Candidate Takes San Diego by Storm

The female Che Guevara of local politics has already taped the “Today” show and “Good Morning America,” appeared live on CNN and fielded a call from Hollywood about turning her story into a movie.

“It does seem to have all the right elements,” Donna Frye tells me after slumping into an easy chair in her living room, her shaggy mutt at her feet.

So it would seem.

Surf shop owner becomes environmental crusader when her surfing legend husband gets horribly sick after catching some big ones on San Diego’s notoriously polluted coast.

She wins election to City Council and becomes the lone voice of fiscal sanity while militantly anti-tax San Diego sinks into Enron-style collapse.

She jumps into the mayor’s race at the last minute as a write-in candidate, inspiring a populist uprising in a traditionally conservative city.

The only problem is that the movie has no ending yet. Frye is in the lead, but officials are still counting votes from the Nov. 2 election, and it could take weeks to get through 147,000 write-in ballots and an additional 110,000 absentee and provisional ballots.

Then there’s a sour-grapes lawsuit to sort through, filed by a business attorney who wants Frye’s candidacy thrown out, followed by a runoff between the other two candidates.

Meanwhile, the city is abuzz. I visited a beach at dusk, and the first three surfers out of the water were Frye backers who hang on the daily vote updates.

“San Diego has been run by developers and the building industry for so many years,” said surfer Suzanne Michael, a University of San Diego professor of environmental law.

Michael said that when the power brokers meet behind closed doors, she can always count on Frye to bang the door down on behalf of the environment and the little guy.

Adding to the drama is the fact that voters approved a measure granting broad new powers to the next mayor. It was sponsored by what’s left of that Old Boys Network, and UC San Diego professor Steve Erie said the boys never imagined they might be “handing over the keys to the kingdom” to a maverick surfer chick.

“The San Diego establishment has certainly hoisted itself on its own petard,” said San Diego resident Mike Davis, the renowned cage-rattling author.

Naturally, more traditional San Diegans are horrified.

“If I wanted to live in Berkeley, I would have moved there years ago,” La Jolla’s Joe Timko wrote in a letter to the San Diego Union-Tribune, questioning whether a surf shop owner had the skills to manage a major burg. “What a disaster this would be for our fine city.”

This ignores one small point:

The people running the city can’t run the city.

That’s why San Diego appeared on the brink of bankruptcy amid a federal investigation into mismanagement of the shrinking employee pension fund. It was Frye who saw trouble coming and cast a lone vote against shorting the fund.

“People need to start hearing the truth,” she said.

When you’re talking about safety and environmental protection, you can’t always do it on the cheap, as she sees it. This is the city that let the lease run out on its only firefighting helicopter just before the Cedar and Paradise blazes killed 16 people and destroyed 3,000 houses.

There might be more money in the till, Frye said, if downtown power brokers weren’t always bellied up to the corporate welfare trough. She’s sick and tired of watching city officials bend over backward for the owners of the Chargers and Padres, in particular.

“People have always underestimated her,” said Skip Frye, who shapes surfboards for a living at the shop he and his wife own. “She does her homework more than anyone. When she went up against the city on water quality, I saw her take a correspondence class in sewage treatment, and she got an A.”

It was about 10 years ago that Skip felt sick after surfing, and Donna Frye began educating herself on lax water quality controls. Convinced that Skip had been exposed to a viral pathogen, which still troubles him, she began shaking a fist at City Hall and the state Capitol. Frye helped draft the legislation that now requires water quality monitoring along the entire coast.

“Her story has been used as an inspiration for coastal water quality groups nationally,” said Mark Gold of Heal the Bay in Santa Monica.

San Diego’s water quality has improved dramatically, says Bruce Reznick of San Diego Baykeeper, but the city still has a long way to go. San Diego pumps about 169 million gallons of partially treated sewage into the ocean daily. It’s the largest U.S. city with a waiver from the federal Clean Water Act.

City officials have long resisted upgrading the treatment facility, believing it’s better to have residents and tourists swim in dung than pay to protect the very asset that draws them in the first place.

Is it any wonder Donna Frye has taken San Diego by storm?

“I want to save the city from itself, open up government for the good of the people and have some fun doing it,” Frye said. “San Diego needs to be turned on its head.”

She seems to have accomplished that, whether she wins or loses in the final tally.

But she isn’t going to lose, she says, still slumped in the easy chair with her dog at her feet.

Diogenes, she calls him, in honor of the character who wandered Athens in search of an honest man.

The columnist can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com.