Financial Planner to Run for Former Martinez Seat

Calling for more teamwork at City Hall and aggressive economic development programs, financial planner Ty Smith on Thursday announced his candidacy for the San Diego City Council vacated by Uvaldo Martinez.

Smith, who is taking a leave of absence from his job as an investment counselor with Dean Witter Reynolds for the campaign, said his background in business management “best addresses the needs of the 8th District and the city.”

Smith, a 34-year-old Republican who lives downtown, has never before run for public office but has worked on the campaigns of several local Republican candidates.

He is the second announced candidate in the non-partisan race, which is expected to be the city’s most heated election this fall.

Although he will be running in a heavily Democratic district, Smith’s campaign consultant, Hannah Edelstein, argued that his Republican background would not be a handicap.

Over the past 2 1/2 years, Edelstein noted, the 8th District has voted for President Reagan, Gov. George Deukmejian, council Republicans Gloria McColl, Ed Struiksma and Judy McCarty. It also voted to oust former California Supreme Court Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird.

The district is represented by Democrat Celia Ballesteros, who was appointed last year after Martinez resigned following his felony conviction for misusing a city credit card.

As a condition of her appointment, Ballesteros pledged not to run for the seat this fall.

Ballesteros narrowly lost to Martinez, a Republican who had been appointed to the council, in the 1983 city-wide election, although she had finished first in the district-wide primary.

The other candidate who has announced for this year’s election is lawyer Michael Aguirre, a Democrat. The field of potential contenders includes salesman Bob Castaneda Jr., lawyer Henry Empeno, former San Diego School Board member Bob Filner, county staffer Neil Good, former TV newsman Jesse Macias and land-use planner Gail MacLeod. The top two candidates in the nominally non-partisan September primary will face each other in an at-large election in November.

The district includes San Ysidro, Barrio Logan, downtown, Hillcrest and parts of Golden Hill and Southeast San Diego.

Alluding to Martinez’s resignation and other scandals that have rocked City Hall in recent years, Smith said that, if elected, he would “personally strive to build cooperation between the factions of City Hall and restore the credibility and effectiveness that were tarnished by recent events.”

“Our city has a booming economy that is generating many changes,” Smith said at a news conference outside City Hall. “In a quality-oriented community like ours, those changes demand good management.”

Smith, a National City native who graduated from UC San Diego and Harvard Business School, said public safety, economic development and managed growth would be his other priorities.

Noting that public- and private-sector leaders “have only scratched the surface” on the city’s economic potential, Smith said that enterprise zones, twin plants on the U.S.-Mexican border and increased pursuit of Pacific Rim trade could help “steer San Diego to become an international trade and financial center able to compete with the best in the world.”