Tearful Rookie and a Grizzled Veteran Look at City Hall Politics : Jim Williams Assails Political Egos

Judy McCarty has been a San Diego City councilwoman since November. More accustomed to life as wife and mother than politician, McCarty had little preparation for the high-pressure job of an elected official. Jim Williams is a grizzled veteran of City Hall machinations. His years as an aide to a mayor and councilman and as a lobbyist for the building industry have left him with a gruff and sometimes cynical view of the way city affairs are handled. Here are their views on how City Hall works.

Jim Williams, it seems, has been around San Diego City Hall forever. A retired Marine, he was the top aide to one San Diego mayor and an assistant to a councilman before spending nine years as the lobbyist for the development industry.

He has this advice for newcomers like Councilwoman Judy McCarty.

“First thing I would say is let me have a tape measure so I can measure the size of your head,” snapped Williams. “And I’m going to measure it every month, to be damn sure it doesn’t get any bigger because all this attention that you’re going to get from very prominent people is going to affect you, in all probability.

“And it’s going to affect you to the point where you’re going to think that you’re the hottest thing on the face of the Earth.”

Egos grease the gears of city government, William claims.

“Professional politicians” are running City Hall now, cocky council members who are attracted to the $35,000-a-year job and its perks because they can’t get any other work, he contends. Their large office staffs are actually “spoiling” the public, Williams said.

And in their quest for votes, council members are paying greater heed to a rising class of vocal community groups and individuals who, Williams said, “would like to build a fence around San Diego and say, ‘Hey, I’m here (and) I don’t want anyone else to come here.’ ”

But there is at least one holdover from the past: The business community, traditionally a wellspring of social connections and political donations, continues to wield considerable clout.

Such are the pointed observations of a grizzled veteran of city government, a man who argues that developers should be considered the first environmentalists in San Diego.

“You look at everything in San Diego--someone built it,” he said. “You can look at the Zoo, you can look at Sea World, you can look at Mission Bay, you can look at Seaport Village, the things all of us enjoy--some damn builder built it.”

Williams was the lobbyist for the Building Industry Assn. before he retired last June. Wearing outlandish clashes of bright sports coats and polyester pants, he was a fixture in the corridors and meeting rooms of City Hall, baby-sitting public meetings and calling on council members.

The 62-year-old admits he is from a different era. Williams was hired in 1971 as the top aide to Mayor Frank Curran, after a 28-year career as a Marine Corps pilot that included service in World War II, the Korean War and two tours in Vietnam. He retired as a colonel.

Those were the days when Curran and Williams tooled around town in a telephone-equipped city limousine.

Yet the pretense was innocent enough. The mayor and council members knew their place. Curran was paid $12,000 a year and councilmen $5,000 for what was considered a part-time job. They were content to make ceremonial appearances and preside over municipal affairs like a passive board of directors.

The day-to-day operations--picking up the garbage, fixing potholes, putting up stop signs--were left to the city manager and his staff. That’s the way the City Charter said it should be, Williams said.

All that started to change with Pete Wilson.

Elected mayor in 1971 on a slow-growth platform, Wilson, now a U.S. senator, began to change the dynamics of how City Hall works. When city voters rejected his 1973 proposal to increase his powers in the mayor’s office, Wilson created a council committee system to accomplish much the same goal.

The committee system not only established a pecking order on the council--Wilson retained the power to appoint chairmen--but it gave the mayor and council members added leverage over the city manager. They used their committee meetings to quiz city administrators about citizen complaints or to order reports on a wide range of issues.

As Wilson’s power and staff grew, other council members “started hiring people to be able to keep up with all of the stuff that Pete’s office was cranking out,” said Williams. City records show that, in 1973, there were 12 secretaries and aides working the eight council offices; today, there are 52--a 333% increase.

As the power at City Hall began to shift more toward elected officials--and as they received pay raises--the job of council member began to attract a “different breed of cat,” said Williams.

“Most of the ones who come on today, they become professional politicians because they’ve found a niche in life that they like. Most of them, for one thing, they’re younger . . . and most of them have never done anything important in their whole life. They’ve never had recognition . . . personal recognition, that made them feel extremely important before they’re elected to that job.

“Now, secondly, they’re showered, I mean absolutely showered, with attention from the most prominent people in the City of San Diego,” Williams said. “We used to kid about some of them would come on there and within a matter of three or four months, there wasn’t a hat in town could fit their head.”

Williams said he considers a majority of the current City Council--Judy McCarty, Ed Struiksma, Mike Gotch, William Jones and Uvaldo Martinez--to be professional politicians. Their main goal in life is to keep their jobs.

“I don’t think that their decisions are as independent as they should be as to what is best for the City of San Diego,” said Williams. “Their decisions are based more on ‘How’s this going to affect my next election? How many votes am I going to lose? How many people am I going to make mad? Which group of people am I going to get mad at me over this?’ ”

And those kind of political concerns have even affected the behavior of council staff members. Williams said that when he was serving as an aide to Councilman Jim Ellis from 1974 to 1976, a constituent calling the office to complain about bad roads would hear something like this:

‘So you’ve got a chuck hole in front of your house. So what? We’ll fix the damn thing when we get around to it. A lot of people’ve got chuck holes. They don’t call. What makes you so special?’

“I would listen to their plea and just ignore it.”

But today the story is vastly different. Council staff members scramble to respond to constituent complaints by sending a wave of memos to city administrators asking for help in solving mundane problems.

“They write a letter to the person that called or wrote in and I guess it makes the person . . . feel like ‘My councilman is taking care of me,’ whether he does anything about it or not,” added Williams.

Community groups that he once scorned are now feared. Williams said that one former council member recently confided in him that he was “scared to death of the community planning groups. Absolutely terrorized. One day he said without the support of the community planning groups, you can’t get elected.”

While the breed of councilman has changed, so has the style of the business leaders.

Williams said that people like Lee Grissom, San Diego Chamber of Commerce vice president, and Gordon Luce, chairman of Great American First Savings Bank, are “more aggressive, sophisticated . . . They get their names in the society column all the time, which I guess they like, or at least their wives do.

“These guys are not the rough, tough, slugging, knock-down drag-out politicians they used to have,” he said. “Those guys back in the good old days, they called the shots.”

Yet businessmen continue to influence the elected officials, and their power is undeniable.

“Because of the sensitivity of it, I don’t think the politicians will even let on as much as they used to that the power is there” in the business community, said Williams. “They might even try to disguise their beliefs by indicating the opposite, but they know where it (the power) is. I don’t think a good politician is going to go against it.”

Unless Ego rears its head.

In that case, you will see what Williams has witnessed time and again in the halls of municipal power.

The young developer, who sports an ego with “an unquenchable thirst,” marches in to see a councilman to push a project. The developer “comes out thinking, ‘Boy, I’ve got it made!’ ”

Meanwhile, the politician is cackling.

“I would go in there the next minute and the councilman would be laughing, ‘Boy, did I give him a bill of goods!’ ”