Agnos Appears to Be Facing Win in S.F.--and a Deficit

SAN FRANCISCO —  Art Agnos fashioned a commanding plurality in San Francisco’s mayoral primary last month by promising many things to many people, from families pinched by housing costs to preservationists worried over the loss of quaint architecture.

Over the last four weeks of the runoff campaign, which ends Tuesday, the liberal assemblyman has had a tougher task--explaining how this city, with a projected $86-million municipal budget deficit next year, can afford subsidized housing, help for the homeless and all of his other promised social programs.

The answer: His agenda, published in a widely distributed campaign booklet, is not as costly as claimed by his rival, City Supervisor John L. Molinari; moreover, he says, creative financing can pay for the programs without any additional taxes.

General Promise

If cuts are needed to keep the city solvent, he promised during a televised debate last week, he will make them--but declined to be more specific. Until he is in office and faced with a problem, he said, “I can’t tell you ‘this issue I’ll be opposed to’ and ‘this issue I’ll be for.’ ”

This has hardly satisfied Molinari, a City Hall veteran who still hammers away at what he contends is Agnos’ budget-busting $310-million “wish list.” But Agnos seems to have satisfied voters. The 49-year-old ex-social worker and former long-shot candidate holds a 56%-18% lead in public opinion polls. The remaining 26% of those polled were undecided.

Molinari is unfazed--in public, at least--by polls and pundits predicting his defeat Tuesday, but some of his more prominent supporters have not been as brave. After Agnos came within a few percentage points of winning the campaign outright last month, several Molinari backers--the Rev. Cecil Williams, a key advocate of civil rights and homeless issues; Fire Commission President Henry Berman, and airport commissioner and political fund-raiser Morris Bernstein--urged him to bow out of the race.

The 52-year-old insurance salesman ignored the advice, leading Williams and Berman to defect to Agnos. They found that campaign office crowded. Since demonstrating his popularity with voters, Agnos has become very popular with local and national power brokers. In the last month, he has been endorsed by, among others, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.), Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp and San Francisco City Atty. Louise Renne, who had all but accused Agnos of corruption during her own brief mayoral campaign this year.

With his proven, effective army of election advisers and precinct workers, Agnos has become a valuable asset for Democrats. He can use his supporters to rally Bay Area voters behind his mentor and longtime supporter, Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy, when McCarthy challenges Republican Sen. Pete Wilson next year.

Agnos even picked up the endorsement of former City Administrative Officer Roger Boas, further damaging Molinari’s comeback hopes. Boas, a conservative, finished a close third in the primary, and Molinari needed his votes to close in on Agnos. But polls showed that most of Boas’ supporters actually favored Agnos, the liberal, over Molinari, a former moderate who has become a conservative.

Molinari, meanwhile, failed to capture the endorsement of independent state Sen. Quentin Kopp, a popular figure in the city’s conservative, middle-income west side neighborhoods that Molinari has focused on for support. However, the former Republican has been endorsed by the local Republican Party, a decidedly mixed blessing in a city where only 18% of registered voters are Republicans.

Both Molinari and Agnos are registered Democrats and the election is officially nonpartisan.

Post-election analyses of the primary election balloting showed the remarkable depth of Agnos’ support throughout the city. He led in 614 of the 711 precincts--an 86.3% rate in a crowded field with two other major contenders--and finished first in 20 of the city’s 21 unofficial neighborhood districts. Agnos finished second only in the conservative area west of Twin Peaks, which was won by Boas, who now supports Agnos.

On the other hand, Molinari finished first in only five precincts--fewer than 1% of the total. Tellingly, Molinari could not top Agnos in the Treasure Island Naval Base precinct, even though Molinari vocally supports the city’s Navy bases and Agnos opposes them.

Costliest Campaign

If Molinari loses by a similar margin Tuesday, it will not be for lack of effort--or money. Pollsters say the outcome has been known for at least six weeks, but this still has been San Francisco’s costliest mayoral campaign.

Campaign finance reports filed before the balloting showed that the two men have spent a total of $3 million running for the $107,349-a-year job. Molinari raised almost half of his $1.5-million campaign fund in the first half of this year, when he seemed invincible. Agnos’ fund-raising has been balanced over a longer period, although about a third of his $1.5-million fund arrived in the last month.

Molinari’s supporters consist mostly of local developers, bankers, lawyers and other professionals and business owners, according to campaign finance disclosure forms. Agnos was favored by government employees, other politicians, labor unions, entrepreneurs and developers. Moreover, Agnos has received more contributions from outside the Bay Area than has Molinari.

Agnos also has recently found new friends among the financiers and business giants in the granite canyons of San Francisco’s financial district. He spent a good portion of his runoff campaign assuring them that he need not be their enemy.

“I’m interested in their problems as I’m interested in all the problems of this city,” Agnos said during the recent debate. “Before the Nov. 3 election, it was kind of hard to get them to listen to me. They had made some other choices in this election and they weren’t interested in listening to me. Now they are, and as they do, they find it is something they like.”

Part of Molinari’s problem in calling Agnos a big spender is Molinari’s own role as chairman of the city’s Finance Committee. During most of his tenure on the budget-balancing body, the city consumed a $250-million surplus and plowed into the projected $86-million deficit.

Factors Blamed

Molinari said the deficit is due not to bad management but to unforeseen problems. For example, the city has spent $55 million on its own to care for AIDS patients and has been instructed by voters to initiate a costly program to improve the pay of women and minorities employed by the city. At the same time, he added, dry weather has cut the amount of money earned by city-owned hydroelectric power stations, while sales tax revenues have been hurt by the remodeling of a major shopping mall.

Such realities, he said, call for more restrained spending proposals, not those outlined by Agnos in his 82-page campaign platform booklet.

“It’s very easy to write a book and to promise everything to everybody,” Molinari said at a campaign stop last week. “I’d like to put eight chickens in every pot, too, but it’s just not possible.”

Agnos insists that his proposals are not nearly as costly as his opponent says, and he believes they can be financed in creative new ways--redevelopment zones for affordable housing, for example, or public-private partnerships in which the city would participate in profit-making ventures to make ends meet.

But other than scolding Molinari for backing down from some of the liberal social programs that Molinari supported on the Board of Supervisors, Agnos remains conciliatory toward his opponent. It reinforces the let’s-work-together theme of his campaign.

“I’ve run my campaign as I would run the city,” he said recently, “by including people in the decisions that affect them, by reaching out to the new elements of our city that have not been included in the past.”