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FeedThe Uncivil War at City Hall
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IN JUNE, AGUIRRE was asked by VoiceofSanDiego.org whether the situation looked like developer Aaron Feldman, owner of Sunroad, was getting special treatment because he was a developer and a Sanders campaign contributor—in other words, did it look corrupt? Aguirre said it did. And since Mayor Sanders’ office was involved, did that make the mayor look corrupt? Aguirre took the bait. Yes, he said.
Sanders exploded. He immediately called a news conference to defend his reputation and was flanked by more than a dozen law enforcement officers, judges, the FBI, the district Attorney, the county sheriff and the city police chief. Union-Tribune columnist Gerry Braun called Sanders, Dumanis and Sheriff Bill Kolender the “Axis of Virtue.” Aguirre stood by his claim.
Months later, Sanders told San Diego Magazine most people were not shocked he and Aguirre had this blowup. “Most people were shocked that we got along with each other as long as we did,” he says. “We haven’t totally recovered from it yet. We will—we’re just not dating right now.”
Sanders says Sunroad exposed some systemic problems within city government, such as departments that don’t talk to each other, and the tendency of some in the bureaucracy to sit on their hands when they have a decision to make, hoping the problem will simply go away.
“I’m out there making statements, and then I get new information that makes my statements wrong,” he says. “My credibility is at stake, and then I need to make different statements. It pisses me off beyond belief.”
To make the Sunroad matter even worse for Sanders, he accepted the resignation of city land-use chief Jim Waring in mid-August. Waring was still lobbying on behalf of Sunroad well after the mayor publicly announced the city would accept nothing less from the company than full FAA compliance.
Part of the fallout, Sanders says, is that he is much more careful in what he says, which can be interpreted as either a lack of candor or an unwillingness to take a strong position.
“I like the mayor, personally,” Aguirre says. “He’s interesting and funny. This is like a family, and Sunroad was our first major blowup. I hope he can look at it and see I had his best interests in mind. The lessons are that the rule of law applies to everyone, and when the strong-mayor powers are used, the system works.”
But which system?
“Sanders was active in helping people do what was illegal, then brought his virtue group in to stand behind him,” Aguirre says. “That was ‘Will the real system please stand up?’ It showed me the real system is based on relationships, not the law.”
Sanders agrees the Sunroad issue gave the appearance of the old ways of doing business in San Diego, where politicians were heavily influenced by the city’s business interests, namely real estate developers and builders.
—Mike Aguirre
“I understand why people saw it that way,” he says. “In retrospect, I should have put a stop-work order when I first saw what was happening, rather than try to solve the problem. We muddled that up.”
But Sunroad also gave Sanders’ critics (besides Aguirre) the opportunity to voice their misgivings on how the city in general is being run, and how well those strong-mayor powers are being applied.
“This is a pay-to-play administration, and he got caught on Sunroad,” says Steve Erie, professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, who is writing a book on local politics, called Paradise Plundered: Fiscal Crisis and Political Turmoil in San Diego. He sees many parallels between Sanders’ administration and Susan Golding’s, who was mayor for most of the 1990s.
“The story of San Diego is told in sweetheart deals with developers,” says Erie. “Sanders is guilty of moral corruption by doing one thing and then denying it. Just like Golding, he gives special access to the big contributors who represent the growth machine of San Diego. The developers have run this town for so long it will be a struggle to the death to break their hold. He’s Susan Golding in drag.”
Sanders is merely the spokesman for business-as-usual politics, Erie says. “When Sanders opened his mouth during his campaign, Tom Shepard’s voice came out,” Erie says. Shepard, a campaign consultant, worked on both the Sanders campaign and the strong-mayor proposition. “Now when Sanders speaks, all I hear are Kris and Fred.” Kris Michell, Sanders’ chief of staff, and Fred Sainz, his spokesman, both were part of Susan Golding’s inner circle.
In addition to Sunroad, Erie points to the deal made for developer Doug Manchester to turn the Broadway Pier area into a complex of hotels, condos and shops. That deal was reached before Sanders took office, but if Sanders really wanted to exert his power over developers, Erie says, he would have delayed approval of the complex so that the area’s use could be reevaluated.
“But since Manchester was a big contributor to Sanders’ campaign, there was a quid pro quo,” says Erie. He also cites the selection of the firm Grubb & Ellis to handle the auction of city property as evidence of more sweetheart deals. “Sunroad is just a preview of coming attractions,” he says.
But the mayor’s supporters offer a strong rebuttal. First, they note, Manchester had been a strong supporter of Steve Francis, Sanders’ opponent in the mayoral primary. As for being a “big contributor,” they say, even if Manchester had given the maximum allowable contribution to Sanders, the legal cap was just $300. And Shepard points to times when Sanders’ decisions have run counter to developers’ wishes as evidence the mayor is not their stooge, and he echoes DeMaio’s contention that many of the problems Sanders has are inherited from previous administrations.
“The mayor has done much to annoy development groups,” Shepard says. “He insisted on inclusionary housing and parks downtown and made developers pay their fair share. He also took action to insist that developers cooperate with land-use agreements around airports. That ran counter to their wishes.”
As for Sunroad, Shepard says that the problem was with the inertia in the development services office that existed long before Sanders arrived. “Essentially, no one was accountable before,” says Shepard.
In August, both Jim Waring, the city’s top land-use official, and Marcela Escobar-Eck, director of the Development Services Department, left their posts. They were either fired or they resigned, depending on whom you believe.
“It’s easy to criticize [Sanders] for problems he inherited, but these are real growing pains,” Shepard says. “He’s having to change the culture of an 11,000-person bureaucracy.”
George Mitrovich, who runs the City Club of San Diego and hosts frequent public forums on city politics, says while he supported both Sanders and the strong-mayor proposition, he is “disappointed” with how the city is being run.
“Sanders is a great person and is popular, but he and his people play defense,” Mitrovich says. “A leader leads. He needs to get out in front of the public with a plan and say ‘Here’s what we need to do.’ What we don’t need is a caretaker mayor.”
CITY COUNCILMEMBER Donna Frye, who ran against Sanders in 2005, says Sunroad was an example of how the mayor’s office operates in direct contradiction to Sanders’ campaign promise of transparency in government.
“This administration has a strong tendency to control everything without explanation,” she says. “You had the city attorney offering a legal opinion and the mayor not accepting that opinion, and instead doing an end run trying to work out a compromise, all outside of the view of the public and the city attorney. That’s fairly instructive. It revealed a pattern of someone who is not clear on government as a public process.”
Frye was also frustrated by the mayor’s office when she tried to conduct a public hearing on a rigorous citywide recycling program she was proposing earlier this year.
“They told me they wouldn’t be showing up to our hearing,” she says. To force their appearance, she issued a summons, which she has the authority to do under the city’s charter. Some of the mayor’s staff reluctantly showed up, she says, but they were unprepared.
“You can’t just thumb your nose at the city charter,” Frye says. “It’s not the way to govern. A lot of time gets wasted on these power struggles. I should not have to work this hard just to get things before the public. It’s weird and depressing sometimes.”
In late August, Sanders reversed course and is now supporting a law that would require city residents to recycle and would provide recycling bins to apartment, condo and office buildings. The law is similar to the one proposed by Aguirre in April.
But the power struggle matters, Frye says, because it is exposing where the city’s power really is.
“The developers and real estate interests are struggling to hold on to the same old structure,” she says, “but we’re starting to see it crumble. The battle will get worse, but the framework has been laid to expose the deals and let the public see how they’re done.”
That’s not to say Aguirre is against the Building Industry Association, the powerful conglomeration of developers, land owners and builders, the city attorney says. “It’s expected that the economic drives the political—every city grew up that way,” he says. “But the economic has so overwhelmed our system that we have no plan for sustaining our city into the future. We have no fallback plan for energy or water. We don’t want to shut down the development industry. But they’re on automatic pilot, and we need to convince developers we need a greater social utility from them.”
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