Debate Brews Over Funding of Motion Picture Bureau

Mayor Maureen O’Connor and San Diego City Council member Ron Roberts are questioning whether the Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce is misspending city funds on its Motion Picture and Television Bureau, as part of what may be a bid to remove the prestigious bureau from chamber control.

The conflict pits two of the city’s most powerful institutions, the mayor’s office and the chamber, against each other in a debate over which should control an agency considered one of the nation’s best at luring film, television and advertising productions.

The motion picture bureau is housed in the chamber but financed entirely by the city’s hotel room tax.

For fiscal year 1989, the city has budgeted $345,000 for the bureau, whose leaders say they brought more than $7.4 million in business to San Diego County during fiscal 1987.

Aides to Roberts and O’Connor are questioning the need to pay the chamber $21,000 a year in rent for office space--a rate they say is twice the amount charged to other organizations renting space in the chamber building--and $24,000 for “administrative services.”

Moreover, they want to know why the bureau’s director, Wally Schlotter, is paid 20 cents in city funds for every mile he travels in a car the city leases for him at $276.98 a month. The city also pays for repairs and maintenance to Schlotter’s Volvo and for his parking, perquisites not given some other chamber employees of equal rank, the aides claim.

“I think the chamber might be using this as a profit center,” said Roberts’ chief of staff, Paul Grasso. “I think (the chamber) might be using it to fund other chamber activities.”

Doug Byrns, O’Connor’s assistant chief of staff, said he wants the city auditor to examine some of the motion picture bureau’s expenditures.

Defenders of the existing arrangement note that a May 31 report from the city manager’s office shows that the city would save only $133 a month, and possibly less, by moving the motion picture bureau to city offices.

The city bureaucracy also would be unable to respond as quickly to the needs of film and commercial makers, weakening an operation that was voted the second-best of its kind in a 1986 poll of the nation’s 235 motion picture bureaus, the bureau’s defenders said.

“They have an extremely efficient operation there,” said Councilman Ed Struiksma, an appointee to the California Film Commission. “The city of San Diego and how we have chosen to structure our bureau here is the model that all other cities are trying to emulate.”

Struiksma said California must battle other locales to keep the film industry here and that quibbling over small expenditures is “myopic.”

Chamber Executive Director Lee Grissom called the controversy the work of “a couple of political hit men who have decided on their own that they want to remove the motion picture bureau from the chamber, and they’re trying to create a nest of problems.”

The conflict’s political overtones have created the perception among some City Hall insiders that O’Connor is using the questions over the motion picture bureau to punish Grissom for opposing her on issues such as the city’s slow-growth Interim Development Ordinance.

However, both the mayor’s office and Grissom discount that theory. Grissom said that, if interest in the bureau is political, it is being initiated by Grasso, who worked for the chamber briefly before being hired by Roberts, a close ally of O’Connor.

Overall Mayoral Strategy?

But Grissom did question whether O’Connor’s interest in the motion picture bureau is part of an overall mayoral strategy to consolidate power within her office.

In recent weeks, the mayor, with little opposition from the council, has moved the Downtown Marketing Consortium from the chamber into her office--a move the chamber did not publicly oppose. She also has moved the Binational Affairs Department, which works with Tijuana officials, from the city manager’s office to hers.

Are the moves “a real conviction that they can do it better than it’s currently being done and therefore benefit San Diego . . . or is it a power grab?” Grissom asked.

But mayoral spokesman Paul Downey said that both moves, like the motion picture bureau transfer, will increase efficiency and reduce overhead.

Grasso agreed that O’Connor and her aides did not initiate the examination of the motion picture bureau.

“People are trying to make this a Grissom-Maureen thing,” he said. “This did not originate in the mayor’s office. I will take a polygraph on that.”

Grasso said the questions arose during the May budget season, when he and two other council aides examined the hotel tax revenues and expenditures and began to question whether the city’s output for the motion picture bureau was worthwhile.

According to Grasso and Byrns, O’Connor’s assistant chief of staff, the chamber receives the prestige generated by the motion picture bureau--the bureau’s letterhead identifies it as a division of the chamber, Grasso said--and hotels and other businesses profit from the money spent by motion picture employees working here. In fiscal 1987, film makers shooting here generated 7,813 hotel room nights and employed 2,600 San Diegans.

Yet the city, not the chamber or the business community, foots the bill, they said.

“Is the city being treated fairly?” asked Councilman Roberts. “Are we getting our money’s worth? And it is our money.”

“I think we’re interested, as anybody would be, in return on our investment,” said Byrns. The mayor, who wants to examine a takeover of the motion picture bureau, is not yet firmly committed to it, he said.

Councilwoman Abbe Wolfsheimer also supports the move because of her belief that a motion picture bureau is legitimately a city operation, said aide Joanne Johnson.

At a May 18 meeting of the council’s Public Services and Safety Committee, Councilman Wes Pratt asked for an analysis of the city’s expenditures on the bureau. The subject is scheduled to be brought up again at a July 6 meeting of the same committee.

The analysis by Deputy City Manager Coleman Conrad concluded that the city would earn no “substantial savings” by moving the bureau from the chamber, where five employees share 588 square feet of office and have access to 9,945 square feet of meeting rooms, copying equipment, reception areas and other common space. The same arrangement would cost the city $1,600 a month for office space alone, Conrad’s report shows.

But Grasso and Byrns believe the common space should not be counted against the city’s rent payment. The city is actually paying for 588 square feet, amounting to about $3 a square foot, they say. Other organizations pay $1.35 to $1.75 a square foot for space in the chamber building, Grasso and Byrns said.

Grissom said the charge for the bureau’s use of the common space is valid and that the administrative services account pays for switchboard operators, clericals and time Grissom spends working for the bureau.

Grissom and Schlotter confirmed that Schlotter receives the 20-cent-a-mile fee for driving the Volvo leased by the city. Schlotter, who has held the position 11 years, said the arrangement is a longstanding one that has never been questioned by the city’s auditor or its Financial Management Department, which reviews his claims for reimbursement.

Grissom said the 20 cents a mile pays for gasoline. “What good would a car be if he didn’t have gas to operate it?” he asked. “Twenty cents per mile--I don’t think that’s out of line at all.”

An examination of Schlotter’s reimbursement claims from November to March shows he filed claims ranging from 310-mile round trips to Los Angeles to 8-mile in-city trips. All were paid at 20 cents a mile. The total of the reimbursements to him was not available this week.