It’s a Zoo, but Many Still Wild for City

For a city supposedly in the grip of crisis and scandal, San Diego looks amazingly attractive and tranquil.

Take Friday: Tourists and locals flocked to beaches, construction downtown charged forward, and city services continued without interruption.

No garbage in the streets, no large-scale exodus of businesses, no sinkholes, nothing reminiscent of New York in the 1970s or other urban invalids.

What’s going on here? To update a Depression-era saying attributed to Will Rogers: If San Diego is going to the poorhouse, it’s going in a Lexus.

While it is impossible to ignore the city government’s problems, it is possible to overstate their effect on life. The litany is known: federal and state investigations, two convictions in a case called “Strippergate,” criminal charges against six pension board members, feuding among City Hall officials and a $2-billion pension deficit.

All true, but there is a disconnect between the well-being of the city and the woes of the city government. And there is also a disconnect between the political and administrative class of a hundred or so and 11,000 city employees.

“City employees are still working their [tails] off despite all this,” said architecture professor Michael Stepner, a former city planner. “They’re picking up the garbage, filling the potholes -- all those things that a city does.”

San Diego has rarely been as prosperous: an unemployment rate of 4.4% (below the state and national figures), investment flowing into the building and biotech sectors, tourists and conventions in record numbers, the Padres still in first place, universities expanding, and, this weekend, Street Scene, one of the nation’s largest music festivals.

“I wouldn’t say we don’t have some significant hurdles to get over: Political uncertainty always translates into a certain amount of business uncertainty,” said Julie Meier Wright, president of the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corp.

“But on the other hand, the positive attributes of San Diego are very strong. San Diego is most definitely open for business.”

While there may be bigger cuts ahead, reductions in city services have been mild, mostly trims in library and swimming pool hours.

The Police Department remains highly regarded, and city lifeguards routinely pluck swimmers from the undertow. A woman last week wrote the San Diego Union-Tribune to marvel at the speed with which city workers filled a pothole in front of her home.

So why has San Diego become a national punch line? Why did Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly, when looking for an insult to hurl at Atlanta, decide on “it’s almost as badly run as San Diego”?

San Diego’s problems have played more as farce than tragedy. This is a no-casualties calamity. It’s not, for example, like another controversial police shooting in Los Angeles. Also, it involves a city that tells the world it’s “America’s Finest” and almost begs to be brought down a peg.

Two main theories have emerged to explain the city government’s predicament.

One, pushed by the Union-Tribune editorial page, is that rapacious labor unions and craven City Council members have sent the city government to the brink of bankruptcy.

Another is that the city’s pinch-penny approach to government has finally caught up with it. This is a holy site for the anti-tax movement. None of the 11 mayoral candidates in last week’s mayoral primary dared suggest raising taxes, not even on tourists or out-of-town businesses.

“San Diego has had a 30-year experiment with minimalist government,” said Steve Erie, political science professor at UC San Diego.

Even in its time of travail, there is confidence that San Diego will survive the tarnish on its reputation.

“We’re a national joke now, but we’ll get out of this -- the issues that are comedic are fixable,” said lobbyist Michel Anderson, one of several longtime City Hall figures recruited by Deputy (and acting) Mayor Toni Atkins to guide her until a mayor is elected to succeed Dick Murphy, who resigned July 15.

It has fallen to Atkins to protect the civic zeitgeist from a pounding of national ridicule. She was asked at a news conference Friday if she is pained by the put-downs by late-night comedians, such as Jay Leno’s crack that the president of Iraq has more job security than a mayor of San Diego.

Atkins moved here in the mid-1980s and her speech still has the flatness and dropped Gs of her native Oklahoma. But her answer was pure San Diego: “We still have the most beautiful beaches and the sun. San Diego is still the most wonderful place to live.”

Although service cuts are small, City Hall problems may have buckled the knees of some San Diegans. One of the declining economic indicators in a report issued by the University of San Diego last week was local consumer confidence.

Despite Atkins’ hope for a return of civility, it is unlikely the city’s political turmoil will abate soon. Not with a mayoral election that has been reduced to the equation of surfer-chick (Donna Frye) versus former police chief (Jerry Sanders).

And not with a virtual shooting war between City Atty. Michael Aguirre and the rest of the government.

The morning after the mayoral primary, Aguirre told The Times that an era of good vibes was dawning at City Hall.

By nightfall, however, Aguirre had accused city officials of cheating employees on their investments, called for the city manager to be fired, and pressured the City Council to appoint three losing mayoral candidates who hold views similar to his to the pension board.

Atkins knows that perception can affect reality, and among her advisors are public relations specialists. But changing the outside view of San Diego may be difficult. The journalistic trope of the sunny city suffering storm clouds has been around a long time.

Take a story about San Diego in the Wall Street Journal that referred to the “beautiful seaside city” as the “victim of a whole string of bumblings, scandals and disasters that make it seem almost a city cursed.”

The front-page story appeared May 7, 1974.