LOCAL ELECTIONS / 3rd SUPERVISORIAL DISTRICT : 3rd District Race Maintains a Low Profile

They are competing for the right to represent more than half a million people and craft a budget of nearly $2 billion. But the six-way race for 3rd District county supervisor has been barely a whisper next to the political shouting matches that have dominated the 1992 primary season.

“The problem with the race is we’ve been too polite,” said Dick Rider, one of the candidates hoping to succeed current Supervisor Susan Golding, who is stepping down to run for mayor. “The press always says ‘we can’t stand all these negative campaigns,’ and then that’s all that’s covered.”

“We’re overshadowed by the mayor’s race and the presidential race,” said San Diego City Councilwoman Judy McCarty, the contest’s generally acknowledged front-runner because of her name recognition advantage in the city of San Diego, where most of the district’s voters live.

The 3rd District candidates face the daunting task of reaching more than 318,000 registered voters in a district that encompasses the county’s midsection, from Carlsbad to Mission Beach along the coast and east to San Carlos and Rancho Bernardo.

Yet the six candidates combined have raised less money than any of the top three candidates for San Diego mayor.

They are McCarty, a second-term city councilwoman with a pro-business, pro-development record; Pam Slater, a first-term Encinitas city councilwoman running as one of two pro-environment candidates; Rider, a Libertarian best known for winning the lawsuit that struck down the county’s half-cent sales tax for courts and jails; David Kreitzer, a county planning commissioner and chairman of San Diegans for Managed Growth; Rick Wildman, a La Jolla attorney, and Tom Erwin, a North County activist who remains on the ballot despite halting all active campaigning.

McCarty, a 51-year-old Republican who lives in San Carlos, is campaigning on her six-year record as councilwoman for the eastern San Diego neighborhoods.

“I have always, in my tenure, represented the people, not the government, and they recognize that,” she said.

Her environmental record is mixed. A leading advocate of curbside recycling, McCarty has also led the effort to eliminate products with chlorofluorocarbons, which damage the ozone.

But she also supported the proposed SANDER trash-burning incinerator and a toxic waste incinerator in La Jolla, and aroused the ire of environmentalists by successfully leading the drive for the extension of Jackson Drive through Mission Trails Regional Park. The decision was later reversed.

McCarty believes the county needs to find a site for a new landfill and solve the crowding in the county’s courts and jails.

Slater, a 44-year-old Republican, is adamant about ending waste and fraud in county government.

“Who’s minding the ship?” she asks about recurring county budget problems and scandals involving the Social Services Department. “Why aren’t they doing something?”

Endorsed by the Sierra Club, the Deputy Sheriff’s Assn. and the county’s major labor union, Slater has raised just over $23,000 herself, but is benefiting from more than $11,000 in spending by labor groups to put her on slate mailers.

Her campaign literature touts her slow-growth record, but she prefers to call herself a “managed growth” candidate and a fiscal conservative who wants to cut 5% across the board from the county budget to fund more law enforcement.

Rider, a 46-year-old Clairemont resident, believes much more drastic budget-cutting will be necessary, predicting that a $100-million to $150-million budget shortfall is in store for the county this year. Proposing to take a 25% pay cut when he assumes office, Rider believes the budget will have to balanced by deeply cutting into the county labor force, through layoffs if necessary.

After that, Rider, who badly lost two previous races for Congress, proposes to privatize just about every county function besides the sheriff’s patrol deputies and the criminal courts.

“You don’t have to have government bureaucracies providing monopoly services at extremely inefficient levels and very high costs,” he said.

Kreitzer, a 62-year-old Republican who retired from Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich publishers, is best known in environmental circles and his home base of Rancho Bernardo and the I-15 corridor.

Kreitzer was leader of the group that pushed through a 1985 ballot initiative to protect the city’s urban reserve and was appointed to the county Planning Commission in 1988 by Golding.

He believes that his emphasis on saving agricultural lands and blocking residential development on privately held land within the Cleveland National Forest distinguishes him from Slater and the other candidates. He has also been endorsed by the Sierra Club.

Wildman, a 48-year-old litigator, is accepting no contributions in order to avoid conflicts of interest, and has spent about $5,000 from his own pocket on the race.

He says supervisors who have demonstrated expertise that would allow them to hire fewer “experts.” Wildman is a former Army construction engineer.

He would try to put a new county landfill on “unusable” land on Camp Pendleton and float a “supplemental bond measure” for construction of new jail space, paying back the money with the $340 million collected during litigation over the now-illegal courts-and-jails tax.

Erwin, a 48-year-old Democrat from La Costa, is a retired air traffic controller who won a years-long fight against a proposed trash incinerator at the county’s San Marcos landfill.