San Diego Hopes to Get Respect Ride on Wilson : Image: Civic leaders expect the state’s power brokers to at last notice their city once the new governor is in office.

Catch the wave of expectation cresting through San Diego’s civic elite these days: One of their own has been elected the 36th governor of California, and now they want some respect.

With a former mayor, Pete Wilson, set to be inaugurated Jan. 7, city leaders say San Diego has never been in a better position to shed its reputation as California’s cultural cul-de-sac and assume its rightful prestige as the second-largest city in the state.

They’re tired of living down the image of a sleepy Navy town and one-dimensional vacation spot, where sailors, surfers and blue-haired retirees exist quietly in the shadow of brawny Los Angeles. They’re tired of getting left out by the power brokers in Sacramento when it comes time to divvy up state funding for social programs and hand out the political plums.

Now they’re banking on favorite son Wilson, surrounded by his coterie of hometown advisers, to usher in a new era when San Diego no longer will be considered the shy stepsister of California government. “He (Wilson) really did a lot to put San Diego on the public map . . . and I think San Diego will benefit from it,” said Robert C. Fellmeth, a law professor and director of the University of San Diego’s Center for Public Interest Law.

“I think that, at least before this election or Pete Wilson’s rise, people in California and Sacramento thought the state stopped somewhere south of Disneyland, but they weren’t exactly sure,” he said. “I think they now know there’s a little bulb of land down here, growing like a weed, called San Diego.”

Lee Grissom, president of the Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce, added:

“This is really a very special opportunity for San Diego to exercise its political vision and exercise its political connections. If there is something that San Diego needs, like additional financial support for the county, this is literally a once-in-a-lifetime chance--actually, a once in a 200-year-time--to achieve it.”

Fueling the enthusiasm is the hope that Wilson, like Deukmejian before him, will reward his most trusted supporters with appointments to influential state boards and commissions--jobs that set the tone for state regulation and planning. Some of the more prestigious posts include the UC Board of Regents, the CSU Board of Trustees, the Public Utilities Commission, the California Transportation Commission and the California Coastal Commission.

Deukmejian drew upon supporters from hometown Long Beach and Armenians in Fresno to help stock these and myriad other boards.

He appointed his former law partner to the state Supreme Court; his brother-in-law to the Del Mar fair board; his barber to the Board of Barber Examiners; his local sporting goods retailer to the Fish and Game Commission; his minister to the Board of Behavioral Science Examiners, and his neighbor across the street to the California Medical Assistance Commission.

San Diegans expect no less from Wilson, who tagged his hometown with the slogan “America’s Finest City.” Their optimism is undimmed by his first four cabinet picks, all of whom hail from elsewhere.

Wilson spokesman Otto Bos tried last week to temper such talk.

“You’ve got to be careful what you draw from all this,” Bos said, adding that Wilson has spent the last eight years as U.S. senator and has an extensive network of supporters throughout the state.

Yet, even with that caveat, Bos acknowledged that the Wilson camp has nurtured the hopes by underscoring the former mayor’s ties with San Diego. A former San Diego Union reporter, Bos observed that Wilson’s election marked a political “coming of age” for the city.

“I remember the days when . . . consultants used to give this kind of advice if you were a candidate, you were from San Diego and you wanted to run for statewide office: ‘Move!’ ” Bos said.

Repeated television ads during the campaign held the city up as a shining example of Wilson’s managerial abilities. Candidate Wilson insisted on operating his campaign out of San Diego offices, even though Los Angeles would have been more convenient politically and for travel. His campaign symbol was a surfboard.

Now that he’s elected, Wilson’s inaugural plans include trucking up food from the popular El Indio restaurant for a special San Diego-styled “fiesta” to kick off the festivities in Sacramento on Jan. 5. Planeloads of prominent locals--including the San Diego Chicken, in tux--will attend. Then, a triumphant Wilson will return after the inauguration to a hometown reception Jan. 11 to the San Diego Convention Center.

Meanwhile, Wilson has decided to open a San Diego gubernatorial office. And his aides are said to be working behind the scenes to persuade Republican National Committee officials to hold their 1992 presidential convention in San Diego--a publicity coup that would rival the city’s successful bid to host the 1988 Super Bowl. Nothing like this has happened since local boy Dennis Conner lost and then won back the America’s Cup yachting trophy from Australia.

All the attention has done wonders to assuage the wounded pride of a place with a reputation as the backwater of California politics.

“If you went down to the tip of California, it (San Diego) was a pleasant place with nice climate--but kind of a non-entity,” said A. Alan Post, legislative analyst from 1949 to 1977. “It took care of itself, and it was a Navy town. As a matter of fact, the city didn’t feature in any large way in state politics.”

Before Wilson, the highest statewide officeholder hailing from San Diego was Bert A. Betts, treasurer between 1959 and 1967. In fact, Wilson is the only San Diegan ever elected to the U.S. Senate since California was admitted to the Union in 1850.

Part of the reason for San Diego’s weak showing over the years has been sheer numbers: It is difficult to make a mark in the Legislature or statewide politics when you’re dwarfed by colossus Los Angeles and more sophisticated San Francisco, say Capitol old-timers.

In the 120-member Legislature, Los Angeles County owns 52 seats and the San Francisco Bay Area has 21. San Diego lags behind with 11 in the Assembly and Senate. The impending redistricting should take San Diego’s recent growth into account and narrow the gap, but it still will be unable to match Los Angeles.

Even with that disadvantage, San Diego over the years could have overcome its political isolation if its legislators weren’t so busy building the reputation as one of the most provincial--and weirdest--delegations around, said former State Sen. James R. Mills.

“San Diego was thought to send some strange people to Sacramento,” said Mills, who as powerful Senate President Pro Tempore during the 1970s, counted himself an exception.

Assemblyman Frank Luckel, a retired naval officer who represented parts of San Diego from 1948 to 1962, took delight in confusing colleagues by uttering speeches that were “intentionally unintelligible,” Mills said.

Jack Schrade, an inveterate prankster who served in the Assembly from 1955 to 1962, once conned a legion of lobbyists into using his “secret” Oriental aphrodisiac, which he dispensed in small bottles. The potion turned out to be a harmless dye, which horrified the lobbyists by turning their urine the color of blood, Mills said.

The antics underscored the fact that most local legislators showed no interest in meaningful legislation, and were suspicious of the insider game of power politics, he said.

“It was easy to take advantage of San Diego because San Diego was such a political island,” said Mills, now chairman of the Metropolitan Transit Development Board. “It’s out of the mainstream, therefore the people writing legislation could treat it lightly.”

That kind of benign neglect has dogged the county even through the go-go ‘80s, when its population surged nearly 32%--from 1.9 million to 2.5 million residents. While the county was becoming the second-largest in California, many people still didn’t allow for it in their psychological map, said Sen. Lucy Killea (D-San Diego).

Killea tells the story about the time she attended a conference on Southern California tourism shortly after being elected to the Assembly in 1983.

“I spoke up and said, ‘It’s not that way in San Diego,’ ” Killea recalled about a discussion involving transportation issues. “Somebody said, ‘Oh, we’re not talking about San Diego. We’re talking about Southern California.’ ”

But the ultimate hurdle in San Diego’s quest for statewide respect is the most ironic. The region’s carefully cultivated image as a laid-back beach paradise is undermining its ambitions in Sacramento, say Killea and others.

This year, the San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau will spend $2 million in tax money to entice tourists with glossy magazine photos of sailboats lining a sun-drenched bay. “Just Another Beautiful Day in San Diego,” say the ads, which boast of its 70 miles of beaches and proximity to Mexico.

While the ads are aimed at the working stiff chattering through the Cleveland winter, they also hit home in Sacramento, where appearance is sometimes more important than reality. Legislators, staff members and lobbyists believe the San Diego image so much, they find it hard to believe that the region has outgrown its own hype.

“They cannot understand that we have gang problems, drug problems and jail overcrowding problems,” said Kathryn C. Rees, Sacramento lobbyist for the city of San Diego. “They can only think of San Diego as the sunny, sleepy town along the border, in the shadow of L.A.”

“People are very surprised to become alerted to the fact that San Diego is the second-largest city,” she said.

Case in point is Rees herself, who confessed that she didn’t know the dark side of paradise before being hired by the city more than three years ago. “I had been there for conventions and meetings and seen little other than the beaches and the hotels,” she said.

Robert Forsyth, spokesman for Senate President Pro Tempore David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles), said: “The beltway in Sacramento is no different than other places in the United States when the words ‘San Diego’ come up--you think of an incredibly pleasant place to be, to work, to live. Maybe we suffer from a Chamber of Commerce myopia.”

Myopia to some has been diagnosed as blindness by San Diegans, who have begun to grumble loudly about their stepchild treatment in the state Capitol. They complain that they can’t interest enough people in their welter of urban ills, some of them formidable.

San Diego jails, for instance, are some of the most overcrowded in the nation, according to a law enforcement survey for the first half of 1990. The San Diego lock-up held 84% more inmates than its approved capacity, trailing only Phoenix at 85% overcapacity. Los Angeles held only 37% more than its designed capacity and San Francisco 6%, the statistics showed.

An increase in the cases of abused children also has social workers scrambling. Department of Social Services figures show it admitted 584 abused children in October to the Hillcrest Receiving Home, a 26-year-old facility that was built to hold only 16 at a time.

At the border, illegal immigrants stream in from Mexico, taking up residence in North County encampments.

Meanwhile, county officials also lament state funding formulas that deliver mental health grants at a rate 27.6% below the average for California. Other restrictions keep the revenue-starved county collecting such a small share of the local property tax that its general fund average of $189 per resident ranks a lowly 56th out of 58 counties. The state average was $260 per capita, with Los Angeles County collecting nearly $300 per resident in property taxes.

Fed up with Sacramento’s inattention, San Diego officials have filed three suits against state government since 1986 to receive more money. One was settled, giving the county an extra $13.7 million a year for drug and alcohol treatment. The others are pending.

The Deukmejian Administration was slow to offer state help with the chronic sewage problem, and its diplomatic differences with San Diego Mayor Maureen O’Connor, a mercurial Democrat, scuttled any hope of money to help build crucial jail space.

Assemblyman Steve Peace (D-Rancho San Diego) said he believes San Diego has made up for these oversights in other ways. Despite the sagging social programs, the region has collected more than its fair share in transportation dollars to build the trolley and its highway system, he said. Recent figures also show that San Diego has been blessed with a healthy cut of state money for local parks.

Peace also cautioned against San Diegans demanding too much from Wilson, especially since he must now wrestle with a projected $6-billion budget deficit.

“I think some of the expectations are unfair to the governor-elect, in the sense that he’s going to be dealing with limited resources,” he said.

But such sobering warnings have done little to dampen the hopes of Wilson’s fellow San Diegans, who can hardly conceal their joy that a former mayor is finally going to take over the governor’s suite.

They are looking to him to even the score on state funding, as well as pay attention to peculiar San Diego problems long ignored by the state--problems such as the rogue sewage that washes over from Tijuana and onto local beaches.

“The chances of San Diego getting its fair share has probably improved by the fact that you have a San Diegan sitting here at probably the most powerful job in the state,” conceded Wilson spokesman Bos. “It’s got to help. When (County Supervisor) Susan Golding or Brian Bilbray comes in, they know they can get in the door, bend his ear and get a sympathetic ear as well.”

Beyond that, there’s simply the idea that San Diego can now, in political terms, step out of the shadows of Los Angeles and San Francisco, said Sen. William A. Craven (R-Oceanside). Wilson’s election marks the passage of a one-time Navy town into the ranks of a major city that commands attention, if not respect, he said.

Moondoggie has grown up, and he has traded his swimming trunks for a business suit.

“Maybe that’s the most important thing,” said Craven, a 17-year veteran of the Legislature. “If San Diego can produce a governor, people will have to stand up and take notice more than they have in the past . . . of an area that has emerged with political clout.”