Mayoral Race Foes Are Doing the Math

By Tony Perry

Oct. 30, 2005 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

SAN DIEGO — The subject at the mayoral debate was seals: whether the animals that have taken over part of the beach in La Jolla should be booted out so children can go swimming.

Former Police Chief Jerry Sanders, leading in the polls after a well-funded, carefully crafted campaign, was cautious. Some people are pro-seals, some are pro-children, and the issue is snarled in litigation, he noted.

“Let’s let the court process go through,” he said.

Councilwoman Donna Frye, his opponent, threw caution into nearby Mission Bay.

“I support the seals,” she said, disappointing half the crowd.

With victory looking increasingly unlikely, Frye has decided to finish her quest for the mayor’s job the same way she started 14 months ago: saying things nobody else is saying, whatever the political risk.

Among the things she’s saying is that the city may need a half-cent sales tax to dig its way out of its multibillion-dollar budget problems.

In tax-averse San Diego, with some of the lowest tax rates of any large city in the country, that’s not smart politics, and Sanders has pounced on it.

Still, Frye, 53, environmentalist, surf-shop owner and political maverick who was nearly elected mayor a year ago, presses on. “Earth to San Diego: We have a problem -- we don’t have enough money,” she said.

Sanders, 55, said the half-cent idea, which would need voter approval, would force taxpayers to pick up the cost for mistakes made by Frye and other City Council members.

Even observers who admire Frye for raising the issue concede that it isn’t working.

“I think Donna Frye has the Jack Nicholson problem in a ‘Few Good Men’: ‘You can’t handle the truth,’ ” said Carl Luna, a political science professor at Mesa College. “San Diego can’t handle the truth that it will have to either raise revenues or cut services, that Santa Claus is not coming.”

On the other hand, Sanders brought Arthur B. Laffer, former top economist in the Reagan administration, to a news conference to predict that a tax boost would drive businesses out of San Diego and cost jobs.

The campaign for the Nov. 8 mayoral election has become a rolling tutorial on municipal finance, which could explain a curious lack of widespread enthusiasm among the voting public even as the city faces its biggest budgetary mess.

Political consultant and writer Scott Barnett said Frye has made a mistake by emphasizing pension problems over the “quality of life” issues such as clean beaches and controlled growth that helped propel her political career.

“Donna has forgotten who she is,” said Barnett, who is unaffiliated. “All the echo chamber is talking about is the pension problem, but the average citizen doesn’t understand it.”

Sanders is a first-time candidate. Frye ran a last-minute write-in campaign last year against then-Mayor Dick Murphy and county Supervisor Ron Roberts on the strength of her record as an early critic of the city’s pension plan, now mired in a $2-billion deficit.

In last year’s race against the two Republicans, Frye, a Democrat, placed first, but a judge invalidated thousands of her votes, giving the election to Murphy.

After Murphy resigned this year amid criticism of his handling of the pension mess, Frye placed first in a mayoral primary against two Republicans: Sanders and business leader Steve Francis.

But polls suggest that Francis’ backers quickly switched to Sanders for the runoff, giving him an immediate lead. An independent pollster last week put Sanders at 51% versus 39% for Frye.

Sanders has said he favors salary freezes, layoffs and the threat of bankruptcy to force labor unions to accept pension rollbacks. He has chipped away at Frye’s image as the outsider who warned that the pension system was headed for trouble even as her colleagues favored it.

In speeches and television commercials, he notes that she voted numerous times to increase pension benefits for city employees.

At the debate last week at a resort next to Mission Bay, the candidates were asked about traffic congestion in La Jolla, public drunkenness in Pacific Beach and the long-standing effort by City Hall to oust mobile-home dwellers at city-owned De Anza Cove.

But discussion inevitably returned to the city’s financial solvency. Both candidates have recovery plans, and their debates are filled with dueling numbers.

The Performance Institute, a local fiscal watchdog group, has concluded that Sanders’ plan is “stronger and more credible” and that Frye’s tax boost would amount to “throwing good money after bad.” She protests that the tax idea would be part of an overall revamping of city finances and employment practices.

But even as they praise Sanders, institute analysts say neither his plan or nor Frye’s adds up unless pension boosts approved in 1996 and 2002 are rolled back -- an action the city’s powerful public employee labor unions have vowed to resist.

Frye and City Atty. Michael Aguirre say the pension boosts were illegal because pension board members had conflicts of interest. Frye vows to end the pension increases her first day on the job.

Sanders says such a unilateral move would trigger legal action that would leave the city “paralyzed for the rest of our natural lives.” He says he prefers forcing labor unions to accept rollbacks through negotiations.

“Nobody is going to vote for a billion-dollar blank check,” Sanders said, referring to Frye’s half-cent tax idea.

“Right now, Jerry Sanders is in denial,” Frye said.