Bernhardt’s Recall Vote to Be Held in New District, Council Decides

Setting the stage for a legal showdown over the city’s first recall campaign, the San Diego City Council decided Wednesday that the April election should be held in Councilwoman Linda Bernhardt’s new district rather than the one in which the recall petitions were circulated.

The council’s 5-4 vote, which appears to enhance the 5th District councilwoman’s chances of survival, infuriated leaders of the Recall Bernhardt Committee, who immediately threatened to go to court--perhaps as early as today--in an effort to force the recall election to be held within the boundaries of the former district that elected her in 1989.

Bernhardt sided with the majority on that critical decision, which will determine which voters will cast ballots on her political fate and in a tandem race on would-be successors in the first council recall campaign since the City Charter was approved early this century.

“Linda Bernhardt has demonstrated she’s afraid to face the voters who elected her,” said Kathy Gaustad, the anti-Bernhardt group’s chairman. “She’s not going to get away with it.”

If upheld in court, Wednesday’s decision also would disqualify two announced candidates for Bernhardt’s seat--corporate lawyer Tom Behr and county planner Mike Eckmann--whose Scripps Ranch residences fall outside the new 5th District lines approved late last year under a controversial redistricting plan that helped to spawn the recall drive.

Adding to the recall’s growing legal and political murkiness, Bernhardt supporters, too, may carry their battle to the courthouse. Indeed, some Bernhardt partisans still hope to block the recall campaign by challenging the legality of the signature-gathering process used to qualify the issue for the ballot.

Wednesday’s decision, a subject at once volatile and sensitive--the latter because it deals so directly with a colleague’s future--clearly was an unpleasant task for the council members, most of whom cast only furtive glances at Bernhardt during the two-hour debate. Bernhardt herself listened impassively, sometimes resting her chin on one hand and occasionally smiling wryly at some of the remarks made by opponents and supporters alike.

Aside from their sympathy for Bernhardt, several council members said that the occasion’s solemnity stemmed at least in part from their grim recognition that, as Councilman Bruce Henderson succinctly put it: “What can happen to a colleague can obviously happen to oneself.”

Under the laws governing recalls, the 11,289 signatures--only 49 more than necessary--collected by Bernhardt’s opponents effectively eliminated the question of whether there would be a recall, limiting the council’s prerogative to when and where that contest should be held.

Required to schedule the recall within 60 to 90 days, the council accepted the city clerk’s recommendation that the race be held on April 9.

The key question of whether the recall should be conducted in Bernhardt’s new or old district, however, sharply divided both the council and the dozen public speakers who addressed that thorny topic--one brimming with both major legal and political ramifications.

Recall leaders and others argued that, because Bernhardt had been elected in the old 5th District, where the recall petitions also were circulated--based on City Atty. John Witt’s opinion--the recall should be conducted there. Under the new council boundaries approved by a federal court as part of a voting-rights lawsuit, Scripps Ranch and Mira Mesa were removed from Bernhardt’s district, while much of Clairemont was added to it.

“If you put this in the new district, you basically have lost an opportunity for the people who know how (Bernhardt) conducted herself . . . to recall her,” said Perry Beaird, a member of the anti-Bernhardt group.

In response, those who favored holding the election in Bernhardt’s new district stressed that allowing her former constituents to decide whether she remains in office would disenfranchise voters in her new district. In addition, if Bernhardt were unseated, her successor for the next 2 1/2 years conceivably could come from outside the district’s new boundaries, they complained.

Principle blended with politics in the council’s own debate, as members on both sides argued that their position preserved accountability and citizens’ voting rights even as they grappled with an inherently political decision that, depending on its ultimate outcome, could tip the council’s balance of power.

In the end, the council split along familiar lines, with council members Abbe Wolfsheimer, John Hartley, Wes Pratt and Bob Filner joining Bernhardt in deciding that the recall should be held in the new 5th District. Mayor Maureen O’Connor and council members Ron Roberts, Bruce Henderson and Judy McCarty opposed that decision, siding with Witt’s recommendation that the race occur in the old district.

“We came down on the side of the accountability to the present and future rather than the problems of the past,” Filner said.

From the perspective of the recall leaders, however, the council’s so-called “Gang of Five” was motivated largely by a desire to help an ally by ensuring that Bernhardt would not have to face angry Scripps Ranch and Mira Mesa voters who felt abandoned by her support for the redistricting plan that shifted them to another district.

Turning that argument back upon its advocates, others characterized the efforts to hold the recall in Bernhardt’s old district as stemming more from political than legal grounds--in particular, a desire to see the recall waged under the conditions most disadvantageous for Bernhardt.

Though Bernhardt argued that the decision on the election’s boundaries “will have more impact on my opponents’ strategy than on me,” the consensus within political circles is that her chances would be markedly better in her new district. There, she would not confront the same liabilities or, equally important, the same voters that initiated the recall effort.

A simple majority vote will determine Bernhardt’s political fate in the April election. If she receives more than 50% of the vote, Bernhardt would retain her post, rendering the outcome of the companion election on possible successors moot. However, if Bernhardt were ousted, the candidate drawing the most votes in the other race--in which Bernhardt cannot compete--would serve the rest of her four-year term that expires in December, 1993.

Beyond Behr and Eckmann, other potential candidates mentioned to date include two former councilmen: Ed Struiksma, the two-term incumbent whom Bernhardt upset in November, 1989, and lawyer Floyd Morrow, who previously held the same seat.

Recall leaders have cited a number of factors as the impetus behind their effort, including their dissatisfaction with Bernhardt’s approval of the redistricting plan that shifted several high-growth neighborhoods from the 5th District. Her opponents also have complained that, since her election, Bernhardt has accepted campaign contributions from developers after pledging not to do so in last year’s campaign and fault her for hiring her roommate as her City Hall chief of staff.

Calling the recall effort “politics at its very worst,” Bernhardt argues that the campaign is being largely orchestrated by individuals who opposed her during last year’s election.