by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Bob Filner speaking
at the LGBT Center, Dec. 3, 2012
Bob Filner and his
fiancée, Bronwyn Ingram
Bob Filner and Ingrid
Croce (Jim Croce’s widow)
Bronwyn Ingram, Bob
Filner, Jess Durfee and Christine Kehoe
Bob Filner “works the
crowd”
Audience listens to
Bob Filner speak
Newly elected City
Council President Todd Gloria
Jess Durfee,
Christine Kehoe, Todd Gloria
Christine Kehoe and
her wife, Julie Warren
Elaine Graybill
Linda Perine and
Ingrid Croce
Maureen Steiner and
Mike Growe
Sister Ida Know of
the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence
Where’s the big hair?
Sue Palmer plays boogie piano
Jack
When Bob Filner,
long-time Democratic Congressmember and one of the most progressive voices in
the House of Representatives, took the oath of office as Mayor of San Diego
December 3, he did it with a difference. Instead of the formal stage of the
Civic Theatre in the City Hall complex downtown, he booked the Balboa Park Club
off Presidents’ Way and held his formal inauguration ceremony in its more
proletarian environs. Then he got back in touch with his political roots — his
first elective office was as a member of the board of the San Diego Unified
School District — and did a tour of five schools across the city. After that
his inaugural co-chairs, Nancy Chase and Bob Nelson, and “co-chair for
neighborhood participation” Linda Perine took Filner on a whirlwind tour of
five community events in La Jolla, Mira Mesa, Hillcrest, Euclid Avenue and San
Ysidro, dramatizing Filner’s campaign promise to be a mayor for all San Diego’s
neighborhoods, not just downtown and the affluent communities north of
Interstate 8.
Filner began his
speech after the swearing-in ceremony by introducing his fiancée, Bronwyn
Ingram, and promising that they would be a team in the office. He also thanked
his three major opponents in the mayor’s race, including City Councilmember
Carl DeMaio, who placed first in the mayoral primary in June and narrowly lost
the November runoff, “for your reform efforts and being so gracious as we have
a change in administrations.” But he also made it clear that he rejected
DeMaio’s confrontational attitude towards city workers and their unions. After
thanking the city’s chief operations officer, Jay Goldstone, he told her, “The
day of vilification of your employees is over.”
Calling his
inauguration “the beginning of a new day for our city,” Filner thanked the City
Council and the Mayor he’s replacing, former police chief Jerry Sanders, for
helping San Diego overcome its years-long budget crunch. “After a decade of
crises and cutbacks, we have a chance to look towards the future,” Filner said.
“I can start with a balanced budget and a bond rating. We can talk about moving
forward, but I couldn’t do that without the stability you have given us.”
Filner acknowledged the city may still face financial challenges, including the
end of the state’s redevelopment program and a bill passed in the state
legislature denying construction aid money to cities that outlaw project-labor
agreements (PLA’s) that protect local jobs, wages and union representation in
the city’s construction projects.
San Diego voters
passed a ban on PLA’s last June and also approved Proposition B, which ends
guaranteed pensions for new city employees and replaces them with a 401(k)-type
system. Filner’s main opponent, DeMaio, pushed Proposition B, former mayor
Sanders signed on to it and all the major mayoral candidates except Filner
(DeMaio, former Assemblymember Nathan Fletcher and San Diego County District
Attorney Bonnie Dumanis) supported it. Filner pledged to implement Proposition
B but “to do it in an environment that respects and honors the hard work of our
city employees, who are on the front lines. They keep us safe, they pick up our
trash, they maintain our parks, they answer our 911 calls, they keep our
libraries open. Thank you, city employees.”
Pledging
“transparency” in city government, Filner said, “The real heart and soul of our
city is its neighborhoods. They define our residents’ character and quality of
life. As I traveled across the city during the long mayoral campaign, residents
expressed near-unanimous frustration with the city’s neglect of the facilities
and services that they depend on. To me it’s unacceptable, in what we call
‘America’s Finest City,’ that some neighborhoods still lack some basics like
paved streets and streetlights. It’s unacceptable that some neighborhoods
devastated by the wildfires in 2003 and 2007 still lack adequate fire
facilities and equipment, and a lot of times we can’t even meet federal
standards for emergency response times. It’s unacceptable that a police
department that already has one of the state’s lowest ratios of officers to
residents is still over 200 officers short of our budgeted staffing level, and
we lack the resources right now to restore community-oriented policing.”
Filner mentioned
other areas in which the city falls short of what it should be doing, including
the closing of neighborhood libraries evenings and weekends; the closing of
lifeguard towers and community restrooms during off-hours; and the city’s
failure to equip first responders with the vehicles they need. “We’re going to
complete the updates of our community plans, protect urban open spaces, reduce
storm water pollution and make sure our neighborhoods are pedestrian- and
bike-friendly,” he said. “We’re going to work with labor unions, working people
and businesses to streamline our regulatory processes. We’re going to encourage
partnerships between businesses and school districts. … We’re going to build on
the innovations of companies like Qualcomm, push the initiative to install
solar panels on city buildings and push for more maritime uses for the port.”
Other pledges
Filner made in his opening speech were more problematic for the progressives in
the audience, including campaign volunteers who helped to elect him. He pledged
his support for expanding the San Diego Convention Center and “keeping the
Chargers in San Diego” — even though that may not be possible unless the
cash-strapped city gives a major public subsidy to a stadium project. He also
committed to “a great celebration of Balboa Park’s 100th
anniversary,” but said, “I want my tenure as Mayor to be remembered by how it
makes its decisions. I want an administration where everyone is at the table,
and the only prerequisite for participation is your love for the city and your
interest in improving it. I understand the difference between being a
legislator and being Mayor, but I still have things I feel passionately about.”
Filner closed
his inaugural speech by quoting Robert F. Kennedy’s famous lines about how some
people see things as they are and ask why, while others see things as they might
be and ask why not. “Why not get serious about eliminating homelessness?” he
said. “Why not make the combined San Diego-Tijuana region an incubator for an
innovative new economy? Why not protect our beaches and ensure that every neighborhood is a safe place to work and play in?”
Filner Visits the Queer
Community
Filner’s
post-inaugural whirlwind tour of San Diego took him to five evening events,
including one at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Center in Hillcrest.
He was introduced by openly Queer City Councilmember Todd Gloria, who had an
announcement of his own: that day the San Diego City Council elected him as its
president, the first time an openly Queer member of the Council has filled that
position. “Bob Filner made it clear that he was running to protect
neighborhoods, and I intend to help him,” Gloria said.
Veteran Queer
community activist and city commissioner Nicole Murray Ramirez also was
prominently featured at the Center event. He thanked Filner for attending the
Transgender Day of Remembrance, an annual commemoration in November of
Transgender people who have been killed over their gender identity, and the
lighting of the memorial tree on World AIDS Day December 1. Murray Ramirez
announced that December 3 is his birthday and said Filner’s inauguration was
the best birthday present he’d ever had.
Referencing his
entry into activism 50 years ago, when he rode on one of the Freedom Rides
protesting racial segregation on interstate bus lines and spent two months in a
Mississippi jail, Filner said, “The previous Mayor [Sanders] was a police
chief. I started my political career in jail. I think that’s an improvement.”
He said that the way he’d scheduled his first day as Mayor — first visiting
schools and then participating in events all around the city — showed that
“we’re going to live in the neighborhoods” during his time as Mayor.
The celebration
at the Center was full of ironies. Two of Filner’s election opponents, DeMaio
and Dumanis, are openly Queer, but DeMaio was endorsed by Right-wing
Republicans with strongly held anti-Queer positions, including hotel owner and
publisher Doug Manchester, attorney and activist Charles LiMandri, and
talk-show host and former Mayor Roger Hedgecock. DeMaio got the endorsement of
the San Diego Republican Central Committee, largely by attacking opponent
Nathan Fletcher for his vote for a bill to require public schools to teach the
history and achievements of prominent Queers. He was raked over the coals about
this at a forum for the primary candidates at the Center, and anti-DeMaio
activists posted a clip of the event on YouTube.
Manchester’s U-T
San Diego — formerly the Union-Tribune until Manchester ordered its name changed, possibly
because Manchester, a ferocious opponent of organized labor, didn’t want
anything he owned to have the name “union” in it — strongly endorsed DeMaio. So
did Gay San Diego, owned by
DeMaio’s partner Johnathan Hale, which refused an ad from the San Diego
Democrats for Equality because it listed Filner as one of its endorsed candidates.
Ironically, when DeMaio filled out the questionnaire from U-T San
Diego, he listed his marital status as
“single.” Later, after community activists launched a campaign to boo DeMaio as
he and Hale appeared in the LGBT Pride Parade, Hale published an “open letter”
to the community saying that the people in the Queer community targeting DeMaio
“are putting their allegiance to labor union politics
above what is right for the LGBT community and our efforts to achieve full
equality.”
With a lot of people in the room being Queer activists who
campaigned for him against an openly Queer opponent, Filner told the crowd at
the Center, “You’ve helped us in the election and you’re going to see some new
faces at City Hall. There might even be a Gay face or two to make sure this
city is open to everybody” — an odd statement to make in a city which has had
at least one openly Queer person on the City Council since 1993 and where two
Queer long-time city commissioners, Murray Ramirez and Al Best (whom Gloria
acknowledged as the very first openly Queer person to run for the City
Council), were in the audience.
“It’s going to be harder to govern than it was to win an
election,” Filner said, repeating a warning he’d given at the San Diego
Democrats for Equality’s Freedom Awards November 17. “We’re going to blaze a
new path. When people may need to be educated, we’ve got to go door-to-door,
we’re going to have to campaign. All the things we had to do to get elected, we
need to do now to build community support and make sure we’re doing what people
want. We need your help and participation.”
