Wild Card for Mayor’s Race?

With less than a year until San Diego’s 1992 mayoral primary, it is becoming increasingly evident to some political observers that growth-management leader Peter Navarro is preparing a wild-card bid to succeed retiring Mayor Maureen O’Connor.

A run by the head of Prevent Los Angelization Now!, which would face the seemingly fatal obstacle of meager financing, could nevertheless offer voters the intriguing choice of a candidate outside the tarnished mainstream--and one at the helm of the city’s ever-popular slow-growth movement.

Although insiders give Navarro little chance of defeating those regarded as front-runners--San Diego County Supervisor Susan Golding, State Sen. Lucy Killea or City Councilman Ron Roberts--some strategists wonder whether PLAN’s efforts to place its initiative on the June, 1992, ballot will dovetail with a simultaneous run by Navarro in the primary that will be held the same day.

At the very least, such a candidacy could skew the strategy for next year’s most important local political race and give PLAN and its allies influence beyond their numbers, some say.

In several interviews recently, Navarro emphasized his commitment to the growth-management initiative that he says will soon garner enough signatures to qualify for the ballot, claiming that he now has no plans to run for elected office.

But, when pressed, he added this qualifier: “If it comes down to Susan Golding and Ron Roberts, if you had a choice between Tweedle-bull and Tweedle-dozer . . . I might have to listen more carefully to a lot of the people who are urging me to consider this.”

Many others, both friend and foe, are more confident that Navarro will step into the mayor’s race.

“All the signs are there,” said John Kern, a consultant whose distaste for Navarro is well-documented. “This is not his old initiative. This is a platform for running for office. And anybody who doesn’t believe that is kidding themselves.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me at all if he’s a candidate in the future,” said consultant Bill Wachob, a personal friend and Navarro’s adviser, who speculates that Navarro might consider a run for either mayor or the county supervisor’s seat that Golding is expected to vacate to run for mayor.

Some, however, contend that a Navarro run for mayor is too daunting a task for any non-establishment candidate, especially one with low name recognition among voters and no access to developer money.

“I can’t imagine he’s going to run for mayor,” said political consultant Tom Shepard, who may work for Golding’s campaign. “That seems like way too big a (task) for him right now.”

Though they clearly regard the 41-year-old Navarro, a UC Irvine faculty member and Del Mar Heights resident, as at least a potential opponent, it is an open question whether any of the undeclared candidates for mayor should concern themselves with him. With no declared candidates, Golding, for example, considers the field too wide open to begin contingency planning, said spokesman Silvio Pucci.

But Navarro, his allies and even his enemies raise several intriguing factors that could work in favor of an articulate, photogenic, registered Republican with ties to the environmental and growth-control movements.

Primary among these is the Planned Growth and Taxpayer Relief Initiative itself. Running for office on the same ballot as a managed-growth measure that PLAN surveys indicate still enjoys widespread voter support would be a powerful advantage in attracting voters to the polls and shaping the campaign agenda, many observers say.

If the measure qualifies for the ballot, the council fails to enact it and a court doesn’t throw it out, Navarro’s growth-management platform would appear before voters on the same June 2 ballot as the mayoral primary.

“If his message is on the ballot, every candidate in the race will be forced to take a stand,” said Shepard.

“Everyone in this race . . . will run on growth management and the environment,” asserts Navarro, who says that 85% of the respondents in his group’s poll want some form of better controls on growth. “Nobody who has emerged thus far has the credentials in terms of growth management and the environment to back it up.”

In 1988, at the height of city furor over runaway growth, PLAN’s predecessor organization, Citizens for Limited Growth, in which Navarro played a prominent role, drew more than 136,000 votes in the city of San Diego and more than 307,000 countywide for two more radical growth-control measures that included caps on home construction.

Backed by Citizens for Limited Growth’s modest budget, the propositions lost in the face of a more than $2-million campaign against them by builders. Three other growth-control measures on the same ballot were rejected by voters.

Last year, again with a modest budget, PLAN led the successful campaign to defeat two ballot measures placed on the ballot by the building industry.

The PLAN initiative seeks to force builders to pay their fair share of the services required to accompany new development. Building would be planned to mitigate its impact on traffic, police protection, the availability of water and the city’s sewage system and economic growth. Affordable housing would be promoted.

PLAN is returning to the ballot out of frustration at the council’s failure to implement most of the requirements of a 1989 PLAN initiative, which the city embraced in concept in early 1990 but failed to enforce, Navarro claims.

In the intervening 18 months, PLAN’s message appears to have broadened--a perceived change in strategy often noted by those who believe Navarro has political ambitions.

In addition to the organization’s insistent hammering on unchecked growth’s link to traffic congestion, pollution and vanishing open space, PLAN’s recent radio ads cite growth’s impact on money available to hire police officers--thus including another voter “hot button” in a platform that already encompasses many of the top local issues.

In interviews, Navarro also frequently notes his initiative’s appeal to “fiscal conservatives,” the kind of anti-tax voter responsible for Proposition 13.

Navarro claims that PLAN has always cited such examples, but now the message is getting through. “We’re now being heard,” he said. “In the past, we essentially had developers putting words in our mouths.”

The initiative also includes a provision guaranteeing “payment of livable wage rates to construction workers” on most development projects, public and private. The clause, which may mollify building trades workers who believe that growth management will eliminate jobs, is cited by Navarro critics as an attempt to woo labor support for himself as well.

In fact, Local 230 of the Plumbers and Steamfitters union has donated more than $25,000 to PLAN’s signature-gathering campaign, said Steve Vealey, the organization’s financial secretary-treasurer, but not out of political allegiance.

“It’s because the quality of life in San Diego has deteriorated,” Vealey said. “My people live here and work here. Their children go to school here. They’ve seen the quality of everything decline.”

Nuts-and-bolts political strategists also point to PLAN’s growth as a political force. The group that began two years ago as a band of academics and activists now boasts a full-time staff of four, a small phone-bank operation, polling capacity and a computer system with 200,000 voter histories that have been “enhanced” with other information, Navarro said.

PLAN recently mailed 50,000 copies of its initiative to selected voters, seeking both signatures and money.

PLAN endorses candidates, and some of its more than 5,000 members walk precincts for it. In this spring’s election to replace recalled Councilwoman Linda Bernhardt, PLAN ran its own candidate, Les Braund, who placed third, behind well-financed winner Tom Behr and former Councilman Floyd Morrow. Navarro likes to claim that PLAN and Braund raised more money from non-developer sources than anyone else in the race.

This summer, PLAN will lease the information on its computer system and offer its backing to George Stevens, who is seeking to unseat Councilman Wes Pratt in the upcoming council race.

“This is a very, very sophisticated operation going on,” Kern said.

Navarro will also enjoy the undoubted asset of running as an outsider at a time when the City Council’s reputation for leadership and competence has plunged to perhaps its lowest point in recent years, and incumbents at every level are viewed with suspicion.

“In many ways, not being an elected official is an advantage to him, because he’s been able to take a clear unambiguous position against growth,” said Michael Shames, chairman of the Sierra Club’s political committee.

“He is getting people out there contributing to a cause. He is the embodiment of that cause. Peter is offering people a crusade,” Kern said.

The flip side of that advantage, of course, is the danger of being pegged a single-issue candidate with no knowledge of other issues. “He does not have a stand or a history of accomplishing anything in any other area,” said Jean Andrews, a political consultant with long ties to the building industry. “What about cops? That’s a pretty important issue with the voters.”

In a race that could cost $1 million to win, Navarro’s lack of money would seem an insurmountable disadvantage to getting his message out--though no one knows if Navarro has personal wealth to tap for the race.

In April, Navarro personally loaned $9,000 to candidate Braund. He also has contributed to his organization, according to financial statements, but not the kind of money needed for a respectable showing in a mayoral primary.

At her opening fund-raiser two weeks ago, attended by 400 mostly prominent San Diegans, Golding raised $62,000, campaign sources said. In contrast, PLAN’s financial statement, due July 31, will show about the same amount of funds raised during the first six months of 1991, Navarro said.

Navarro also would have to contend with opponents and developers attempting to paint him as a single-issue, no-growth candidate, one who floated a flawed measure simply to advance his own political ambition.

“I think running for mayor might color the work he’s done for the past few years,” said John Whitehurst, consultant for Roberts’ 1991 City Council reelection campaign.

“The concern would be that it would politicize the PLAN initiative,” said Shames. “But, given the nature of the initiative, I’m not sure the initiative would suffer from that politicization.”

Navarro also would have to overcome his reputation among city leaders as an uncompromising hothead, a town crier more at home “lobbing grenades into other people’s bunkers” than engaging in the give and take of politics, in the words of one political observer.

Similarly, longtime friction between Navarro and Sierra Club leaders over strategy for the environmental agenda could make that organization’s crucial endorsement difficult to obtain, several environmentalists noted. Golding, on the other hand, might not have that difficulty.

“I think that Susan’s candidacy is going to be able to pass itself off as realistic environmentalism: ‘We care about the environment, but we’re not going to destroy the economy,’ ” said Andrews.

Navarro’s own polls show that his name recognition among city voters is low--but so is everyone else’s, with nearly a year to go before the primary, said Scott Flexo, a pollster who has been conducting surveys for PLAN during the past year.

Roberts and Navarro are about even in voter identification, Golding ranks higher, and Killea is the best-known of all the frequently mentioned candidates, Flexo said.

“In this town, he’s fooling himself,” said Bernhardt, who believes she was done in by developer interests, the Copley press and Mayor Maureen O’Connor. “Look at what happened to me. You can’t survive. They are too powerful.”

With months before the race begins in earnest, many of the factors that will determine who is San Diego’s next mayor are as yet imponderable. For Navarro, in addition to the presence of other candidates and the availability of money, the key may be the state of the city’s economy and whether growth alone will motivate voters to support a candidate.

“In many ways, it depends on how hot the issue is. San Diegans have shown they can be very issue-oriented,” said Shames. “In 1992, after San Diegans have lived with two years of recession, I do not know if they will look at growth the same way.”