Oceanside’s Vice Mayor at Center of Recall Storm

It was a sky-high political triumph for Oceanside City Councilwoman Melba Bishop--simultaneously one of the most beloved and reviled politicians in San Diego County--and now that victory may bring her down.

Only last November, this caldron of political passion overcame earlier failures and guided the election of two allies to the council, where they have forged an iron-fisted slow-growth bloc.

But now, she is headed for a recall election--the county’s second this year--that will judge whether Bishop, who has become vice mayor, has ridden the frothy crest of her power too far.

Under the new majority, city government has been spun around like a top. Department heads have resigned under pressure. Half the Planning Commission has been fired. Mayor Larry Bagley’s authority has been hobbled. And tough budget-cutting decisions have infuriated some community groups.

“Politics involves power,” said Bishop, who sees her enemies circling and adds, “Well, I guess I never learned to keep my mouth shut. I never learned to go along to get along.”

Against a bitter backdrop of political intrigue and accusation, Bishop stands at the center, a moon-faced figure typically in a bright floral dress who commands either fierce loyalty or biting hatred.

When it comes to Bishop, there seem to be no feelings in between.

“People who support her love her honesty, and they respect her opinion and trust her,” said Charisse Krieger, who belongs to Bishop’s inner circle. “Somehow Melba’s honesty has been misconstrued to be something evil and dastardly.”

Then comes this bee sting from ex-Councilwoman Lucy Chavez, once a friend and supporter of Bishop, now turned irreconcilable foe: “She’s an expert manipulator, one of the most cunningly clever minds that’s come to Oceanside in a long time . . . tyrants are made of such stuff as Melba Bishop.”

Even one of Bishop’s staunchest backers, city Planning Commissioner Dennis Martinek, had to admit, “When she makes enemies, she really makes enemies.”

The political world of Melba Bishop isn’t confined to the ornate council chambers or the living rooms of her followers where goals and strategy are cogitated and plotted.

Her influence goes beyond her city of nearly 130,000 people, the third-largest municipality in the county behind San Diego and Chula Vista. Bishop has been a motivating force behind a broad slow-growth movement, and she’s rumored to be interested in running for county Supervisor John McDonald’s seat. She wholly denies wanting higher office.

Bob Glaser, a La Jolla-based attorney and political consultant, said: “She became leader of the slow-growth movement in North County. She’s in the vanguard of what a city can do to regulate growth.” Glaser is the lawyer for a group that’s filed a lawsuit to derail the recall election.

For Bishop, 49, surviving the recall may be the ultimate test of her political prowess and grass-roots support. But, in a lesser respect, it is one more fight in an 11-year career drenched in conflict and her lion-like ability to rise from defeat.

“If they can portray me as a power-hungry person with a bloc vote on council, then it’s possible to remove me,” she said. But Bishop has come too far to let anybody get away with that without a struggle.

Certainly not the very people who once held the council majority, until, after years of being a lone voice, Bishop shepherded the election of allies Nancy York and Don Rodee in November.

Bishop has learned the old-fashioned way how to win at politics. It was part of her breeding as she grew up in Hemet and Riverside, one of six daughters of a gardener and a politically active mother who took Melba, at age 6, to canvass precincts for Harry Truman. (Her mother was once a wire walker in a circus, a skill Bishop is in a position to appreciate.)

She met “this lovely Marine from boot camp” and moved to Oceanside to be near him at Camp Pendleton. In 1964, she married Lucky Bishop, a career Marine, an enlisted man who served four tours in Vietnam before retiring with 20 years in uniform. The Bishops have four sons.

The Bishops live in a modest stucco home in a working-class neighborhood near the back gate of Camp Pendleton. The living room, kept dark during the day, boasts dozens of family photographs. The telephone, Bishop’s political lifeline, rings every three minutes without fail. As it rings yet again, she mutters “shut up” under her breath.

She sits during an interview, surgically slicing bites from a pear and tilting frighteningly far back in a rocking chair. She is wearing an American flag T-shirt and recalling that time, back in 1975, when a left-turn lane drove her into politics.

Citizen Bishop descended upon the then-City Council, exhorting it about the need for the turn lane in her neighborhood. She said it took repeated return trips to the council, but she got her turn lane and the beginning of a political career.

In 1980, she was elected to the council, served four boisterous, acrimonious years, and suffered her first defeat. That was in 1984, when she ran for mayor against Larry Bagley, who won then and is now serving his third term as a directly elected mayor.

She tried to jump back on the council in the 1986 election, but lost again. Finally, Bishop pushed the council door open again in 1988 and is in the third year of her latest term.

And once again, supported by York and Rodee on most issues, Melba Bishop is rattling the town, raising both cheers and boos.

Why do people love Bishop?

Said her neighbor, Bonnie Roberts: “She is really a very concerned human being. I feel she’s been maligned. . . . I’ve seen factions make vicious, vicious attacks against Melba (at council meetings), and she just sat there like a lady and took it.”

Krieger remembers calling Bishop for help four years ago to fight a proposed recycling center near her house that would handle hazardous wastes. “That woman spent three hours on the phone with me that night, telling me how to figure out the situation,” said Krieger, who has been loyal ever since and has been appointed to the Planning Commission.

Martinek, another Bishop backer and planning commissioner, has a similar story of political bonding a few years ago when Bishop taught him the ropes in opposing a large residential development on agricultural land near his neighborhood.

“Rather than being a highfalutin politician, she helps. She doesn’t distance herself from the average citizen,” Martinek said. “She’s helped slow down the rapid rate of growth, she’s done a lot for individual neighborhoods and (set) standards the development community has had to meet.”

Why do people hate Bishop, or at least her style?

Nancy Jakovac, once a Bishop ally, accused her of only posturing for growth issue.

“She doesn’t give a damn whether there’s slow growth, fast growth or in-between growth so long as she’s in control,” she said.

Then Jakovac, clearly bitter that the council majority had fired her from the Planning Commission last December, said: “I was going to resign anyway, I had had a heart attack. If she (Bishop) had given me time, I’d have left on my own volition. I had open-heart surgery and she knew it.” (Bishop claims she thought Jakovac was recovering and planned to continue serving.)

Ed Wicburg, the recall campaign leader, said: “The need for power is what makes Melba tick. . . . I don’t think people stick with her. They get run over or pushed aside.”

And Mayor Bagley, his own power diminished, said voters see televised council meetings and especially remember the tumultuous Dec. 5 session. That’s when York and Rodee took office, and the majority proceeded to fire adversaries on the Planning Commission and strip Bagley of his post on the San Diego Assn. of Government’s board.

Television “has had more effect than anything,” Bagley said. “The arrogance was there. The vindictiveness came across. People watch. They’re offended.”

To be sure, Bishop can dish it back.

Of one-time friend Chavez, whose November reelection defeat Bishop did much to hasten, Bishop said: “I don’t have hatred for her. I feel sorry for her. She has a narrow view of the world and Oceanside. She sees Oceanside as she saw it as a young woman. She’s in a dream world. It’s still 1949.”

Even so, knowing that some hate her “hurts me very badly. I am not thick skinned.”

With so much bad blood openly flowing, it’s little wonder the jousting for power never ends, and that Oceanside is the venue for the county’s second recall election this year.

The first was in April, when voters overwhelmingly removed San Diego City Councilwoman Linda Bernhardt over her plan to change council district boundaries.

Bishop is no innocent herself when it comes to the bare-knuckled business of recall. In 1981, her critics say, she masterminded the successful recall of two council foes accused of misusing their city expense account. Bishop denies being a recall leader, but concedes that she did everything possible to embarrass the two colleagues.

And now it’s her turn.

Recall forces accuse her of being the power-mongering leader of a cutthroat majority that’s slashed police and fire services and presided over the resignations of Police Chief Oliver Drummond, City Atty. Charles Revlett and Fire Chief Jim Rankin. They further claim that Bishop played a role in last year’s resignation of City Manager Ronald Bradley.

One of those former city officials, asking not to be identified, said of Bishop: “She’s manipulative, and she interprets information in a way to serve her purpose that may be totally inaccurate. . . . I think she wants complete control.”

For Bishop, the reality is quite different.

She views the recall as motivated by Chavez’s vengeance over being defeated and Bagley’s desire to recast the council the way it was, run by an old guard that prominently included himself.

If she goes, and slow growth loses its majority, Bishop said, the city’s balance of power will shift and the developers will once again hold sway in Oceanside.

Bishop sees the recall campaign as seeking to return to the days of city overspending (recent budget cuts erased a $5.8-million deficit), and purported council bullying of the city staff to promote special projects.

“They want the power back themselves,” she said. “The charges they’ve leveled against me have never been substantiated. I feel the recall was born in deceit.”

Neighbor Bonnie Roberts, scoffing at allegations that Bishop leads a council bloc, put it this way about Bishop’s critics: “They talk about a voting bloc. What do they think they had?”

With the recall election coming in November, maybe sooner, local developers don’t seem eager to step in the way of this buzz saw, despite the election outcome’s possible effect on growth policies.

“From our perspective, it’s in our best interest to remain a passive observer,” said Brad Griggs, project manager for Fieldstone’s Rancho Del Oro development. “This thing is a really dirty mess.”

Perhaps the single biggest rallying point of Bishop’s foes was the harsh Dec. 5 council meeting, when half the planning commissioners were ousted and Bagley was unceremoniously beached from SANDAG.

Now, Bishop has regrets over how that meeting was handled. “I think the meeting just plain got away from us,” she said, largely blaming York and Rodee with idealistically wanting to reform city government in one day. “It was their naivete. . . . They know it was heavy-handed.”

It was, she said, a case of “bad manners, yes. Bad decisions, no.” Recall leaders shortly after that bloody meeting targeted Bishop, but not York or Rodee, who had not served long enough to be legally recalled.

That leaves Bishop.

“She’ll go down fighting,” said Jakovac.

Of course, Bishop doesn’t plan to go down at all.