O’Connor Off and Running Again for U.S.S.R. Arts Trip

Mayor Maureen O’Connor’s twice-delayed effort to tour the Soviet Union in search of artists for her proposed festival of Soviet arts has been tentatively scheduled for the last week in June and the first week in July, mayoral spokesman Paul Downey said Monday.

Downey also said that the monthlong festival will not be staged until the spring of 1990 because of delays in planning the event with Soviet officials. It will cost an estimated $3 million to $4 million--which O’Connor hopes to fund out of the city’s hotel room tax and corporate donations.

The projected timing of the trip may cause the mayor problems because it currently conflicts with two of the San Diego City Council’s most important summer projects: Budget deliberations and discussion of a new growth management plan.

“We’ll have to finish budget a week early, and we won’t be able to start discussion of growth management until at least the second week of July,” Downey said.

Council deliberations on the fiscal 1989 budget, scheduled to begin during the first week of May, must be completed by June 30.

The growth management plan, which could guide the city’s expansion until as late as 2010, must be in the hands of the county Registrar of Voters by Aug. 12 to qualify for the November ballot, said Jack Fishkin, assistant city clerk. But it will have to be completed by about Aug. 1 to give the City Attorney’s office time to draft the language of the ballot initiative, before it is finally approved by the council, he said.

That scheduling gives O’Connor and her unnamed delegation of San Diego arts leaders a narrow window of time through which they can peer at Soviet artists in Moscow, Leningrad, Odessa and Tbilisi. The four cities are the expected stops on the delegation’s two-week tour of the Soviet Union, Downey said.

City Council member Ron Roberts, chairman of the Citizens Advisory Committee on Growth and Development that is drafting the growth management plan, has tentatively scheduled council hearings on the issue for June 28 and July 5, 12, and 18. That schedule would put O’Connor out of town for at least two of the hearings.

“The council could do it without her,” Roberts said. “I have trouble believing that given her interest in this thing, that that would happen.”

Assuming an Aug. 1 date for a council decision on the matter, four hearings could be scheduled in the weeks after O’Connor returns, Roberts said.

“I haven’t talked with the mayor directly. I guess my hope is that she will be here to participate to the fullest extent possible,” Roberts said.

Informed of the proposed dates for O’Connor’s trip, council member Bob Filner said that “The Year of the Arts is a great thing, but I think we all ought to be involved. I wish there was more communication with the council. The council is going to have to approve the money, I take it.”

And the prospect of completing the budget early caused at least one council aide to scoff: “Budget always takes longer than you think it does. It’s always pushed back.”

O’Connor made the Soviet arts festival the centerpiece of her Jan. 11 State of the City address, when she proclaimed 1988 “the year of the arts.”

Her plan, she said, is to bring top Soviet artists, dancers, musicians and actors to San Diego for a festival that would attract tourists from around the country and “rival the music festivals of Edinburgh and Salzburg, the painting exhibits of the New York Metropolitan and the Getty Museum in Malibu and the dance and folk concerts of the most classical regions of Europe.”

Efforts to arrange a trip to the Soviet Union in March and April fell through. Downey said Monday that Soviet officials told him that a June-July trip would be more productive than an August visit because many Soviet leaders will be on vacation during that month.

Downey said that O’Connor will discuss the festival privately with Gennady Gerasimov, spokesman for Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, when Gerasimov addresses an April 19 luncheon being hosted in La Jolla by O’Connor and Citizen Diplomacy, a nonprofit organization that promotes cultural exchanges.