Wolfsheimer Builds Record as Naysayer : Councilwoman Digs In, Convinced She’s Right

Her estranged husband, prominent land-use attorney and San Diego Port Commissioner Louis Wolfsheimer, asks:

Dear Abbe:

What is all this commotion I hear at City Hall about the enfant terrible of the City Council? You and I know that you are a thoughtful, gentle soul. Why do your fellow council members think of you not in these terms but rather more harsh terms? What happened?

“I don’t think I’m the enfant terrible ,” said San Diego City Councilwoman Abbe S. Wolfsheimer, responding to the inquiry relayed by a reporter. “I think I’m doing my job.”

Doing a job is one thing. But the job that the 47-year-old rookie councilwoman from La Jolla is doing at City Hall has been enough to make some people gnash their teeth.

The former property law professor has picked fights with the city attorney’s office over legal matters and procedures, including the way zoning appeals are handled.

The fiscal conservative has repeatedly criticized city administrators for hiring so many consultants.

The daughter of a San Diego philanthropist has openly resisted plans to sell off city property, saying it is a violation of the public trust.

Last month, Wolfsheimer took on the building industry and won. She persuaded her colleagues to approve a five-week moratorium on building permits and sewer connections to an undependable Sorrento Valley sewage pump station, which has spilled millions of gallons of human and industrial wastes into Los Penasquitos Lagoon since 1979.

She has done all this with a style that has tongues wagging.

Wolfsheimer has accused her fellow council members of “grandstanding” and lambasted a city manager’s report as “gibberish.”

With her face often fixed in a frown, she excels at questioning city staff members during open meetings with the unsettling precision of a defense attorney during cross-examination. And when it comes time to vote, chances are good it will be Everybody Else “yea,” Wolfsheimer “nay.”

City records show that since she was inaugurated in December, she has been the lone “no” vote on at least 21 council issues, ranging from the controversial council pay raise to more mundane matters of continuances, consultant contracts and leasing space for city offices.

“Abbe is someone who is consumed with being right,” said one person at City Hall who asked not to be identified. “My evaluation is the most important thing in her life is being right.”

Serving on the City Council is a matter of conscience, Wolfsheimer says.

“I’m still an idealist,” she said. “Many moons ago, I said that if I ever entered politics or ran for office, I would like to be able to maintain my principles the entire time I was there, truly vote my conscience. . . .

“I don’t believe it can’t be done. I’m an optimist. I believe people can enter this arena and maintain their principles and maybe have some impact and maybe get other people to do the same thing. I may be wrong.”

Yet Wolfsheimer readily admits that some of her idealism these days is being tempered by frustration. Since a good portion of the council’s weekly business pertains to her district, she can’t afford to take the advice of people like her estranged husband to sit back, observe and learn.

Trained as an attorney and teacher to engage in debate, she says she’s at a loss in the cagey world of city government.

“There’s no feedback on the 10th floor,” she said, referring to the council offices. “There’s no feedback anywhere. You can ask a question and there is no response. It’s almost like talking to a brick wall.

“I think to be open is not what’s done at City Hall. I think they’re astounded and don’t know what to do with it.

“I’m a different kind of colleague.”

Wolfsheimer is so open that she agreed to answer “Dear Abbe” letters solicited by The Times from people who know her or have business at City Hall.

Dear Abbe:

You’re very opinionated and you feel the necessity to express your opinion on everything. You also ask so many questions. Why do you think you know it all? And why do you think you should know it all?

Hours in the Council Chambers “I don’t think I know it all, which is why I ask questions,” Wolfsheimer said. “I also ask a different type of question, which is not too productive. I ask specific questions. I have just recently learned this week that I’m not to ask specific questions, I’ll get better answers if I ask open questions.”

Wolfsheimer was chairman of the Department of Property Law, Land Use and Negotiations at Western State University College of Law when she started to ask herself questions in January, 1985.

After 11 years of teaching, do you want to continue? Is it time for a sabbatical? What about becoming a full-time arbitrator for the Superior Court? Want to go to England?

“I woke up one morning and, rather than feeling indecisive about the various avenues I could choose to go into, I felt very decisive: ‘I know what I want to do this morning. This morning I know that I am ready to run for City Council. I want to do legislative work, to work with the law . . . something that feels very creative to me,’ ” Wolfsheimer recalled.

“I also knew I was going to win.”

Thus cloaked in self-confidence, Abbe Wolfsheimer leaped into yet another stage of what her friends describe as an eclectic “metamorphosis.”

“I think it was part of Abbe’s evolution,” Joann Johnson, Wolfsheimer’s administrative assistant, said of her decision to run. “She for many years did all of the right things you’re supposed to do. Wife. Mother. The community volunteer. Raising money. Working for charity. Working for the arts.

“After you’ve done that for a while, you say, ‘When is it my time?’ ” said Johnson.

Friends say the campaign against Councilman Bill Mitchell satisfied two impulses for Wolfsheimer. It affirmed the notion of public service she inherited from her father, yet it allowed her to take a psychological step out from his shadow and that of her husband.

Wolfsheimer’s father, Irving Salomon, made a career of noblesse oblige after he amassed a fortune from a Chicago metal furniture manufacturing business and moved to San Diego County in 1947, when Abbe Salomon was 9.

Salomon served as a consultant to the Ford Foundation and was a trustee for several colleges across the country. He was among a group of people who persuaded war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower to run for president and, in the late 1950s, Salomon was appointed as the U.S. delegate to the United Nations General Assembly.

Locally, he was chairman of the board for San Diego Ballet, a director of the Old Globe Theater, a benefactor of the Boy Scouts and YMCA.

The family’s 888-acre ranch in Escondido was the setting for many parties where college professors and political types were invited to go horseback riding, fishing or to just sit and play cards.

Abbe Salomon and her parents also took long trips to Africa, Europe and Asia. “I got to see how all kinds of people lived around the world,” she said.

But there were constraints on the girl who inherited her father’s strong will. Some were imposed by a mother who was Midwestern austere and “frugal,” said Kerry Hoxie, Wolfsheimer’s attorney and best friend.

Despite the family’s considerable wealth, Abbe, an only child, was made to wear hand-me-downs. When she did buy her own clothes, she was made to wear them long after they went out of fashion. She received no allowance.

And life for women of Wolfsheimer’s generation--even wealthy women--had a predictable pattern.

“We kind of came from the generation where you fell in love, you had children, the wife tended the house, the husband went to work, and that was that,” Wolfsheimer said.

In the summer of 1958, Abbe Salomon met Louis Wolfsheimer. She was a student at Goucher College in Baltimore, and his family owned a women’s clothing factory there.

They were married in December and, at Salomon’s urging, moved to San Diego in 1962. He continued law school; she tended the house.

“Louis became more and more important to Papa,” Hoxie said. “He became the heir. In the social sense. In the business sense. As Papa got older, and especially after the strokes, he relied more on Louis. He relied on Louis to take over his responsibilities and take care of the family.”

Shortly after the move to San Diego, Abbe Wolfsheimer’s metamorphosis began. “Whatever came along that felt good, I put on and acted it,” she said.

She left housework for volunteer work, throwing herself into fund-raising for cultural and medical causes. The Salk Institute. The Arthritis Foundation. UCSD School of Medicine. Brandeis University. Goucher College. San Diego Ballet.

Next, she left her Jackie Kennedy hairdo behind for a pseudo-hippie phase. She wore gauzy clothes and would sit on the beach to discuss nuclear disarmament with her friends.

The radical change came, however, in the late 1960s. Wolfsheimer wrote “Up,” a how-to philosophy for living so “you can live as your own person, you can become your own person, you can live with yourself.”

The premise of the unpublished manuscript is that people should test the values they’ve inherited from their parents and friends to make sure which ones are comfortable and useful.

Wolfsheimer wrote poetry, an ongoing endeavor embracing love and a variety of other subjects. Here is the first stanza from a poem entitled, “Plateau”:

Today, I have a name, and it is me.

Still, I exist outside humanity

As I did when I learned I had no name,

But with one difference. When I had no name,

I existed below humanity

Because I no longer respected it

And I refused to accept its values

And be weakened by its endless pressures.

I needed all my strength to live alone.

Also in the late 1960s, Wolfsheimer decided to enroll in law school and became more active in feminist causes like the Women’s Bank, which lent money to women without regard to their husbands’ credit ratings. By 1974, she was a property professor who collaborated with Hoxie, then a law student, to write a property law textbook.

When her father died in 1979, he left an estate of $10.1 million that was distributed to his widow, daughter and son-in-law. Salomon’s will gave Louis control of the money by appointing him trustee for everyone.

But Wolfsheimer insisted a few years later that she be given control of her own share of the inheritance, which includes joint ownership of the Escondido ranch. And in 1982, she and Louis--by then a well-known associate of former San Diego Mayor Pete Wilson--separated.

The stage was set, then, for the wiry, energetic Wolfsheimer to take on a new challenge. Her target became politics and Mitchell, a liberal known for his quirky comments.

“That’s something she could do totally on her own, that she could get totally on her own,” Hoxie said of the election. “It wasn’t a hand-me-down from Poppa and Louis. . . . She got elected by the public. Louis didn’t get her elected. Poppa didn’t get her elected. She did it on her own.”

Wolfsheimer says she visited 16,000 homes during the campaign in the 1st District, which includes the fast-growing areas of Rancho Penasquitos, portions of Sabre Springs and North City West, as well as established La Jolla and bucolic San Pasqual Valley.

Her campaign ads were bluntly critical of Mitchell. She campaigned on a platform of “humane growth,” a phrase she coined that still has some in the building industry scratching their heads.

“My vision is to have a city that has all the amenities accompanying its growth because this is not intended to be a city where we destroy the natural assets, we fail to put in the man-made assets where we can,” she said last week.

Wolfsheimer also used more than $400,000 of her own money. According to campaign records, she lent her campaign $153,852 as loans, and footed the bill for $250,257 worth of advertising and other services.

“That’s my present to me,” she said of the campaign expenditures.

“You should give yourself some presents, some rewards. I think to spend money on good government--that sounds immodest--is the appropriate thing to do. That investment was an investment in good government, as far as I’m concerned, because I thought I could be a good legislator.”

Dear Abbe:

One of the major problems with the City Council this past year has been the absolute lack of leadership. You more than any have pursued your role as an individual, ignoring established policies and procedures in a most unproductive manner. You are intelligent and well-educated, but your performance reflects lack of understanding or a willingness to listen. The Building Industry has been unable to ascertain your philosophy or to discern just who you are. Just where are you headed? Signed, A member of the Building Industry “I think some of the time it’s not productive and some of the time it is productive,” Wolfsheimer said. “And rightly called: My performance does reflect a lack of understanding. I don’t understand all the ins and outs of City Hall, so I do agree with that.

“On the other hand, I don’t think that I’m unwilling to listen. I just wish people were willing to part with information. I will listen hard if people will give me data, but it isn’t forthcoming on a voluntary basis.”

Abbe Wolfsheimer was making a scene.

The council’s Public Facilities and Recreation Committee meeting of June 26 was in progress in a second-floor conference room at City Hall. Council members were debating an item of keen interest to Wolfsheimer--the proposed sale of 291 acres of city-owned land near Lake Hodges to the City of Escondido.

Wolfsheimer, who was against the sale, upbraided city administrators, who favored it.

She criticized them for handing in a written report on the issue at 5 p.m. the day before. She also said it was “unresponsive.”

“There’s nothing here but gibberish,” she snapped. “I give it a C minus.”

When one of her colleagues proposed a long-winded motion that she disagreed with, she characterized it as “sloppy.” When committee Chairman Bill Cleator tried to limit debate and vote on the motion Wolfsheimer didn’t like, she appealed to the city attorney to overrule Cleator on a point of parliamentary procedure.

The attorney upheld Cleator, so Wolfsheimer quickly proposed two motions of her own to undo what the first motion had done.

Her colleagues ignored the motions.

“If she feels really strongly, she’ll dig in her heels,” said Johnson, Wolfsheimer’s administrative assistant. “If she’s worked (an issue) over, if she’s made up her mind that’s the right thing to do for the people of San Diego, you won’t be able to budge her, not for any political reason or for some trade-off or whatever process council members go through.”

Some people, including those who provided The Times with “Dear Abbe” letters asking her whatever they wanted, say they can’t predict how Wolfsheimer will react to an issue or problem. Others are wondering if Wolfsheimer’s slashing style is not becoming a handicap.

“She gets turned off by her colleagues and the public,” said Jay Powell, local conservation coordinator for the Sierra Club. “That’s a perception that is out there, and that’s a danger. It’s a danger that when she is doing something we agree with, we may be supporting something that is doomed when the context is . . . ‘Oh, there she goes again!’ ”

But Louis Wolfsheimer said his estranged wife, whose strong suit is perseverance, will catch on to the ways of City Hall.

“Abbe will learn, after they stamp her into the dirt a few times, if they do,” Louis said. “ . . . I believe you can say what you believe and you can be successful and win the points you want to win without being nasty.”

Wolfsheimer’s tactics have, in some cases, worked. She won a five-week ban on sewer connections to Pump Station 64 in Sorrento Valley on June 24 by staging a self-styled filibuster, warning council members they may be encouraging an outbreak of cholera if they don’t stop the station from spilling sewage into coastal waters.

On many issues, however, Wolfsheimer often finds herself alone.

She lost a bitter fight June 10 to turn back the Costa Verde project, a development that would put more office buildings and 6,000 new residents across from University Towne Centre in University City. She fought the development in its present form because she said her calculations demonstrated that the project would actually put 7,000 more cars on the road than the city Planning Department said.

She was the lone vote against renaming Market Street for Martin Luther King Jr. She voted against the council’s $10,000 pay raise twice. She voted against the proposal to tear down the historic Plunge Building at Mission Beach and replace it with shops and restaurants.

Wolfsheimer said she isn’t bothered by the lone votes and the talk by some that she is difficult to understand. And she says she’s willing to take advice on how to be a City Council member.

“If someone thinks I’m wrong, I encourage them to come up and speak to me about it,” she said. “I want to know if I’m going to make a mistake.”

For now, no one has taken up the offer.

“I’ve always been able to develop very good working relationships with everyone I’ve been associated with my entire life,” she said. “This is the first time that I find that I’m not communicating.”