Bishop Survives Recall Vote in Oceanside

Embattled Vice Mayor Melba Bishop, riding on the strength of her grass-roots political machine, survived a recall effort Tuesday and preserved her role as matriarch of the City Council’s slow-growth majority.

With virtually all the votes counted but pending a final canvass involving about 7,730 absentee ballots, Bishop got 55% of the vote.

Turnout was 38% of the city’s voters.

The 49-year-old Bishop said: “I think the voters have spoken, and what they’ve said is, they didn’t make a mistake last November” when they elected two of her allies to the council.

At her campaign headquarters late Tuesday, Bishop reached for her victory speech. “I’ve got one that says ‘Defeated’ and one that says ‘Victory,’ ” she said, blushing.

Recall leader Ed Wicburg, secluded at an Oceanside restaurant, refused to meet with reporters.

By holding onto office, Bishop will get to finish the fourth year of her second term--one in which the one-time council rebel was finally enjoying the fruits of her political prowess after having guided two allies to City Council election last year.

Bishop, who was alternately cast as the corrupted, manipulative power broker and the quintessence of the grass-roots, populist politician, characterized the recall as “the political battle of my life.”

“A recall is an uphill battle for a politician. It’s the only situation in the United States of America where you’re guilty until proven innocent,” she said.

Still, she said, she wasn’t sour.

“You can’t be bitter or sour against anyone. This is corny, but I have to tell you the truth: I have a seriously ill child (a 22-year-old son with cancer). And I go to God every day and ask him to keep him alive. You don’t ask God to keep your child alive and and say, ‘By the way, I hate some people.’ You have to ask Him to forgive you for any thoughts you have that were bad against anyone.”

The movement to recall Bishop catalyzed after last year’s city elections, when two of her political allies, Nancy York and Don Rodee, were elected to the council, giving Bishop--who until then had been the council rebel--a majority voting bloc.

The new Bishop troika moved quickly to claim its power; at the first post-election council meeting, they fired their political adversaries from the city’s Planning Commission and dumped Mayor Larry Bagley as the city’s representative on the San Diego Assn. of Governments, a regional planning organization.

In the ensuing weeks of the power transfer, the city manager, city attorney, police chief and fire chief resigned, leaving City Hall, already deep in fiscal crisis, in further turmoil.

Bishop’s critics claimed she was on a power trip, and even she conceded later that maybe she was guilty of “bad manners” for the rapidity with which the new majority bloc turned City Hall on its head.

But Bishop’s supporters sang her praises, saying the new council voting bloc was finally representing the will of the citizens and was only stripping the “old guard” of its power and ridding City Hall of its pro-development bent.

Bishop was first elected to the Oceanside City Council in 1980. Four years later, she ran for mayor and lost to her political nemesis, Bagley, who is now in his third term as mayor.

She ran again for election to the City Council in 1986 and lost, but was elected in 1988, placing second for two council seats out of a field of 11 candidates and getting 25.7% of the vote.

The recall election proved the tougher test just by definition, said her campaign manager, Kit-Bacon Gressitt. “In a general election, you’ve just got to get a plurality of the votes. In a recall, you’ve got to win by 50% plus one. She was being asked to keep her seat by winning twice the percentage of votes she got the first time.”

Tuesday’s recall pit traditional adversaries against one another--and created a strange pairing of combatants.

The Oceanside Merchants Assn. and other business leaders--including mobile home park owners--generally worked for Bishop’s downfall, saying her slow-growth political agenda was cooling economic development in Oceanside, the third largest city in San Diego County.

But strongly on Bishop’s side were neighborhood associations, senior citizens groups and mobile home park residents, for whom the councilwoman has supported rent controls.

The Oceanside Police Officer’s Assn., fresh from having received pay increases, came down on Bishop’s side in the recall, while the Oceanside Firefighters Assn., saying Bishop stung the department by reorganizing the paramedic program against its wishes, actively campaigned against her.

Indeed, the loudest cry of foul politics in the closing day of the recall campaign came when the firefighters union distributed flyers to targeted neighborhoods, saying that, in a city with too few fire stations, they lived in “dead zones,” where a paramedic or fire engine response could take 10 minutes or longer. The flyers blamed Bishop for that.

“That part of the recallers’ campaign was very negative, very unethical and a dishonest effort to dissuade Melba’s supporters from voting for her,” Gressitt complained. “They were very frightening flyers. They went for the emotional jugular.

“Politics in Oceanside is a fairly dirty game by general standards anyway,” she said. “But this election was particularly foul, even by Oceanside standards.”

Bishop and her band of supporters tried to work the phone banks in the closing days of the campaign to neutralize the flyer, Gressitt said.

“The firefighters were the only powerful force in the recall effort,” she said. “The others were simply old-guard people in Oceanside who lost their position of power and were trying to regain it.”

The Bishop campaign strategy was to identify her supporters early in the recall campaign and provide them with absentee ballots so they could cast their votes early--and before the last week, when any last-minute “hit pieces” could be expected to surface, Gressitt said.

“The absentee ballot program was the key to us,” she said. “We knew we would get hit very badly in the last week, and we knew we had to get our votes in early.”

For a time Tuesday, though, the strategy only caused confusion within Bishop’s ranks. So many absentee ballots were cast that the Oceanside city clerk’s office was unable to distribute lists to each of the polling places of the names of those who had cast absentee ballots ahead of time.

As a result Tuesday, Bishop’s campaign forces weren’t sure whether the voters they thought they had lined up had voted or not, and, as darkness fell, they were left wondering whether targeted voters had indeed cast their absentee ballots ahead of time, as they had promised they would.

“And, once it got dark, you don’t know if you can get them out to vote,” Gressitt said.

Bishop said she didn’t think the recall election would scar the city.

“Oceanside can recover. It’s a very resilient city,” she said. “I don’t think the recall was about me, personally, or even the charges against me. It was about people who wanted to get back into control, who lost at the last election.”