San Diegans Oust Bernhardt; Behr Tops List

Writing the final chapter in San Diego City Councilwoman Linda Bernhardt’s rapid fall from political grace, voters overwhelmingly ousted Bernhardt in a special recall election Tuesday, but left the question of who will succeed her undecided until later this week.

In a campaign widely seen as a losing cause for Bernhardt virtually from the moment the recall qualified for the ballot, voters in Bernhardt’s 5th District, by a more than 2-1 margin, removed her from office with nearly two-thirds of her four-year term remaining.

The result in the seven-candidate race to succeed Bernhardt was less conclusive, with corporate lawyer Tom Behr clinging to a narrow lead over former San Diego City Councilman Floyd Morrow--a gap that could be overcome when more than 850 absentee and so-called “provisional” ballots are counted Thursday.

Final, unofficial totals showed that voters favored replacing Bernhardt by a landslide margin, 14,756 votes to 5,916. Behr drew 4,742 votes in the election among would-be successors--in which Bernhardt was ineligible--followed by Morrow with 4,418 votes.

Bernhardt will leave office, and her successor will be sworn in, when the City Council officially certifies the election, probably later this month.

If Behr’s 324-vote lead survives Thursday’s tabulation of the 853 absentee and provisional ballots--the latter representing contested ballots cast at the polls despite questions over the voters’ registration--it would rank as at least a mild upset for the 47-year-old Scripps Ranch resident who described himself at candidate forums as “family man, community leader, corporate counsel.”

Morrow, 58, had entered the race as the clear front-runner because of his high name recognition and strong political base in the district that he represented from 1965 to 1977, and where he hoped to revive a political career that has seen numerous failed comeback attempts in recent years.

The five other challengers--four of them, like Behr, first-time candidates--lagged far behind Behr and Morrow in the first council recall election since the City Charter was adopted early this century.

Warm, sunny weather Tuesday, combined with increased public awareness in the race’s closing days of its historic nature, helped produce about a 30% turnout in the north-central San Diego district, nearly double some candidates’ pre-election predictions.

Recall leaders, whose effort stemmed largely from their fury over Bernhardt’s vote to dramatically redraw her district’s lines, characterized their campaign as the embodiment of grass-roots citizen power.

Tuesday’s outcome, they boasted, provided a message that will reverberate throughout City Hall, putting other council members on notice that serious transgressions can have immediate, career-breaking consequences.

The uncertainty over Bernhardt’s successor, however, also left the council’s philosophical balance in doubt Tuesday night. Although a Morrow victory would preserve the narrow pro-environment majority that now dominates the council on most major issues, given his ideological similarity to Bernhardt’s growth-management positions, Behr’s election would probably dismantle that coalition.

Morrow, in fact, often described himself throughout the race as a “logical second choice” for Bernhardt supporters. Behr, meanwhile, billed himself as a moderate on the politically volatile growth issue, but the fact that much of his financial support came from the development industry heightened concern among environmentalists that his election would significantly alter the council’s balance of power.

For the 31-year-old Bernhardt, Tuesday’s lopsided loss was a disappointing but hardly unexpected conclusion to a campaign that, in her own words--repeated so often that they became a source of dark humor within her own family--”turned my childhood dream into a nightmare.”

When recall leaders began publicizing their plans last summer, the consensus within political circles was that the decisive battle would be over whether the issue qualified for the ballot, not what would happen in the election itself.

Indeed, even some of her closest supporters conceded that Bernhardt would face a daunting, seemingly insurmountable array of liabilities in a recall election, beginning with the conventional political wisdom that, in a single-issue, low-turnout race, voters usually are motivated more by anger than satisfaction with the status quo.

In the face of an aggressive campaign by Bernhardt’s partisans to persuade her constituents not to sign the recall petitions, the Recall Bernhardt Committee gathered 11,289 valid signatures--only 49 more than needed.

“That may have been the ballgame,” a dejected Bernhardt aide said the next day.

Though myriad factors lay behind the recall, its flash point was Bernhardt’s role in a controversial redistricting map approved by the council last year that removed two major neighborhoods--Scripps Ranch and Mira Mesa--from the 5th District.

By jettisoning those communities into another district, the anti-Bernhardt group argued, the councilwoman broke faith with the very constituents who had helped to elect her less than a year before. From their perspective, Bernhardt’s willingness to part with most of the northern tier of her district was a politically expedient effort to rid herself of those communities’ thorny growth problems--which she had pledged to alleviate during her campaign.

That “act of political abandonment,” recall leaders told campaign audiences, was sufficient reason alone to justify the attempt to oust Bernhardt.

Recall advocates also pointed to a wide array of other perceived transgressions in Bernhardt’s performance, led by her post-election acceptance of contributions from developers, contrary to a campaign pledge not to do so. They also faulted Bernhardt for hiring her roommate as her top City Hall aide, for redecorating her office shortly after being sworn in and for various votes that they argued ran counter to the district’s interests.

Though she parried her opponents’ charges, Bernhardt--eager to frame the election on her own terms--also refused to get trapped into a point-by-point debate over her record.

Accordingly, Bernhardt adopted a campaign strategy that had as its guiding theme her argument that she was being unfairly victimized by the same pro-development interests that opposed her when she defeated two-term incumbent Ed Struiksma in 1989. Not content to wait until she faced reelection in 1993, her opponents “manipulated and twisted the political process” in their impatience to return a conservative, pro-development majority to the City Council, she repeatedly told voters.

“Fairness is the key issue in this campaign,” she said. “I deserve to serve a full term and to be judged on that basis.” Recall, Bernhardt and her supporters added, should be reserved only for the most severe circumstances, such as illegal or immoral behavior, and not used--as they argued it was in this case--over simple displeasure with an elected official’s performance or positions.

The seven candidates hoping to succeed Bernhardt, meanwhile, struggled throughout the unusually brief two-month campaign to carve out a niche in a race in which they were constantly eclipsed by Bernhardt’s battle for political survival.

EDITION TIME ELECTION RETURNS

Linda Bernhardt Recall

100% Precincts Reporting Votes % Yes 14,756 71.4 No 5,916 28.6

5th Council District Tom Behr 4,742 25.8 Floyd Morrow 4,418 24.0 Les Braund 2,834 15.4 John Brand 2,088 11.4 Dena Holman 1,601 8.7 Ken Moser 1,446 7.9 Mike Eckmann 1,264 6.9

Elected candidate and winning side of measure are in bold type.