Day-to-Day Issues to Test Mettle of Council Freshmen

Councilman Mike Gotch, a battle-scarred veteran of eight years at San Diego City Hall, has these words of warning for the four new council members who will come bouncing enthusiastically into office next month:

You’re not as powerful as you think.

Gotch’s beef is with the 1931 City Charter, which invests much of the power of daily municipal government--sweeping the streets, writing reports--in the city manager’s office.

“The demand placed upon a council member by the public is exceptionally high,” Gotch said. “They (the public) want their potholes fixed and they want it fixed tomorrow.

‘Thwarts Responsiveness’

“On the other hand, the system where the power and the flow of information is vested in the manager really thwarts the responsiveness of the council member to the affected interest group.”

Whether to change that balance of power, Gotch said, will be one of the first issues that will face the council’s Freshman Class of 1987--Ron Roberts, Wes Pratt, Bruce Henderson and Bob Filner. Indeed, the mayor’s office says a special task force to review and rework the charter will be convened by early next year.

Yet, determining the essence of city government won’t be all. The rookies will be called on in their first year or two to make decisions on a handful of thorny, sometimes mundane, issues that will have long-lasting impact on San Diego, said Gotch and several others intimately familiar with the workings of city government.

“What’s sexy about trash? What’s sexy about courts and jails? But these are the kind of issues that these people will have to deal with and it’s not easy and it’s not fun, but it will require a sense of dedication that is very, very high,” said Lee Grissom, president of the Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce.

Opinion From Judge

Having four new faces on the council, however, will be a detriment in facing the issues, said Municipal Judge Dick Murphy, who served on the council from 1980 to 1985.

“It’ll hurt because of two reasons,” Murphy said. “One, the council members will need a year to get up to speed in understanding the complexities of the problems. And, secondly, new council members tend to be preoccupied with problems in their districts even if they get up to speed.”

One of the immediate challenges Grissom said he anticipates is just how the rookies will conduct themselves and what kind of working relationship they will forge with their senior counterparts on the council--a concern also shared by Kim Kilkenny, lobbyist for the Construction Industry Federation.

“I hope that the divisiveness and the political cannibalism that we’ve had on some issues--where they chew on each other all the time--can be changed and we focus less on those things that make us different and on the many things that we hold in common,” said Grissom. “I hope that a real team can be built for the good of the city by the nine members of the council.”

Caution Against Infighting

Kilkenny, who monitors the council closely for his developer group, added: “Avoid bickering and infighting. Avoid battles over silly issues . . . . “

“I don’t know that the public has a whole lot of confidence in the political process,” said Kilkenny, explaining why he gave the advice. “The council could make the best decisions in the world and have the best professional staff available, and unless the public has confidence in those decisions, I think there is going to be political turmoil.”

Turmoil of another kind will greet the rookies as soon as they take the oath: What to do about San Diego’s vigorous growth?

They will be facing a rash of growth proposals. They will hear updates of the city’s recent Interim Development Ordinance (IDO), and also will have to give direction to a task force already at work studying how to update the city’s 1979 Growth Management Plan. Meanwhile, slow-growth groups are circulating two petitions for proposed ballot measures that would be placed before voters next year.

“The window of opportunity to squarely face the growth issue is here,” declared Murphy. “The IDO, the political climate, gives elected officials the courage to take on such a sensitive issue.

“If this opportunity passes, there may not be another opportunity to come along for a decade.”

Murphy suggested that the new council members will have to grapple with policy implications a bit different than what kind of external controls to slap on home building. He said it is time for the council to take a look at whether its own actions are contributing to the growth it is trying to control.

“You can’t limit growth unless you limit economic development,” Murphy said. “People come here for jobs.

“As long as the council continues to hype economic development and tourism, then it’s really a facade to pretend that we’re trying to limit population growth,” he said. “All that will end up happening is people will relocate to Chula Vista, El Cajon, Escondido and other communities to take jobs in San Diego. That will even aggravate the traffic-related problems.”

New council members will also face how growth has put the pinch on the inner-city neighborhoods, where for years developers have been encouraged to build so-called infill projects to revitalize the older neighborhoods, Kilkenny said.

In trying to induce builders to the older neighborhoods, city government decided not to impose development fees on each house, condo or town home under construction in the inner city. Such fees, however, were imposed in the outlying, more suburban communities of San Diego, where the money paid for parks, fire stations, sewer lines and roads.

The result of that policy has left older neighborhoods about $800 million short for much-needed public facilities, especially parks, said Kilkenny. How to raise that money will be a politically sensitive challenge for the rookies, he said.

Residents Would Pay

“Existing residents would have to pay for part of it . . . the major part of it,” Kilkenny said.

Gotch, Grissom, Murphy and Kilkenny all identified other growth-related issues that will face the council members. Those issues include traffic congestion, overcrowded jails, protection of hillsides, and the city’s diminishing garbage dumps.

Then there is the headache of dealing with the city’s aging, breaking and inadequate sewage system.

The biggest question, they said, is to find a way to finance the $1.5-billion secondary sewage treatment plant, the city’s largest single public works project. Construction of the plant was mandated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to comply with the federal Clean Water Act.

Murphy called dealing with the sewage woes the “art of masochism.”

“I think that building a secondary sewage system is going to be an extraordinarily difficult thing to do because of the lack of money and the difficulty in finding the sites,” he said.

“The City Council can’t fool around for another two years, wringing its hands, or we will face thousands of dollars in fines,” he said.

Both Murphy and Grissom urged the council to pitch in with the problem of overcrowded jails, although the court system is funded and run by county government.

Grissom said new council members will also face the nettlesome question of what to do with Lindbergh Field.

“In the next four years, this City Council will have a role to play in defining what the future solution is to San Diego’s airport needs,” said Grissom. “I think the signs of its (Lindbergh Field’s) obsolescence will be very crystal clear four years from now. We will have had the Super Bowl, we will be having the America’s Cup trials and defense, and we will have had the 12-meter championships in March, 1990.

“We will probably have been cursing ourselves for not doing something a lot sooner on the Lindbergh issue,” said Grissom.

Tackling an issue like Lindbergh or the jails may require council members to change their San Diego-only focus and look at the larger region of San Diego County, said Grissom.

Whatever the tack, Gotch said the new council members must begin listening more to community groups before making decisions.

Initiatives Cited

Citing the number of initiatives on the ballot, Gotch said that the “electorate has shown quite clearly that it wants to participate directly. It may not be efficient, but it is surely democratic, and this council will have to painstakingly see that community groups participate in community issues.”

He suggested the council should hold night meetings in different parts of the city.

Currently, the council holds four night meetings a year, and each one has only one agenda item of particular interest to the community where the meeting is held. All that does is “benefit the council member from that district, so in fact what you have is a traveling road show,” said Gotch.

“I believe the public ought to witness the day-to-day operations of the city and tedious as it may be, then, if we are going to have community meetings, the meeting ought to run the breadth of the council docket,” he said.

Gotch said he has high hopes for the Freshman Class of 1987.

“I believe that this crop of council members is going to be much more organized, much more politically astute and have much more of a sense of community roots than any other group that has come in during my eight years, and I’ve served with 15 council members and mayors,” he said.