Wolfsheimer Vote Tactics Rub Mitchell Wrong Way

Bill Mitchell finds Abbe Wolfsheimer’s campaign artillery a little disconcerting.

First, there was a flyer featuring a cartoon of the two-term councilman mounted backward on a swaybacked horse. Listing three big real-estate projects Mitchell is proud to have fought, the flyer scolded, “The development has been approved. Bill, what happened?”

The following page appeared to show a campaign contribution filing by Mitchell. But the contributors had been rearranged, Mitchell says. Only developers and contractors were on the list. He says ordinary people had been left off.

One more flyer showed Mitchell’s San Diego City Council seat ominously empty, and cited an attendance survey ranking him in the bottom half of the council. But it failed to mention that Mitchell’s seven-year attendance record is still above 90%.

“She’s just not very gentlewomanly about things,” Mitchell ruminated recently, back from the library in search of a book on ethics. “I’ve known her for 10 years . . . I always thought she was a lady. I was really rather surprised to see what she tolerates.”

Wolfsheimer, the 47-year-old lawyer and law professor who wants to win the City Council seat for the 1st District in the election Nov. 5, has set the terms and tone of the campaign with a frontal assault on Mitchell’s record.

She has accused Mitchell of ineffectiveness, saying he fights losing battles and can’t muster support for his causes. She says he has failed in his mission to support managed growth and neglected the consequences of his failure.

She has also attacked Mitchell for reneging on a pledge to leave office after two terms. One of her radio and television commercials suggests to listeners, “Don’t you think it’s time to help him live up to that promise . . . Hmmmm?”

Mitchell has taken the lumps with characteristically quirky detachment.

He counters that his effectiveness is proven by public-safety programs he is widely credited with initiating or supporting. As for managed growth, Mitchell and others say he has been one of its strongest proponents on the council.

He says it is unreasonable to insist he could have convinced some of the other council members to join his fights against developments: “That’s like saying General Patton should have led the Nazi troops to victory over the Axis during World War II.”

He says there is little difference between himself and Wolfsheimer except that he is more committed to controlling growth. He says the real difference is her campaign style, which he traces to an absence of campaign substance.

“Most of the things, we’re the same on,” he said last week. “That is why she has to resort to Chicago-style tactics. Because she can’t find anything on me. So what does she do? She takes my strongest point, attendance, and starts saying that I’m not there.”

The council district in question encompasses the northern reaches of the city, from Rancho Bernardo in the northeast to coastal La Jolla in the northwest. It includes University City and the rapidly developing Golden Triangle, and San Diego’s vast urban reserve to the north.

Yet neither candidate has endorsed Proposition A, the Growth Management Initiative, which would require a public vote on development in the urban reserve. Mitchell says he supports the concept but not the particulars, so remains neutral. Wolfsheimer opposes it.

Mitchell was first elected to represent the district in 1977, a 45-year-old La Jolla real-estate broker and civic activist. He won the seat after walking 500 miles through the city from San Ysidro to his neighborhood in Rancho Bernardo.

In 1981, he was re-elected, defeating developer Ed Malone. He repeated his marathon walk in a run for mayor in 1983, but ended up in fourth place.

Described as likable but odd and unpredictable, Mitchell is a Republican who promotes himself as a populist. He is known for his “Mitchellisms,” including his perhaps apocryphal opposition to a 911 emergency number on grounds that there are no elevens on phones.

Among his accomplishments, Mitchell is credited with initiating Community Alert and a drug program in the schools. He also claims credit for initiating the horse patrol in Balboa Park, the arson squad and the “I Report Crime” program.

The San Diego Crime Commission as well as motorcycle parking spaces to discourage driving downtown are among the items on his list of achievements. He also takes credit for the multimillion-dollar property swap through which the city got Rose Canyon as a park.

Described by environmentalists as one of the council’s most consistent supporters of managed growth, he has fought such development projects as North City West, La Jolla Valley and Blackhorse Farms. As Wolfsheimer points out, Mitchell lost.

But at least some supporters don’t hold that against him.

“I think his record has been really quite exemplary in protecting growth management, community plans and the environment in those areas,” said Jay Powell, coordinator of the Sierra Club’s local chapter. “I think that should be recognized. His district is under tremendous pressure for development and amendments to the plans.”

However, some La Jollans criticized Mitchell recently over what they felt was a mishandling of the effort to limit the height of office buildings. Others accused him of insensitivity to residents working for a “cultural zone” to prevent cultural institutions from selling their land for development.

Still, while some La Jolla activists said they feel that Wolfsheimer is a sharper candidate, they said they fear she may be too conservative and pro-development for the community. Others accused her of hedging on the issues.

A La Jolla resident, Wolfsheimer is chairman of the Department of Property Law, Land Use and Negotiations at Western State University College of Law. Her many civic involvements include serving on the Board of Zoning Appeals; her cultural work has included presidency of the San Diego Ballet Association.

She is separated from her husband, Louis Wolfsheimer, a prominent land-use attorney and a San Diego port commissioner. She insists she would not have to disqualify herself from voting on projects he represents, because she says there is no “community property interest.”

Mitchell, too, is divorced from his second wife, Sharon Stroud-Mitchell, a minister of the Church of Religious Science in Mission Valley.

Wolfsheimer says the possibility of running for the council first came to her while serving on community boards. “The idea came to me that what we needed was a legislator who carefully tended to the nurturing of these nonprofit causes,” she said.

But these days she talks more about Bill Mitchell, saying she looks around her district and doesn’t like what she sees. She accused Mitchell of “permitting a great deal of density without taking care of the human services involved.”

“In other words, he has voted no from time to time, but he has not been able to form a coalition so that ‘no’ vote has any significance. And then if he’s lost the vote . . . he’s kind of dropped it and not taken care of what needs to be done in the area to be developed.”

For example, she pointed to Mitchell’s vote against North City West--”an ineffective vote,” she said. When he lost, Wolfsheimer said, Mitchell turned his back on the issue and allowed North City West to develop without the services needed to make it livable.

She also discounted Mitchell’s public-safety accomplishments, saying all he can take credit for is Community Alert and ADAPT. She criticized his effort to expand the San Diego police force as “a very short-sighted concept.”

“What are you going to do with 677 officers making arrests when there are no courts, there are no judges, there are no prosecutors?” she asked, referring to manpower shortages. “ . . . His idea is correct. Yes, we need to increase the police force. But it stops dead there.”

Mitchell scoffed at such sweeping charges.

“She stands up and says, ‘I’m for this, I’m for that. It ought to be this way, it ought to be that way’,” he railed humorously. “She hasn’t shown one lousy program or plan how she’s going to accomplish it. She hasn’t one lousy track record to show she’s ever done anything like that.”

The idea that Wolfsheimer has promoted most during the campaign is something she calls “humane growth.” Though she has been asked repeatedly to define it, critics and some neutral observers say they remain mystified. Mitchell dismissed it as “just words.”

According to Wolfsheimer, humane growth “embraces the growth management plan but moves a step beyond it.” Whereas growth management involves a series of plans--the growth management plan and the community plans--”humane growth takes those paper charts and looks to see if they have a good impact on the public.”

She talks about problems that arise in turning plans into reality: streets with gridlock and sewer lines overflowing into the Penasquitos Lagoon. She talks about a seven-lane road past the schools in Rancho Penasquitos that has neither a median strip nor a single crosswalk.

Under the concept of humane growth, Wolfsheimer said, she would resolve these problems rather than strictly follow plans. She also wants to see the community plans updated to expand and improve infrastructure, with deadlines set for completion.

To build roads and sewers, Wolfsheimer said, she would support floating bonds, a gas tax, and what she called “a Prop. 13 test.” That would be a ballot question in which residents could vote for “a property tax to be utilized solely for this infrastructure.”

Asked about her opposition to Proposition A, Wolfsheimer argued it could cost the city millions in legal challenges and special elections. She said she doubted its constitutionality, and said it was much too broad.

“We have mom and pop, their three children, their dog and cat, and they own an acre of land (in the urban reserve),” she said. “If mom and pop and their three children want to develop their piece of property, they get a special election for $500,000.”

Unlike some, Wolfsheimer interprets the impulse behind Proposition A not as a rebellion in support of the principle of growth-free areas but as an insurrection against what she would call inhumane growth.

“I think you wouldn’t find any complaints about developing La Jolla Valley if people were not concerned about the traffic congestion,” she insisted. (Nevertheless, she says she opposes developing La Jolla Valley now, and would have voted against North City West.)

One other issue that has arisen in the race is the question of campaign contributions. Wolfsheimer pointed out, and Mitchell acknowledged, that he has received more contributions from developers and contractors than ever in the past.

In campaign finance statements released Thursday, Mitchell reported contributions totaling more than $128,000. Wolfsheimer reported more than $126,000, of which she said $121,000 was her own money.

Wolfsheimer suggested that developers give to Mitchell because he is ineffective in opposing them, so they would like to keep him on the council. He said they contribute to him because they have found they “can’t lick him so now we’ve joined him.”

Mitchell says he has voted against contributors like Genstar Southwest Development Co. as often as he has voted for them. He says he even voted against the interests of his sister and brother-in-law, landowners in North City West, by voting against that project.

As for reneging on his pledge to step down after two terms, Mitchell pleads guilty.

“There’s a small voice within me that keeps driving me on,” he said last week, chuckling. “ . . . I was born and raised here, I didn’t like the way things were going. So I’m in here and I feel like I’m on the crest of the wave.”