Mayor Off on Timing, Priorities

If timing is everything, then the Soviet arts festival that Mayor Maureen O’Connor has proposed for San Diego is in trouble.

A cultural exchange with the Soviet Union has much appeal in the abstract, and the importance of the arts’ contribution to San Diego is undisputed. But the timing and the apparent priority given to the festival by the mayor leave much to be desired.

The mayor proposed the festival during her State of the City address in January. Her emphasis on the arts and her intent to pay for part of the festival with tax dollars seemed curious given other pressing problems, which she readily acknowledged.

Any question about her priorities was answered last week, however, when the mayor announced that her trip to the Soviet Union in search of artists for the festival would be carved out of time originally scheduled for budget deliberations and discussion of the new growth management plan.

To finish a budget on time is virtually unheard of anymore in most levels of government--last year, the City Council was almost four weeks late. Shaving a week off the process seems doubtful without giving important decisions short shrift.

Overshadowing the importance of a single year’s budget, however, is the growth management plan, which could affect development in the city for more than 20 years. No issue in San Diego--certainly not an arts festival--holds more weight in the public mind than growth and its attendant problems.

A petition drive to get a strict growth-limit measure on the November ballot is evidence of that. The measure is fueled by citizen dissatisfaction with the council’s actions on growth, and it’s hard to believe that O’Connor’s absence at such a critical time will do much to change their thinking.

The mayor displayed considerable skill last summer in putting together compromises for an interim growth plan, though the plan was later weakened while she was on a trip to Europe, which angered many community activists.

Her leadership will be needed again this year. Even if her Soviet trip schedule allows enough time for hearings on the growth plan, the council and the residents of the city have a right to expect that the mayor will--in the words of Councilman Ron Roberts--”participate to the fullest extent possible.” That seems unrealistic if the plan needs to be finished by Aug. 1 to appear on the November ballot and if the mayor devotes the last week of June and the first week of July to a wholly unrelated matter.

We also question using the proposed increase in the hotel room tax to fund part of the festival. The increased revenue would be better spent on repairs and maintenance of existing tourist attractions such as Balboa and Mission Bay parks, which serve millions of people each year, than on a new event as costly as a Soviet arts festival. A reputation for sewage spills at Mission Bay will do more harm to San Diego’s image than any arts festival will be able to offset.

If the mayor’s dream is a Soviet arts festival, perhaps she should use her office to lend visible moral support and appoint a task force from the arts community to perform the time-consuming tasks of scouting out talent and raising funds.

As the mayor said in her State of the City address: “The City of San Diego stands on the threshold of adulthood. . . . Great deeds lie ahead. This is our time. It will not come again.”

We agree. But sometimes practical problems must be solved before the dreams can become reality.