O’Connor Tops the Field in S.D. Mayor Primary

Former San Diego City Councilwoman Maureen O’Connor, narrowly falling short of total victory Tuesday, will face City Councilman Bill Cleator in a June 3 runoff to determine who fills the vacancy left by former Mayor Roger Hedgecock’s resignation.

In final, unofficial returns, O’Connor had 46% of the vote, followed by Cleator with 30%. A simple majority is needed for outright victory.

O’Connor and Cleator, the former a moderate and the latter perhaps the most conservative member of the City Council, easily outdistanced their opponents in the 14-candidate field in the special mayoral primary--the city’s third mayoral election in less than three years.

Because neither Cleator nor O’Connor received more than 50% of the vote, they will compete in a runoff to determine who serves the remaining 2 1/2 years in the term of Hedgecock, who resigned in December after his 13-count felony conviction on charges stemming from illegal contributions to his 1983 mayoral campaign.

Former Councilman Floyd Morrow, who largely bankrolled his own campaign, ran a distant third but fulfilled prophecies that he would act as a spoiler whose votes would force a runoff. The final returns showed Morrow with 19% of the vote, nearly double his standing in pre-election polls. Many political observers argue that, had Morrow not entered the race, most of those votes would have gone to his fellow Democrat, O’Connor, rather than to Republican Cleator in the nominally nonpartisan race.

Ten long shots on the ballot received only a fraction of the total vote, but those votes, too, helped produce the inconclusive result--as did the votes received by acting Mayor Ed Struiksma, whose name remained on the ballot despite his withdrawal from the race amid controversy over his falsification of city expense accounts. Two write-in candidates also competed.

Despite her failure to top 50%, O’Connor called her showing a “landslide” and downplayed the notion that she could have won the race outright.

“In normal terms, it is a landslide,” O’Connor said. “But in terms of Maureen O’Connor it goes past the probable. I have to produce the impossible. We almost did the impossible tonight. I feel very strongly that, come June, I will hopefully be the next mayor.”

Hot, sunny weather Tuesday helped to produce an estimated 36% turnout, well above election officials’ projections. The higher-than-expected turnout may also have been the product of massive get-out-the-vote efforts launched by the O’Connor and Cleator camps.

The 39-year-old O’Connor, perhaps best known for her key role in developing the San Diego Trolley, is seeking to become the first woman mayor of California’s second-largest city.

In 1971, a then-25-year-old O’Connor shocked political oddsmakers when, running on a shoestring budget and aided by an army of volunteers from a Catholic girls’ high school where she taught physical education, she became the youngest person ever elected to the City Council.

During her two terms on the council, O’Connor gained a reputation as a feisty advocate for the underdog, particularly senior citizens. Although she has maintained a low public profile since her narrow 52%-48% loss to Hedgecock in 1983, O’Connor last year became a leading critic of the rising cost of the downtown convention center--a project now estimated to cost at least $30 million more than the $95-million figure cited when voters approved it in November, 1983.

Cleator, considered the leader of the conservative coalition that dominates the City Council on most major issues, finished third behind O’Connor and Hedgecock in the 1983 mayoral primary to elect a successor to Pete Wilson.

A partner in a family-owned Mira Mesa furniture manufacturing company, Cleator is a San Diego native who returned here in 1975 after living in Los Angeles for more than 20 years, where he rose to become president and a director of TRE Corp., a firm that manufactures hardware and aerospace parts.

His business background and fiscal conservatism--as well as the fact that he grew up with many of San Diego’s current top business and civic leaders--have helped to make Cleator a favorite of the downtown business Establishment since his election to the City Council in 1979. While those ties have proven extremely valuable in his fund-raising efforts, they also have saddled Cleator with an “old boys’ network” image that has hampered his efforts to broaden his appeal among younger, less affluent voters--an image that he tried to soften in the primary by aggressively seeking support among minorities, labor unions and neighborhood activists.

Waged in the wake of Hedgecock’s demise and the approval by voters last fall of a strong growth-management initiative, the mayoral race saw each of the major candidates seek to capitalize on those two disparate events that sent quakes rumbling through San Diego’s political bedrock.

Indeed, the genesis of Tuesday’s election--Hedgecock’s forced resignation in December--cast a large shadow over the race to elect his successor. Likened by former San Diego County Republican Party Chairman Allan Royster to a local version of “what you saw in national politics after Watergate,” the campaign produced much oratory designed to assure voters that the candidates will help to restore normalcy to City Hall after nearly two years of turmoil caused by the uncertainty over Hedgecock’s political and legal fate.

Cleator, for example, pledged to “re-create an image of respect for San Diego” in announcing his candidacy. A major theme of O’Connor’s campaign was to “make government more honorable.” Morrow portrayed his non-incumbency as a badge of honor, encouraging voters to “reach outside City Hall . . . to clean up City Hall.”

Hedgecock’s legacy of opening up City Hall to homosexuals, minorities and other community groups through appointments to city boards and his frequent meetings with neighborhood leaders--a key source of his strong grass-roots popularity--also prompted repeated promises from the candidates that they would be equally accessible.

In addition to borrowing Hedgecock’s former campaign slogan--”A Mayor for All San Diego”--Cleator, a wealthy Point Loma businessman, characterized himself as “a coalition builder” who could draw on his strong ties to the city’s Establishment to help minorities and neighborhood groups achieve their goals at City Hall.

O’Connor--”Nobody’s Mayor But Yours,” according to her TV ads--pledged to “open up City Hall to the people” by spending every other Saturday in her office meeting individuals on a first-come, first-served basis.

Morrow promised to dramatically increase citizen involvement in city government through the creation of advisory panels “that wouldn’t just be window dressing.”

The campaign’s other undercurrent stemmed from San Diegans’ approval in November of Proposition A, which strengthened the city’s 1979 Growth Management Plan by requiring public approval of projects in undeveloped areas in the North City area and elsewhere. Growth has traditionally been a dominant issue in elections in environmentally conscious San Diego, and the Proposition A mandate had each of the candidates scrambling to heed the public’s latest pronouncement on the volatile topic.

Although Morrow was the only one of the three major candidates to endorse Proposition A last year, Cleator, who opposed it, and O’Connor, who remained neutral but is considered a moderate on environmental issues, quickly joined him in pledging to strongly enforce the measure. O’Connor even went so far as to pledge to “carry out the spirit of Prop. A” through city ordinances and council policies even if the measure were later ruled unconstitutional.

The public’s prevalent slow-growth attitude posed a particularly thorny problem for Cleator, a conservative whose consistent pro-development votes once prompted a council colleague to derisively label him a “cement mixer.” However, saying that he has “heard and strongly supports . . . the message of Prop. A,” the 58-year-old Cleator strove to recast his image in a more environmentally sensitive manner--a tack that O’Connor tried to undermine by reminding voters that more than one-third of Cleator’s contributions came from development interests.

O’Connor, however, also confronted an image problem that has plagued her since her service on the City Council--the perception that she is aloof and, critics say, largely inaccessible except to a tight circle of family members and friends.

In her attempt to dispel what she described as “an inaccurate image . . . created by my opponents,” O’Connor ran a campaign dramatically different from her unsuccessful 1983 mayoral race. Throughout the 1986 race, O’Connor devoted 24 days--three in each of the city’s eight council districts--to what she called “person-to-person, one-on-one campaigning” at shopping centers, supermarkets, factories and residences, a style that provided a stark contrast to her slick and expensive media campaign of three years ago.

Accused then of trying to buy the mayor’s office when she spent $560,000 of her own money in her race, O’Connor, the wife of multimillionaire businessman Robert O. Peterson, this year imposed a $150,000 spending limit on her primary campaign. She called the limit “a bold experiment . . . to end the craziness” of spiraling campaign costs. She also did not spend any of her own money, but has not ruled out the possibility of doing so in the runoff.

Times staff writer Ralph Frammolino contributed to this story.

SAN DIEGO MAYORAL VOTE

836 of 836 Precincts Reporting

Votes % O’Connor 80,861 45.9 Cleator 52,940 30.0 Morrow 33,559 19.0 Struiksma 2,851 1.6 Christian-Heising 981 .5 Crane 859 .4 McCullough 845 .4 Peters 798 .4 Kelley 671 .3 Nielsen 571 .3 Watts 336 .1 Walpert 247 .1 Lynne 208 .1 Helliwell 188 .1