Mayor’s Motives Spawn Frenzied Debate

Stunned by Mayor Maureen O’Connor’s announcement that she will not seek reelection in 1992, local civic leaders spent much of Tuesday speculating on the motives for her surprising decision even as they began assessing how it dramatically alters the city’s political horizon.

It ranks as one of the central ironies of O’Connor’s 3 1/2-year-old mayoralty that her planned early retirement--announced during Monday’s annual State of the City address--has spawned more frenzied debate and wide-ranging interpretations than perhaps anything else that she has done since becoming the city’s first woman mayor in July, 1986.

In an interview Tuesday, the 43-year-old O’Connor reaffirmed that she plans to step down in order to be better-positioned to campaign for the sweeping political and City Hall ethical reforms that she proposed in her Monday speech--changes that, among other things, would move the city closer to a strong-mayor form of government by giving the mayor veto power over City Council actions.

“I want the changes I’m proposing to be the issue--not my motives,” O’Connor said. “Since I’m not going to be the long-range beneficiary of these changes, critics won’t be able to say that I’m power hungry or just out to strengthen myself.”

Some San Diego leaders wondered aloud Tuesday, however, whether additional factors influenced her decision. A few O’Connor allies suggested that her growing disdain with an increasingly fractious council and personal distractions--notably, the fact that her father recently suffered a serious stroke and her husband’s long-time leukemia--may have played a role in her decision.

Critics, meanwhile, speculated that O’Connor was simply becoming disenchanted--or simply bored--with a job in which she has been consistently criticized for lacking a long-range vision for the city and for inattention to many of the major problems facing the city, as well as for other perceived shortcomings. In a recent report card in San Diego Political Watch, a monthly newsletter, O’Connor was ranked last overall among the council members. A recent San Diego Union review also showed that O’Connor had the worst attendance record on the council last year--repeating a pattern seen late in her tenure as a councilwoman in the 1970s.

O’Connor’s declaration of non-candidacy also was interpreted by her foes as an effort to position herself above the political fray in anticipation of future council battles.

“She’s trying to stake out the moral high ground,” Councilman Bob Filner, who has clashed often with O’Connor, said Tuesday. “For the next three years, she’ll say, ‘I’m not running again--my motives are pure.’ But any time any of us disagrees with her, she’ll say we’re politically motivated or that we’re just after her job. I see a couple of horrendous years ahead.”

Saying simply, “I’m the only one who really knows,” O’Connor dismisses all those theories as “total non-factors” in her decision, which she insists stems primarily from her strong support for a two-term limit on local elective office. Though her first term was a shortened one--the uncompleted term of former Mayor Roger Hedgecock, who resigned after his 1985 campaign-law conviction--O’Connor said she felt that her push for a two-term limit on council and mayoral service would have been weakened if she herself sought a third term.

“Because of the circumstances, a third term was was a very tempting idea to play around with, but I finally decided it’s better to leave after 6 1/2 years than 10 1/2,” O’Connor said. “One of the things I like least about politics--and something I think has turned off a lot of people--is that so many officeholders try to hang on forever. We need new blood and new ideas in local government. So, I’m going to lead by example.”

Among O’Connor’s confidants, there was greater surprise over the timing of her announcement--which comes 2 1/2 years before the next mayoral primary and with nearly three years remaining in her term--than over its content.

“She’s been hinting for some time that she was leaning this way, so it doesn’t come as a shock,” said land-use attorney Paul Peterson, one of O’Connor’s closest advisers. “She might have preferred to wait longer to make her announcement, but I think the timing was dictated by her desire to campaign for these reforms without having it look like she was trying to feather her own nest.”

Beyond the two-term limits and mayoral veto, O’Connor also proposed other fundamental changes that would reshape, in both form and content, local campaigns and officeholders’ behavior at City Hall.

The mayor’s recommendations--which she hopes to put before voters this spring on a special mail ballot--include expansion of the council from eight to 10 seats, barring council members from voting on projects involving contributors from whom they have received more than $1,000 in the past year, confining political fund-raising to nine months before a campaign and requiring candidates to eliminate campaign debts within 30 days after an election.

Ironically, the last time that a mail ballot was used in a citywide election--the 1981 convention center campaign--O’Connor’s husband, multimillionaire businessman Robert O. Peterson, challenged its constitutionality, suing the city all the way to the state Supreme Court, which upheld the electoral method’s legality. Emphasizing that she prefers mail ballots because they encourage higher turnouts, O’Connor said wryly: “My husband and I disagree on this, but I guess I should thank him for taking care of the legal questions.”

The need for the proposed structural and ethical changes included in her reform package has been accelerated, O’Connor argued, by the advent of district elections in council campaigns. As the only member of the council still elected citywide, the mayor needs additional powers to better balance citywide interests against district concerns, O’Connor contends.

“The problem is, we’ve got a system of government that simply doesn’t work any more in San Diego,” O’Connor said. “Without these changes, the problems of the ‘80s will be unsolved in the ‘90s. I want to give people a new government and process they can be excited about. When only 25% of the registered voters bother to go to the polls, that’s a pretty strong indictment of the system we have now.”

Though O’Connor views her non-candidacy as strengthening her lobbying efforts for the proposed changes, others suggested that it could have the opposite effect by transforming her into a lame duck with ever-diminishing clout both inside and outside City Hall.

“I don’t think anyone has to worry about Maureen becoming a lame duck,” responded San Diego Unified Port Commissioner Lou Wolfsheimer, a longtime O’Connor confidant. “Just because you’re going to be leaving in three years doesn’t mean you can’t be effective, especially if you’re the mayor.”

O’Connor added: “That’s the old thinking of the past. All the way from Eastern Europe to San Diego, reform is in the air, and if we want a new San Diego Spring, we’d better spring right up there with reforms. That thinking is obsolete. Actually, I think I’ll be stronger.”

Moreover, even some O’Connor opponents concur with her analysis that she probably had to remove herself as a future mayoral candidate in order to effectively push for adoption of her proposed reforms.

“It may be that the only way San Diego is ever going to get a strong mayor is to have a lame duck campaigning for it,” said political consultant Tom Shepard, who helped manage the 1983 campaign in which Hedgecock narrowly defeated O’Connor. Indeed, when then-Mayor Pete Wilson sought to strengthen the mayor’s office in the 1970s, his plan was soundly rejected.

While O’Connor’s announcement may be tantamount to the opening bell in the 1992 mayoral campaign, most of the potential candidates whose names are included in the early line on the race agree that it is premature to even begin most behind-the-scenes politicking. In addition, most confront more immediate concerns.

Three possible mayoral contenders--Councilmen Ron Roberts, Bruce Henderson and Filner--face 1991 reelection campaigns that will mark their first taste of district-only races.

Similarly, former San Diego City Councilman Mike Gotch must first try to win this spring’s special 78th Assembly District race before possibly turning his attention to an office that he has flirted with in the past. And county Supervisor Susan Golding, who carefully weighed the possibility of challenging O’Connor in 1988 before opting to seek reelection to her own seat, realizes that her own political future could be affected by the outcome in the spring trial of her husband, businessman Richard T. Silberman, on federal money-laundering changes.

“If you’re thinking of running in 1992, probably the best thing you could do right now is to concentrate on doing a good job at what you’re already doing,” political consultant Jim Johnston said. “It’s a little early to be collecting checks.”

Perhaps more to the point, as O’Connor herself noted, if her campaign and ethics reform package wins public approval, the size of those checks and the manner in which they are collected could change the dynamics of the 1992 race.

“It could be a new game with new rules the next time around,” O’Connor said.