SAN DIEGO COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Wake-Up Call for Community Leaders

San Diego voters made the right choice for mayor Tuesday when they selected Susan Golding, a pragmatic county supervisor with a decade of public service to her credit, over Peter Navarro, the bold but untested UC Irvine economics professor and managed-growth advocate.

But in many respects Golding’s win is as much a challenge as a victory. It’s a personal challenge that calls for her to rise above conventional politics and to re-energize this city. And it’s a challenge to the local political Establishment to look inward and acknowledge the lack of strong leadership that San Diego has suffered for years.

Tired of civic drift, the electorate was almost ready to hand the reins of the second-largest city in the nation’s most populous state to an unproven newcomer. To the local Establishment, that was unthinkable. But Navarro’s shake-’em-up message won him 48% of the vote. That isn’t the number of a fringe candidate.

Why the strong showing by Navarro? In a word, frustration. More specifically, voter frustration with a City Hall that too often seems to shift between civic somnolence and shrill bickering. Instead, Navarro seemed to offer vision, energy and commitment. But his in-your-face style, which played so well in his role as chief spokesman for the local managed-growth movement, could have gridlocked City Hall. So, ultimately, the electorate narrowly chose to give Supervisor Golding’s more pragmatic approach another try.

Golding has a history of building coalitions, reaching out, getting things done. She is widely regarded as the smartest and most energetic member of the Board of Supervisors. Those attributes--carefully and deliberately honed during her public life--give her the tools to become an outstanding mayor.

Certainly, this was no time to roll the dice in selecting the city’s leadership. In the coming years, the next mayor will face the loss of thousands of aerospace jobs, the economic promise of the North American Free Trade Agreement and continuing fiscal crises in a city government that can’t even afford to fully fund police services. Meeting those problems will require cooperation, creativity and vision. Golding has proven ability in all those areas.

So, unless something remarkable happens when the remaining absentee ballots are counted today, Golding will be sworn in Dec. 7 as San Diego’s 32nd mayor. That is as it should be.

But Navarro’s narrow defeat should serve as a wake-up call for community leaders who didn’t recognize the city’s fundamental need for change, its hunger for bold leadership.

Now, they have been put on notice. They ignore that call at their own own risk.