LOCAL ELECTIONS 5TH DISTRICT RECALL : Challengers Eclipsed by Bernhardt Battle

One candidate in next month’s San Diego City Council 5th District recall campaign says he sometimes feels like an opening act at a concert. Several others half-jokingly liken their role to that of the first runner-up in the Miss America contest.

The analogies are apt, for, like a warm-up act, the seven challengers in the April 9 vote are well aware that the main reason people have been flocking to candidate forums throughout the northern San Diego district is not to see them, but to witness embattled Councilwoman Linda Bernhardt struggle for political survival.

And, just as the beauty pageant’s runner-up is reminded annually that she will claim the title if the victor is unable to complete her term, so do the candidates realize that their only hope to ascend to City Hall hinges on similar circumstances overtaking Bernhardt.

“At least we’re being spared the bathing suit and evening gown competition,” an aide to candidate Les Braund quipped at one recent forum.

Though the seven challengers have been eclipsed by the increasingly bitter showdown between Bernhardt and the committee seeking her ouster, the consensus within political circles is that one of the seven is likely to supplant Bernhardt in the first council recall campaign since the City Charter was adopted early this century.

Under the unusual format governing next month’s election, Bernhardt’s fate will be decided by a simple majority vote in one race, while her seven would-be successors compete in a tandem contest.

If the 31-year-old council freshman receives more than 50% of the vote, she will retain her post, rendering the outcome of the other race moot. However, if Bernhardt is ousted, the candidate drawing the most votes in the other contest--in which Bernhardt is ineligible--would serve the rest of her four-year term, which expires in December, 1993.

The candidates hoping to replace Bernhardt are corporate lawyer Tom Behr, land-use planner John Brand, general contractor Braund, lawyer and part-time county planner Mike Eckmann, former congressional aide Dena Holman, former San Diego City Councilman Floyd Morrow and credit union services manager Ken Moser.

Despite the obvious link between the two races, there has been little interaction between Bernhardt and the seven challengers. Just as Bernhardt recognizes that her fate is in her own hands, the seven contenders regard the up-or-down decision on her political future as something that will resolve itself independently of their own actions.

Their major objective, the seven believe, is to quickly establish a political identity that will enable them to outdistance their opponents to become, in the words of Brand campaign consultant John Kern, “the councilman-elect with an asterisk.”

“You could win but still lose,” Kern added, noting that a first-place finish will be meaningless if Bernhardt tops 50% in her uphill battle.

In trying to carve out a niche, the candidates face several formidable obstacles, beginning with the brevity of the two-month special-election campaign. That factor is particularly nettlesome to the race’s five first-time candidates, who began the campaign as unknowns to all but the most ardent political aficionados.

Moreover, with voter turnout expected to be less than 20%, the candidates are in the unenviable position of needing to rapidly increase their visibility with a public that is giving, at best, cursory attention to the race.

Those difficulties could benefit Morrow, whose 1965-77 council tenure allowed him to begin the race with a level of name recognition and political base unmatched by any other challenger.

Widely regarded as the candidate to beat, the 58-year-old lawyer is attempting a political comeback in the very district where his career began. For that to occur, Morrow will have to overcome his reputation as the Harold Stassen of San Diego politics, an image formed by his succession of losses in recent years, including campaigns for mayor (twice), City Council, State Board of Equalization and judge.

Even in those losses, however, Morrow consistently ran strongly in Kearny Mesa and Linda Vista, where he has lived and worked for more than three decades. In addition, his lengthy career gives him both a political resume and a track record that surpasses that of the six other candidates combined.

“Long before people talked about open space or water recycling or campaign reform, I was creating programs to do something about those things,” Morrow says in his standard stump speech.

During his years on the council, Morrow compiled a strong environmental record, pushing for development of a water-recycling project that since has gained international attention and helping to create the Tecolote Canyon Preserve and the city’s environmental growth fund. Morrow has used that record as a subtle lure to Bernhardt supporters, who, much as they hope she survives, would be even more distressed if her loss dismantled the council’s slim pro-environment majority.

Braund and Holman have tried to similarly position themselves as a backstop to Bernhardt, while also taking pains to distance themselves from her woes.

The 46-year-old Braund, who describes himself as “the only genuine growth-management candidate” in the race, is a member of the group Prevent Los Angelization Now, or PLAN, and has made its growth-control tenets the cornerstone of his campaign. Among his major proposals is a “no net gain” water plan that would require developers to cut current water use by retrofitting existing homes with water-saving devices before they could receive building permits.

“We should ration new development, not water,” said Braund, a Mira Mesa resident who often tells campaign audiences that he would be “a voice for moderation” on the council.

Holman, meanwhile, has tried to claim her share of the pro-environmental vote through similar pronouncements, including a call for a five-point waste disposal program that features citywide expansion of curbside recycling services, changes in trash-hauling fees to reward recyclers and aggressive development of local markets for recycled products.

The aide to former Democratic Rep. Jim Bates also casts herself as a maverick who could help quell the frequent political infighting between the council’s so-called Gang of Five and the minority led by Mayor Maureen O’Connor.

“If you want a business-as-usual candidate, then you don’t want to vote for me,” the 36-year-old Linda Vista resident said at a recent Scripps Ranch forum. “In office, I’d adhere to a certain set of values, not a certain set of friends.”

One of only two Democrats in the race--Morrow being the other--Holman believes she also will benefit by being the only woman in a field that she dismisses as “mainly a bunch of male lawyers and land planners.” Most major women’s political groups have endorsed Holman, including the San Diego chapter of the National Women’s Political Caucus, and both the local and state chapters of the National Organization for Women.

If Morrow, Braund and Holman have veered to the left on the volatile growth issue, the four others have adopted a middle ground, a stance that, in some cases, contrasts with their backgrounds, positions and source of campaign donations.

Resurrecting a line from his unsuccessful 1989 5th District race, in which he finished fourth in a five-candidate primary, Eckmann argues that his growth policies would position him midway between “no-growthers” and developers.

Several of his major growth policies, however, place him clearly on the managed-growth side of that critical political equation. In addition to seconding Braund’s “no net gain” water program, the 46-year-old Scripps Ranch resident also supports establishment of citywide impact fees, a concept--passed but later retracted by the council last year--that would require developers to pay a larger share of the cost of roads, libraries and other public facilities and services necessitated by their projects.

Though he took a drubbing in 1989, Eckmann wears that candidacy as a political badge of honor, arguing that it demonstrates that he is not simply a “political opportunist” seeking to capitalize on Bernhardt’s problems. Morrow also competed in that primary, finishing third behind Bernhardt and then-Councilman Ed Struiksma.

Brand, who worked for several large development-related firms before starting his own land-use company, has sought to soften that background by both extolling the virtues of projects he has worked on and pointing to his research on degradation of African and Indonesian rain forests and orangutan habitats.

“I’m not an armchair environmentalist,” the 35-year-old Mira Mesa resident said. “Some of these people who call themselves environmentalists wouldn’t know a least Bell’s vireo if it landed on their shoulder.”

A similar balancing task faces Behr, who emphasizes his service on the Scripps Ranch and Kearny Mesa planning groups as a counterpoint to his receipt of substantial campaign contributions from development interests.

Sensitive to his image as developers’ preferred candidate, Behr, a 47-year-old lawyer for Solar Turbines, often offers himself up at campaign events as a kind of political everyman who, in his own words, is “not a party insider or a political pro.”

“What I am is one of you,” Behr told one audience. “I’m someone coming out of private life to try to make a change.”

Boasting that he has already fought and won for the district, Behr never misses an opportunity to remind listeners that his lawsuit helped ensure that the recall would be held in the district that elected Bernhardt, not the new one created under a controversial redistricting plan last year that spawned the recall drive.

Although that is true, it is equally true that his lawsuit was designed to revive his own candidacy, since Behr’s Scripps Ranch home places him in the “old” 5th District. Only Morrow and Holman live within the district’s new boundaries, meaning that any of the other five candidates, if elected, would have to move before 1993 to seek reelection.

By his own admission, Moser, a 32-year-old Mira Mesa resident, has tried to “corner the conservative niche” in the race by, among other things, reciting his doctrinaire conservative positions on issues such as the death penalty, abortion and gun control--topics beyond the council’s purview.

“Even if you can’t vote on those things, saying where you stand helps give people an idea where you’re coming from,” Moser said. Lest anyone miss the point, Moser underlines his philosophical bent through his campaign slogan: “Let’s put a conservative majority back on the City Council.”

The head of fund raising for the San Diego Republican Party Central Committee, Moser handily won a recent straw poll conducted by the GOP organization, outpolling the combined total of the four other Republicans by a 2-1 margin.

“We’ve got a circus down at City Hall,” Moser says. “I think I could do something about that.”