Mayor Golding Vows to Transform City : Future: Inaugural address promises economic and environmental coexistence, opportunities for children.

Hailing San Diego as a potential “showcase . . . for the nation and the world,” Mayor Susan Golding pledged in her inaugural address Monday to transform the city into a collection of “urban villages” where economic and environmental goals comfortably coexist to give today’s children better opportunities at success.

Offering a soaring vision of how San Diego can “light the way to the next century,” Golding told a crowd of more than 3,000 at the San Diego Convention Center that adherence to “four tough promises” could make San Diego “the first great city of the 21st Century.”

In a 22-minute address, Golding outlined a general framework for the four-year term she won by defeating Peter Navarro in last month’s election, explaining that she plans to detail her specific proposals for attaining those goals in next month’s State of the City speech.

“I don’t want to minimize the very difficult problems that we face today,” Golding said. “We must solve them--and we will. But as we stand here tonight on the threshold of the new millennium, we have an even greater responsibility than just making it through the day. We must light the way to the (future). . . . And we cannot build the San Diego of the future unless we start laying the foundation for it--right now.”

Golding’s Monday night address followed a public re-enactment of an earlier private swearing-in ceremony at City Hall that made her San Diego’s 32nd mayor. Although a Golding spokesman claimed--erroneously--that outgoing Mayor Maureen O’Connor had asked that the media be barred from the morning ceremony in the mayor’s office, O’Connor’s staff in fact deferred to Golding’s decision on whether the event should be public or private.

During her inaugural address, the 47-year-old Golding was flanked by all but one of the San Diego City Council members, all of her former colleagues on the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, 10 mayors of other cities in the county and the new mayor of Tijuana. Their presence, she told the crowd, was “more than symbolic,” calling the rare display of political unity “a ringing commitment to change.”

Two of the “four tough promises” that Golding identified in her speech focus on eliminating the widely held perception that economic expansion and environmental objectives are mutually exclusive, a viewpoint that has been a mainstay in San Diego politics since the so-called “Smokestacks versus Geraniums” mayoral race early this century.

“For too long, we’ve viewed business development and environmental protection as mortal enemies,” Golding said. “In the 21st Century, they either (must) become full-time allies or neither will survive.”

One of her overriding objectives, Golding explained, will be to make San Diego “the most business-friendly city” in the nation by “bury(ing) the nonsense that being against business is somehow good for people.”

“Every business we add to our city is a new source of work and hope for San Diegans,” she said. “Every business that leaves--or doesn’t even get started--is another closing door.”

The major challenge in meeting that goal, Golding said, hinges on simultaneously making San Diego “the most environmentally sound city that we can.”

Invoking the words of the Sierra Club--”Not blind opposition to progress, but opposition to blind progress”--Golding, who drew strong financial support from developers in her campaign, pledged to strive to find ways to “make environmentally safe economic activities more cost effective than environmentally harmful ones.”

As San Diego inevitably continues to grow, Golding said, its leaders must work to make it “the first big city in America to restore and preserve its human scale.”

In outlining that goal, her third major policy direction, Golding reiterated her campaign pledge to “build a city of urban villages--a city where people identify with their block and their neighbors as much as they do with their city center.” To achieve that objective, she added, San Diego must reverse a trend seen in other large cities in which a loss of community became one of the undesirable byproducts of growth.

“As people lost their sense of community, they also lost their sense of identity and hope--as the recent riots in Los Angeles made all too clear,” Golding said. “This must not--and will not--be the future of San Diego.”

To help restore citizens’ identity with vibrant, self-reliant neighborhoods, Golding called for a greater emphasis on a neighborhood-oriented police force and for San Diegans to volunteer to help schools, the elderly and the ill as a demonstration of their commitment.

Golding’s fourth objective, the one that she described as being “closest to my heart,” is to make San Diego “a city where every child has a chance to succeed.”

The mayor’s office, she pledged, will work with the Board of Education in an attempt to ensure that more children remain in school and graduate, as well as to encourage private businesses to expand day care programs for working parents. In addition, Golding urged her new council colleagues to expand park and recreation programs, after-school activities and other “desperately needed alternatives to gangs and drug dealing.”

“We will make San Diego the first great livable city of the 21st Century,” she said, “a city that is good for business, a city that is environmentally sound, a city of self-reliance and a city where all children, and all people, can succeed.”

Earlier Monday, in her final official act as the city’s top elected official, O’Connor concluded her 6 1/2-year mayoralty by delivering an emotional farewell address to the City Council that ended with this politically tantalizing promise: “I’ll be back.”

After being presented by her colleagues with two gifts, one serious and the other whimsical--the first a gavel on a plaque, the other a mounted Pepsi can signifying her soft drink of choice, often seen in her hand at council meetings--O’Connor likened her tenure at City Hall to a “trip down a river.”

“I have been very blessed with the friends that I have accumulated on my trip down the river of life at City Hall,” O’Connor said, her voice occasionally breaking as she recalled that it was her recently deceased father who first offered that analogy to her.

Later in her brief speech, O’Connor quoted Frank Sinatra in acknowledging that her style of leadership--one that saw her spend far more time on the streets of San Diego than in her City Hall office--differed markedly from most past mayors.

“My style has been different,” O’Connor said. “As the old Frank Sinatra song (says), ‘I did it my way.’ I was loyal to my parents’ value system. And today, they’re not with us, but they’re looking down upon us in heaven, and both of my parents would say today that this city, the city that they loved, (is) on the verge of greatness. And I’m proud . . . to have a small part of service to my city.”