CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS : Candidates in San Diego Mayor’s Race Focus on Economy

SAN DIEGO —  With joblessness and consumer anxiety on the rise, this season’s campaign for mayor is the first in years that has not revolved around the debate over “Los Angelization,” this city’s pejorative term for urban sprawl, snarled traffic and smog.

Nearly 100,000 residents are out of jobs and home construction is at its lowest point in a decade as California’s second-largest city suffers through the region’s lingering recessionary slump.

With that bleak backdrop to their campaign, candidates Peter Navarro and Susan Golding are focusing on ways to create jobs in industries such as biotechnology to help offset those lost through defense cutbacks and business failures.

In better times, mayoral hopefuls have focused more sharply on the issues of rapid growth and environmental protection, playing on residents’ fears that the woes of Los Angeles may someday spread to San Diego.

Both Navarro, a managed-growth activist who casts himself as a political outsider, and Golding, a two-term county supervisor, have offered ambitious economic recovery programs.

Navarro’s “30-Day Economic Action Plan” would, among other things, eliminate business license fees for small companies and change zoning laws to permit biotech firms to do research and production at the same site. Golding’s inner-city “Marshall Plan” would help new businesses get financing, and first-time home buyers renovating dilapidated houses could receive no-down-payment loans.

This year’s mayoral race ends a 20-year reign by a trio of political figures whose public careers began before the current candidates even lived in San Diego.

Mayor Maureen O’Connor, who is retiring after a 6 1/2-year tenure, and her two predecessors--Roger Hedgecock and Pete Wilson--began casting shadows over the political landscape in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Golding’s career began in the early 1980s, and Navarro did not even move to San Diego until the mid-1980s.

“Whenever the mayor’s office changes hands, there’s a sense of turning a page,” said lawyer Michael McDade, Hedgecock’s former chief of staff and a top Golding adviser. “That’s especially true this year.”

The contest also embodies other political dynamics of this campaign year: insider against outsider, change versus experience and the “Year of the Woman.” Both candidates have tried to bend those forces to their own advantage. Navarro, for example, contends that change occurs more through ideology than gender, while Golding, trying to moderate her insider’s image, argues that “women are the ultimate political outsiders, elected or not.”

Navarro, a 43-year-old UC Irvine economics professor, catapulted to political prominence in the late 1980s as the head of a managed growth group called Prevent Los Angelization Now!

Although the group failed three times in bitter campaigns to win passage of growth-restricting ballot initiatives, each campaign enhanced Navarro’s stature.

Having earned the enmity of politicians and business leaders alike, the registered independent entered the race with a core constituency of environmentalists and the disaffected that allowed him to finish comfortably ahead of Golding in a six-candidate primary.

Using his non-incumbency as a weapon, Navarro repeatedly characterizes himself as “an agent of change” at campaign forums.

“How many of you think our local political leadership over the past eight years has adequately managed our growth and protected our environment?” he asks at forums. “How many think you’re safer in your home today than you were eight years ago? How many think that your environment’s cleaner, that your job’s more secure? If you can’t answer yes to even one of those questions, my advice is to help me work with you to change direction.”

As Navarro framed the race as an insider-versus-outsider matchup, San Diego’s business Establishment coalesced behind Golding, giving her a contributors’ list that reads like a “Who’s Who” of business, civic and political luminaries.

To keep pace with Golding’s $800,000-plus campaign, Navarro has used a family inheritance and a line of credit secured by his home to loan himself $390,000 of the $620,000 he has spent so far.

The race has already become the most expensive mayoral campaign in San Diego history. Including funds spent by losing candidates in the primary, the race’s final price tag probably will exceed $2 million.

Golding has had to defend her lengthy public resume--which includes two years on the City Council and a brief stint in the Deukmejian Administration--from an anti-incumbency backlash while also trying to chip away at Navarro’s appeal as an outsider.

“I’ve seen government from the inside, so I know what works and what doesn’t,” the 47-year-old Republican tells audiences. “Seeing what’s broke from the inside makes it easier to fix it. . . . The city is a complex, $1-billion-a-year corporation. You don’t make someone the CEO of a billion-dollar corporation when he hasn’t even been to the mail room yet. Experience does count and it does matter.”

The economic issue has challenged Navarro because of his past advocacy of managed-growth measures that critics argue would cost jobs and increase housing prices.

Shrewdly repackaging his themes, Navarro argues that developers’ failure to “pay their fair share” of public costs associated with growth has shifted the financial burden to residents and businesses.

Navarro’s self-billing as the race’s “jobs candidate” has drawn a predictably skeptical response from Golding and her backers. “Jobs terminator,” she argues, would be a more appropriate political moniker for Navarro.

Golding’s major strategic problem is in being a career politician in a year when incumbency has officeholders.

That issue has overshadowed what was expected to be Golding’s major obstacle--overcoming the taint of her ex-husband’s 1990 conviction on federal charges related to a money-laundering scheme.

Although Golding and Richard Silberman have since divorced, Navarro has worked hard to link the two in voters’ minds. One of his television and radio ads concludes: “Silberman committed a crime--Golding is committed to politics as usual.”

Despite suffering a mild political embarrassment when the local chapter of the National Women’s Political Caucus declined to endorse her, Golding hopes to be a “Year of the Woman” beneficiary at the polls.

“Elected or not, women have never been part of the Establishment,” she said. “Voters want change, and women represent change.”

Navarro said: “She’s an incumbent, I’m an outsider--that’s what voters will remember. . . . She’s had her chance. Now it’s time for someone else to try.”