Candidates Line Coffers With Hustle : Politics: Mayoral contenders are working harder, devising new tactics to pry funds from recession-riddled donors.

Tom Carter spent Valentine’s Day with five local women, plus his wife. Nothing kinky--the San Diego mayoral candidate was just trying to raise money for his campaign.

Carter used the Valentine’s Day tie-in to send personal invitations to 60 prominent local women for his $250-a-plate lunch at Pacifica Grill, just one of several theme events Carter is counting on to replace more traditional fund-raising methods this year.

“That’s the type of thing we might not have thought of before,” said Henri Lagatella, Carter’s chief fund-raiser. In years past, “we could have raised that dollar amount, say, from developers, who could have . . . made a few phone calls and raised $25,000 to $50,000.”

The collapse of San Diego’s building industry, the ongoing recession and the unusual number of competitive races produced by reapportionment have made 1992 a tough year for local political fund-raising, forcing candidates to work harder and resort to new tactics to raise critically needed cash for their campaigns.

Unable to depend as heavily on the building industry, which has financed as much as 60% to 70% of some past campaigns, candidates are working overtime to expand their fund-raising base by tapping “non-traditional” sources of money--ethnic groups, friends, acquaintances and professional contacts who typically avoid electoral politics.

“It used to be that the development industry . . . bankrolled campaigns,” said Nancy Pusanik, campaign manager in County Supervisor Susan Golding’s mayoral bid. “It’s not going to happen anymore.”

Unlike those running for some higher offices, local candidates are constrained by laws which prohibit contributions from political action committees and corporations, and limit personal contributions to $250 apiece in the primary and runoff elections.

With whole segments of the relatively narrow group of local political contributors staggered by recession and job cuts, candidates know that they will have to make do with less money and more hustle.

“You have to scale down your expectations about what you can raise and you have to scale down your expectations about” spending, said political consultant Ann Shanahan-Walsh, who is running a congressional campaign. “People who have never been politically active before are going to be tapped for the first time.”

Of course, few candidates are willing to concede that their fund-raising will suffer; it’s the other guy who is expected to falter. That’s because fund-raising is one of the few barometers of credibility and success in the early going, when candidates at all levels are trying to distinguish themselves from the rest of the pack.

“Will it be more difficult to raise money this year? The answer is yes,” said Councilman Ron Roberts, another candidate for mayor. “Will we be able to raise the money? Yes. This campaign will have the dollars to get the job done.”

But attorney Robert Simmons quit his race for the 3rd District County Supervisor seat that Golding is vacating primarily because of fund-raising difficulties. Simmons said he had collected about $20,000 between Dec. 1 and mid-February, when he left the race--and it wasn’t nearly enough.

“I was getting a good many contributions, but they were $50, $100 maximum,” Simmons said. “The $250 contributions didn’t materialize.

“They are legitimately hurting. The people I’m drawing from are hurting,” he added.

The building industry is the best example. According to the Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce, 4,200 of the 62,300 jobs in the construction trades were lost in 1991. The real estate industry dropped another 1,300 employees.

“The building industry has been the primary fund-raising source for political campaigns and building is flat,” said Walsh. “The industry is dead in the water right now.”

“I can’t contribute $250 at a pop to . . . four, five or six candidates,” added Mac Strobl, a building industry political consultant who would prefer to spread the wealth. “I don’t have that kind of money. No way.”

Another indicator is the building industry’s political action committee, which took in $104,300 in 1991. That was $9,300 more than it received the year before, but the 1991 committee included more than twice as many firms, the result of a merger of several building industry associations.

Many major construction industry firms, which had contributed up to $1,000 to the building industry PAC in 1990, were either bankrupt or willing to give much less in 1991.

“A lot of . . . local political donors in the construction industry are out of business,” said Tom Shepard, Golding’s campaign consultant. “Whole pieces of that (industry) have dropped out.”

Builders are hardly the only ones suffering. The banking, manufacturing and retail sectors have reduced their work forces. In fact, virtually every employer except local and state governments have slashed jobs, said Kelly Cunningham, senior research analyst for the Chamber’s economic research bureau.

Still, no one expects the powerful building industry to sit out the all-important mayor’s race. Offered the first opportunity to influence a mayor’s race since Maureen O’Connor took office in 1986, no sizable interest group can afford to be inactive, regardless of the recession.

Some observers expect the builders to husband their resources until the runoff election, and predict that they will do whatever it takes if managed growth leader Peter Navarro were to become one of the finalists. Navarro, founder of Prevent Los Angelization Now! rose to political prominence by calling for controls on home building.

“Financially, I think it will be a limited year for us,” said Frank Panarisi, chairman of the local Construction Industry Federation. But “there is no question we will be active.”

Despite hard times, both Roberts and Carter are hoping to raise $500,000 for the mayoral primary alone. Navarro’s aides estimate he will collect $150,000 for the primary campaign, which ends June 2, when two of the candidates will survive for a head-to-head contest Nov. 3.

Shepard and Karolyn Dorsee, Golding’s chief fund-raiser, declined to list the supervisor’s fund-raising goal for the primary.

Carter’s and Roberts’ predictions appear ambitious, even considering the effects of inflation, when compared with spending in the 1986 mayor’s race, the last time the seat was open.

According to their financial reports, then-City Councilman Bill Cleator spent about $267,000 in the 1986 primary, and eventual victor O’Connor spent $110,000. Each spent more in the second half of the race.

Roberts and Golding, the two elected officials in the mayor’s race, have demonstrated recent fund-raising prowess. Roberts raised more than $300,000 to win re-election to the council last year, even as the county’s building industry suffered through its worst year in a decade.

And Golding, who started fund-raising earlier than all her competitors, had amassed $157,000 in contributions for the current mayor’s race by the end of last year.

Navarro’s organization raised more than $120,000 in a failed attempt to qualify a growth management measure for the June ballot.

Campaigns are responding to the fund-raising challenge in different ways, though many are reluctant to provide details out of fear that their opponents will swipe their ideas. Several consultants spoke of maximizing the efforts of volunteers and the candidates themselves, a daunting task in the city-wide mayor’s race or the supervisorial contests.

Candidates are scaling down the size of their requests, looking more to their personal networks of contacts and seeking ways to cut costs.

San Diego City Councilwoman Judy McCarty, who is attempting to win Golding’s supervisorial seat, is delaying the opening of her campaign headquarters to save money on rent, phones, insurance, furniture and food for volunteers, said consultant John Kern.

“Until we get a better sense of what the ultimate goal is, of what is ultimately possible, we’re running our campaign out of people’s houses,” Kern said.

For Carter, “theme” fund-raising events, like a reception featuring former San Diego State University and San Diego Chargers Coach Don Coryell, have become a key fund-raising mechanism. Carter invited 5,000 people to the upcoming Aztec reception.

The Golding campaign is seeking more money than usual from women donors and trying to make in-roads among San Diego’s Chinese population. “They haven’t been big political players, but they want to be,” said Shepard. “So we’ve been encouraging them to use the campaign as an organizing tool.”

Golding’s campaign also will stress more personal contact with contributors, relying less on mail solicitation, Dorsee said. “What’s happening . . . is we’re having to go back to basics,” she said, “in the trenches, hands-on sales contact.”

Navarro, who has no hope of attracting support from builders, must raise small contributions from large numbers of people, making maximum use of volunteer support and his own energy.

“It’s a nickel and dime strategy,” said Steve Erie, a UC San Diego political scientist who sat in on some early Navarro strategy sessions. “It means he’s spending an incredible amount of time fund-raising.”

But Navarro will attempt to claim the political advantage of pointing to his opponents’ developer contributions, always a touchy subject in San Diego politics. “It’s all relative,” he said. The building industry “is still going to provide the lion’s share of funds to those candidates,” he said of his opponents.

Navarro and Carter also have shown willingness to dip into their own pockets. Navarro plowed more than $26,000 of his own money into his campaign, accounting for half of all funds raised during 1991, according to financial reports. In the same period, Carter loaned his campaign $10,000, or about 25% of the more than $40,000 he had raised.