by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Todd Gloria
David Alvarez
Mike Aguirre
Nathan Fletcher
Bruce Coons
At their regular
meeting September 26, the predominantly Queer San Diego Democrats for Equality
gave District Eight City Councilmember David Alvarez their endorsement for
Mayor of San Diego in the November 19 special election to replace Bob Filner,
the progressive Democrat who left office August 30 after being accused of
sexual harassment of women. Alvarez fell one vote short of the 60 percent
threshold for an endorsement on the first ballot and won on the second, after a
contentious but polite meeting lasting 2 ½ hours that featured mayors past,
present and — at least the club’s members hope — future.
The past mayor
was Filner; the present mayor — acting mayor, anyway — was District Three City
Councilmember Todd Gloria. He’d actually been invited to speak at the club’s
September meeting last May, at which time neither Gloria nor the club’s board
had any idea he’d be holding any office other than the ones he held when they
invited him: Councilmember and City Council president. But Filner’s resignation
put Gloria in the position of acting mayor, in which he will serve until March,
when the winner of the special election will take office.
Filner came up
early in Gloria’s speech when he thanked the club for calling for Filner’s
resignation in July, two weeks after the sexual harassment allegations against
him first surfaced. “I know that that was incredibly difficult to do,” he said.
“I know that for those of us who worked incredibly hard to elect Bob Filner Mayor,
it was hard to come forward and speak that truth. But it was the right thing to
do to make sure that our movement, our effort to make San Diego a more
progressive place, did not die with the man, but that we could move it forward
together.”
Gloria said that
rather than “put the city in neutral” until the next duly elected mayor takes
office, he would seek to “get things done.” One of the accomplishments he
pointed to was the City Council’s recent approval of a new plan for Barrio
Logan “that respected both industry and neighborhoods.” He also cited
Councilmember Sherri Lightner’s proposed ban on plastic grocery bags, and an
affordable-housing proposal that would restore the city’s so-called “linkage
fee” — a charge to developers of market-rate and high-end housing developments
that was supposed to go into a Housing Trust Fund to build affordable housing,
but instead since the 1990’s has been regularly raided by the city to close the
gaps in its general budget.
Among the other
initiatives Gloria promoted are a city response to climate change, the opening
of the new central library, and a plan for the expansion of San Diego’s
convention center which the California Coastal Commission will consider October
10. “It’s an important project, supported by business and labor,” Gloria said —
but most of the questions Gloria got from the audience looked skeptically at
this project. Gloria said the expansion will be funded partly by the city,
partly by the port, and partly by a so-called “assessment district” to which hotel
owners will contribute based on their proximity to the center: one, two or
three cents per dollar in additional occupancy taxes on their guests’ bills
depending on how close they are to downtown.
But the
assessment district has already been challenged in court, and, asked if Gloria
has a Plan B in case it’s ruled illegal, all Gloria could say was, “There may
be other options. We believe the legal process coincides nicely with our
development process, and we are confident we will finish construction by 2018.
Gloria also got
quite a few questions about when city services will be expanded — when
sidewalks and streets will be fixed, the bathrooms at Mission Bay opened again,
and hours at branch libraries extended after they were cut years ago. He blamed
all these problems on the city’s major budget deficits, which confronted him
and the other Councilmembers who took office in 2009.
“When you run
for office, you tell the voters about all the wonderful things you want to do,
but when Sherri (Lightner), Marti (Emerald) and I got on the Council we
immediately had to cut $170 million from the city budget.” Gloria explained.
“That’s why the bathrooms were locked up. We have to maintain the fiscal
discipline to restore what we cut, and since the city’s employees stood with us
in the sacrifices, they should share in the restorations.”
The Candidates Speak —
In Shifts
The original
plan for the meeting had been to present all four major Democratic candidates
for mayor — Alvarez, former Assemblymember Nathan Fletcher, former San Diego
City Attorney Mike Aguirre and businessman and historical preservationist Bruce
Coons — at once and have them answer written questions. But the San Diego
Voice and Viewpoint, an African-American
community newspaper, also scheduled a forum for mayoral candidates September
26, and the four candidates juggled their schedules differently to accommodate
both events. Fletcher and Coons arrived at 7:45 and had their portion of the
forum, including opening and closing statements as well as opportunities to
answer five questions Carla Kirkwood, the club’s vice-president for political
action, had written based on those submitted by the audience.
Alvarez and
Aguirre came to the club’s meeting almost an hour later, and former San Diego
County Democratic Party chair Maureen Steiner made a motion to allow them to
answer the same five questions Kirkwood had earlier put to Fletcher and Coons.
A few club members actually opposed this. Former club president Stephen
Whitburn basically said all four candidates had had their chance to speak to
the club, and two had taken advantage of it while the other two apparently felt
it was more important to speak to another organization. But the club voted
overwhelmingly to allow Alvarez and Aguirre to answer the questions, though
they weren’t allowed to make opening and closing statements and were given less
time to speak to each question than Fletcher and Coons.
Fletcher, who
ran for Mayor in 2012, started his campaign as a Republican, then re-registered
without a party affiliation after the County Republican Party endorsed Carl
DeMaio over him, and subsequently re-registered Democratic after he lost in the
primary to DeMaio and Filner, recalled the issue that started his break with
the Republican Party. In 2010, two years after he won his Assembly seat as a
Republican, “there was a resolution on the floor to ask Congress to repeal the
‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy” which kept Queer people from serving openly in
the military.
“That was an
issue I knew well,” Fletcher, a former Marine, said. “When I served in
peacetime, it was dumb; when I served in wartime, it was dumb; and when I
served in the Assembly, it was dumb. So I shared with my fellow Republicans
that I would give a speech on the matter, but it would not be the speech they
expected or wanted. That was the beginning of the end of my seven-year failed
relationship with the GOP.”
“Only one month
ago, I wasn’t thinking of running for Mayor,” said Coons. “But I didn’t see
anyone who would carry Bob [Filner]’s progressive agenda forward, and I still
don’t. There are three questions the Mayor should be asking: what do the
residents say, what do the community groups say, and most importantly, what
does it do for the quality of life for all
residents of San Diego, no matter where they live?”
Because he’s
best known as the head of Save Our Heritage Organization (SOHO), aimed at
preserving the city’s historic buildings, many commentators on the race have
written off Coons as a one-issue candidate. So he stressed his business background
— “I’ve built a company from zero to $30 million in five years” — as
qualification for the managerial responsibilities of the office under San
Diego’s relatively new strong-mayor charter.
Kirkwood’s
questions for the candidates were: 1) What had they personally done for Queer
equality, specifically to defeat California’s anti-marriage equality initiative
Proposition 8? 2) What is their vision of the city’s need for housing growth,
including helping homeless people and possibly instituting rent control? 3)
Would any of them support amending the City Charter to allow Irwin Jacobs’
Balboa Park bypass plan, including a paid parking garage in the park, to go
through after the courts invalidated it? 4) What would they do about the city’s
estimated $1 billion worth of infrastructure needs? 5) Should California pursue
big-box stores as a means of development and job creation?
Since all four
candidates had scored 100 percent on the club’s issues questionnaire — Coons
even joked it had been one of the easiest of any organization’s for him to
answer — their answers had more to do with their personal styles and
commitments than anything else. Coons reminded the audience that SOHO had been
founded by the late Gay artist Robert Miles Parker. Fletcher talked about his support
for SB 48, the bill passed by the California legislature that requires public
schools to teach about the achievements of Queer people, and called Queer
rights “the civil-rights issue of our
time.”
Aguirre said
that as city attorney he had prepared the legal opinion, later approved by the
City Council, that put the city officially on record against Proposition 8 when
it was challenged in the courts. He also pointed to his successful defense of
the city in a lawsuit filed by four firefighters who claimed their civil rights
had been violated when they were ordered to appear in a Pride parade and said
they were sexually harassed by attendees. Alvarez said he had personally
contributed money to keep the San Diego LGBT Community Center open after the
Center was ruled ineligible for Community Development Block Grant (CDBG)
funding from the city.
On the housing
question, all four candidates ducked the part about rent control. Some
emphasized the issue of residential growth in general and others focused on the
part of the question about how to deal with homeless people. “We have to get
serious about our housing needs,” said Fletcher. “We’re 52 unique neighborhoods
and we need to develop them in their own ways. I was the first mayoral
candidate who put out a bike plan. We need to make it possible for people to
live, work and shop in their neighborhoods.” He said he’d first encountered the
homelessness issue working with homeless veterans and was happy to see the city
set up a year-round shelter — an accomplishment Gloria had also hailed.
Coons cited the
high rents in San Diego — “over $2,000 for a two-bedroom apartment” — and said
he hoped to solve the affordable-housing problem by going after federal grants
to convert historic buildings into low-cost housing.
“I voted to
restore the linkage fee, cut in 1996, to have a bigger amount of money in the
Housing Trust Fund,” said Alvarez. “I was homeless for a few months when I was
a senior in high school. I supported the year-round shelter, even in my
backyard, because I believe it’s the right thing to do.”
“As city
attorney, I issued a legal opinion that we would not prosecute people for being
homeless unless there was available shelter for them,” said Aguirre. “We have
to catch people falling out of jobs and focus on temporary or short-term
homeless (people). The obvious solution is providing jobs. The city should be
the employer of last resort.”
On the question
of the Balboa Park bypass, Coons reminded the group that SOHO had filed the
lawsuit that led to the project’s demise. He said “you couldn’t even have walked
through Balboa Park” if the Jacobs project
had been built. “We fought the Mayor and Irwin (Jacobs) and we won. They said
they were going to crush us and get my friends fired. Later on, at the end,
they said, ‘You fought the good fight. We’ll give you a seat at the big boys’
table.’ But they found out I can’t be bought.”
“I don’t see
anyone bringing this back,” said Fletcher, who supported the project the last
time he ran for Mayor in 2012. Aguirre said he’d opposed it from the get-go.
Alvarez acknowledged he’d voted to approve the Jacobs plan as a Councilmember
but, like Fletcher, admitted the issue was over — especially since the much
simpler alternative Mayor Filner pushed through to get cars out of the Plaza de
Panama worked.
Regarding the
city’s estimated $1 billion infrastructure needs, Fletcher said it’s probably
higher than that estimate. “We have to consider all the financing options,” he
said. “We have to figure out how much we owe, how we can do it, and then put
together a financing plan. … Bob [Filner] rightly talked about investing in
neighborhoods and communities that have been left behind. It’s going in and
rebuilding our city.”
Coons said San
Diego should follow the example of Phoenix, which got their voters to fund
infrastructure repairs by slicing the financing into three separate bond
measures and not asking voters to approve the next one in sequence until the
work on the previous one had been completed. “We have to make new developments
pay their fair share and not use the
money for something else,” he said. “We also have to continue finding ways to
save money at the city.”
“My priorities
are to start the San Diego Water Project (an attempt to make the city’s water
supply independent of the Metropolitan Water District, which is dominated by
Los Angeles), repair sidewalks and bridges, and get libraries open,” said
Aguirre. He boasted of his success in helping reduce the city’s pension costs
and said that’s where the savings would come from that could be invested in
infrastructure.
Like Fletcher,
Alvarez said the city’s real infrastructure needs are probably higher than the
$1 billion estimate, which he said reflected only “deferred” — that is, fixing
roads, sidewalks and other existing infrastructure that has been allowed to
deteriorate. He said there’s probably about an additional $2 billion in
infrastructure the city needs but doesn’t have at all. But he warned that the
city will have to regain the trust of voters before it can hope to get them to pass
multi-billion dollar bond measures for infrastructure.
On the big-box
store issue — Walmart in particular — Fletcher said the current management of
Walmart has betrayed the original vision of founder Sam Walton, who paid his
workers relatively high wages and sold only products made in the U.S. “I think
we need to do a full economic-impact study on these big-box stores,” he said.
“Don’t ban them across the board but ask the questions about their economic
impacts.”
The San Diego
City Council actually passed an ordinance that would have done just that, but
then rescinded it after Walmart supporters, bankrolled by the company, got
enough signatures to force a public vote — and a similar bill was passed by the
state legislature but vetoed by Governor Jerry Brown. Aguirre said that as city
attorney he had written the local version of this bill — and criticized former
City Councilmember Donna Frye for having cast the deciding vote to rescind it.
“I fought with
the people in Barrio Logan against the Walmart there,” said Coons. “I think
it’s a tragedy and another blot on the American system when one of our most
profitable employers has most of their employees on the dole.”
“It depends on
which big-box stores,” said Alvarez. “If you’re talking about (ones that pay) poverty-level
wages, no. If we don’t give people good
jobs, it’s not a development policy; it’s a corporate giveaway. We need to
develop our neighborhoods with good jobs.”
The Club’s Debate: Who’s
Electable?
The debate over
the endorsement turned less on any differences between the candidates and more
on some sharp disagreements between members on which candidate would have the
best chance of beating City Councilmember Kevin Faulconer, who was anointed the
sole major Republican candidate at a secret meeting of 36 power brokers on
August 31. (See the article by Los Angeles Times San Diego County bureau chief Tony Perry at http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-san-diego-mayor-20130924,0,1310610.story.)
Club member David Warmoth put his finger on the problem
facing Democrats in the race: “Republicans outvote Democrats in primary
elections and special elections, and this one is both.” He said he favored
Alvarez partly because he “is the closest thing to me in my beliefs,” but also
because he thought the prospect of electing San Diego’s first Latino mayor
since California was still part of Mexico would help excite the Democratic
base.
Matt Corrales, speaking for Fletcher, said, “We’re not
going to elect someone who’s the strongest liberal. We need someone who can
pull Republicans and independents. We need to support a strong Democrat. That man is Nathan Fletcher.”
Though she had been reported in CityBeat magazine as supporting Alvarez, former San Diego
Democratic chair Maureen Steiner made a surprise plea for the club not to
endorse in the race at all. “If you knew nothing about the candidates other
than what you heard tonight, you’d have a hard time making a choice,” she explained.
“So I’d rather do no endorsement and go home.”
The club took
two votes on the race. On the first ballot, Alvarez got 39 votes to 24 for
Fletcher, one for Coons and two for no endorsement — leaving Alvarez with 59.5
percent, one vote shy of the 60 percent needed to endorse. On the second
ballot, Alvarez got 36 votes to 18 for Fletcher, giving him the endorsement.
