San Diego D.A. Trails in Bid for a 7th Term

San Diego County Dist. Atty. Edwin L. Miller Jr., the dean of California prosecutors, was trailing three challengers Tuesday and apparently headed for an inglorious end to an illustrious career.

Miller, 68, who was first elected in 1970, was trailing former star prosecutor Paul Pfingst, Municipal Judge Larry Stirling and Deputy City Atty. Casey Gwinn. Miller was barely ahead of a perennial candidate, Michael Schaefer, who has a quixotic history that includes a wife-beating conviction.

With no candidate getting a majority, Pfingst appeared sure to be in a November runoff against Stirling or Gwinn.

Miller, who has served longer than any district attorney in the state and has long been lauded by prosecutors nationwide as an innovator, had been politically damaged by a controversial and failed prosecution of a former Sunday school teacher on charges of child molestation. His opponents hammered at him as being arrogant and out of touch with voters.

Voters in Carlsbad, on the ocean north of San Diego, were approving plans for a 40-acre, $100-million children’s theme park to be built by the makers of Lego blocks. It would be California’s first new theme park in a generation.

Proposition D in Carlsbad pitted Denmark-based Lego against a determined bunch of local property owners. After arduous wooing by Gov. Pete Wilson, Lego selected Carlsbad as the site of its first American theme park, but local opponents warned of traffic, crime and degradation of the coastal city’s peaceful lifestyle. The vote is only advisory but Lego has said it will abide by local wishes.

San Diego County Sheriff Jim Roache, dogged by a no-confidence vote by his deputies and a rash of jail escapes, was being crushed by Bill Kolender, former San Diego police chief and now director of the California Youth Authority.

And county voters were divided over an advisory vote that calls for shifting the region’s major airport from Lindbergh Field near downtown San Diego to the property now occupied by Miramar Naval Air Station if the military ever abandons the site.

In Northern California, two dead men were on the ballot: George Shirakawa, listed for reelection to the San Jose City Council, and Dan Hallisey, a candidate for Contra Costa County assessor. Shirakawa won, but Hallisey lost.

In a year when public fear of crime is running high, voters in a handful of locales from Mt. Shasta to Borrego Springs were considering tax levies to improve police and fire protection.

One of those was in Petaluma, the Sonoma County town traumatized by the murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas, where voters were asked to approve a tax increase to boost law enforcement. In absentee ballots, the first to be counted, the measure was losing. A similar measure in Port Hueneme in Ventura County was winning.

In rural Imperial County, Brawley voters handily defeated the idea of selling alcoholic beverages at their town’s top annual social event--the Cattle Call rodeo.

Cattle Call officials said that the annual weeklong celebration needs to sell beer to make enough money to keep the rodeo grounds in repair and to continue as a venue for the professional rodeo circuit. Educators and ministers had responded that selling beer at the Cattle Call would undercut efforts to educate Brawley youth about the dangers of alcohol.