Mayor’s Movie-Star Sparkle Loses Its Luster in San Francisco

Willie Brown, San Francisco’s high-profile, high-energy mayor, is finding himself in trouble with voters as he gears up for next year’s municipal elections.

Brown initially enjoyed such widespread popularity that residents greeted him like a movie star when he strolled along San Francisco’s streets. But now voters tell poll-takers they find the mayor to be arrogant and say he should be doing more to fix the city’s much-maligned public transportation system, clean up decaying public parks and address the problem of homeless people living on the streets.

Recent public opinion polls show Brown’s popularity has slipped to its lowest point since he beat former Police Chief Frank Jordan and became the city’s first black mayor in 1995. In a San Francisco Chronicle poll this month, just 3 in 10 registered voters said they would vote for Brown if elections were held today.

Allegations of Arrogance, Cronyism

The mayor’s approval ratings are so dismal that Jordan recently said he is considering running against Brown next year. Also in the running is former political consultant and longtime Brown nemesis Clinton Reilly. And the city’s political junkies--who just months ago considered Brown unbeatable--now are bandying about names of other possible contenders, including Board of Supervisors President Tom Ammiano and board member Leland Yee.

“Nobody in San Francisco ever has reelection locked up,” said Criss Romero, president of the Harvey Milk Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender Democratic Club, which has been critical of the mayor. “Folks in San Francisco don’t necessarily like to be pushed around. A mayor perceived to be a very powerful man makes people uneasy.”

Chronicle columnist Ken Garcia recently invited readers to send him names of leaders they thought could take Brown on. Garcia received 65 responses the first day.

“There is a lot of ‘anybody but Willie’ sentiment out there,” said Garcia, who often criticizes the mayor in his columns. “There is a total disconnect there between what you would normally consider all the happy indices and people’s feelings toward the mayor.”

Indeed. San Francisco is enjoying an economic boom, skyrocketing housing prices and a near-zero vacancy rate in commercial and residential rental properties. The city’s hotels are packed and its convention center is booked for years to come. The crime rate is down.

“I think the dissatisfaction is almost an expression of the economy going so well,” says San Francisco Supervisor Michael Yaki, a Brown loyalist. “The city is in such great shape financially that people have the luxury to hold him accountable for quality of life issues and issues that no mayor has been able to address.”

Brown, who ran for mayor after term limits forced him to leave his beloved job as speaker of the state Assembly, already has announced that he will seek reelection as mayor. A mayor is restricted to two consecutive terms here.

The mayor was not available for an interview last week, according to his spokeswoman, Kandace Bender. She dismissed the recent surveys’ significance, contending that polls “are generally conducted in a vacuum.”

“The mayor has high visibility; he is subjected to media scrutiny every single day,” Bender added. Brown “will be running on his record. His record is extensive.”

During Brown’s tenure, San Francisco’s budget has moved from deficit to surplus. He has added city workers and restored some services that were cut during California’s recession in the early 1980s. The mayor has kept peace with the city’s powerful labor unions--which backed him against Jordan--and has earned kudos from the Chamber of Commerce for making San Francisco a more business-friendly town.

He also helped win voter approval for two sports stadiums. The Giants baseball stadium is under construction on the Embarcadero. The city still is negotiating with the 49ers football team on a planned reconstruction of aging 3Com Park.

So why are people unhappy with the man?

“Style is what got him elected,” says independent pollster David Binder. “Energy and colorfulness were positives when he was elected. Those qualities are not quite as appealing to people if they feel that on a day-to-day basis the city is not working.”

In the Chronicle poll, about 44% of San Franciscans said their opinion of Brown was unfavorable, up from 19% who said they had an unfavorable opinion of the mayor two years ago. More than half--54%--said they disapproved of the way the mayor has used his power in office--a reversal from 1996, when those who approved were in the majority, with 59%. Brown, long one of the most powerful political figures in the state, has always delighted in his slightly outrageous public persona. Although this was his first effort as a chief executive, he has seemed to revel in the job.

From his expensive Italian suits and Borsalino hats to his love of night life, the mayor has embodied San Francisco’s image as a free-wheeling, hedonistic child of California’s Gold Rush. Although his highest support in the 1995 election came from the black community--where he still is enormously popular--Brown’s appeal crosses racial, ethnic and class boundaries.

Until January of this year, Brown scored higher in public approval ratings than any mayor before him. That month, a San Francisco Examiner poll pegged his public approval rating below 50% for the first time. Nearly 4 in 10 voters queried by the newspaper then cited “arrogance” as the mayor’s most negative attribute. The mayor also began to take drubbings in the press for cronyism--for allegedly favoring longtime political allies or even onetime clients of his former law practice in lucrative city development projects.

“I supported him in 1995,” said tenant activist David Spero. “But I’ve been disappointed. It seems that he is more into enjoying the flash of being mayor than the substance. He has had a very cavalier attitude toward some serious issues.”

Voters queried in the January poll were beginning to complain about Brown’s failure to address two issues that promise to plague him in the coming year: the municipal transport system, known as Muni, and the city’s army of homeless people.

During his campaign against Jordan, Brown promised to fix Muni in 100 days. And he furiously attacked Jordan’s police crackdown on the homeless, which had driven many of the estimated 10,000 or more people living on downtown streets into the neighborhoods.

Shortly after taking office, however, Brown changed tack--declaring publicly that homelessness is so complex that it might be unsolvable. Advocates for the homeless have since accused Brown of continuing Jordan’s policies of arresting the homeless for drinking or urinating in public.

As for Muni, Brown poured millions of dollars into buying new rail cars and buses and oversaw the installation last summer of a computerized switching system meant to make the trains run more efficiently. Instead, the train system collapsed in August--leaving fuming riders stranded, sometimes for hours.

“It would be wrong to say that people are not very concerned about Muni and homelessness,” says Bender, Brown’s spokeswoman. “That is why the mayor devoted two-thirds of his State of the City address this year to those two issues in particular.” The mayor “is focused very diligently on those two issues.”

A Mayor With Coast-to-Coast Clout

Even Brown’s critics say the man would still be hard to beat next November. It is a measure of his power in a city where he has been a dominant figure for more than three decades that no heavyweight political leader has indicated publicly any interest in running against him. The Board of Supervisors--which acts here as a city council--is packed with handpicked Brown supporters. He already has locked up endorsements from several Democratic clubs in a town where the Republican Party has an insignificant presence.

“The man’s ability to campaign--the energy and the money he is willing to spend, the fund-raising he is capable of, the amount of clout that he has all the way from Washington to Sacramento into San Francisco--is very, very formidable,” pollster Binder added.

“He honestly, truly loves this job,” said Brown’s spokeswoman, Bender. “He works from 5 a.m. to midnight every single day, he makes at least a half-dozen public appearances every night, visits one school a week, holds open-door days at City Hall. This is what he loves to do.”