LOCAL ELECTIONS SAN DIEGO MAYOR’S RACE...

Demographers call them “belongers.” Richard Nixon called them “the silent majority.” They work hard, join the PTA, trim their lawns. They don’t ask much of government--only that it keep the streets safe and their taxes down.

And they are San Diego City Councilman Ron Roberts’ best hope for a chance to become mayor of the city in which he--like they--grew up, went to school, married, bought a home and prospered.

Despite four years in office and six more before that on the city’s Planning Commission, Roberts entered the mayor’s race without the core constituency or citywide profile that his rivals are counting on to propel them past the June 2 primary and into an expected November runoff between the two top vote-getters.

So Roberts is reaching out to the city’s middle-class homeowners with a message that highlights his own all-American upbringing, his family and his successful struggle to build a small business.

It is a difficult political undertaking, especially in a year when money is limited. But it is a strategy that the Roberts campaign is counting on to attract voters to the 49-year-old councilman in a fragmented four-way race.

Families “are not organized,” said John Whitehurst, Roberts’ campaign manager. “You can’t go to a meeting and have all the leadership show up and have a vote. We’re trying to organize something that hasn’t been organized. So it’s difficult, but do-able.”

But some analysts believe it is too late for Roberts to create a base capable of countering his two established rivals’ support among sizable interest groups.

“I don’t think (Roberts) has the strong definition that the other two have,” said Harlan Lewin, a San Diego State University political scientist, in reference to County Supervisor Susan Golding and growth management advocate Peter Navarro, two of Roberts’ three major rivals in the mayor’s race.

“Maybe in a race with more plaid characters, he would stand out as the professional, the guy who worked his way up,” Lewis said.

Golding is expected to receive widespread backing from women, North City’s frequent voters and other groups in the sprawling supervisorial district she has represented for eight years.

Navarro, founder of Prevent Los Angelization Now!, is believed to be the first choice of many environmentalists and voters fed up with the problems associated with rampant growth.

Financier Tom Carter, an outsider with name recognition problems of his own, is targeting his campaign message at Democratic loyalists. Carter is the only Democrat in the nonpartisan primary. Also on the ballot are magician Loch David Crane and accountant William Thomas.

“I think what’s fundamentally wrong with the campaign is the candidate,” Steve Erie, a UC San Diego political scientist, said of Roberts. “I think he’s an absolute lightweight.

“What’s his product niche? What makes him special and different?” Erie asked.

Roberts hopes the answer to that question is the image of quiet competence he attempts to project, both at chaotic City Council meetings and in public campaign appearances. A centrist on many issues, a social conservative on some, Roberts wants voters to see him as the hard-working guy who can get the job done--no matter what it is.

“I think, more often than not, (voters) are looking for: Who do we feel has the integrity, the ability, the experience, to be able to lead us and to make these decisions?” Roberts said as he campaigned door-to-door in San Carlos recently. “Frequently, people say to me, ‘You’re the voice of reason on that council.’ ”

San Diego attorney John Davies, chairman of Roberts’ campaign committee, believes “Ron is one of those few public officials I’ve seen who is willing to take on difficult issues and work long-term for solutions, without being distracted by fears of who might get credit and who won’t.”

Ken Klausen, a volunteer who signed on with the campaign after his grandparents attended a council meeting and were impressed by Roberts, cited Roberts’ “easy accessibility as an elected official” and “willingness to listen to people.”

Roberts’ constant promotion of his family can be cloying at times and has prompted sniping from the Golding campaign, which believes it is a backhanded reminder that Golding’s ex-husband, Richard Silberman, is in prison. But Roberts is a legitimate up-from-poverty success story.

Raised in a Linda Vista public housing project, Roberts worked his way through San Diego State University and UC Berkeley, where he earned an architectural degree. He married in 1964 and lives with his wife, Helene, and the youngest of their three daughters in a Mission Hills home that he designed.

Roberts went to work for SGPA Planning & Architecture, spending 17 years there, becoming a partner in the firm, which designed shopping centers and retail projects nationwide.

The American tale is spoiled only by the suicide of Roberts’ father, who, distraught over being out of work, poured gasoline over his car, climbed inside and set it on fire in Tecolote canyon during Roberts’ senior year at SDSU.

In a year when Roberts finds himself running against the “incumbent politician” label and the City Council’s history of bickering and ineffectiveness, Roberts contends that his background gives him the right to call himself the candidate with the most experience in the real world.

“They didn’t have to wake up in the middle of the night and wonder about that note that they signed for credit for their firm, and those hundred people that were going to have to be paid on Friday, and how all of this is going to work out,” Roberts said of Golding and Navarro.

A prodigious fund-raiser but a stiff, sometimes uncomfortable, speaker at campaign events, Roberts is counting on a strategy bringing him or his mail into voters’ homes four or five times before June 2. He and Navarro are the only candidates to air television ads so far.

In fact, most observers believe Roberts has been planning a run for the city’s top spot since shortly after he took office in the council’s 2nd District, which stretches from Point Loma to Pacific Beach, inland to Mission Hills and downtown and even to a small section of South San Diego. Last year, in the reelection campaign for his council seat, Roberts aired citywide television ads, even though only his district’s residents could vote in the election.

Focusing his campaign around two major issues, crime and jobs, Roberts repeats his intentions to clean up the streets and put San Diegans back to work like a mantra at campaign forums.

Roberts’ 43-page crime plan calls for development of a huge “privatized” jail to complement the privately operated facility the city will open this week, expanding private work-furlough operations, establishing a night court, expanding the police force, supporting community-police partnerships and establishing a city “drug czar.”

Roberts supports and helped draft the Police Officers Assn.’s ballot initiative that would mandate an increase in the police force.

Roberts’ jobs and economic plan is targeted squarely at small businesses, which he says account for 91% of the companies in San Diego. The plan includes streamlining the regulatory and permit process, reducing business license fees, increasing city support for economic development efforts and expediting public works projects.

But Roberts must battle the city’s spotty record on both counts. The city’s police force has barely kept pace with population growth during Roberts’ four years on the council, and a recent report contended that city government has fostered a climate hostile to business.

Roberts is the leading council proponent of TwinPorts, an airport straddling the international border with Mexico, for long-haul flights he says will unlock the region’s potential for Pacific Rim trade, tourism and light manufacturing. The plan has drawn opposition from South Bay leaders and Mexican officials, but Roberts insists it is workable.

Under the concept, Lindbergh Field, which is in Roberts’ district, would remain open for shorter flights.

Roberts has worked to cut restrictions that led to the redevelopment of single-room occupancy hotels downtown for the poor and helped win passage of regulations leading to the creation of the Rachel Grosvenor Family Center, a rehabilitation facility for women and children.

Roberts is an advocate of downtown redevelopment and supports a downtown Sports Arena. He supports a shift from yellow street lights to white lights downtown to deter crime.

Though he recently voted to halt spending and try to restructure the city’s $2.5-billion sewage upgrading project, Roberts spent years as the council’s most ardent proponent of the plan, particularly its water reclamation component.

“Examination of the proposed system . . . reveals a comprehensive and rational plan carefully constructed to be feasible, without bankrupting the ratepayers,” he wrote in a 1989 commentary for The Times.

Even then, however, Roberts said he would be willing to cut out the costly conversion of the Point Loma treatment plant to a higher level of treatment if federal officials approved and scientists were correct that the partially treated sewage now discharged by the city does not harm the ocean. Although Roberts frequently condemns Navarro’s stance on managing growth, which he insists will worsen the city’s economic woes, it was Roberts who in 1988 chaired the committee that wrote a city-sponsored ballot measure that would have capped home construction at 7,600 units citywide. He later became the initiative’s leading proponent in a campaign that saw all four growth-control measures on the November ballot defeated.

In the final days of the bruising campaign, Roberts even urged voters to cast their ballots for Navarro’s more stringent Proposition J if they were “confused” by development industry advertising.

“I’d rather see something adopted than nothing adopted,” he said then. “I’ll take my chances, even if it’s J at this point.”

Environmentalists, in fact, had high hopes for Roberts when he first campaigned for council as one of the Planning Commission’s voices against over-development of hillsides and canyons.

But that hope has faded during Roberts’ five years on the council. He tied for fifth place in the Sierra Club’s 1990 environmental report card, although his score of 70% correct votes placed him among the council’s swing votes on environmental issues.

“His special masters are those tied to the development industry,” said Michael Shames, chairman of the Sierra Club’s Political Committee, which has endorsed Navarro.

“When push comes to shove, and he has to make a decision, he has to make it in their corner, rather than the environmentalists’ corner. And that doesn’t qualify you as an ardent environmentalist.”