The City of San Diego, Once Thought of As a Model City - Is, Says Steve Erie, Politically "Melting Down"

Steve, San Diego's City Hall melt-down has made headlines across the country. What are your thoughts and reactions to the scandals, resignation, indictments, etc.?

It is like watching the last reel of Titanic, and City Hall is still taking on water. The Mayor has resigned, and a special election to choose a new mayor is scheduled for late June. We've got two councilmen on trial for bribery and corruption charges, including the Deputy Mayor who will assume the mayorship June 15th until a new mayor is selected. There are possible indictments of other city officials for securities fraud violations. We have a City Manager who resigned in November, effective this June, and recently decided to stay until the end of 2005. We have a new pension board stonewalling the release of documents needed to complete the audits allowing the city to float bonds again. And we have a City Attorney who is at war with the mayor and city council. In the midst of this chaos, we are trying to plan for the implementation of a new mayor-council form of government, to take effect in January 2006. While it usually takes a crisis to convince voters to change their governance system, I don't think any city has been called upon to do transition planning under as difficult a set of circumstances. A further complication in terms of governance is that the city of San Diego (but not the county) is undergoing political change, much as L.A. and San Francisco did earlier, as a once-Republican bastion trends Democratic.

Is this all terrible or is some good going to come from all the bad news from City Hall? Give the readers outside of San Diego a sense of the governance issues.

Well, in one sense it's good, because there's a much more honest dialogue about the city's fiscal and governance problems. They've been covered up for years by local officials and boosters. On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be the political will or leadership downtown to grapple adequately with the pension crisis. You hear from the Mayor and City Council that everything is going to be better the day after tomorrow. Yet the magnitude of the pension obligation worsens with inadequate yearly contributions. It is now approaching $1.5 billion and still growing. If we had more courageous leadership willing to make tough choices such as reducing benefit obligations or raising taxes and fees, I would be more optimistic that we are going to pull out of this sooner than much later.

What's at risk in the city in terms of planning, infrastructure investment, transportation, housing, etc? What is jeopardized by this crisis of leadership in San Diego?

Everything is at stake. Everything is at risk. The problem is that most decision making in the city is on hold. We can't go into the bond market. We can't do capital projects. We don't have the petty cash to repair the 30,000 potholes caused by the record winter rains. But there have been some policy initiatives amidst the turmoil and paralysis. Thus, the city council just passed a living wage ordinance, believe it or not. I call it L.A. Lite, since it covers few workers, and will be slowly phased in. Otherwise, city government is mostly in a bunker mentality. We're not any closer to making housing more affordable than we were 4 or 5 years ago. And, with looming budget cutbacks and layoffs, San Diego's "crown jewels"-its magnificent park and recreation facilities-are threatened.

Yet San Diego continues to attract people and to grow. How do you reconcile San Diego's attractiveness with its political crisis? Do people see City Hall as inconsequential?

I think a lot of them do. There really is a kind of schizophrenia in terms of continued job growth and a good economy while we go through this incredible crisis in city politics. And the county is still afloat financially. The suburbs are still afloat, but the central city-over 40 percent of the county's population-is sinking. Until the pain is actually felt-reduced city services, layoffs, benefit reductions and the like-most will treat this as a spectacle. The real crunch will come if and when the real estate market suffers as a result.

Steve, you participate in a select group of civic leaders who are advising the process of transforming San Diego government from a city manager form to the mayor-council form of governance. Who are your colleagues and what is this informal group's civic role?

The group is what's left of the power structure of San Diego. It includes a number of business and civic leaders such as Padres owner John Moores, real estate mogul Malin Burnham, and City Club head George Mitrovitch who are concerned that City Hall is so preoccupied with the crises that it really is not doing adequate planning for the new form of government to be implemented on January 1st. I've worked closely with them to hire the RAND Corporation to do a study of best practices for implementing a mayor-council municipal system. The RAND study will be delivered in early June, and can assist city officials, and business, labor, civic, and community stakeholders in implementing and fine tuning the new governance system.

What exactly was the charge your San Diego leadership group gave RAND?

RAND is looking at best practices in other cities that have undergone governance reform in the past 10-15 years, including Los Angeles. What are the best ways to reorganize the executive and legislative branches as we shift from a council-manager to a mayor-council system? For example, the city council has a new budget analyst office. Should it be confined to fiscal matters or, like L.A., should it also have a legislative mission? RAND also is looking at transition planning, trying to understand the San Diego context as well as learn from other places. The city also has hired consultants on an as-needed basis to prepare reports on matters such as the powers and duties of the new council presiding officer, the committee system, etc.

What a great report on city governance in San Diego from RAND say?

It would be a report that not only guides us in terms of transition planning between June and December, but is also useful in terms of fine tuning this experiment over the next 4 or 5 years. Unless it is re-enacted by voters in its current or revised form, the mayor-council system automatically expires after 5 years, and we revert to the old council-manager system. Ideally, the RAND report will inform that larger public debate over the proper design of San Diego city government as we consider whether and how to make this a permanent change.

Steve, you head the Urban Studies and Planning Program at UC San Diego. Elaborate, wearing you academic cap, on the architecture of city government and the essential tensions, if any, that must be designed into the City's charter to make representative government work well in San Diego.

The operative words are healthy competition and greater transparency. What we had under the old city manager system was legislative/executive branch collusion with lots of mutual back scratching and very little public transparency, particularly come budget time. The mayor-council system, with its separation of powers and checks and balances like our national government, creates a healthy tension and competition between the legislative and executive branches. I believe that this a better form of government for large and diverse cities, where there are significant differences of opinion about public policy that require political, not merely administrative, mediation. The council-manager system works best for small homogenous communities where there is overall consensus, and problems are essentially administrative.

Critics of San Diego City Government might say that the real problem has been the imposition of term limits that undermined the efforts of elected officials to oversee the city hall bureaucracy. Do you agree?

I think that term limits were indeed a contributing factor but not the real cause. Under the city manager system, a weak city council with limited staff could not adequately perform its oversight function let alone be an effective player in budget making. Neither could the mayor, who was essentially the 9th at-large voting member of the city council with limited powers. City managers knew how to count-to five-in terms of pleasing a council majority with goodies for their districts. This made the managers' job more secure, and discouraged greater oversight of their bailiwick.

What are the chances that a civic transformation will be successful and San Diego City Hall will right itself?

Well, actually I'm hopeful about preparations for the new governance system. The City Council appears to be waking up to the fact that it is going to be a separate branch of government, and has started its own transition planning.

A preliminary budget proposal has been prepared that will govern the first six months of the new governance system. After months of paralysis, decisions finally are being made in City Hall. It looks like we are going to have an independent budget analyst's office, perhaps with legislative duties such as in Los Angeles. We are about to debate the powers of a new council presiding officer, and whether to change the committee system.

Several months ago the City Council created a Citizens Advisory Committee to assist in the transition, with members appointed by the Mayor, City Council, and two at-large members representing the League of Women Voters and the Better Government Association. I serve on this committee, and we are making progress convincing city officials of the urgency and importance of careful transition planning. I'm actually surprised that we are this far along, given the chaos in San Diego government today.

Thus, while I'm pessimistic about a quick fix to our fiscal woes, I'm becoming hopeful about our chances for successfully installing the new governance arrangement.