Leading From the Streets : A Year on Job, O’Connor Called a People’s Mayor but Short on Goals

‘I have a different style. I go about quietly. I put things in place and I get things done. I don’t run around making speeches and (then) not produce.’

Mayor Maureen O’Connor

If you want to make San Diego Mayor Maureen O’Connor angry, suggest that after a year in office she’s failed to articulate a clear vision of where the city should be going.

“Go out into the community,” says O’Connor, her voice taking on an edge. “They’ll tell you what’s wrong with the city. They’re tired of the (traffic) congestion. They’re tired of their beaches and bays being polluted. They’re tired of the crowds. And they want something done about it.

“That’s their vision,” she says, then quickly distills it into a pointed message for a development-minded city government: “Maybe the vision around here is having to say ‘no’ to people.”

Tuesday marked O’Connor’s first anniversary as mayor. Yet a year after her inauguration, San Diego’s first woman mayor often finds herself on the defensive about her populist brand of leadership that has some wondering just where she is leading the city, if anyplace at all.

Not Like Pete Wilson

“My feeling is that it is very difficult to see where she is taking us,” said Bill Nelson, chairman of the board at the Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce. “She’s not long on making grand prescriptions and worked-out plans and the State of the Union sort of style that we got used to under (former Mayor) Pete (Wilson).”

O’Connor and her aides counter that they’ve been too busy to make grandiose speeches and point to a long list of accomplishments during her first year.

She and her council colleagues ousted one city manager and hired another; they took tighter control of a troubled Housing Commission by dumping a majority of its board of directors and firing its top administrator.

They witnessed the exit of Councilman Uvaldo Martinez--who was convicted of misusing public funds--and appointed Celia Ballesteros, O’Connor’s choice.

At O’Connor’s urging, the City Council abandoned its decade-long fight with federal regulators and agreed to build a secondary sewage treatment plant, the city’s largest public works project ever, with an estimated price tag of $1.5 billion.

The mayor was on the losing side of a battle earlier this year when she fought to keep the Mission Beach Plunge building from being razed to make way for 70,000 square feet of commercial development--a bitter public battle she waged against one of her council allies, Councilman Mike Gotch.

Yet the pair patched up their differences and last month passed what O’Connor boasts is the crowning achievement of her first year--the Interim Development Ordinance. The controversial measure is aimed at putting a dent in urban growth by slapping a limit on the number of housing units that can be built in the city during the next 18 months.

But that same leadership has caused rumblings of dissatisfaction among many, especially those connected with the city’s traditional power structure.

They complain that there is no common thread, no comprehensive philosophy, running through O’Connor’s approach to the issues. Despite more than a year of promises, O’Connor has yet to even unveil her own legislative plan.

“In terms of issues, I wish that we, the (development) industry, had a better feel for where she was headed so that when we agreed with her, we could help her achieve her goals,” said Kim Kilkenny, lobbyist for the Construction Industry Federation. “And if and when we disagreed, we could have an intelligent public debate.

“The office has yet to articulate its goals and objectives,” he said.

Appointments Unfilled

And, some grumble, while O’Connor has been busy taking out-of-town trips to pump up San Diego’s national image, she has allowed crucial government appointments at home to go unfilled--a circumstance that compounds the feeling of municipal drift.

O’Connor’s office has yet to nominate anyone to fill four spots that have come open since May 1 on the Centre City Development Corp., the quasi-public body that helps to shape redevelopment. The positions are being filled by the former appointees, but the City Council has yet to accept them for another term or replace them with someone else.

And permanent replacements under an O’Connor-led council have yet to be found for the city’s planning director, housing commission director and intergovernmental relations director. Those posts have been filled by acting directors or remained empty for 4 months, 4 months, and nearly 7 months, respectively.

Said a prominent political supporter of O’Connor, who asked not to be identified:

“My major concern is the appearance at least of disorganization, if you want to call it that. Mild chaos down at City Hall. There just doesn’t seem to be any structure, any formalized movement. For now, City Hall appears almost rudderless.”

In part, criticisms of O’Connor’s performance are grounded in what San Diegans have come to expect from their mayors.

Unlike cities in the East, where the mayor’s office is the nexus of power because it proposes a city budget and controls patronage of municipal jobs, San Diego’s City Charter prohibits the mayor or any other council member from having that kind of direct influence on the daily operations of city government.

The mayor and council, then, become the city’s board of directors in setting policy, and the mayor’s most visible task is chairing council meetings and controlling public debate.

But the office attracts attention--especially from the media--and former Mayors Wilson and Roger Hedgecock were able to seize on this to influence public opinion and forge political alliances among their colleagues.

For instance, Hedgecock parlayed the afterglow of his 1983 election into voter approval for the waterfront convention center, and his 1984 State of the City address--warning of imminent “Los Angelization”--is memorable for its apocalyptic image of the effects of unchecked growth.

O’Connor, however, says her style is decidedly different.

Rather than relying on brazen pronouncements and predictions, the mayor is more comfortable at working behind the scenes with an eclectic group of advisers. Her goal is to forge a consensus on city issues while restoring San Diegans’ trust in local officials.

“Talk is cheap,” O’Connor said in a recent interview. “Anybody can come up with a Los Angelization speech and as soon as the lights go off, the cameras go away, the reporters put their little story in the paper and they put it to bed, who goes back and sees what’s done about it?

“That’s not how I operate. I have a different style. I go about quietly. I put things in place and I get things done. I don’t run around making speeches and (then) not produce.”

That’s not to say O’Connor didn’t once have intentions to lay out big plans for the future. In a breakfast meeting with Los Angeles Times staff members last July, she promised to reveal her legislative agenda in August.

Nothing materialized, and in her January State of the City address, she promised publicly to unveil her legislative blueprint. Today, the document is lying on her desk for review, said Ben Dillingham, her chief aide.

Old Business Left Undone

O’Connor laments that she has spent much of her time simply trying to dig out from under the pile of unfinished business left on her desk behind from her predecessor:

Problems with former City Manager Sylvester Murray; the troubled Housing Commission; a bankrupt San Diego Symphony; sewage spills from Pump Station 64 in Sorrento Valley; an outdated sewage system; the festering drug abuse problem; the homeless; the unwillingness of city administrators to scrape for state and federal funds; the crowding of urban growth.

It is through the mayor’s handling of these “nuts and bolts” issues, Dillingham and others argue, that O’Connor’s vision can be glimpsed.

“People in San Diego would like the quality of life five or 10 years from now to be relatively similar to what it is now,” said Richard Dresner, O’Connor’s political consultant based in New York.

“You’re not dealing with someone saying, ‘I want my city to be radically different in 10 years,’ ” he said. “You have a politician--and it is unusual in a way--who is saying, ‘My goal is to keep the quality of life the same as it is.’ ”

Along with this “Back to the Future” approach, O’Connor says, she is also concentrating on erasing the blot on City Hall left by the Hedgecock-Martinez-Housing Commission scandals. Publicly and privately, she emphasizes that many of the ills at City Hall did not happen on “my watch.”

Sometimes, she will even venture a backhanded slap at Hedgecock, who beat O’Connor out for the mayor’s post in 1983 in a particularly acrimonious campaign. Hedgecock resigned in 1985 after he was convicted of illegally laundering money into the campaign from the fraud-ridden J. David & Co. investment firm.

For instance, in talking about her failed attempts to revive the San Diego Symphony, O’Connor said the problem was “something that happened long before I arrived.”

Blame for Symphony Snafu

“In my opinion, they never should have gone ahead with (renovation and purchase of) Symphony Hall, but they were promised an anonymous donor that would donate all the money, called J. David.

“See, there was a time around here that it really was visionary and fantasy land,” she said. “Nobody was saying, ‘Now wait a minute. What’s real? This isn’t real.’ ”

O’Connor also cultivates her image as the millionaire populist.

She has arranged to work on a city garbage truck and has gone on police ride-alongs several times. She was the first San Diego mayor to march in the Gay Pride Parade, a step that even the more brash Hedgecock feared to take.

She has made trips to Washington, D.C., to meet with the secretary of the navy and top-ranking officials of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which has been at odds with the city over its sewer system. She has buttonholed representatives in Washington and Sacramento in her attempt to gain more federal and state funding.

At home, rather than having lunch with downtown business leaders, O’Connor puts on sneakers to take frequent walks around the center city or through city neighborhoods. She is continually stopped by citizens with compliments and complaints, said land-use attorney Louis Wolfsheimer, a man often at odds with the mayor’s political views.

“They feel a camaraderie,” said Wolfsheimer, who took a walk through downtown with O’Connor six months ago. “They feel more a part of government than they ever had before. I think it is unusual for a mayor to have that kind of touch with people.”

In addition, O’Connor has instituted a “Meet the Mayor” program, where citizens can sign up to spend five minutes telling O’Connor about their neighborhood problems and concerns. At the beginning of her term, the parade of citizens consumed most of two Saturdays a month. She has curtailed the Saturday sessions but has opened up her office in the evening hours during the week.

O’Connor is just as eclectic in the way she seeks advice in making her decisions, Dillingham said. Rather than rely heavily on her staff or a brain trust, she will bounce ideas off a “wide circle of contacts,” he said.

“Her walks at noon, her forays into the community, the Meet the Mayor--she has a tremendous memory, a tremendous capacity to absorb impressions so that what I think you end up with in many instances with her is a community consensus point,” Dillingham said.

And community leaders say they feel she’s making a good effort.

“I would say that she is perceived as being conscientious about recognizing and dealing with community issues,” said Dr. Brad Truax, a prominent member of the gay community and chairman of the County Task Force on AIDS.

He said O’Connor’s decision to march in the Gay Pride Parade was “reassuring and encouraging” to members of the gay community. “It does send a message that City Hall knows the community is there and has issues that must be addressed.”

Slow-growth advocate Lynn Benn, who was appointed to the city’s planning commission, gave O’Connor high marks for giving neighborhood planning groups more say in how development will occur.

Planners Get Attention

Symbolic of that change is the fact that recommendations from the planning groups on any given project are now listed on the front page of planning department reports, Benn said.

“She’s lived up to her campaign promises to the communities to open up City Hall, to give communities more of a say in the whole process,” she said.

Up until recently, perhaps the mayor’s closest adviser was Mavourneen, her twin sister. Mavourneen served as one of O’Connor’s chief strategists during the mayoral campaign.

However, the sisters had something of a falling out after Mavourneen joined the mayor’s staff as an unpaid chief of protocol. People close to them say the rift was over a series of things, including O’Connor’s decision to endorse U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston in his reelection bid.

During her mayoral campaign, O’Connor had pledged that she would not make endorsements in partisan races.

O’Connor’s style is frustrating for some of the city’s traditional business leaders, who are looking for predictability from and access to San Diego’s top elected leader, said Nelson from the Chamber of Commerce.

Unlike Wilson and Hedgecock, who had strong chiefs of staff who could speak on behalf of their bosses, O’Connor has no counterpart among her aides, he said. Therefore, Nelson said, it is difficult, without talking directly to O’Connor, to discern her feelings and direction on any particular subject.

And arranging such a meeting is mighty difficult, a fact that leaves a number of business and civic leaders feeling that O’Connor is purposefully aloof.

“It is very difficult for me and others to find out where she is taking us,” Nelson said. “She gets cut off from a fair amount of, if not advice, then warnings from people who make their living here, who hear things and are willing to pass them onto the leader of the city.”

The mayor pooh-poohs such talk.

Available, Mayor Says

“If you want to see me, you can see me,” she said. “Some people feel they are too big to come in on a Meet the Mayor. I have a personal philosophy and that’s everybody’s equal. Just because you have power and money doesn’t mean you are better than somebody who doesn’t.”

O’Connor’s quest for consensus, however, does have its drawbacks and has moved some people to speculate that she lacks the guts to make hard political decisions.

The reason that four CCDC appointments have gone unfilled is that O’Connor has promised to work with three other council members to come up with worthy candidates, Dillingham said. Juggling their schedules to arrange a meeting has been difficult.

“The struggle is with trying to do it by consensus,” he said. “Basically, because there is a need for a meeting, you have to plan two months out. Anything less than two months, you won’t get somebody.”

Yet, O’Connor’s style has been highly successful in winning quick results on the monster growth issue facing city government.

The mayor has called for a reworking of the city’s Growth Management Plan and appointed a citizens’ task force of environmentalists and developers to hammer out the details with a free hand.

As a holding action, she helped push through the council the Interim Development Ordinance (IDO) that, when finally adopted, will limit developers to building 8,000 housing units a year citywide--almost a 50% decrease from the current rate of housing production.

“I was surprised at this whole interim ordinance,” said Gary Rose Weber, a slow-growth advocate who serves on O’Connor’s growth management task force.

‘Something Is Happening’

“First of all, I was surprised that it came up . . . and furthermore I was surprised that there was an implementation ordinance that has teeth in it. The fact of the matter is this thing is focused and something is happening. I’m not sure everyone knows what the ramifications are yet, but something is happening,” he said.

O’Connor said she considers the growth issue the cornerstone of her administration, and she is aiming to complete the revamping of the Growth Management Plan in time to place it on the 1988 ballot for voter ratification.

Coincidentally, the mayor also will be running for reelection on the same ballot.

“Clearly, getting through the council and putting it on the ballot is going to benefit the mayor politically,” conceded political consultant Dresner. A check of O’Connor’s schedule shows the consultant to be one of the more frequent visitors to her office.

“By being on the ballot when she runs, it allows her to run on the same issue and talk about it in her campaign and bring it home,” he said.

Until then, he said, the city can expect O’Connor, who turns 41 Tuesday, to continue grappling with the basic services of city government, as well as the thorny issue of growth.

It is an approach that, despite the cries about lack of vision, has served the mayor well, he said, adding that the latest polls show O’Connor’s approval rating climbing over 70%.

“If she can keep doing what she’s doing, she will not draw a major opponent,” he said.