Analysis : Cleator, O’Connor Mix Vision With Vagueness

“Trust me,” San Diego City Councilman Bill Cleator said as he concluded his remarks at a mayoral candidates’ forum in La Jolla earlier this month.

“I’m asking you to trust me. I know somebody else said that once. But I really mean it. Trust me, and I think you’ll be pleased and surprised.”

At nearly a dozen forums and debates over the past month, both Cleator and his opponent, former Councilwoman Maureen F. O’Connor, have asked San Diegans to entrust them with the office on the 11th floor of City Hall for the next 2 1/2 years.

Inevitably, trust figures prominently in any election, as voters seek to distinguish rhetoric from reality while trying to decide which candidate is more likely to transform campaign promises into legislative achievements.

In asking for voters’ trust, O’Connor and Cleator, like most politicians, have routinely dispensed the most basic of hopes: that the city will be better off with them in charge than it is now. However, the evidence that the two candidates have offered in support of that claim is riddled with misstatements, exaggerations, goals as lofty as they are impractical, and pledges that are long on generalities but short on specifics.

O’Connor, for example, repeatedly tells campaign audiences that she “knows” that the proposed waterfront convention center can be built for millions of dollars less than even the most optimistic predictions of planning and construction experts. While stopping short of outright commitment, she also fosters the impression that she will solve civic ills ranging from cracked sidewalks to inadequate sewage treatment, but is vague about how she will finance those improvements.

Cleator’s speeches, meanwhile, often are laced with platitudes--notably, his repeated calls for “a safe city” and “a city that works,” two of his major themes. At the other end of the rhetorical spectrum, however, Cleator also offers visions of a local art, business and law library that could rival the architectural drama of Paris’ Georges Pompidou National Center of Art and Culture--a bold yet dissonant plan in light of his suggestion of a closed Sears building in Hillcrest as a possible site for a different library. (Earlier this month, the City Council voted to purchase the Sears property for $9.3 million, but has not decided how the site will be used.)

“I wouldn’t call it being unrealistic,” Cleator said. “I’d call it setting your sights high.”

“You need some dreamers in city government,” O’Connor said. “We need to dream great dreams to carry this city into the 21st Century.”

The line between “dreaming great dreams” and political demagoguery, however, can be a thin one. In the mayoral runoff, both candidates appear to have occasionally crossed that line, with Cleator pointing to O’Connor’s position on the convention center as one of the clearest transgressions.

The controversy over a projected $20-million-plus cost overrun for the convention center created a powerful issue for O’Connor, who began criticizing the project’s gradually rising price tag more than two years ago while she was a member of the San Diego Unified Port District’s commission. Although proponents estimated the center’s cost at $95 million in the November, 1983, advisory election in which San Diegans endorsed the project, construction bids that came in more than 20% above projections and other factors have since pushed the center’s estimated overall cost to nearly $160 million.

Adopting an I-told-you-so stance, O’Connor immediately called for the project to be rebid “to get back closer to the figure voters approved.” The Port District ultimately did order a second round of bids, a process that a special mayoral task force--a panel that included top architects and construction experts--estimated might trim the final cost by as much as $10 million, thereby lowering what Port Commissioner William Rick calls the “open-the-door price” to about $150 million.

O’Connor, however, persistently argues that the center can be built, without serious aesthetic cutbacks, for about $25 million less than that figure. But she has offered little in the way of evidence to support that contention.

“If I’m elected mayor, I will get you a convention center,” O’Connor told the La Jolla Kiwanis Club. “It will look nice and it will cost you $125 million, not a penny more.”

Cleator dismisses O’Connor’s attempt to position herself as the tight-fisted guardian of the public treasury as “just plain phoniness and deception.”

“I think she knows good and well it can’t be built for that number, but she continues to say it anyway,” Cleator said. “I don’t want to spend a dollar more than absolutely necessary to build that center. But I don’t feel comfortable putting a number on it now, and I don’t think it’s very honest to do that before all the facts are in.”

In response, O’Connor notes that Ward Deems, who heads the convention center’s architectural team, once told the Port District he was confident that the project could be built for $125 million.

“That’s my goal, and with fiscal prudence, I think we can reach it,” O’Connor said. “I’m not saying definitely, absolutely that the number won’t go up. But it you don’t have a goal, you never reach it.

“Back in the ‘70s, some people said the trolley was going to cost $1 billion. We set a goal of bringing it in at $101 million, and I brought it in at that. So, I have a track record that shows that I can do it.”

Another of O’Connor’s proposals--a plan to finance a new central library downtown--also has engendered skepticism. Saying that the city might be able to “solve two problems at once,” O’Connor has suggested that the city consider leasing the air rights above the existing library to a developer who, in return for being allowed to build low-cost to moderate-cost apartments or condominiums, would also help finance a new library on the same site.

Such “mixed-use” projects have been successful elsewhere, but O’Connor concedes that she has not “worked out all the details” as to whether the concept is feasible for the library project. Critics have argued, however, that the combination library-housing tower would have to be the size of a New York City skyscraper in order to be economically viable.

“What she is proposing would take a building about 160 stories high,” Cleator told a group of hotel executives last week. Cleator’s campaign aides jokingly refer to O’Connor’s proposal as “the leaning tower of O’Connor.”

Cleator, though, has some flamboyant notions of his own regarding the library project. The two-term councilman, in fact, has called for the development of two major libraries--one a general-use library in either Balboa Park or at the former Sears site to replace the current central library downtown, and the other an art, law and business library.

The latter facility, which Cleator suggests could also house major art exhibits, is the one that he likens to the Pompidou museum, noted for its controversial architecture featuring brightly colored steel tubes and girders, huge glass walls, and exposed exterior plumbing pipes, ducts and shafts.

“I think this is something that would go over like gang busters in San Diego,” Cleator said. “I’m not saying you have to duplicate the Pompidou’s exterior. But you want something that pops, something that makes people say, ‘Wow!’--not just four plain walls and stucco. We could create something that people from around the world would want to come to see.”

Cleator’s proposal, however, drew open snickers during one recent speech, and the councilman concedes that some may view his idea as “a little far-fetched.”

“Some people out there probably think, ‘Well, Cleator’s been chewing on his shoe again,’ ” he said.

Most of the specific policy proposals made throughout the campaign by the two mayoral candidates have been relatively non-controversial--with the notable exception of O’Connor’s early call for rebidding of the convention center project, which drew an angry response from many downtown business leaders and tourism officials.

Illustrative of the more innocuous proposals emanating from the competing campaigns are O’Connor’s suggestion that community plans be amended only once a year to “allow increased community input,” and her call for city funding of after-school youth recreation programs. Cleator has called for a “regional growth summit” of mayors within San Diego County, and has proposed a summer jobs program for disadvantaged youths--a recycled version of a plan offered almost annually by some candidate in some race.

Vagueness has dominated the candidates’ remarks on a wide variety of subjects usually discussed at the forums--in particular, municipal finances.

At numerous forums, O’Connor has pledged to try to improve and expand city services ranging from street repair and lifeguard services to police and fire protection and sewage treatment. She has not specified, however, where she hopes to find the dollars in an already tight city budget to accomplish those goals.

“That’s the mayor’s job, and if you elect me, I’ll dig into that budget and find those dollars,” O’Connor said in Rancho Bernardo. With little variation, O’Connor also has delivered that remark at many other debates.

O’Connor also frequently tosses out phrases such as “listen to the community” or, “I’ll take a close look at that if I’m elected,” in regard to myriad issues.

“Whatever we do, I want to be sure the community is satisfied,” O’Connor said in answering a question about growth management at a Mira Mesa forum. This most noncommittal of responses, however, rarely fails to produce applause.

Cleator does not do much better on the specificity score card, as evidenced by this line that is featured prominently in many of his speeches: “What I’d really like to do is create what I’m going to call a safe city and, second, the city that works.” One major way to make San Diego safer, Cleator says, is to “give kids a job so they feel good about themselves and aren’t out getting in trouble.” His argument on why the city is not working properly now is largely limited to a personal anecdote about how city road crews put asphalt “on a perfectly good street” near his house that had already been slurry-sealed.

On other occasions, Cleator has misstated or glossed over the facts on certain issues. For example, at a recent downtown forum sponsored by a handful of Latino groups, Cleator complained about the concentration of low-cost housing projects in southern San Diego, particularly the South Bay area.

“The crummiest projects that we have are in the south part of the city,” Cleator said. “But they didn’t happen on my watch. I’d try to disperse them a heck of a lot better.”

However, city Housing Commission figures show that the number of low-cost housing units in south San Diego has increased since Cleator was elected to the council in 1979. In addition, Cleator also vigorously opposed a major low- and moderate-income rental housing project proposed for Ocean Beach, the so-called Site 17 project.

Predictably, both candidates insist that they have tried to avoid overstatements and attempted to be as specific and accurate as possible throughout the campaign.

“The campaign is where you identify the general direction you’d like to take the city in,” O’Connor said. “It’s impossible to have all the answers on things like, Where’s the money going to come from for this program? or, Will that idea really work? This is the time to reach, to show the public our vision. You work out a lot of the details later. The important thing is to have a target, a goal.”

Similarly, Cleator attributes the vagueness or other shortcomings of some of the candidates’ remarks to the difficulty of trying to answer complicated questions in the brief time allotted at public forums.

“A lot of these things aren’t ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions, so sometimes you do end up cutting corners,” Cleator said. “All you can do is do your best. When you mess up . . . you can bet somebody will let you know about it.”