Lockwood Departs Like He Led--Quietly : City Hall: Much lauded city manager to take state post, at time when city and state have financial woes.

About 10 times each week, San Diego City Manager John Lockwood selects a name at random from the local phone book, picks up the receiver in his spacious ninth-floor office at City Hall, and punches in the seven digits.

Lockwood introduces himself and asks a simple question of the startled city residents at the other end of the line: “How are we doing?”

Many are complimentary, most have few complaints, and a sizable number use little more than the city’s essential services, he said.

“If they were driving to work over streets that were all torn up, that would affect their quality of life,” Lockwood said in an interview last week. “If their trash didn’t get picked up, that would affect their quality of life. If, when they flushed their toilet it didn’t go anywhere, that would affect their quality of life.”

As much as his glowing performance evaluations or his $126,000 salary, the silence at the end of the phone line is proof that Lockwood is quietly, anonymously, doing his job while the city he is charged with serving has tripled in size during his 42 years of municipal employment.

“Like everybody else who’s a success at things, John Lockwood made it look easy,” said former Mayor Roger Hedgecock, whom Lockwood served as assistant city manager and acting city manager. “Magic Johnson makes it look easy. And it isn’t easy.”

“I’ve served on lots of boards and commissions . . . and I’ve never worked with someone who is as responsive as he was to his (City Council),” said Councilman Bob Filner. “He is back with you immediately. I’ve never seen anything like that.”

Lockwood, who began his career in municipal government in 1949, when San Diego had two miles of freeway, retires today as the 17th chief administrator of the sixth-largest city in the nation, one of the fastest-growing metropolises in America.

He has survived and prospered in the city’s political milieu due to a reputation for scrupulous evenhandedness and a quiet leadership style that includes delegating many chores to a corps of managers that he carefully cultivated.

Lockwood likes to quote an anecdote about the late Green Bay Packer coach Vince Lombardi when asked how he handles the sometimes vicious politics on the nine-member council. “The thing I liked about Vince,” one of his players once said, “is that he treated us all the same. Like dogs, but all the same.”

“You never betray a confidence. You treat everybody fairly. And they all know,” Lockwood added.

One of just seven remaining city employees who began their careers before 1960, Lockwood’s departure severs another link to an era when San Diego aggressively sought to outgrow its inferiority complex and the public clamor for limits on government spending had not yet begun.

“We wanted to become a city of 1.1 million,” Lockwood remembered of the post-war, post Depression era 42 years ago, when he started in city government as a $142-per-month mail room messenger. “We took great pride when we jumped from 14th- to 13th-largest city in the country, because we had an inferiority complex.”

“We wanted to play in the big leagues,” Lockwood added. “As we crept up the population ladder, people would say, ‘Hey, did you hear we just passed New Orleans?’ And when we passed San Francisco, we went ballistic. We were bigger than San Francisco. And it was great.”

But Lockwood leaves the city at a time when its financial resources cannot keep up with the demand for services, when his successors face another year of cutting back or raising taxes to make ends meet. Having presided over an era of retrenchment during more than four years as city manager, Lockwood last February described the city’s financial plight for fiscal 1991 as the worst in 56 years.

For a man who bleeds over the condition of the city’s street lights and sewers, the decline in city services since the 1978 passage of Proposition 13 causes personal embarrassment.

“You drive around town and you see dead trees, and you know it’s going to be a year to a year and a half before we can remove that tree,” he said. “The quality of service isn’t what it used to be. And I feel bad about that.”

“I think it got to the point where he was personally in pain over what has happened to the city and its environment,” said Peter Navarro, chairman of the managed-growth group Prevent Los Angelization Now, which lobbies for greater development contributions to the city’s infrastructure. “I think it hurt him to see what was happening to the city.”

Somewhere between the two extremes was “10 minutes” in the early to mid-1970’s when San Diego was comfortable with its size, when growth had brought the amenities the city sought in the post-war era but not the modern problems that Lockwood and his staff grapple with each day.

“We got the Civic Theater. We got the Convention Center. We got major league baseball. We got major league football. We got so many good restaurants that you can eat out every night of the year and never have to back to the same one twice. Now what does growth give you?,” Lockwood asked.

“That’s when people started to say ‘Hold it, wait a minute.’ Because with it did not come additional amenities. What came with it is more crowded beaches and more crowded parks, traffic and the rest of it.”

Despite the demands of that growth, Lockwood continued the city’s tradition of fiscal conservatism. In a survey of fiscal 1990 budgets, City and State magazine ranked San Diego 49th among the nation’s 50 largest cities in long-term debt per capita and 48th in number of employees per 1,000 residents.

In June, 1989, Business Monthly magazine named San Diego one of the 10 best-managed cities in the country.

Lockwood’s retirement will last exactly three days--the time it will take him to move to Sacramento, where he is taking over as head of the state Department of General Services on Friday.

There have been no public tributes to Lockwood and there will be none at his final council meeting today, if he has anything to say about it. Lockwood has informed Mayor Maureen O’Connor that he will not show up if he gets wind that any major salutes to him are planned. Lockwood said that he wants the spotlight on his successor, Assistant City Manager Jack McGrory, who will be sworn in at the meeting.