NEWS ANALYSIS : Departure Starts Clock on the Test of Time : Government: Maureen O’Connor’s tenure at City Hall comes to an end Monday. She accomplished notable achievements, but critics say she lacked vision and leadership.

It was Oct. 22, 1989, a date that had been dubbed, rather self-importantly, “Super Powers Sunday,” the opening ceremony for a culturally bold, financially risky three-week Soviet arts festival on which San Diego Mayor Maureen O’Connor had staked her political reputation.

When the day dawned cool and overcast, O’Connor fretted that the weather could dampen--literally and figuratively--the high-stakes civic gamble to which she had devoted the past 16 months. O’Connor need not have worried, however, because the day would end as one of the brightest--politically, if not meteorologically--in her 6 1/2-year mayoralty.

More than 60,000 people jammed into Balboa Park--the biggest single-day draw in the park’s history--to watch colorfully costumed children and a troupe of Georgian dancers perform. As she paused along the park’s historic Prado, O’Connor stretched her 5-foot-2 frame for a view of the growing midafternoon crowd and could not help but beam at what she saw.

“Geez, Louise!” O’Connor said, squinting as she surveyed the scene with several Soviet officials. “This is a long way from Rosary High School.”

If there is a lingering impression of O’Connor’s tenure in the mayoral suite on the 11th floor of City Hall, it is that she seemed to too often forget just how far she had, indeed, come in the two decades in which she rose from gym teacher at a Catholic girls’ high school to become the first woman mayor of America’s sixth-largest city.

“It was more important to Maureen to be elected mayor than to be mayor,” said one former staff member. “She loved the title, but I’m not sure she ever looked at it in the way (her predecessors) did--as a way of grabbing issues by the neck and getting things done. There were times when you wanted to say, ‘Hey, you’re the mayor. You could do this. You should do this.’ ”

Although O’Connor and her partisans vigorously dispute that analysis, her performance--her sometimes curious priorities, her unorthodox work habits, her relationship with the City Council, her style--undeniably lent credence to the former aide’s withering assessment.

While the 46-year-old mayor labored doggedly on pet projects such as the arts festival, she displayed apparent disinterest, or, at best, cursory attention to other major urban woes, opening herself to criticism that she lacked vision and the leadership that her position demanded.

The 100-megaton achievements of her mayoralty--the arts festival, resisting mandatory water rationing, blocking Southern California Edison’s plan to take over the San Diego Gas & Electric Co.--demonstrated O’Connor’s impressive potential on issues to which she was strongly committed.

What frustrated even her backers, however, was the sporadic nature of those priorities. Indeed, the arts festival posed the essential question critics asked about O’Connor’s mayoralty: Why didn’t she consistently bring the same planning, dedication and hands-on approach to the city’s long-term problems that she devoted to assembling the world’s largest public showing of Faberge Imperial eggs?

“Some of those major accomplishments are so significant that one can’t help but wonder if even more couldn’t have been accomplished,” Councilman Ron Roberts said. “When she really set her mind to something, you saw what she could do.”

Given the enormous demands on any mayor’s time, O’Connor’s choices and actions were often puzzling. She regularly found time, for example, to ride along with on-duty police officers and firefighters or for publicity stunts such as working on a garbage truck or a much-chronicled 1988 odyssey in which she spent two days living on the streets disguised as a transient. Yet she eschewed meetings with business and political leaders who consistently complained, not so much they they could not always gain the mayor as an ally, but that they could not even get an audience to try to make their case.

While her staff, unusually protective even by political standards, often covered for her, O’Connor gained a reputation inside and outside City Hall as a lackadaisical worker with appreciably shorter office hours than previous mayors and who was more inclined to slip out for a midafternoon movie than to sit through a tedious policy briefing.

Her reluctance to rein in pontificating public speakers and council members stretched many council meetings into excessively lengthy, unruly sessions that left many observers, as one councilman put it wryly, “wondering about dictatorships’ advantages over democracy.” Some of her colleagues, in fact, privately rejoiced over her occasional absences, knowing that the members who conducted meetings in her stead usually gaveled them to a quicker conclusion.

Familiar with those and other criticisms, O’Connor, who chose not to seek reelection this fall, has had ample experience parrying each.

“There’s no limit to what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets credit,” O’Connor often said, invoking a maxim that explains her willingness to allow council members to take the lead on issues ranging from a new airport and multibillion-dollar sewage system to budget priorities. But while her readiness to share the headlines drew praise in some quarters as an admirable political rarity, it also sometimes delayed progress in areas where mayoral attention could have expedited action.

Yes, by conventional standards, her office hours were often short, O’Connor admits, but that is because she preferred to spend more time outside City Hall and often conducted the city’s business via the telephone late into the night. True, hers was a hesitant gavel at meetings, she concedes, but that stemmed from being wary of abbreviating debate in a way that could be perceived as heavy-handed by either her colleagues or public speakers who had taken time off work or out of their personal lives to come to City Hall.

As for the Chamber of Commerce executives and political officials who complained about her inaccessibility, O’Connor responds that she had little patience or sympathy for “big shots who thought they were too good” to line up with other San Diegans for five minutes with her at her twice-monthly “Meet the Mayor” sessions.

O’Connor’s attitude on entree to the mayor’s office is particularly telling, and raises a fundamental question debated throughout her tenure. While O’Connor hailed it as keeping faith with her campaign pledge to put community activists and everyday San Diegans on an equal footing with downtown power brokers, critics pounced on it as a naive, ill-conceived public relations gesture that sought to manage California’s second-largest city as if it were Mayberry, a failure to acknowledge that the small city of her youth had become an increasingly complex metropolis.

“You don’t squeeze a CEO who’s thinking of expanding his company in between two guys upset over potholes--you just don’t do that as mayor,” said one politically prominent business leader who, after taking “plenty of heat” for supporting O’Connor, said that he looks back on her service with “grave disappointment.”

By her own admission, O’Connor was always more comfortable conversing with the common man “in the neighborhoods” than meeting in City Hall with the assortment of high-powered business and civic leaders who typically occupy much of a mayor’s calendar. To O’Connor, however, those luminaries were political supplicants whom she frequently dismissed as “the so-called insiders and experts who think they have all the answers.”

“I could find out more in five minutes outside this building than I could in five hours inside,” O’Connor said in an interview last week in her office. “The people are the real experts, but that’s something a lot of politicians don’t realize.”

As evidence, O’Connor notes that some of her most notable successes were spawned by the political intelligence that she picked up on the streets--where San Diegans often shouted “Hey, Maureen!” greetings and approached her for autographs during her habitual noontime walks, uncommon displays of public affection that dazzled even her rivals.

It was on the streets, for example, where O’Connor gained confidence that San Diegans would enthusiastically support an arts festival that many civic leaders privately scoffed at, but which proved to be an artistic and financial success.

Similarly, her chats with average citizens at shopping malls bolstered her conviction that San Diegans would heed her 1991 call for voluntary water conservation amid a lingering drought--a controversial approach that many attacked as a politically timid alternative to the sterner mandatory measures taken elsewhere, but which ultimately produced greater savings.

Rather than judge the effectiveness of a late-night beach-area alcohol ban simply on the basis of police citations, O’Connor patrolled the streets and bars to gain a first-hand impression.

And when this spring’s verdict in the Rodney King case touched off rioting in Los Angeles and other cities, O’Connor spent several sleepless nights with Councilman George Stevens and other top city officials in visiting “hot spots” to help preserve the peace.

“People say, ‘She’s one of us,’ ” said Louis Wolfsheimer, a land-use lawyer and longtime O’Connor confidant. “That’s fairly remarkable for someone who’s been in public office for most of the past 20 years.”

That exceptionally strong bond enabled O’Connor to achieve what some regard as her most critical achievement, one perhaps less tangible than the SDG&E; victory but no less significant--returning integrity to a City Hall wracked by turmoil before her arrival.

Elected in a special 1986 race necessitated by the felony conviction of former Mayor Roger Hedgecock, to whom she had lost three years earlier, O’Connor entered City Hall with a councilman under indictment, with the head of the Housing Commission ensnared in scandal and with the city manager and council at odds.

Thanks in part to City Hall personnel changes that she helped orchestrate, O’Connor will leave behind a relatively harmonious council with a much-improved public image that has a solid working relationship with City Manager Jack McGrory and the rest of the city bureaucracy.

A tangible byproduct of that goodwill, O’Connor argues, was city employees’ recent willingness to accept salary reductions to help alleviate the daunting budget problems posed by cutbacks in state funding.

“If things weren’t in such a mess when I got here, maybe there would have been more time for some other things,” O’Connor said. “But it took a lot of time and work just to restore normal governance to this city. I got this city working again. People might not like everything City Hall does, and probably never will, but at least they think the place is honest again.”

Critics argue, however, that only minimal improvement has been made during O’Connor’s tenure on some of the urban ills that she inherited--among them, homelessness, choked roadways, an understaffed police force and an escalating infrastructure problem--and that the city’s business climate remains problematical.

But those problems are not unlike the crises faced by every rapidly growing city, and the City Charter gives the mayor limited authority to grapple with them, factors that help deflect some of the “Why wasn’t more done?” criticism.

As she prepares to depart City Hall, a building where she has spent most of her adult life, O’Connor said that she has no definite plans but is “not ruling out anything”--including a possible return to elective office.

One immediate priority will be continuing to push for a bayfront high-tech library, a project that she had hoped to make a reality before leaving office.

Any disappointment over that failure or any other unfinished business, however, is heavily outweighed by the acute, lingering pain that O’Connor still feels over the deaths of her mother and father within days of each other in September.

Although her father had been in failing health, the death of her mother--a constant presence at O’Connor’s annual State of the City addresses and other major appearances--was a shock that the mayor has cushioned by turning to her religious faith that her parents are “together again.”

“They were married and devoted to each other for 54 years, and she wanted to be with him,” O’Connor said, her eyes glistening and her voice breaking. “But it’s a loss I’ll never get over.

“There’s no question that my parents were very much part of my political psyche. They instilled all of my value system in me. Just before my dad died, I was with my mom outside his room, and it was kind of tough. She said to me, ‘You, know, Maureen, I just want to tell you, even if I wasn’t your mother, you did a wonderful job as mayor. But I’m doubly proud because I am your mother.

“So, listen, I can take all the critics in the world. The people that I cared most about in judging my behavior were my parents. And I passed their test.”