Both Sides Assess Their Scars From Recall Battle

Oceanside City Councilwoman Melba Bishop, a day after defeating a bitterly contested recall attempt, said Wednesday it’s time for reconciliation and a return to business as normal.

Others hope not.

The Oceanside Firefighters Assn., which spent about $15,000 of its own money to campaign for Bishop’s ouster, said it had no regrets taking on the locally powerful politician and has no plans to retreat now that it has lost.

In fact, said the organization’s president, the firefighters have emerged with their own political punch that will be delivered again in future elections.

And the man behind the unsuccessful recall effort said Wednesday that he’s still holding his head high and promised that “we’re going to watch her every move--and she’s going to know it.”

Bishop, 49, was able to repel the recall attempt with her trademark, well-greased grass-roots political machinery that put thousands of absentee ballots in the hands of identified supporters early in the campaign. More than 5,000 returned them before the final days of the campaign, giving Bishop a kick-start into Election Day that allowed her to prevail.

The final but unofficial results on Wednesday showed that of the 38% of the city’s voters who cast ballots, 12,313--or 55.4%--wanted Bishop to remain in office and finish the fourth year of her second term. Nearly 45% of the voters, or 9,834, cast ballots against Bishop.

About half of Bishop’s votes were garnered ahead of time, through absentee voting that was the linchpin of her campaign strategy.

Bishop said the defeat of the recall was an endorsement not only of her, but of the two council colleagues whom she helped into office last year--Don Rodee and Nancy York.

“Oceanside indicated on Tuesday that it knew what it was doing when it voted last November,” Bishop said Wednesday. “The voters were reaffirming their previous vote. They want a council that will handle the city’s money like they would handle their own, and they want people in office who are for managed growth. And they want the special interests and political cronies out of their City Hall.”

At issue in the recall were accusations that the upstart Bishop troika had turned City Hall upside down overnight with its brand of politics, including the removal of political adversaries from the Planning Commission and the removal of Mayor Larry Bagley as the city’s representative on the San Diego Assn. of Governments, a regional planning organization.

There were charges, too, that the Bishop majority ordered across-the-board budget cuts that were insensitive to the peculiar needs of the Police and Fire departments, which had lagged behind in keeping pace with the city’s growth.

The election created predictable adversaries--businessmen against neighborhood groups, for instance; pro-growthers against slow-growthers; mobile home park owners against mobile home park tenants.

But, if the recall created one longer-lasting crease in local politics, it may well prove to be the emergence of the 99-member Oceanside Firefighters Assn.

“We are now a visible political organization in Oceanside,” said the group’s president, Wayne Mounts. “We went through years of being simply spectators, and we watched what can happen to you if the council majority flips against public safety.

“This year, we chose not to be spectators, but to be participants, and to try to have some effect on the outcome of the vote. And, we will continue to be participants in local politics.”

Mounts said it wasn’t the association’s intent to involve itself in politics, but that efforts to get the council majority to soften its position on harsh budget cuts and the council’s decision to reorganize the way the paramedic program is operated in Oceanside, forced its hand.

“We finally decided we had to take a (political) stance and stand up for public safety, because the city has fallen so far behind in its ability to protect citizens.

“The last new fire station was built in 1974, and that year we had 1,000 calls for service. Last year, we had 8,350 calls, and it’s going up, and we’re stretched even thinner. We went through three rounds of budget cuts, and we didn’t see the council considering public safety as an essential service, but just one more department to deal with.

“So it was time to stand up for what we felt was right,” Mounts said. “We exhausted all the good-guy options before resorting to the recall. That became our only remaining option.”

He said he didn’t think the firefighters’ political involvement will necessarily jeopardize their position the next time biannual salary negotiations resume.

“Who knows which way it will go? But politicians come and go, and city managers come and go. Firefighters, though, have a 20- or 30-year career in the city, and we’re in for the duration. We have to stick up for safe staffing.”

Mounts said he was frustrated that, although the association has been bruised by the recall campaign, the issues that forced its involvement still have not been resolved.

“A lot of us are relieved the election process is at least over, but morale is pretty low. The problems that we brought to light early on still haven’t been addressed,” Mounts said.

Mayor Bagley, who left Oceanside early Wednesday morning for a post-election rest at his vacation condominium in Utah, said by telephone from there that he, too, is worried whether the Fire Department will remain integral after the election.

“There’s a lot of bitterness among them,” Bagley said. “I think we’re at risk of losing a third of them tomorrow, if there were cities that were hiring.”

Bagley said he hopes the city will put the recall behind it.

“We still have a city to run,” Bagley said. Recall elections “aren’t supposed to be one person against another, but that’s the way they turn out. I think, in a way, this recall will help clear the air a little bit.

“None of us came through this unscarred, and hopefully each of us learned something about it.”

Ed Wicburg, who led the recall effort, hopes that Bishop, first and foremost, learned something by it.

“We’re not going to walk away. We’re going to watch her, and she’s going to know we’re watching her. She’s got a lot of plans for the city which I don’t like and we’ll question each one of them.

“I think the whole city has been enlightened to what’s going on at City Hall. The whole city will be watching her.

“She’s still got the same amount of power,” Wicburg said of Bishop, “but I don’t think she’ll wield it the way she did. I think this recall election has tempered her.”

For her part, Bishop says she already had tempered her somewhat flamboyant political style after her first term in office, from 1980 to 1984.

“The recallers harken back to my earlier days in politics, when I was brand new and fresh and green and younger and a lot more uncompromising than I’ve grown to be over the years,” Bishop said.

Even in the day after the election, there was still lingering pouting, with Bishop claiming that 1,000 of her supporters were not allowed to vote because they were erroneously not sent sample ballots and were declared ineligible to vote by the City Clerk’s office.

City Clerk Barbara Bishop-Smith (no relation to the council member) acknowledged confusion about the voter rolls, but said her office simply was working with lists of voters provided by the county registrar of voters. If there were problems or shortcomings, she said, her office should not be held accountable.

Voters who claimed they were denied the right to vote were allowed to cast ballots after signing statements contending their right, but the paperwork was too complicated for many voters, Melba Bishop said.

Answered the city clerk: “Everything is a paperwork pain-in-the-butt and voting is no different.”