O’Connor, Cleator Facing Runoff for San Diego Mayor

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

In unofficial final returns, O’Connor ran well ahead of Cleator but was four percentage points short of the 50% vote needed for outright election as mayor of California’s second-largest city.

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

Neither Wins Majority

Because neither Cleator, with 30%, nor O’Connor, with 45.9%, received more than half 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 conspiracy and perjury charges stemming from illegal contributions to his 1983 mayoral campaign.

Former Councilman Floyd Morrow, who largely financed his own campaign, ran a distant third with 19%, but fulfilled prophecies that he would act as a spoiler whose votes would force a runoff.

Returns showed Morrow running well ahead of his standing in polls, winning votes that many political observers argued would have otherwise been more likely to go to his fellow Democrat O’Connor 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 in Tuesday’s election, as did the 2,851 votes (1.6%) 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-reimbursed expense accounts. Two write-in candidates also competed in the race.

Hot, sunny weather Tuesday helped to produce an estimated 36% turnout, well above the projections of election officials. The higher-than-expected turnout also was attributed to strong get-out-the-vote efforts mounted by all three major candidates.

Focus on Two Issues

Waged in the wake of Hedgecock’s conviction and voters’ approval last fall of a strong initiative aimed at controlling development in the city’s outlying areas, the mayoral race saw each of the major candidates seek to capitalize on those two disparate events.

Indeed, the genesis of Tuesday’s election--Hedgecock’s forced resignation in December--cast a large shadow over the race to elect his successor.

Characterized by former San Diego County Republican Party Chairman Allan Royster as a local version of “what you saw in national politics after Watergate,” the campaign produced much oratory from the candidates designed to assure voters that they would help to restore normality to City Hall after nearly two years of turmoil.

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

Pledges of Accessibility

Hedgecock’s legacy of opening up City Hall to gays, 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,” said 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. She also imposed a $150,000 spending limit on her primary campaign in what she hailed as “a bold experiment . . . to end the craziness” of spiraling campaign costs. O’Connor is the wife of multimillionaire Robert O. Peterson, founder of the Jack-in-the-Box fast food restaurant chain, and poured $560,000 of her own money into her unsuccessful 1983 mayoral campaign.

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

Development Mandate

The campaign’s other undercurrent stemmed from 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 northern section of the city 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 pay heed to the public’s latest pronouncement on the 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 pledged to “carry out the spirit of Proposition A” through city ordinances and council policies even if the measure were later ruled unconstitutional by the courts.

The public’s slow-growth attitude posed a particularly thorny problem for Cleator, a conservative whose consistent pro-development votes once prompted one of his council colleagues to label him a “cement mixer.” However, saying that he has “heard and strongly supports . . . the message of Proposition 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.

Fighting an Image

O’Connor, however, also confronted an image problem--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 this year’s 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.

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