Business Leaders Plan Lobby Effort : Politics: Chamber of Commerce director charges that the new group is a platform for the finance chairman of Susan Golding’s mayoral campaign.

Seeking to restore the lost clout of San Diego’s business community, leaders of some of the region’s top companies are reviving a lobbying group that they hope will give them more influence over the public policy decisions that directly affect them.

Led by Robert J. Lichter, president and chief executive officer of John Burnham & Co., the Coalition for San Diego Business hopes to become the political voice of the city’s diverse, changing business community on issues spanning regulation, growth management, transportation, infrastructure, redevelopment, water supply and air quality, to name just a few.

“For too long, we business leaders have allowed our interests to be pushed aside by the stampede of regulations, fee impositions and populist movements,” Lichter wrote in a recruitment letter he sent to hundreds of San Diego businesses Tuesday.

“It’s our turn as employers and the backbone of this community to unify our diverse businesses into one cohesive and, yes, powerful voice,” he added.

But Lee Grissom, executive director of the Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce, which traditionally has filled such a role, said that the new group is intended largely as a platform for Lichter’s personal goals.

Grissom said that the group will be something that Lichter can “directly and immediately influence, and he will use as a platform . . . for his own personal agenda.”

Grissom said that the group, which is coming together in the middle of the primary campaign for mayor of San Diego, will be viewed as a tool for Lichter to help elect County Supervisor Susan Golding, the front-runner in the race. Lichter, who flirted with the idea of running for mayor himself, is finance chairman of Golding’s campaign.

Grissom also said he wondered “if, financially, it’s prudent for the (business) community to take on another group which seems to be redundant to other groups already in existence.”

Lichter, who said he hopes that the Chamber of Commerce will become part of his organization, promised that the group would stay out of the 1992 mayor’s race, as long as the finalists included Golding, San Diego City Councilman Ron Roberts or financier Tom Carter.

If Peter Navarro, founder of the growth management group Prevent Los Angelization Now!, were to make the runoff, however, the group would work against his candidacy, Lichter said.

While politics will not be the organization’s focus, it does hope to take advantage of San Diego Mayor Maureen O’Connor’s retirement and local government’s recession-induced posture of cooperation with the business community to restore the private sector’s stature, Lichter said. “The timing is perfect,” he wrote in the recruitment letter. “Finally, government and the average citizen realize jobs and the restoration of our system of economic balance dictate that the pendulum has swung back towards the essentials of capitalism.”

Moreover, it is time for someone to fill the leadership vacuum in the business community that developed in recent years, when a number of large corporate headquarters left town and the savings and loan crisis claimed top banking executives who doubled as civic leaders, Lichter said.

“Somehow, we’ve been brow-beaten to believing we shouldn’t use the word influence or clout or power or whatever it is,” Lichter said in an interview. “And clearly we have to get that influence back.”

Lichter said that he already has enlisted some of the city’s top executives, leaders of a wide range of industries, to head the organization, which will be an extension of the current Coalition for San Diego, which has been active in past battles over growth management ballot measures.

They include Tom Page, chairman of San Diego Gas & Electric Co.; Robert Goldsmith, president of Rohr Inc.; David Hale, chief executive officer of Gensia Pharmaceuticals; Peter Davis, head of the Bank of Commerce; Gail Stoorza Gill, a partner in the public relations firm Stoorza, Ziegaus and Metzger; and Richard Vortman, president of Nassco. Lichter has named himself chairman.