Lesson of ‘80s: False Springs Mean Lingering Winter of Civic Discontent

Count me as a child of the decade. I arrived in San Diego as a practitioner in the first week of 1980.

I remember San Diego in those first years as a more contented but less confident place. Maybe it was exhaustion from the 1970s.

If you thought the ‘80s were rocky, you should check the headlines on the ‘70s: C. Arnolt Smith, the Yellow Cab scandal, the Mira Mesa land grab, the PSA crash, school integration, racism and drug use in the Navy, the Blue Bird Motel shooting (white cop/black suspect) and more.

It’s hard to imagine now but the civic orthodoxy of the early 1980s decreed that all the great problems had been solved. It was a false spring but very comfy.

Runaway growth? An arrogant police chief? Police brutality? Buying of influence in high places? A sluggish bureaucracy? A polluted bay?

The answer was always the same: We used to have that problem but it’s been solved. By mid-decade, that kind of smugness had been tried and found wanting.

I remember a press conference in Mayor Wilson’s office. He was campaigning in Orange County so he answered questions by speaker phone; the wonder was that nobody thought it was strange.

You could argue that the 1980s didn’t really begin until Jan. 2, 1983, that Sunday afternoon when Wilson and his top staff boarded a plane for Washington after 11 years in power. Suddenly the lid was off.

What followed was the O’Connor-Hedgecock war, the trials, the paralysis, and the greed and narrowness that have smothered much of local political life. Through it all, the public seemed startled to discover that all was not well in America’s Finest.

I suppose there is an ant-and-the-grasshopper moral here for the 1990s. Ignore the oncoming winter and you pay dearly.

I prefer something closer to home: Beware of the conventional wisdom. It’s wrong as often as it’s right.

Fair-Weather Environmentalist?

The rap against Bob Glaser by his detractors is that he’s an enviro-hustler: Sometimes he’s a public-spirited environmental activist (complete with media access and credibility) and sometimes he’s a consultant interested in making a buck.

Glaser says he’s just trying to make an honest living. At the very least, the flap points to a gray area where private and public motives mingle.

Exhibit A is Glaser’s $250,000 offer to a Los Angeles firm to help win San Diego City Council approval to build a hotel near Mission Bay. A smaller example comes from the recent 1st District council race.

Jack Orr, a political consultant to challenger Bob Trettin, says Glaser asked him for permission to place the order for Trettin’s campaign signs so that he could get a commission from the sign-maker.

Orr says the unspoken quid-pro-quo was: let me make the commission and I won’t join other environmentalists in endorsing Abbe Wolfsheimer. He says Trettin wanted desperately to have Glaser not endorse Wolfsheimer, so he let him place the sign order.

Orr estimates Glaser’s commission at $500 to $600 for less than a day’s work.

Glaser remembers it differently. He says Trettin approached him about the sign order and that he told Trettin he planned to endorse Wolfsheimer. He won’t say how much commission he got.

Trettin says he can’t remember who approached whom. He says he never thought giving the sign order to Glaser would influence his endorsement.

But Trettin adds that he was shocked when Glaser, an old pal from high school, not only endorsed Wolfsheimer but signed a letter branding Trettin as nothing but a tool of the building industry.

Glaser says Orr is just lashing out because Trettin lost. Orr says Glaser is a crumb.

New Year’s Eve May Be a Gas

If New Year’s Eve in Encinitas was more festive than usual, maybe there’s a reason.

Sheriff’s deputies are investigating the recent theft of two large cylinders of nitrous oxide from a dentist’s office. That’s the painkiller known as laughing gas.

It can cause the giggles, but it can also leave you with a monster headache. And a weird craving to be an orthodontist.