to be used at some key moment in the future. And while he has visited almost every local chamber of commerce in his district since January, Bailey also has taken time to meet with small groups of residents and to tour areas in hopes of learning firsthand about the issues that come before the board.

It is that combination of homework and pressing the flesh that many credit for helping Bailey get what he wants at the county.

One of Bailey’s first acts as a supervisor was to win his colleagues’ approval for an increase in the county’s hotel room tax from 6% to 8%. The former president of the Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, Bailey was able to silence any objections the tourist industry might have had. As a result, what amounted to a 33% increase in the tax sailed through with hardly a ripple, barely making the next day’s newspapers.

Since then, Bailey has worked to ensure that the tourist tax money is distributed evenly--to the East County areas that got little last year, and to the Balboa Park museums that lost most of their county support in a budget coup carried out by Supervisor Paul Eckert.

Later, when a bitter controversy was simmering over whether the charter of a proposed Human Relations Commission would include a reference to discrimination against homosexuals, Bailey was the first to suggest that the panel be given a more general charge listing no specific ills.

“I wouldn’t want to put senior males with crew-cuts in there, because then it would be a problem to be a senior male with a crew-cut,” he said in a typical, self-mocking Bailey-ism.

Before long, Bailey’s point of view had moved its way from far-fetched to realistic. By the time the commission was created, its charter read just as Bailey had suggested.

The homosexual community was happy, because its leaders said the new commission would be free to investigate their grievances. At the same time, fundamentalist Christians who had opposed the panel left believing they had won because the charter’s reference to sexual orientation had been deleted. Bailey, meanwhile, played no public role in resolving the dispute.

At the board’s weekly meetings, Bailey speaks much less than Golding and Bilbray--the two other newcomers. But when Bailey does say something, it usually carries great weight.

“He doesn’t fool around,” said Walt Ekard, an aide to Supervisor Bilbray. “He doesn’t waste words. Once he’s said his piece, he’s satisfied.”

One of Bailey’s aides said: “He doesn’t open his mouth up there a whole lot. But it’s not out of ignorance. It’s out of smarts.”

Often, Bailey will speak only to offer a bit of wry humor he believes will break the tension building among board members or the audience.

At one recent meeting, a citizen was having trouble getting his thoughts across and, stumbling with his words, confessed to being nervous. “I don’t come here every day like you do,” the man told the board members.

“You’re lucky,” Bailey shot back with a grin, eliciting a round of laughter and helping the speaker forget his inhibitions.

“The average person that comes before the board--not the professionals, the lawyers--comes once in a lifetime,” Bailey said in an interview. “They’re scared to death, shaking in their boots. It’s important for them to know we’re just as human as they are.”

But the Bailey wit, turned on its edge, can be cutting, almost to the point of insensitivity.

For example, when Supervisor Leon Williams lost a fight to keep the county from expanding a work furlough program in his district, Williams lamented that the expansion had come “over my dead body, because I’m dead inside now for that.”

Bailey replied: “Will someone haul him off?”

Another time, Bailey was pushing for an inquiry into oft-repeated complaints from neighbors of an East County egg ranch of flies spreading over the neighborhood. Supervisor Eckert suggested that the issue had been studied enough.

“There’s an old saying,” Eckert began. “If you want to live in the country, you can’t just listen to the rooster crow. You’ve got to smell the chickens, too.”

Bailey, visibly irritated by Eckert’s protest, replied with a look that made his meaning clear. “I don’t mind the smell at all, Mr. Eckert,” he said dryly.

Mostly, though, Bailey is content to play the congenial old man, the “godfather of locally elected officials,” Bilbray said, “if not the grandfather.”

In so doing, Bailey seems to pose little threat to anyone--politician or citizen-at-large. Even Meyer, the retired Lakeside man who has never trusted anyone from the county’s urban areas, says he thinks Bailey might do all right.

“He’s a city boy, and he has trouble thinking country,” Meyer said. “But he’s trying his damnedest. I think he’s doing a good job.”

Fred Nagel, who replaced Bailey as mayor of La Mesa, said Bailey has not forgotten his political roots.

“We’re pleased with what he’s done so far,” Nagel said. “He’s staying in touch with the cities. He’s not invisible. He’s handling himself well and I’m expecting him to continue to do so.”

MONDAY: Supervisor Brian Bilbray, representing the 1st District, has surprised some people during his first three months in office with his knowledge of county issues.