Golding Vows ‘New Era of Cooperation’

Moving quickly to set an agenda for her administration, Mayor-elect Susan Golding on Wednesday began devising an economic revitalization plan and, in a rare show of unity, drew together members of the City Council and County Board of Supervisors to symbolize what she termed a “new era of cooperation” in San Diego politics.

Basking in the afterglow of her still-unofficial narrow victory over managed-growth advocate Peter Navarro, Golding outlined some of her priorities and pledged to “forge a strong cooperative relationship” between city and county governments to address regional concerns that “don’t begin or end at the city boundary.”

Only hours after Election Night returns gave her a lead unlikely to be erased by today’s tabulation of nearly 94,000 absentee ballots countywide, Golding began making preliminary preparations for assuming the mayor’s office next month.

Echoing the economic themes that dominated her campaign, she asked a handful of local business leaders for guidance in developing a job development and business revitalization program to be unveiled at her Dec. 7 inauguration.

“There is absolutely no time to waste,” Golding told cheering supporters at a downtown news conference.

At the news conference, Golding was flanked by all eight members of the City Council, all but one of her colleagues from the Board of Supervisors and two newly elected board members--including one who was elected to fill the seat Golding vacated to run for mayor.

Given that the two governments’ elected officials have in the past zealously guarded their political turf and often blamed each other for regional woes, Golding’s staging Wednesday was a political tour de force that she characterized as emblematic of the “serious cooperation” that will typify her mayoralty.

“The fact that we have every member of the City Council and (most members) of the Board of Supervisors here joining together makes a statement in and of itself,” said Golding, who stressed during the campaign that her tenure with the county could enable her to be a unifying force between the County Administration Center and City Hall.

That cooperation between local governments, however, is only a part of the solution to San Diego’s problems, Golding added.

“The challenge of rebuilding our weakened economy and getting San Diegans back to work . . . will require unprecedented cooperation between business, local government, our schools and our citizens,” she said.

However, even as Golding looked forward to the challenges awaiting her in the mayoral suite on the 11th floor of City Hall, she, her strategists and Navarro cast another glance backward Wednesday at her come-from-behind victory from a double-digit deficit in midsummer polls.

Although nearly 94,000 absentee ballots countywide remain to be counted, both Golding and Navarro agree that they are unlikely to change the outcome. About 46% of the county’s nearly 1.4 million registered voters reside in the city; if that same percentage roughly applies to the absentee ballots, there would be about 43,000 outstanding votes in the mayoral race.

Election Night totals showed Golding with a 13,668-vote lead with 202,376 votes (52%), compared to 188,708 votes (48%) for Navarro. To overtake Golding, Navarro therefore would need to receive two-thirds of the absentee ballots--a scenario that even Navarro termed “statistically possible but politically improbable.”

Golding and her top strategists attributed her uphill victory to several factors, beginning with their belief that voters saw her as better suited to turning around the city’s lagging economy than Navarro, who rose to political prominence in the late 1980s by championing managed-growth measures widely criticized as constraints on jobs and economic expansion.

“Voters felt that I was the right person to address the business and economic problems . . . and that my record has shown that I can produce that,” Golding said.

The public’s assessment of the two candidates on that and other key issues was shaped in part by the heightened scrutiny Navarro received this fall, following what the Golding camp saw as the cursory examination he received before his first-place finish in June’s six-candidate primary.

In the one-on-one runoff, Golding aides explained, it became easier to highlight discrepancies between the growth-control measures Navarro had previously advocated and his self-billing as the “jobs candidate” in this race.

“Navarro got a lot closer look this fall, and as the campaign wore on, people really began to sense the magnitude of our economic crisis,” Golding consultant Tom Shepard said. “Those two things operating in tandem eroded his support.”

Strong performances by Golding in the race’s two final televised debates and a backlash over several Navarro TV and radio ads that attacked her via references to her former husband, imprisoned felon Richard Silberman, also swung undecided voters toward her, Golding’s aides argued. In one of those debates, a teary-eyed Golding protested that Navarro’s ads had deeply hurt her children and her family.

“People were repulsed by a candidate’s willingness to reach that far for electoral advantage,” top Golding aide Michael McDade said. “In the end, I think that helped us.”

Golding’s second-place primary finish also had a galvanizing force on her campaign that helped to correct internal organizational problems that McDade and others contend undermined her in June.

“It was a wake-up call that made us recognize that we had to do things a lot better--and we did,” McDade said.

Navarro offered a different interpretation for his apparent loss.

“The truth fought the lies, and the lies won,” Navarro said bitterly at a La Jolla news conference. “By the time this was over, the person who some of the voters thought I was had been shaped by sleaze bags.”

Although he was faulted for attacking Golding in his ads, Navarro argued that his ads “just told the truth, while hers just told lies.” In addition, Navarro contended that it was Golding who first diverted the campaign onto a negative path with ads that falsely accused him of, among other things, wanting to raise taxes, attracting drug addicts to San Diego through a needle-exchange program and of drawing financial backing from the pornography industry.

Navarro also offered a less sanguine view of San Diego’s future than Golding, predicting that the new mayor will fall short of campaign promises to hire more police, will be unable to halt the decline in San Diego’s per-capita income and might acquiesce to pressure to build in the city’s urban reserve from developers who were major contributors to her race.

“I don’t believe that anything’s going to change,” Navarro said. “I hope things are going to change, but I don’t believe that they will.

“Clearly, the ideas that I represented in terms of change, in terms of protecting the environment, in terms of diversifying our economy, lost out to a political Establishment here which is intent on continuing to rely on overdevelopment and speculation. . . . We’re essentially turning the keys over to an Establishment which has failed us for years.”

Navarro aide John Wainio termed Navarro’s narrow loss a “remarkable” achievement.

“Look at what almost happened here,” Wainio said. “Who two years ago would have given Peter Navarro a one in a million chance in a town like San Diego to almost beat a candidate with pure Establishment credentials? It’s amazing the guy came so close considering what he was up against.”

Golding consultant Shepard noted that his counterpart’s analysis glosses over one crucial detail: Navarro’s ability and willingness to spend at least $550,000 of his own money in the campaign.

“Peter likes to portray himself as a nobody outsider who came from nowhere to become a serious candidate,” Shepard said. “But that’s a fantasy. Anyone spending $600,000 of his own money in a local race is going to be a credible candidate. That’s something else we didn’t know about Peter Navarro before this race began.”