San Diego Race for Mayor Is Wide Open : Politics: Two non-politicians are challenging two elected officials. The weak economy is overpowering more traditional issues.

For the first time in recent memory, the race for mayor here has not developed into the customary hand-wringing debate over “Los Angelization,” the code words for snarled traffic, polluted air and runaway development.

With home construction at its lowest since 1982 and the economy of the state’s second-largest city in a tailspin, the perennial tension between environmental protection and rapid growth has been pushed aside in a wide-open mayoral race.

Two non-politicians are challenging two elected officials in the June 2 primary for the right to succeed retiring Mayor Maureen O’Connor, giving San Diegans a choice of four distinct personalities.

Each candidate, in one fashion or another, has been jockeying for position as the outsider in a year when incumbency is seen as a disadvantage. Unless someone captures more than 50% of the vote, there will be a runoff between the top two in November.

“Everybody’s scrambling for a savior, a solution or somebody to blame,” said Nikki Symington, spokeswoman for county Supervisor Susan Golding, the front-runner in the race.

The mayoral race takes place in the shadow of the two controversial figures who have dominated the mayor’s office and the political landscape of San Diego for a decade. The mercurial O’Connor, who has held office since 1986, remains perhaps the city’s most popular politician, a native San Diegan with an uncanny sense of what plays well on the street.

She has chalked up major successes blocking the proposed merger of Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric and steering the city through a voluntary water conservation program during the drought despite enormous statewide pressure to impose mandatory restrictions.

But O’Connor is often absent from debate over major civic issues, preferring to concentrate on pet projects such as the 1989 Soviet arts festival and, most recently, an effort to site a new city library.

Before O’Connor, Roger Hedgecock was poised to inherit city leadership from former Mayor Pete Wilson. Hedgecock defeated O’Connor in a bitter 1983 election, but was forced to step down in 1985 after his felony conviction for campaign finance violations. After years of court battles during which he maintained his innocence, Hedgecock pleaded guilty to a single charge that was later expunged from his record.

Hedgecock continues to wield considerable influence as host of San Diego’s most popular radio call-in show.

Many issues confronting this year’s candidates are left over from the O’Connor and Hedgecock years. Despite decades of debate, the city lacks an airport to replace tiny and outdated Lindbergh Field. Its sewage woes received national attention in February when an ocean outfall ruptured, spilling 180 million gallons of partially treated sewage into shallow waters every day for two months.

More recently, two major, home-grown savings and loan institutions failed. With defense cutbacks and other business failures, countywide unemployment reached 6.9% in February, three points higher than the annual average for 1989.

Vacancy rates in offices downtown and throughout the county have skyrocketed. The home construction industry, a bulwark of the local economy, last year suffered its worst period since 1982. Only 2,552 residential building permits were issued in the city, down from 19,180 in the peak year of 1986.

In less politically turbulent times, Golding might be the prohibitive favorite to move into O’Connor’s 11th-floor City Hall office. After two years on the City Council, a stint in state government and eight years as a county supervisor, the 46-year-old moderate Republican has the resume, organization and savvy that typically win elections. She is stressing her demonstrated leadership abilities after six years of O’Connor’s style.

“The city is drifting,” she likes to say. “I think there’s a feeling that no one on the City Council really is able to create a coalition that’s going to be decisive and get things moving.”

But two years ago, Golding’s husband, Richard T. Silberman, a wealthy financier and former chief of staff to Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. was convicted for his role in a scheme to launder what he believed was drug money. In reality, the man who asked him to launder $300,000 was an undercover FBI agent.

Though the couple divorced this year, Golding’s opponents have worked hard to link the couple in voters’ minds. San Diego City Councilman Ron Roberts, a rival for the post, pledged in an anti-crime ad last year to rid the city of money-launderers.

Golding was not helped when a strategy memo surfaced in February containing a pollster’s advice that Golding should propose cutting nearly 2,000 people from the county’s welfare rolls for the publicity it would generate. Two weeks after getting the memo, Golding did just that. She contends that the plan was in the works for months.

In April, Golding’s tax returns showed that she paid no federal income tax in 1990 as she struggled with the huge home mortgage that Silberman left her when he was sent to a federal work camp.

But more fundamentally, Golding is a career politician in a year when many expect a spring cleaning of government at all levels. Two contenders who have never held elected office constantly remind voters that she and Roberts represent the status quo.

The better known of the pair is Peter Navarro, 42, a UC Irvine economics professor who rose to local prominence in the bitter wars over the city’s rapid pace of home construction during the late 1980s.

The founder of Prevent Los Angelization Now!, a managed-growth organization, has failed in three attempts to win passage of a ballot measure that would address the ills that San Diegans associate with becoming a city of 1.1 million people, the nation’s sixth-largest.

But with each loss, Navarro’s stature has grown. Having earned the enmity of local politicians and business leaders, the registered independent has been able to position himself as the most powerful agent of change in the race.

Flashing anger and charisma in equal measure, Navarro has built a core constituency of environmentalists and the disaffected that gives him a voter base in the fragmented, four-way race. Despite the economy, he attempts to frame debate around the damage he believes developers have done to the city. Polls have him in a race for second place with Roberts.

“There’s nobody in this room who thinks that they’re safer on the streets than they were when my opponents took office, or that the air is cleaner, or the ocean’s clearer, or that they’re safer in their homes or that their jobs are more secure,” he told one public forum.

“I’m the only person in this race who’s the candidate of change. I’m the only person in this race who’s going to take this city in a different direction from where it is inexorably headed,” he said.

But leaders of the city’s business sector and building industry argue that Navarro’s policies are a menace to an economy staggering through the post-Cold War transition. His proposal to impose impact fees on developers and business to pay for the city’s needs are the wrong medicine at this time, they say.

Though most candidates running for office in environmentally sensitive San Diego try to shade their platforms green, the emphasis this year is on creating jobs in new industries such as biotech, and retaining existing ones. In local parlance, the competition between “smokestacks and geraniums” has been one-sided.

“We can smell the geraniums as long as we have something to eat,” said retired state appellate court Judge Ed Butler, a former city attorney and veteran observer of city politics. “When we’ve got nothing to eat, gimme them smokestacks.”

With the growth debate less prominent, other issues such as crime have come to the fore. Last year, the city set a record for homicides. Golding has lambasted Roberts and the council for failing to put more police on the street. Roberts has criticized Golding and the county supervisors for leaving vacant a 1,500-bed jail completed last October.

Roberts, 49, a second-term councilman, is attempting to persuade voters that his 17 years as an architect and small business owner make him an outsider and a knowledgeable pro-business candidate. He is also trying to position himself as tough on crime.

But the council’s record on jobs and crime has been spotty. The city’s police force has barely kept pace with population growth during Roberts’ four years on the council. And a recent study by a city-commissioned coalition contended that the city government has fostered a climate hostile to business.

Hobbled by a lower citywide profile than Golding or Navarro, Roberts is appealing to the city’s middle-class homeowners with campaign ads that emphasize his all-American upbringing in San Diego, his family and his self-made status. One brochure contains letters of support from his mother and his wife.

Roberts believes that voters are looking for the candidate they “feel has the integrity, the ability, the experience to be able to lead us and to make these decisions. Frequently, people say to me, you’re the voice of reason on that council.”

Tom Carter, a second-generation San Diegan, is also playing up his longtime civic and business ties to the city, claiming that he is the citizen politician who wants to put the San Diego he loves back on track.

The 51-year-old Carter is an outsider without Navarro’s anger, a self-proclaimed reformer who has refused to become involved in the three-way sniping between his opponents. The only Democrat in the nonpartisan race, he promises never to run for higher office.

“We’re in one hell of a mess here,” he said. “I think most people believe it’s because of people that have gone into politics and stayed there and not been willing to make the decisions that we need to make to change things.”

Carter is running a low-key campaign that appeals to San Diego’s traditional Democrats, many of them minorities and working-class people who live in the city’s southern section.

But in addition to starting the race as a virtual unknown, Carter is a home builder and former executive of the failed Great American Savings & Loan, two obstacles that most analysts say will be very difficult to overcome this year.