Mayoral Candidates Vow to Lead City to Prosperity

As San Diego mayoral candidates Peter Navarro and Susan Golding offered voters their competing yet invariably rosy visions for the city’s economic revitalization at a recent debate, one woman turned to a friend in the audience and whispered: “The only thing missing is ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’ playing in the background.”

With San Diego’s economy mired in a protracted slump not expected to ease until at least mid-1993, the two major mayoral candidates have built their respective campaigns around sanguine forecasts of more jobs, higher wages and robust economic expansion--predictions that both want voters to believe hinge on his or her election.

From Navarro’s “30-Day Economic Action Plan” and campaign theme of “Stop Job Loss Now” to Golding’s proposed inner-city “Marshall Plan” and ideas to promote expansion of high-technology research and production, the mayoral contenders have presented ambitious programs to, as Navarro terms it, “jump-start our economy and then keep it moving in the right direction.”

“For things to turn around in San Diego’s economy, it is going to have to start in the mayor’s office,” Golding said.

Throughout the campaign, the candidates’ dialogue sometimes has made it appear as if they believe--or want to persuade listeners--that, just as the U.S. president’s words, actions and even health can send the stock market into dizzying gyrations, the mayor can have a pivotal impact on the local economy.

While even Navarro’s and Golding’s aides concede privately that their bosses often overstate the matter, the style and substance of the candidates’ economic proposals raise a larger, structural question about the office that they are seeking: How much--or little--impact does the mayor have in shaping San Diego’s economy and in creating or retaining local jobs?

“The short answer is, as much impact as he or she chooses to exert,” said business lobbyist and former San Diego City Councilman Mac Strobl. “I don’t think it is possible to overstate how much impact the mayor can have. But that depends on whether he chooses to be aggressive or passive--and historically, we have seen the effects of both kinds of behavior.”

San Diego’s economy, like that of any major city, is molded in part by nationwide or statewide economic trends and other external factors, such as deep reductions in defense spending--a shift in national budget priorities with particular local import.

Moreover, under San Diego’s manager-council form of government, the mayor is ostensibly the first among equals at City Hall, with a single vote on the council and certain ceremonial duties delegated under the City Charter. With no veto power and limited executive authority, the elected mayor exerts less day-to-day control over the city than the appointed city manager, who administers the policies set by the council.

For that reason, the candidates, business leaders and others argue that the intangible aspects of the mayor’s job are at least as important--and perhaps more so--than the formal responsibilities that accompany the 11th-floor mayoral suite at City Hall.

“Getting legislation such as regulatory reform through the council is important, but so is the mayor’s role as cheerleader,” said Dan Pegg, president of the city’s Economic Development Corp., which seeks to preserve existing jobs and attract new business here. “He is the one with the vision who charts the course toward a vibrant economy, then gets others excited about it.”

The mayor, Pegg and others say, often sets a tone for the city to the extent that, over time, the image of the two can become inextricably intertwined. That tone can either attract or discourage investment, they add, from business leaders who look to the mayor to provide leadership beyond the official parameters of the office.

“Whether he has titular or actual power, the mayor of San Diego and most major cities is considered that community’s CEO,” said David Katz, president of LIDAK Pharmaceuticals in La Jolla and an adviser to Navarro. “The mayor here doesn’t have all the powers of a CEO, but he is nonetheless regarded in that light, and that creates a tremendous platform.”

Perhaps no modern San Diego mayor has seized that potential as well as Pete Wilson, who, when he became mayor in the early 1970s, presided over a city whose economy, in the words of former Chamber of Commerce President Lee Grissom, was “a chair with one leg--the military.”

Wilson, who later became a U.S. senator and now is governor, helped diversify the city’s economy by attracting “clean” light industries and regional corporate headquarters and helping to promote tourism. His 11-year tenure at City Hall also saw the city emerge as a potential national leader in medical and high-technology research.

“Pete Wilson is the model for what you can do in that job,” said radio talk-show host Roger Hedgecock, who succeeded Wilson as mayor in 1983. “If it were not for Pete Wilson, downtown redevelopment would not have happened, certainly not to the extent it has. Pete’s leadership in making (Horton Plaza developer) Ernie Hahn comfortable about coming into downtown, which didn’t have much to recommend itself at the time, was the spark that touched off $3 billion to $4 billion in private investment downtown.”

Hedgecock, as mayor, spearheaded a successful initiative drive for approval of the downtown convention center--a project that even Wilson had been unable to persuade voters to support.

Similarly, Mayor Maureen O’Connor led a coalition of political, business and civic leaders that blocked the San Diego Gas & Electric Co.’s proposed merger with Southern California Edison--the most notable recent example of how mayoral intervention had major economic consequences, in this case, not just for San Diego, but the region.

Using those success stories as a guide, Golding and Navarro consistently tell campaign audiences that they intend to be the city’s point person on a broad range of economic matters that might never even come before the council for a vote.

“You have to look upon the mayor as the quarterback,” Navarro said in an interview. “He is the one who has to know all the plays, and when he drops back to pass, he sees the whole field. He is the only one with that vantage point.”

Changing his metaphors, Navarro added: “We have stars in this city that shine brightly--the universities, labor, business, the environmental community, government. Now, those stars shine brightly, but alone. I would like to see them become a constellation, and I think the mayor is probably the only one who can bring them together.”

Golding, meanwhile, explains that she envisions the mayor as “San Diego’s chief salesperson, inside and outside San Diego.”

“You are a kind of ambassador,” she said. “If a local business has a problem or one from outside San Diego is thinking about relocating here, the mayor’s office is where they are probably going to start looking for the answers. It is the focal point.”

Aware that he began the campaign facing strong skepticism from the business community because of his past advocacy of managed-growth initiatives, Navarro has sought to assuage his critics both by tempering (with mixed success) his sometimes acerbic style and by offering a variety of pro-business proposals.

Toward that end, Navarro also has taken pains to distinguish his harsh criticism of the development industry from his “support and admiration” for the remainder of the city’s business community--a distinction that he contends opponents have deliberately blurred in an attempt to saddle him with an anti-business image that he calls “absurdly false.”

“You would have to be foolish to be anti-business and expect to be a mayor who is going to govern anything,” Navarro said.

Among other things, Navarro has proposed appointing an economic ambassador in the mayor’s office charged with protecting existing jobs and creating new ones; being “Mr. Accessible” to labor and business leaders alike; repealing taxes on small businesses; streamlining permit processes and paperwork requirements, and establishing “working partnerships” among business, labor, government and universities.

San Diego, he said, “has the challenge and the opportunity” to become the national model for economic conversion programs as defense-related industries are transformed to peacetime uses.

“This is one of those things that might never come to the council floor,” Navarro said. “But as mayor, I could bring all of the forces together and create the critical mass needed to make it happen.”

Navarro also has identified a series of specific goals in “core” industries such as aerospace, tourism, computers and electronics, health care and the military. For example, he has identified expansion of the convention center as his top priority within the tourism sector. And, even as San Diego must look to economic conversion to replace jobs being lost through defense spending cuts, Navarro said that the city should market itself to the Pentagon as a logical locale to consolidate West Coast military facilities.

As she sits next to Navarro at debates and forums, Golding’s face often is a picture of skepticism over what she terms “the most incredible, transparent about-face I have ever seen in politics.” More often than not, a slight shake of the head and a wry grin telegraph Golding’s thoughts as she listens to Navarro billing himself as the “jobs candidate.”

“It is a night-and-day difference for someone who came to the fore attacking the business community,” Golding said. “He has bashed business from the day he came to San Diego, and now he wants to call himself the ‘jobs candidate’? Come on!

“If Peter had had his way in the past, our economic problems would be much worse than they are now. There would be fewer jobs, higher housing prices and less land available for industrial and job expansion. The words are nice, but they are a little too late where he is concerned.”

Golding has matched Navarro in both the volume and range of her own economic platform. One of her most ambitious proposals calls for San Diego to become the nation’s first fiber-optically wired city in the country, which she tells audiences would “open up possibilities in high-tech and other industries we can’t even imagine yet.”

San Diego’s axis of biomedical research, university talent and existing medical facilities also could help the city become “the Mayo Clinic of the West Coast,” she said.

As part of her inner-city “Marshall Plan,” designed to revitalize the southern, poorer half of San Diego, Golding has proposed the creation of job-training centers at closed school campuses and a community development bank funded by local banks to create a new financing pool for businesses.

Closely linked to that proposal is her plan for a mid-city “Renaissance Zone” where a combination of local, state and private funding would be used to permit first-time home-buyers to purchase and renovate deteriorated homes with no down payment.

In most of her proposals, Golding explains, the mayor, and, by extension, the city itself, would be “only one player of many in the public and private sector working toward a shared goal.”

“But the mayor is the one in the best position to be the catalyst,” she said.

Navarro, however, dismisses Golding as a symbol of “the same old ideas we have seen from career politicians that haven’t worked before and won’t solve our problems now.”

“I really think we have reached a point in this city’s history where we would benefit from having an economist at the helm,” said Navarro, a business school professor with a doctorate in economics. “Of course, that might sound a little self-serving.”

That, Golding said, is one of the few points on which she wholeheartedly agrees with Navarro. Her blend of government experience and business expertise--the latter gained when she managed a community newspaper--is better matched to the needs of the mayor’s office, Golding argues.

Sharing many overlapping economic objectives, Navarro and Golding have spent much of the campaign squabbling over whose proposals pave the preferable path and, in some cases, over which candidate first articulated a goal later adopted by the opponent.

One economic issue on which there is a clear distinction, however, involves the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement among the United States, Canada and Mexico, which Golding supports and Navarro opposes. If approved by Congress, the pact would remove trade barriers and, by so doing, could dramatically expand trans-border business between the United States and Mexico.

“We cannot have a city next to us with wages which are one-seventh of what we earn and a city which has environmental regulations which are not enforced, and expect to do anything other than to export our jobs and to import pollution,” Navarro said at one forum, referring to Tijuana. “We will bear a crushing burden if that (agreement) goes through as it is proposed.”

Noting that Mexico “will be the fastest-growing economy in the world,” Golding said she supports the treaty in concept, provided that its final version includes adequate environmental protections.

“Our exports to Mexico will be one of the bright spots in our economy,” Golding said. “There are legitimate concerns about jobs being lost, but I think the job gain will be far greater.”

Whatever other differences they may have, however, both agree with Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce Chairman Mel Katz, who argues that the next mayor “will have a paramount role to play in moving this city’s economy into the 21st Century.”

“We are right on the precipice now,” said the EDC’s Pegg. “On one side, you fall, but on the other side is a wealth of opportunity waiting to be seized. The next mayor could be the one who tips us one way or the other.”