A Tale of Two Cities May Decide Governor’s Race : Politics: Feinstein’s and Wilson’s mayoral records could tell voters how they would govern California.

Dianne Feinstein rose from tragedy to guide her city in troubled times. Pete Wilson was elected in scandal’s wake and led his city to maturity.

Now, Democrat Feinstein of San Francisco and Republican Wilson of San Diego are battling to become the first former mayor elected governor of California since 1930.

Their records as mayors are as different as the cities themselves.

Feinstein took a city wrenched by the assassination of her predecessor and tried to soothe its wounds. A centrist, she sought to mediate disputes among the fractured city’s many factions.

Wilson was elected mayor of San Diego not long after seven of the City Council’s nine members were indicted for corruption. He staked out an ambitious agenda and created his own power base to enact it, presiding over the transformation of a backwater Navy town into a major metropolis.

Both candidates probably take more credit than they deserve for their cities’ successes and receive more than their fair share of blame for the foibles. But it seems clear that their training as municipal leaders has given Wilson and Feinstein a deep understanding of the problems people face in California’s cities.

“The issues that affect people’s lives--their health and welfare, their safety--come at (a mayor) like heat-seeking missiles,” said Art Agnos, who succeeded Feinstein in San Francisco. “There’s no ducking them the way you can as a U.S. senator or a state legislator or an attorney general.”

Of the two candidates, Feinstein’s experience was more like that of a governor. The combined city and county government she ran was responsible for the complete range of public services, from police and fire and jails to health and welfare. She oversaw the city’s staff, introduced a budget each year and could veto actions of the Board of Supervisors.

Wilson’s power was more limited. He had one vote on the nine-member City Council over which he presided. The city’s department heads were hired and fired by a professional city manager who answered to the council majority. In San Diego, the county government, not the city, provides the region’s health and welfare services.

When Wilson took over, San Diego was like a child about to burst into robust adolescence. The city’s population was almost all white, and its vast undeveloped areas were giving way to tract homes filled with newcomers, most of them Republicans. Political influence was concentrated in a clique of conservative downtown power brokers.

Feinstein’s San Francisco was a multiethnic stewpot, a population then about the same as San Diego’s but stuffed into an area only one-seventh the size. There was no vacant land and any development would displace existing structures. Power flowed from the city’s liberal Democratic majority and was shared by the mayor and an independent-minded Board of Supervisors.

In these different settings, the records Feinstein and Wilson built as city leaders show how they confronted challenges and solved problems. Their parallel experiences revealed their management styles and may illustrate how they would run the state.

If the difference between the two can be boiled down to a paragraph, it might be this:

Wilson’s first goal was to keep taxes low. He ranked the city’s services and funded those he could. Lesser priorities were eliminated or cut back. Feinstein inventoried her city’s needs and calculated the cost of meeting them. Then she found the money to pay the bills, raising taxes if necessary.

The differences went deeper than that.

When Wilson came into office in 1971 after five years as an assemblyman, San Diego was fresh from the indictment of seven of the city’s nine council members on charges of taking bribes from Yellow Cab Co. Past mayors had been little more than figureheads, and Wilson proclaimed his intention to make the mayor the political leader of the city.

He did so by declaring a set of priorities, most of which would not cost the city money, and pursuing them doggedly. He succeeded in spurring the redevelopment of downtown San Diego, enacting a campaign finance law, slowing growth in the suburbs, and regulating billboards. He tried, and failed, to move the city’s airport and build a downtown convention center.

“When Pete came on, this city was like a large Santa Barbara. It was just about to boom and explode,” said Louis Wolfsheimer, an attorney and longtime Wilson ally. “He was mayor during the most important part of the history of this community.”

Wilson asked San Diego voters to give him “strong mayor” powers, but the ballot measure was defeated. Instead, he built a power base by helping to elect or appoint members of the City Council and calling on their loyalty to win votes for his programs. He created a committee system dominated by the mayor’s office to ride herd on the city manager.

Former Councilman Mike Gotch, a Wilson adversary, said the mayor was a “masterful” politician.

“He was able to manipulate the council,” Gotch said. “They all got there, either by appointment or election, through his good graces. There were IOUs that were called in.”

In San Francisco, Feinstein, a veteran member of the Board of Supervisors, was on the verge of quitting politics in 1978 when Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were shot and killed by former Supervisor Dan White. The killings came just days after the Jonestown Massacre, in which 900 members of the San Francisco-based People’s Temple died in a mass suicide.

As president of the board, Feinstein became the acting mayor.

“This was a city that was totally reeling in a sense of grief and disaster and dismay,” said Hadley Roff, Feinstein’s longtime chief of staff. “Through her kind of calm purposefulness, she reunified, she brought the city back together.”

Feinstein completed Moscone’s term and then won two more in her own right. In contrast to Wilson, she was more reactive, addressing her city’s many problems as they arose but never setting much of a long-term agenda. Her style, said one former city official, was the “squeaky wheel” approach to management.

Feinstein was known as a “micro-manager” because of the way she demanded details from her department heads. In weekly management meetings, she would want to know the latest crime statistics, hospital bed counts, number of AIDS patients, and potholes filled. She had a police radio on her dashboard and a fire coat and boots in the trunk of her car.

Said Roff: “She would be driving through the city and if she’d see a discarded mattress on a corner or an abandoned car, there would be a note taken and word relayed when she got to the office to the appropriate department to take care of it.”

This attention to minutiae endeared Feinstein to the voters but led some to conclude that the mayor had lost sight of the big picture.

“Her world view sometimes is obscured by her obsession with detail,” said Dick Sklar, a former city public utilities director. “She tends to be more crisis-oriented than systematic.”

After California voters passed Proposition 13, throwing city finances into chaos, Feinstein supported increases in the hotel room tax, the business payroll tax and city parking taxes. Later, she pushed for new city taxes on gas, water, electric and telephone bills. The utility tax was approved by the Board of Supervisors but voters overturned it in a referendum.

Still, the city ran short of funds. Several years running, fiscal analysts warned that the city was headed for a deficit, and each year Feinstein’s Administration took steps to avert the shortfall by increasing taxes and fees or cutting spending. In 1986 and 1987, Feinstein personally reviewed every requisition to hire new employees, keeping an eye out for positions that could be left open.

After she left office, another shortfall was projected, this one of $172 million. Agnos closed the gap the same way she had, with a combination of spending cuts and higher taxes and fees.

Former Deputy Mayor James Lazarus said the city “could not have functioned” after Proposition 13 without tax increases to make up the loss of property tax money.

“Fighting AIDS, hiring more police officers, housing the homeless--these are programs the public demanded, the situation demanded,” Lazarus said. “San Francisco’s population requires a high level of public service.” By the time Feinstein left office, the city was spending $17 million a year to contain the AIDS epidemic, a cost that could not have been contemplated when she became mayor in 1978.

Wilson’s city faced neither an AIDS epidemic nor widespread homelessness, and he had no responsibility for social services or mental health programs. Under his leadership, the city cut property tax rates 25% even before Proposition 13. He pushed successfully for a local spending cap that was stricter than the statewide Gann limit passed by voters a year later.

During his tenure, city spending, adjusted for inflation and population growth, dropped, as did the number of city employees. The percapita tax burden also declined. After Proposition 13, the city cut spending on libraries, parks and recreation. The bus system, which had been expanded to 45 routes, was chopped to 28. Maintenance was deferred.

Here is a look at how the two mayors handled other issues:

* Crime. Both mayors put a priority on public safety--each boosted the police budgets and added hundreds of officers to the departments--but with different results.

During Feinstein’s tenure, serious crimes in San Francisco--murder, rape, robbery and others--declined by more than 20%. Under Wilson, San Diego’s crime rate soared 25.5%, after accounting for the huge jump in the city’s population. Despite the increase, San Diego’s crime rate when Wilson left office remained the lowest among California’s 10 largest cities.

* Sewage. Under the federal Clean Water Act, San Diego was required to upgrade its sewage disposal to so-called secondary treatment, which would remove about 90% of solids from waste water before it is dumped into the ocean. Wilson resisted the change, which at the time would have cost about $500 million, with much of that paid by federal funds.

At Wilson’s urging, the federal government granted the city a temporary waiver from the requirement, but later denied a permanent exemption. Meantime, the city abandoned backup plans for a new treatment plant. Now, San Diego is faced with a $2.8-billion tab for the new plant, and the federal government is no longer willing to pitch in.

San Diego also neglected its existing sewage system during Wilson’s years at the helm, according to current city officials. One pumping station in the north part of town was so overwhelmed by the volume of effluent dumped into it by the rapidly growing city that it often shut down, spilling raw sewage into a nearby lagoon 60 times in eight years. Other sewage failures forced the closure of parts of Mission Bay for 27% of the time between 1980 and 1987.

San Francisco’s sewage system was faced with similar problems, but the city handled it differently. As a supervisor, Feinstein supported a $240-million bond measure approved by voters to repair the system and build treatment facilities. Because San Francisco acted quickly, the federal government paid the lion’s share of the cost. After Feinstein became mayor, she fought a ballot initiative that tried to halt the project in midstream.

* Growth management. Both mayors governed during a time of rapid development. Feinstein’s San Francisco was a magnet for commercial growth; Wilson was San Diego’s leader during an unprecedented housing boom. Although both implemented some controls, both were accused by critics of catering to developers to maximize their campaign contributions.

Wilson calls himself one of the founders of growth management. But the blueprint he drew did not prevent freeway traffic jams that are among the worst in California, smog that exceeds state standards one day out of every three, and an inner-city area in need of nearly $1 billion in public works projects. The city’s population grew by 25% during Wilson’s term, faster than the state as a whole.

Wilson’s plan divided the city into three tiers and sought to channel most of the growth into areas closest to the city’s urban core, where city services were in place. Some development was allowed on the city’s edge, but builders were assessed fees to pay for much of the infrastructure their neighborhoods required. The third tier was to be left undeveloped for future generations.

To entice developers to build in the urban area, Wilson’s plan exempted such construction from the fees charged elsewhere to support public works projects. Now, the city is $900 million short of what is required to pay for the infrastructure--parks, libraries, sewers and streets--needed by those new residents. The City Council voted recently to slap new fees on builders citywide.

Feinstein’s problem was altogether different. With her encouragement, developers built about 25 million square feet of office space in the city, enough, by some estimates, to generate 100,000 additional office workers. Only about 1,000 housing units were built each year in the city. The median-priced home jumped from $108,000 to $262,000 during the 1980s.

Neighborhood groups demanded limits on commercial growth. They urged the city to require developers to help pay for new housing and parks and defray the cost of public transit that delivered workers to their buildings.

Calvin Welch, co-founder of a coalition of nonprofit developers of low-cost housing, said Feinstein refused to acknowledge that her policies were changing the character of the city for the worse--forcing middle-income workers to live in distant suburbs and forcing the poor to live on the streets.

“She never understood or refused to understand that the practical impact of her economic development policy was a housing crisis,” Welch said. “We have gone from San Francisco to Manhattan. Life on the streets has become meaner and harder. It is not only more difficult to find a parking space, it is more difficult to find a neighbor.”

In 1983, Feinstein proposed a “downtown plan” that sought to direct development to an area of warehouses and industry. The plan gave developers the right to build taller buildings south of Market Street in exchange for saving historical structures elsewhere. Over time, Feinstein added elements to force developers to pay for housing, transit and parks, and to provide child care. Under pressure from the Board of Supervisors, she agreed to limit office development to 950,000 square feet a year.

A month after the plan was adopted in 1986, voters, over Feinstein’s objections, approved a ballot measure that cut the annual office limit in half.