Cleator Tries to Change Conservative, Pro-Development Image

When Janice DuVall called Councilman Bill Cleator’s office in late 1983 about a problem in her University Heights community, she received quite a shock. Not only was Cleator’s office unfamiliar with the neighborhood problem, she said, it couldn’t even account for the neighborhood.

“He didn’t know it was in his district,” said DuVall. “When we talked to his aide . . . she didn’t know it was in his district.”

A portion of University Heights, sandwiched between Hillcrest and North Park, had been placed in Cleator’s area three years earlier via redistricting. But the aide, Pat Barnes, said Cleator’s office had failed to notice that one of the new district boundary lines had put the community in its political turf.

This failure by Cleator and his staff to record some nuts and bolts details, say friends and associates, reflects Cleator’s basic approach to things political--the man, they say, would rather concentrate on the big picture than on the details that make it up.

Now, the 58-year-old furniture manufacturer from Point Loma is hoping that the big picture will finally include a successful campaign to become San Diego’s mayor, a post he has publicly coveted for years.

In his second quest for the city’s highest elective office, William Edward Cleator is consciously trying to change his image as the leading Republican conservative on the council, a man who consistently has favored jobs and construction over the environment and neighborhood preservation groups. It is an image that one former council colleague played on when he called Cleator a “cement mixer” during the 1983 mayoral campaign.

By emphasizing a new, more accessible Bill Cleator, he apparently is hoping San Diego voters will gloss over some of his past political positions.

As part of the effort to show off the new Cleator, he and his wife, Marilyn, have played host to blacks, Latinos, Asians, and elected officials at his Point Loma home. In a recent gathering with a group of black leaders, Cleator began the evening informally, working the crowd along with his wife before calling their guests into the living room, which is dominated by a glittering view of downtown San Diego and the bay.

Cleator opened the discussion by confessing that “we did a lot of things wrong three years ago” when he last ran for mayor, but now wanted to “have a dialogue” with different ethnic and community groups.

Referring to the grass-roots popularity of Roger Hedgecock, Cleator said he decided that “one of the things we would do is tear a page out of Roger’s book . . . . We want to get into every neighborhood in the city . . . .”

Throughout the discussion, Marilyn, his wife of 31 years, a slight, enthusiastic woman, stood at Cleator’s side. At many a night candidates’ forum, she has served as silent support for Cleator by sitting in the audience, and her discussions about the campaign include such phrases as “when we decided to run.”

Yvonne Larsen, a city planning commissioner and friend of the Cleators, said Marilyn and her health problems are a key in understanding the “maturing” of the councilman. Marilyn discovered she had lung cancer four years ago. Surgery and radiation treatments cleared up the disease and it has not recurred.

“It was the beginning of the softening of Bill Cleator,” said Larsen. “He had taken life for granted up until then.”

No more, according to Cleator. He is now telling voters that he is accessible to all San Diego communities and interests. He has told blacks he wants to hear about their problems. He is telling environmentalists he is open to their concerns. He is asking homosexuals for their vote. He is telling neighborhood activists he wants their input.

On the record, however, Cleator has not been particularly sensitive to such groups. He twice voted against divesting city retirement finds from companies doing business in South Africa. He once hurt the gay community by ignoring it when he asked for a police undercover crackdown of homosexual encounters in Balboa Park restrooms. He has voted for the major development projects in outlying areas and in neighborhoods that have inspired a political rebellion by environmentalists and slow-growth advocates.

The campaign is working hard to overcome that political past by emphasizing Cleator’s Eisenhower-esque qualities. By far the strongest component being pushed by the Cleator campaign is his reputation for sincerity and honesty. It is a reputation that even his most bitter political foes agree is valid. “You can trust Bill Cleator,” declares Councilman Mike Gotch, a liberal Democrat and an environmentalist.

A portly, balding man with blue eyes and a direct manner, Cleator in personal sessions is inclined to pay close attention and respond directly, sometimes with physical gestures such as touching a listener on the arm. In public appearances, he often paraphrases the Bible and warms up audiences with anecdotes from his San Diego childhood.

“We were out here to the Ranch--I think it was two or three days ago--and I was telling the group that I was talking to, as a youngster, my first job in San Diego was at San Diego Hardware,” Cleator told a crowd of 50 or more at a recent candidates’ forum in Scripps Ranch.

“Every once in a while I would get the job of riding out here and delivering nails and barbed wire to the old Scripps Ranch. If you’re wondering whether I’ve ever been here before, yes. Do I remember what it looked like back 50 years ago? Yes, and it was probably the most beautiful part in all San Diego . . . .”

Another component of Cleator’s campaign is to hitch it firmly to the belief that San Diegans, rocked by a series of political scandals including the felony convictions and ouster of Mayor Hedgecock, are looking for a nice hometown guy to occupy the city’s highest elective office.

“I think the problem right now, the biggest problem facing San Diego, is that citizens out there are concerned about their leadership, and I think that they’re desiresome (sic) of somebody coming in and all of a sudden getting the ship on the right course, and I think I can do that,” Cleator said in a recent interview.

“He’s the Jerry Ford of the City of San Diego,” said Municipal Judge Dick Murphy, a former San Diego city councilman and Cleator ally.

“I think the people of the City of San Diego are ready for a quiet time at City Hall,” said Murphy. “They want a leader who will restore calm and respectability to the mayor’s office, one that will restore integrity to the office and one that will not be out slaying dragons every other weekend.

“That is what Jerry Ford was after Richard Nixon resigned, and I think that’s what Bill Cleator will be in the wake of Roger Hedgecock,” he said. “Therefore, Bill Cleator may be the right man for this time in San Diego history.”

Hedgecock beat Cleator in the 1983 mayoral primary and eventually became mayor on the strength of an anti-Establishment coalition of environmentalists, homosexuals, slow-growth advocates, labor, neighborhood activists and small businessmen. He held it together with a darkly intense, driving personality and the vision of San Diego as a place under siege, where canyons and large tracts of land were being ravaged by developers.

Cleator, meanwhile, appeared in sharp contrast. Among his friends are the tight circle that makes up the downtown Republican business establishment. And Cleator has been solidly in the pro-development camp, often arguing that construction had to continue in San Diego to guarantee jobs and affordable housing for future generations.

He voted in 1982 for the controversial Fairbanks Ranch development, clearing the way for an exclusive 27-hole golf course and 341 high-priced homes in the city’s urban reserve, land theoretically set aside and rescued from development until at least 1995. He also voted for another major project in the urban reserve, La Jolla Valley, in September, 1984. It was the council’s passage of the La Jolla Valley project that led environmentalists to place Proposition A, a radical slow-growth measure for the city’s outlying areas, on the ballot. Cleator, among a number of other council members, fought the proposition, which passed easily in November despite a massive campaign by developers to defeat it.

As recently as last summer, Cleator was still pressing his pro-development philosophy. In an interview published in July, 1985, in BIA Builder, the publication for the Building Industry Assn., Cleator chided association officials for not exerting more influence on council members. He also told developers to stop “pussyfooting around” by supporting anti-development council members who sided with community groups.

“I can honestly say I can’t think of one bad project that I’ve seen in San Diego since I’ve been on the council,” said Cleator. He also confessed that planning, one of the city’s major tasks, “is not my bag” and said he would vote against changes proposed by city planners if builders could persuade him government regulations would add to the cost of housing.

Since the current campaign began, however, Cleator has tried to back off some of that record, repeatedly admitting he’s made mistakes.

He has pledged to enforce Proposition A and he has told the development industry it must start working with environmentalists. He now says he regrets his La Jolla Valley vote, and his negative votes on divestiture. He has called for a task force to study the purchase of more city open space, and recently pushed through a proposal on the council to pay nearly $1 million for 8.5 acres on the 34th Street Canyon in Golden Hill. He has announced his opposition to a proposal to construct a road to traverse the Los Penasquitos Canyon between Rancho Penasquitos and Mira Mesa.

Cleator’s campaign, like his opponents, has inspired no new vision of San Diego. His boldest proposals are to put police on four-day work weeks and to move the central library to an old Sears building in Hillcrest.

Still, Cleator wants to be mayor because he says he knows San Diego. And well he should.

The son of San Diego County’s first Municipal Court marshal, Cleator attended Point Loma High School and San Diego State University, where he was known as a big man on campus. There, his appetite for politics was whetted by his involvement in several campaigns, ranging from campus offices to a 1948 race for Congress, in which he worked on behalf of Republican Charles Fletcher, father of schoolmate Kim. Fletcher lost.

Cleator worked for a short time at Ryan Aeronautical Co. before leaving for Los Angeles in 1952 to make his fortune as a corporate executive. Raised a Republican, Cleator also mixed with Democrats in Los Angeles, including current Mayor Tom Bradley.

In 1972, Cleator jumped from the Richard Nixon Republican bandwagon and served as the Bel Air-Beverly Hills campaign chairman for U.S. Sen. Ed Muskie, a Democrat. “He was one of the most brilliant men I’ve ever met,” Cleator explained.

He returned to semi-retirement in San Diego and started a family furniture business in Mira Mesa. In 1980, he decided to run for the District 2 seat that was being vacated by Maureen O’Connor. His inspiration: anger over government regulations that forced him to put a fire door in his factory showroom.

The day he picked up his nominating papers was only the second time he had set foot in City Hall.

Since his election, Cleator has not distinguished himself as one of the council’s most inspiring public speakers. But he has worked with his network of prominent friends to become one of the council’s most powerful behind-the-scenes leaders at City Hall, the unofficial floor leader who often has publicly beaten the more articulate Hedgecock.

He has knitted together a coalition of conservative cohorts through a system of favors and friendship. For instance, when fellow Republican Uvaldo Martinez became embroiled in a scandal over his use of a city-issued credit card, Cleator dispatched friend and publicist Don Harrison to fend off press questions for the beleaguered councilman.

Cleator’s political strength reaches deep into the business and Republican Establishment. Malin Burnham, chairman of the First National Bank of San Diego and the John Burnham & Co. real estate and insurance firm; Kim Fletcher, chairman of Home Federal Savings and Loan; W. Daniel Larsen, owner of a construction firm, were high school and college chums.

“He really is part of the good old boy network,” said one San Diego Republican who asked not to be identified. “Many of the people that are influential business leaders in this town have been friends and acquaintances of Bill Cleator for 30 to 40 years. They know him, therefore they have access to him, therefore they trust him. Never has the Establishment had such a close friend so close to being mayor.”

Tied to Cleator is the Establishment’s vision of San Diego, said J. Michael McDade, Hedgecock’s former chief of staff and a longtime San Diegan. “Bill comes from a very comfortable era in San Diego history, the ‘40s and ‘50s period, and a lot of people who grew up here in that period of time still look fondly back at a time when it was a quieter town.”

Filtered through those values, the word environmentalist takes on a specialized meaning for Cleator and his contemporaries.

“He (Cleator) has always been what you might say is an environmentalist,” said Dan Larsen. Asked to explain, Larsen said:

“He loves gardening. He loves his yard. He has one of the most beautiful yards of anyone I’ve seen. He spends a lot of time working at it . . . He had three acres in Bel Air, and that was a beautiful spot, too. He does like the environment.”

Although he has the backing of the Establishment, Cleator has failed to capture the imagination of city voters in recent years the way that Hedgecock did. Never the populist, Cleator’s style has been decidedly lower key and corporate, along the lines of the advice he received from his former political consultant, Jack Orr.

“I said, ‘Bill, you think in big terms. Don’t get involved in the small stuff. There are plenty of other people on the City Council that get involved in repairing an alley,’ ” Orr said he told Cleator after the 1980 council race.

“ ‘Get involved in the downtown convention center. Get involved in downtown redevelopment . . . things that take a lot of time to do and a lot of it is done without showing up on the City Council calendar.’ To that extent, he deals with the bigger things and . . . doesn’t enjoy the minutiae, of which there is an extraordinary amount,” said Orr.

While other council members were investing public money in word processors and added personnel, Cleator emphasized frugality. His budget, at $205,647, is the lowest among council offices. Councilman William Jones, who represents Southeast San Diego, has the highest budget with $364,432, city records show.

And while other council members crowd their schedules with meetings, Cleator’s is spare. A review of his 1985 appointment schedule shows that many afternoons, Fridays and weekends are free of council-related commitments. In fact, Cleator’s most frequent appointment is with Jerry Berg, a scrap metal dealer who is his racquetball partner.

Cleator said the schedule doesn’t show how hard he works.

“When your office comes in and you’re talking about what you are going to do about X, I don’t write that down on a schedule,” said Cleator. “Preparation for meetings, I don’t put that down on a schedule. When you have an appointment with Mabel Gluck, you put it on the schedule. But you don’t sit there and try to document your time like an attorney.”

Cleator says much of his time--”hundreds of hours”--has been devoted to his pet project, the San Diego Cruise Ship Consortium. Composed of roughly 150 businesses that benefit from the tourist trade, the consortium was put together in 1983 by Cleator to snare five or six home-ported ships by 1987 at the latest. So far, it has secured two home-ported vessels and several other visiting ships to San Diego.

He also says he’s been the driving force behind the annexation of Otay Mesa, which city officials hope will become a new industrial mecca along the Mexican border. Cleator says the development there is crucial to absorb the unemployment among minorities in southern San Diego.

“It’s crazy to let that talent go wasted,” said Cleator. “If you somehow can turn that around, you connect up in two goals. One, you get these individuals off of the welfare. Two, you get these youngsters feeling good about themselves, and three, your crime rate goes down. All of this can happen if you get these companies . . . directed towards that area.”

But while Cleator has pursued those bigger economic concepts, his tenure on the council has been marked by some problems with neighborhoods in his own district. In mid-1983, Cleator was forced to back down from a plan, pushed by local realtors, to double the zoning density in Ocean Beach after community residents howled with protests.

Cleator said the misunderstanding with Ocean Beach residents came about because he “didn’t have that much experience in community planning” and the local planning group “failed to give me input.” Steve Wimmers, past president of the planning group, said Cleator never alerted the group to the proposal.

“I felt pretty angry when I found out that the realtors, some of whom had been on the planning board at the time, went to him and tried to back-door this thing,” said Wimmers. “There wasn’t a whole lot of notice. But once we found out about this, we turned this thing around. That may not have been the way he (Cleator) wanted it to go personally, but he did, with the public outcry.”

Since then, though, Wimmers said that Cleator’s office has been responsive to the community’s needs. The councilman has helped Ocean Beach plant a living Christmas tree, locate a child care center and receive $100,000 in federal funds for commercial revitalization.

More recently, Cleator found himself at odds with another one of his neighborhood groups when he tried to forge a compromise between environmentalists and builders over a plan to keep development off the canyon slopes of Mission Hills, Hillcrest and other neighborhoods.

The area’s planning group--called Uptown Planners--designed a plan to stave off imminent construction by down-zoning slope areas to allow only one to four apartments or condominiums per acre, the city’s strictest zoning standards. When the plan came to the council for approval, however, Cleator managed to remove the numbers, leaving the pristine slopes open for more intense development.

Cleator’s move evoked protests from Hedgecock and canyon preservationists. After public and private pressure, he relented and re-inserted the numbers.

The councilman said he still doesn’t believe his compromise was a “change” that favored developers, but he acknowledged that he could not give the canyon issue--one of the hottest in his district--full attention when it came before the council.

“Was there anything during the time that was going on . . . that was a distraction to me? Yes,” said Cleator in an interview. “I was into a couple of things that, from time to time, you’re working on something, you just don’t follow every little issue . . . .”

As for University Heights, DuVall says that Cleator has ignored her repeated requests to meet with the community group she founded in 1983 to block a housing development in District 2. The community wanted the 8.6-acre site on the slopes of Mission Valley preserved as a park.

“It was awful,” said DuVall, adding that Cleator’s office kept insisting that University Heights was not in District 2 when it was. “It was incredible. We would call and nobody would take responsibility for what was going on in that area.”

Eventually, Councilwoman Gloria McColl took the lead and her office helped find $3.2 million in city funds to purchase the property. The property is in escrow.

Barnes, Cleator’s aide, said the initial confusion over which district University Heights belonged in led to the councilman’s lack of effort in the matter. She said that even McColl thought the housing site was in her territory at first. By the time the mistake was discovered, McColl had already taken over the issue and Cleator decided to let the councilwoman take the lead, said Barnes.

“Possibly I did somewhat neglect that,” Cleator said. “It (University Heights) is an area that has problems right now, and I would just have to admit that I did not do all that great of a job representing it.”

Then, in November, less than a month before he declared his candidacy, Cleator appeared at a University Heights forum.

The appearance was part of a pattern that has led Cleator to rub elbows and make pitches to ethnic and community groups he says he didn’t have time to meet with during the last mayoral election. For instance, Cleator appeared at a Jan. 28 forum sponsored by political groups in the homosexual community, from whom Cleator has been estranged. “Rather than talk about the past, what I would guarantee you is a future policy in the mayor’s office,” he said.

And at a Scripps Ranch forum last week, Cleator touched on the suggestion he has been deaf to the details of tending to neighborhood groups. “Do I go along with community plans? Yes I do. Have I made mistakes? Yes I have,” he said.

Some observers believe that Cleator’s appeals, coupled with his personality, may overcome his past record and give him a wider following.

“I don’t think he’s a dishonest person,” said Susan Jester, president of the Log Cabin Club, a political group for homosexuals. “I think his reputation stands pretty solid for honesty . . . . I think he’s been honest enough to say that ‘I’ve made mistakes in the past, I’ve been closed to these issues, but at least I’m willing to learn now.’ ”

But DuVall, Cleator’s critic from University Heights, for one, is skeptical.

“What’s funny is that I see him telling everybody, I see him telling newspaper reporters that he’s opening up to the communities. But as far as I can see,” she said, “he hasn’t really changed his method of doing business with us yet.”