O’Connor Gets to Know City -- From Afar

In the less than three months that San Diego Mayor Maureen O’Connor has been in office, she has begun to show part of that intangible political commodity called style. Perhaps nowhere is that more evident than in O’Connor’s travel habits.

Since taking office July 7, O’Connor has traveled out of town on city-related business six times.

From Monterey and Sacramento to Washington, D.C., and New York, O’Connor has spent about 18 days on business travel. Sandwiched in between was a weeklong vacation she and her husband, Robert O. Peterson, spent in Mendocino.

Extrapolated over a year’s time, the mayor would be traveling on city business roughly 30 times and staying away about 90 days, a schedule that would closely resemble Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley’s.

But O’Connor has no plans to do that, according to Paul Downey, her spokesman.

“Her attitude is that the city has really been drifting for awhile . . . what with the former problems with (Mayor Roger Hedgecock),” Downey said. “She wants to bring San Diego back into the national scene, show that San Diego is concerned about things.”

As for whether O’Connor’s time would have been better spent in San Diego, where she has acknowledged there was a leadership vacuum, Downey said the key point involved in the mayor’s travels, as illustrated by her trips to New York and Washington, “is that the issues that came up were of vital concern to San Diego; issues directly affecting San Diego.”

“She was out of town but (she) was relating to issues that are important here in town,” he said.

The extent of the mayor’s travel during her first 2 1/2 months in office was in part due to happenstance, Downey says. “Some of these things kind of came together at the same time, and she felt the trips were important,” he said. “If you look at the trips she’s taken, some of them occurred on weekends and others involved half-days.”

The business topics covered by the mayor’s trips run the gamut from a California League of Cities convention in Monterey and receiving accolades from fellow Democrats and California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown in Sacramento to meeting the local congressional delegation in Washington to two trips to New York.

On the first trip to New York, O’Connor was on a tour of convention centers--a topic that eventually led her to Los Angeles, Anaheim and Toronto--to compare facilities in other cities to the one planned for San Diego, which has been plagued by budget and construction problems.

On the second trip, the mayor visited New York in late August at the invitation of Mayor Ed Koch to discuss the problems of urban drug abuse and the homeless. It was during this trip that O’Connor received national publicity for loaning her black sweater to a New York policeman who talked a man out of jumping off a bridge by posing as a priest with the mayor’s garment.

The wealthy O’Connor, continuing a policy she began when she previously served on the City Council, has paid for the business trips, including air fare and hotel costs, herself. Her official city travel budget is $4,000, which is supposed to cover annual travel expenses for both the mayor and her staff.

Downey said it’s likely that O’Connor will try to increase the travel budget because, “$4,000 doesn’t go very far.”

In comparison to the mayor’s travels, former Mayor Hedgecock made trips to Washington to meet with the local congressional delegation, to New York to promote downtown redevelopment, to Sacramento to meet with legislators and to Asia, including Taiwan and Japan, during his first year in office. He said he made one trip during his first six months in office.

Asked about O’Connor’s travels, Hedgecock responded: “Each mayor has their own style.”

Los Angeles Mayor Bradley, for example, made 28 out-of-town business trips in 1985 covering about 100 days, said Fred MacFarland, Bradley’s deputy press secretary. Bradley’s travel from July 1, 1985, to June 30, 1986, the city’s fiscal year, cost Los Angeles $25,960, according to MacFarland.

This year, Bradley’s travel budget is $28,000, MacFarland said. “Being mayor is not a 9-to-5 position,” he said.

In San Francisco, Mayor Dianne Feinstein spent fewer than 10 days traveling on city business to Portland, Ore., and Washington, D.C., in 1985, said her deputy press secretary, Bill Strawn. Similar to O’Connor, Feinstein relies on a separate, private fund to pay for her trips.

Feinstein has created a Friends of Dianne Feinstein fund that pays for her business trips, among other things. The city has a $10,000 travel budget for the mayor’s office and department heads, Strawn said, noting that it is due to be reduced to $7,500.

“She doesn’t go very far for very long,” Strawn said.

Back in San Diego, Downey said O’Connor has few business trips planned for the rest of the year. She will attend an Oct. 3 meeting in Tijuana to discuss mutual governmental problems with Mexican officials. And she is considering going to San Antonio, Tex., in late fall for a U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting.

“We’re not consciously planning to do a lot of things” for the rest of the year, he said.