Did Gotch Take Wrong Plunge? : No, Says Councilman; Yes, Say Some of His Now-Disgruntled Constituents

Mike Gotch is driving west on Grand Avenue, chugging toward the ocean in his orange 1979 Volkswagen bug. He is giving a tour of the beach area, which has been his power base for nearly eight years on the San Diego City Council.

“You’ve got to understand what makes me tick,” he says to a passenger, peering down the street through his sunglasses. “I’m a person of balance, order and harmony. It all has to fit properly in a grand scheme of things. Making that work is what motivates me.”

Virtually everything in the world of Mike Gotch appears to be neat, ordered, purposeful. His tiny Mission Beach home is so clean you wonder if anyone lives there. And his bug, now relegated to a second car, is as spotless as if it were new. Even the glove compartment is organized.

Not All Harmonious

But the appearance of harmony is only a veneer over the personal and political chaos that has surrounded the council’s best-known environmental populist in recent months.

During that time, his second wife has left him, partly because of the demands of public life, and Gotch’s constituency in Mission Beach has erupted with hostility over his controversial support for tearing down the Mission Beach Plunge building and replacing it with 70,000 square feet of restaurants and shops.

The political fallout from that one issue has been so great that several would-be candidates are stalking Gotch as if he were a wounded animal, a circumstance the challengers concede was unthinkable more than a year ago.

All this, say friends, has taken its toll on a guy who was so open that he would hand out his home telephone number and ride his bike down the beach to jaw with community activists.

Today, Gotch, 39, unplugs his telephone answering machine because of a rash of obscene calls. He takes off to Borrego Springs or Los Angeles for the weekend. He has broken off diplomatic relations with his critics.

The estrangement, said Gotch’s first wife, is partly the result of her former husband’s increasing frustration in his quest to impose order on Mission Beach,

“I think he has watched all his efforts deteriorate,” said Marianne McWilliams, who is remarried but remains friendly to Gotch. “Nothing is getting better in Mission Beach. If anything, it has gotten worse. Now there’s a lot of crime, drugs.”

Problems With District

Gotch concedes that getting Mission Beach in line is difficult because the area “defies organizational skill.” His neighborhood, he says, is still a place owned by absentee landlords, inhabited by students, overrun by tourists, plagued by transients and cursed with dogs that bark until 3 a.m.

“I had somebody defecate in my driveway last week,” Gotch says with disgust.

Still, there is a sense of betrayal among some of the people in the community over how Gotch has been acting lately.

“This is a person you voted for and worked with in a range of community issues. And then you differ and differ sharply with him on an issue and suddenly he’s inaccessible and inflexible,” said Helen Duffy, a community activist.

“It’s that dichotomy that leaves so many people bewildered,” she added. “Are we seeing a new Mike Gotch? Or is there something we’ve never understood about Mike Gotch?”

Prince Charming

Before now, it has been relatively easy to understand Mike Gotch. He was the Prince Charming of City Hall, the handsome, articulate liberal in a conservative town.

Gotch moved to San Diego to attend college in the late 1960s after growing up in East Palo Alto and Glendora. As a student at San Diego State, he said recently, he became enamored with the idea of owning a home by the ocean.

After purchasing the Ostend Court home in 1974, young Gotch immediately set out to improve his neighborhood. He would spend hours sweeping up broken glass from the sidewalks, picking up litter and scrubbing graffiti from walls, said McWilliams. His dedication to cleanliness was so strong that, for Christmas 1974, she gave him a new broom.

“He got several people to buy small homes and fix them up,” said McWilliams. “Of course, those people got fed up and moved away. But he stayed on. I think it was a personal crusade.”

She said the crusade, however, eclipsed the marriage when Gotch didn’t want to leave for more suburban surroundings to start a family. “I think his love for Mission Beach is stronger than for a wife,” said McWilliams.

The couple was divorced in 1977 after six years. By then, Gotch was deeply involved in neighborhood politics, having served two years as Mission Beach Town Council president. His activism with the community group had its beginnings when Gotch helped organize monthly clean-up days for the area.

Exposure to City Hall

Through his work with the town council, Gotch was exposed to City Hall. Upset that many of the community group’s demands were met with indifference, he decided it was time that someone with ties to community groups run for a council seat, he would say later.

The chance came in 1979, when the 6th District seat became vacant. By that time, Gotch had become director of the Local Agency Formation Commission, a state government agency with local offices that studies what happens to government services and the environment as cities grow.

Gotch ran for the council and won a 238-vote cliff-hanger victory after his opponent, former council aide Steve Wittman, became embroiled in allegations that he campaigned on city time.

It was a stunning victory for a political neophyte, who was shown on campaign literature as a smiling young man with an unbuttoned collar and longish hair. But Gotch, a Democrat, was still outside the realm of conservative power held by Mayor Pete Wilson. And the newcomer was soon cast in the role of a liberal upstart, locking horns with the mayor over such issues as the development of Fairbanks Country Club Ranch and North City West--both growth-inducing nightmares by environmentalists’ standards.

Yet public office gave Gotch the chance to use even a bigger broom on his district, which includes Pacific Beach and portions of Clairemont as well.

‘Proudest Achievement’

In what Gotch calls his “proudest achievement,” he made sure that private property owners could no longer make exclusive use of the pleasant, hidden inlet known as Sail Bay. He made sure landowners ringing the bay removed private boat docks so the beach could be widened for public use.

At Crystal Pier, located at the foot of Garnet Avenue, Gotch also pushed a plan to replace oceanfront parking lots with parks--not an entirely popular decision in parking-space starved beach areas.

Three blocks, or half of the project, is now complete, drawing hand-holding couples and joggers where neighborhood toughs once “put speakers on the top of the van . . . dealt drugs, raped young girls and destroyed public property,” said Gotch.

Then there was Belmont Park, the 18-acre former amusement park that lies west of Mission Boulevard, between Ventura and San Fernando places. Opened in 1925, the park, which includes the landmark Earthquake roller coaster, was acquired by the city, then eventually closed to the public and allowed to lapse into disrepair.

Thus it became an economic albatross for the city and, according to Gotch, a magnet for transients, bikers, drug dealers and other undesireables. Hoping to convert the eyesore into a community asset, city administrators suggested during Gotch’s first term that the city lease a portion of the park for private development.

The city received four bids, including plans for an updated amusement park with a 30-foot smoking volcano, a hotel and time-share condominiums. The fourth, submitted by architect Paul Thoryk and developer Graham MacHutchin, proposed building 140,000 square feet of commercial space around an indoor swimming pool called the Plunge.

Proposals Rejected

Gotch rejected all plans. “No matter how well-intentioned when conceived, the combined commercial-parkland concept must be stopped now,” he wrote in an August, 1981, memo, adding that both the coaster and the Plunge had to be preserved.

“First and foremost, Mission Beach Park is public parkland, a rare oceanfront jewel with historical significance. Parkland is a unique and precious resource which I believe the City is obligated to preserve for present and future generations.

“Many cities have cluttered their coastline with buildings that wall off the public, to the benefit of a few. San Diego must have the foresight to preserve and enhance its resources for the enjoyment of thousands.”

Those words would come back to haunt him.

At the time, it allowed Gotch to rally council opposition to any development, although it was recognized that the city had to do something there. Gotch’s position helped solidify his standing, and he won reelection in 1983 with 91% of the vote from his district and 87% city-wide. It was the highest return ever garnered by a local politician.

Hedgecock Soul Mate

The 1983 election also marked a changed in Gotch. His hair was more closely cropped and he wore suits and ties. And with the election of environmentalist soul mate Mayor Roger Hedgecock a few months earlier, Gotch now had access to what he calls the “inner sanctum” of the mayor’s suite.

In practical terms, Hedgecock added only one more environmentalist vote on the council. But the fiery mayor, with his apocalyptic warnings of “Los Angelization,” became the unquestioned slow-growth spokesman in the city.

Hedgecock was the first choice of slow-growth advocates when they mounted their 1985 Proposition A campaign, which was designed to head off premature development in the city’s urban reserve. However, Hedgecock became tainted by a growing financial scandal over his 1983 campaign, and slow growthers had to find another point man.

They naturally turned to Gotch. Yet Proposition A proponents found him to be much different than the daredevil Hedgecock. According to one insider in the initiative campaign, Gotch was reluctant.

“He kept saying this was a big career risk to him, this was a big political risk,” said the insider, who requested anonymity. Proposition A proponents had to keep after him for his support, the source said, “And the message that kept going back to him was ‘Yeah, if you help us win, it’s going to be a political coup.’ ”

Gotch had to be prodded into signing a fund-raising appeal for the Proposition A campaign, the insider said.

Mayoral Bid Rejected

But with Proposition A’s convincing victory, Gotch was in a strong position to succeed Hedgecock, say some. Gotch toyed with the prospect, then announced he wasn’t running. “It is not a job that I needed,” he explained in a recent interview. “My ego didn’t demand it.”

And there was another reason--the balance in Gotch’s personal life was slightly akimbo. His 1982 marriage to Kim, a thoughtful woman nine years his junior, was feeling the effects of life in the public eye.

“I’m a very independent individual and the idea of being an appendage was always distasteful to me,” said Kim, 30, an interior designer working in Sorrento Valley. “I never wanted to be swallowed up by it (public life) and I saw a lot of women that were being swallowed up by it.”

There were the nights that job pressure gave Gotch migraines and insomnia, Kim said. Sometimes he would brood. “It would be difficult to talk to him. He would really just want to sit by himself and think and sort it all out,” she said.

When the couple would circulate to parties and get-togethers, there was always a nagging question. “Kim and I would have some very lengthy conversations about, ‘Were we invited to an event because our company is enjoyed or were we invited because I’m an influential member of the City Council?’ ” Gotch said.

And Gotch became more vocal with friends and colleagues about his desire to make money. He often talked to then-Councilman Uvaldo Martinez about the prospects of opening a consulting firm, said a former colleague who asked not to be named.

Talk of the Gravy Train

“Every so often we (the council) would vote on a $100,000 project to design a park in somebody’s district, and they would say, ‘Oh my God, this guy is making more in one project than I’m getting in one year,’ ” said the former colleague. “They were always talking about getting on the gravy train.”

All of this was compounded by Gotch’s personal and political requirement to keep at least one toe in Mission Beach. Even after he and Kim purchased a home in Tierrasanta in 1983, the councilman insisted on staying alone in his Ostend Court home during the week.

“He was gone so many nights of the week that I became a very, very self-sufficient, functioning individual,” said Kim.

The dual existence prompted Gotch to strike an inside deal with council members that would have allowed him to finally leave the beach. He signed off on a redistricting plan that would put portions of Mission Hills in his district, thus giving him a neighborhood in which he could relocate.

But the plan died more than a year ago, a victim of intra-council political fighting.

Rebellion in Neighborhood

Meanwhile, there was a rebellion brewing in Gotch’s neighborhood.

In February, 1984, Gotch and the council voted to enter into exclusive negotiations with Thoryk and MacHutchin for a development around the Plunge.

Gotch explained recently that he had a change of heart because the circumstances at Belmont Park had changed. Steps were taken to preserve the coaster and the southern half of the park was landscaped. A bold stroke was needed to clean up the unsavory activities around the Plunge, he said.

More importantly, he said, the developers scaled down their proposal from 140,000 to 70,000 square feet of restaurants and shops. While the proposal would eventually mean tearing down the Plunge building, it would still preserve the pool.

Overshadowed by Gotch’s Proposition A fight, the Mission Beach controversy drew little more than perfunctory attention from outsiders, although it marked a deep schism between Gotch and his community.

Leading the charge against development were Ray and Dan Hamel, owners of a sportswear shop directly across from the Plunge on Ventura Place.

The Hamels had been two of Gotch’s more loyal political allies in Mission Beach. After Gotch worked round the clock with them to fill sandbags during the winter storms of 1983, they hung a banner from their store publicly thanking him. And when Gotch suggested a police bicycle patrol along the beach, the Hamels were the ones to donate the vehicles.

Alliance Shattered

Yet that friendship turned ugly on the issue of the Plunge. Gotch said that when he appeared on a radio talk show last summer, someone called in and accused him of taking a bribe. The brothers began peddling T-shirts with the international “no” insignia through Gotch’s name.

Throughout the controversy, Gotch has tried to minimize the opposition to his stand. They were a vocal minority, he would say, led primarily by nearby merchants who would lose business to the newer, up-scale restaurants and shops.

The sentiment, however, ran deeper. “One of the miscalculations that Mike has had on this project is that he has misread the depth of the anti-Belmont Park group,” said Al Brown, former Mission Beach Town Council president.

When denunciations of Gotch became heated and personal during Town Council meetings, the councilman stopped sending his staff. That angered the community even more.

The anger spilled out for the whole city to see last June, barely a month after Gotch had separated from his wife.

During a public hearing at City Hall over whether to approve a contract for a $14.4- million development by the Thoryk-MacHutchin partnership, a surly crowd of constituents packed council chambers and opponents read from his 1981 memo and demanded an answer as to why he had stopped talking to them.

Boos From Crowd

The crowd offered boos and catcalls when Gotch made the motion to award a contract. The community anger from that meeting helped launch and fuel an initiative drive that gathered 80,000 signatures against the proposed Plunge development. The signature drive was one of the largest in recent history, and even topped the Proposition A effort by 10,000 names, according to the city clerk’s office.

The developments appeared to upset the balance of Gotch’s long-held reputation. Pro-park, liberal populist Gotch was now advocating a development on the beach against the public’s will.

“He reached his peak with the passage of Prop. A, only to come crashing down on this Belmont issue,” said David Lewis, a Republican political consultant. “What he has let go forward with Belmont Park is not in keeping with what the public perceives of Mike Gotch.”

Known for his patience and openness, Gotch became curt and distant, a change he blames on the pressures from his personal life.

“When your marriage starts disintegrating, it’s nothing you’re proud of,” he said. “You begin to have questions about your own ability as a human being to communicate. You have questions of your own self.

“It’s a horrible experience to go through and I did my best to separate it and to the extent that it sometimes intruded on City Hall, you know, it’s a normal thing.”

Criticized Signature Drive

Gotch lashed back at proponents of the initiative for using a consulting firm that paid people for each signature they gathered. Yet it was the same firm, charging about the same price, that the Proposition A proponents had used almost two years earlier.

Gotch countered criticism of his aloofness to the community by blaming council rules.

“Recognize--and I say this to those of you who really want to hear--recognize that there are strict city attorney requirements against engaging or being drawn in discussions of controversial land-use projects outside of a public hearing in a community forum,” Gotch told the crowd in June. “The facts are that if I had come to those community meetings and debated with you the merits and the demerits of this particular or any other project, then I wouldn’t be sitting here today as a representative, representing you.”

However, a check of Gotch’s appointment calendar and interviews show that he had been socializing--and talking business--with the developers.

The calendar shows that Gotch was scheduled to go to Thoryk’s bachelor party on Aug. 17, 1985, and that Gotch and his wife had dinner at the MacHutchins’ home on Feb. 13 and April 3, 1986. The MacHutchins and the Gotches are good friends, and Nancy MacHutchin served as Gotch’s political fund-raiser during his reelection campaign.

After the vote, Gotch had a dinner with Nancy MacHutchin on Aug. 11, and an informal dinner “by the pool” at the MacHutchin household on Aug. 28.

Dinners Defended

During a recent interview, Gotch bridled at questions about the dinners.

“You can create whatever innuendo you’re comfortable with ethically creating, but the fact of the matter is Nancy MacHutchin was an employee of a firm that I hired,” he said.

Gotch conceded that dinner chatter sometimes included the project. “I did my best to insure it was not the topic of conversation but Graham has lived and breathed this project and has his entire life savings into it so it’s natural that he would raise it,” he said.

Last month--the same month that Kim filed for divorce--there was yet another tense public hearing. This time, the council was deciding what to do with the initiative, which had qualified for the November ballot.

Because of flawed language in the measure, a November vote would be too late to halt the project, since the developers would pull their building permit and begin demolition months before. Mayor Maureen O’Connor, saying the people should have the right to vote, proposed holding the election via a quickie mail ballot instead.

Gotch, however, gathered the council votes necessary to put the measure on the November ballot--thus insuring the Plunge development would go through. In later interviews, the one-time council outsider lashed back at O’Connor by saying she had “failed” the first litmus test of politics--”loyalty.”

Braced for Backlash

Friends of the councilman say that, while he was braced for a political backlash from Mission Beach, he wasn’t prepared for how strong it has been. Gotch’s defenders say the community should look more kindly on a man who has been on its side for so long.

“The fact is that if you take a scoreboard, it’s 999-1,” said Bob Glaser, a political consultant who worked for Gotch and the Proposition A campaign. “Okay, maybe some people see that he’s been on the wrong side of this issue, but he’s been on the right side of the other issues.”

Others say, however, the Plunge issue has been enough to draw blood from the champ. Political experts add that the summertime activity of construction crews at the Plunge, where many parking spaces will be overtaken by heavy equipment, will serve as a constant reminder for an angry community getting ready for an election.

“If a year ago you told me that I would have considered running against Councilman Gotch this time, I would have said you’re crazy,” said council hopeful Bob Ottilie, a Republican attorney.

“It is not because those issues were not there a year ago--because they were--but because Councilman Gotch had a tremendous amount of credibility with the majority of his constituents. . . . They were not listening or looking.”

Credibility ‘Harmed’

However, with the uproar over Belmont Park, the credibility has been “harmed” and a “lot of people are willing to look around and really evaluate what he has done in office,” Ottilie said.

Gotch downplays such talk. He says openly that he would like to run for state Assembly, but there is no opening right now. Asked if it would be a safe assumption that he was going to run for reelection to the council, he replied with a smile: “That’s a proper assumption. And you’re going to assume that I’m reelected.”

He also says that he’s survived the last year of political and personal upheaval, which has disturbed the order of his world. Although he is getting divorced, he remains a good friend of his former wife. And Gotch is also quietly meeting with estranged community leaders to patch up differences.

The councilman now says he’s got a second political wind, ready to tackle the challenges of 6th District business. The enthusiasm is tempered a bit by a new realization.

“I would have hoped the people would have been big enough to separate one issue from all the previous accomplishments,” he said. “But it was a lesson and the lesson is: What have you done for me today?

“I take this job very seriously, much to the detriment of my personal life, and what is important is being able to strike a reasonable balance in being dedicated to your professional life and having time for your family and simply be a human being,” Gotch said.

“I have not struck that balance very successfully.”