O’Connor Eager to Get Started : Spends Busy Day Cementing Relations With Council

Savoring the prospect of what she termed a 2 1/2-year “probation period in the mayor’s office,” former San Diego City Councilwoman Maureen O’Connor on Wednesday began the task of building a working relationship with a council that she frequently criticized throughout her mayoral campaign.

Describing herself as “a team player . . . who knows that you need five votes to do anything” at City Hall, O’Connor spent most of the first day after her election as San Diego’s first woman mayor paying courtesy calls on her soon-to-be colleagues and other top city officials.

“I anticipate a good working relationship,” said the 39-year-old O’Connor, who defeated Councilman Bill Cleator in Tuesday’s special mayoral race. “The council members couldn’t have been more receptive and more warm. There may be some philosophical differences, but we all have the same goal--bettering our city.”

Final unofficial returns showed that O’Connor received 110,268 votes (55.1%), compared to 89,915 votes (44.9%) for Cleator. The victory entitles O’Connor to serve the 2 1/2 years remaining in the term of Roger Hedgecock, who resigned in December after his 13-count felony conviction on campaign-law violations--transgressions that, ironically, occurred in the 1983 race in which he narrowly defeated O’Connor.

“I think 55% by a non-incumbent was a very, very healthy margin,” O’Connor said at a news conference at her campaign headquarters in Old Town. “I consider that a mandate to move the city forward.”

O’Connor conceded, however, that her elation over the “great honor and humbling experience” of being the city’s first woman mayor is tempered by the knowledge that she will have less than a full four-year term to prove herself.

“Everybody would love to have a full term, but you work with what you get,” she said. “Mayor Hedgecock faced the same problem with a short term. It’s something you can deal with.” (Hedgecock received only an 18-month term for his victory in the special 1983 race to fill the vacancy created by Pete Wilson’s election to the U.S. Senate.)

The two years until the 1988 mayoral primary, O’Connor said, leave enough time to “give voters more to judge Maureen O’Connor by.”

“It just makes it more important to hit the ground running,” O’Connor said. “You don’t have as much time to ease into the job. And that’s fine. I’m eager to get started. I’ve said all along that this short term would be a sort of trial period to show what I can do.”

The top priorities that O’Connor identified throughout her campaign include tightening the city’s growth-management policies; pushing for campaign-law reforms to reduce what she views as the undue influence of special interests, particularly the development industry; reinstitution of city-funded after-school youth recreation programs, and fighting to limit the cost of the proposed waterfront convention center to $125 million--about $25 million lower than most current estimates.

On Wednesday, however, O’Connor declined to specify whether those goals--or others--will be at the top of her administration’s agenda, saying that she wants “to get a little rest before I get into . . . what I’m going to be addressing, one, two, three and four.”

O’Connor and her husband, businessman Robert O. Peterson, plan to leave later this week for a brief vacation in San Francisco.

After her July 7 inauguration, O’Connor will find herself working with a council that she had little good to say about during her campaign. The former two-term councilwoman charged, for example, that the council had “dropped the ball” on growth management after she left City Hall in 1979, and contended that there was a public perception--one that she shared--that the council was “on retainer” to major campaign donors.

Those and other similar remarks by O’Connor, Cleator contended during the race, had some council members “bristling.” However, both O’Connor and some council members expressed doubt Wednesday that the campaign rhetoric would create a shaky foundation for the mayor-elect’s relationship with the council.

“I just assumed that was Candidate O’Connor talking, and it’s not going to get in the way of what Mayor O’Connor might want to do once she’s sworn in,” said acting Mayor Ed Struiksma, who lunched with O’Connor Wednesday to begin planning the monthlong transition period. “Basically, the ball is in her court in terms of establishing a working relationship with the council. Personally, I’m looking forward to a positive relationship.”

During their meeting, Struiksma offered O’Connor office space in the mayor’s suite on the 11th floor of City Hall for use during the next month, and invited her to attend the council’s budget sessions throughout this month “to offer her input.”

Most other council members also extended a warm greeting to O’Connor Wednesday, even though her meetings with each were rather brief and pro forma. Councilwoman Abbe Wolfsheimer and her staff, for example, wore small green adhesive freckles on their faces--O’Connor herself is heavily freckled--while Councilman Mike Gotch, a fellow Democrat who in 1983 endorsed Hedgecock over O’Connor, greeted her with a long hug for photographers.

Even Cleator, whose personal warmth and mutual respect for O’Connor survived some testy moments in the campaign, said that he believes that he and the new mayor will be able to “get together to work on the many problems that are facing San Diego.”

“There will be more detailed meetings in the next couple weeks,” O’Connor said. “We’ll all know each other better by next month.”

One future colleague who apparently is unwilling to extend a honeymoon period to O’Connor, however, is Councilman Uvaldo Martinez.

During the campaign, O’Connor said that Martinez should resign in the wake of his indictment on charges stemming from alleged misuse of his city credit card. Shortly before O’Connor began making her rounds at City Hall Wednesday, Martinez purportedly told a reporter that his advice to the new mayor would be to “keep her nose out of my district.”

Martinez was the only council member with whom O’Connor did not meet Wednesday, but she left a short “let’s-get-together-soon” note with his staff.

When Martinez’s remark was repeated to O’Connor, she said that she doubted that the councilman “really meant that” and expressed hope that the two could work together. (If Martinez, whose trial is scheduled to begin later this month, is convicted, he could be ousted from office.)

Even as O’Connor began looking forward to her new responsibilities, campaign consultants on both sides cast a final glance backward at the race that produced her victory.

Dick Sykes, O’Connor’s New York-based consultant, attributed her victory to three major factors:

- Her ability to “establish and control the agenda of the campaign from beginning to end.”

- Cleator’s difficulty in attempting to moderate the strong pro-development record built during his 6 1/2 years on the council in a five-month campaign.

- A San Diego electorate that was “tired and burned out” by six mayoral races in the last three years and “to a remarkable degree had made its mind up even before the race officially began.”

Indeed, O’Connor’s self-imposed spending limits of $150,000 in the primary and $175,000 in the runoff, her refusal to accept contributions from developers and her emphasis of the growth-management issue became, to a large degree, the key issues of the campaign.

“Bill Cleator was in a race whose framework was designed by Maureen O’Connor,” Sykes said. “I don’t think there was any way that Bill Cleator could win the race so long as the agenda was growth management. This was a situation where Maureen was in tune with what the voters wanted, giving a beautiful symmetry to the campaign. That’s always your goal, because if you control the agenda, you usually win. And she did.”

The apparent failure of Cleator’s attempt to recast his image in a more environmentally sensitive fashion, largely through television ads, illustrates the problems facing any politician who seeks to “dramatically reposition himself over a short period,” Sykes argued.

“One of the lessons of this election is that you can’t expect to change people’s minds with ads saying, ‘Now, Bill Cleator is X,’ even though he’s been Brand Y for 10 years,” Sykes said.

The frequency of recent mayoral elections--combined with the turmoil stemming from Hedgecock’s nearly two-year legal battle and forced resignation--also caused voters to be less receptive to Cleator’s attempts to overcome the lead that O’Connor enjoyed from the earliest pre-election polls.

“People were tired and not really ready for another mayor’s race,” Sykes said. “People had been thinking about this race for a while and anticipating what was going to occur if and when Hedgecock left office. People had a pretty good idea what they were going to do before the race even began, so it was tough to change their minds. This was one of the most non-volatile electorates I’ve ever seen or polled.”

Meanwhile, Cleator campaign official Don Harrison said that, while Cleator outspent O’Connor by about 2 1/2 to 1, O’Connor’s 46% to 30% edge over Cleator in the Feb. 25 primary “scared off” contributors in the runoff.

“I’m not saying that would have changed the outcome, but it might have been closer,” Harrison said.

Although O’Connor said throughout the race that she hoped not to have to spend any of her own money on her campaign--unlike 1983, when she bankrolled her mayoral bid with $560,000 of her own money--she revealed Wednesday that she may have to make a loan to her campaign to cover a projected deficit.

“It’s not certain, but it appears that I may have to loan the campaign some money for cash-flow purposes,” O’Connor said. “Bills are still coming in, and so are donations. We’ll probably know more in the next week or so.” O’Connor added that she could not estimate the amount of the possible loan.

Harrison said that he and other top Cleator aides found ironic humor in Cleator’s own fund-raising difficulties. Noting that O’Connor often suggested that gaining the ear of a council member is the major motivation behind many campaign donations, Harrison pointed out that donors “couldn’t lose either way” if they gave to Cleator, because even if he lost the mayoral race, he still retained his council seat.

“What happened to us contradicted what O’Connor was saying,” Harrison said. “What we found was that a lot of people--I guess you could call them opportunistic givers--simply wanted to go with a winner. So, some people who ordinarily would have donated to Bill decided not to give to anyone. That 16-point spread in the primary really caused the money to dry up.”

Harrison also largely concurred with Sykes’ analysis, though he added that he and others in the Cleator camp have little interest in “picking this thing apart.”

“My philosophy is that losing campaigns ought to pay the electorate the courtesy of remaining silent,” Harrison said. “We had five months to talk and try to get across our message, and if we couldn’t do it when it counted, it doesn’t make much difference today. Now’s the time to look ahead, not back.”