San Diego: The Model GOP City

Republicans meeting in San Diego this week would do well to take a look around them. The host city for their national convention is a work-in-progress embodying a strain of Republicanism that could make theirs a majority party well into the next century.

San Diego Republicans have crafted a model of efficient, low-cost and pro-business governance. Their approach embraces many of the economic ideas associated with the Reagan revolution, while retaining the open-minded spirit characteristic of Southern California life. This means delicately balancing tax rates and regulation, to stimulate the private sector, with demands on the public treasury, to pay for essential services.

“This is a city that represents a lot of what the Republican Party has talked about,” contends San Diego Mayor Susan Golding, who was reelected earlier this year with 78% of the vote in a city whose registration is equally divided between the two major parties.

For a big city, San Diego has one of the lowest ratios of public employees per thousand residents--8.7--in the nation, fully one-third less than Los Angeles’. San Diego County, although a large urban county, has the second-lowest ratio of county employees per capita in California.

To a large extent, this is not primarily the result of a comprehensive privatization program. Rather, it stems from a “Republican” form of urban governance. In San Diego and in other traditionally GOP cities, like Dallas and Phoenix, city managers play pivotal roles in running city affairs.

This political model, first developed by Republican Progressives in the early 20th century, adapts the best private-sector accounting and hiring practices to city government. Such governments tend to see themselves as a utility that serves the public rather than as a vehicle for political patronage and redistribution of wealth.

“City managers implement policies,” explains William D. Eggers, author of “Revolution at the Roots.” “City councils do not much interfere in day-to-day governance. . . . “It’s a business mind-set in these cities.”

Along with its mild climate, relatively low business fees and top-flight scientific and technical faculties at the UC campus at La Jolla, San Diego’s decentralized government has helped make the region increasingly attractive to high-tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. The unemployment rate is now almost two points below the statewide average.

Equally important, San Diego has been able to squeeze more out of less. Although it only has 2,000 police officers for a population of roughly 1 million, one of the lowest ratios among major U.S. cities, its crime rate has been falling faster than virtually any major urban area in California. Most big cities depend on unionized police for even the most petty security functions. San Diego, by contrast, uses civilians to perform various office and administrative duties. “When you go into a police station in San Diego,” says Eggers, “you tend to see as many Hawaiian shirts as blue uniforms.”

In addition, some 800 civilian volunteers, many of them retired, help organize community-policing efforts. Many of these volunteers work 40-hour weeks, relieving police and civilian employees of certain tasks and saving millions for taxpayers.

But Republicanism, San Diego-style, is more than a triumph of efficiency and law-abiding citizens. It has managed to turn its once-derelict central district into a tourist-friendly locale. There, an expanding middle-class population engages in high-end business services, trade and electronic media. Downtown San Diego now boasts the highest concentration of telecommuters per capita in the country.

San Diego’s turnaround owes much to the replacement of its old, often inward-looking financial and real-estate elites by a new, more diverse group of companies oriented to international trade, telecommunications technology, software and biotech. Five years ago, for example, the San Diego Chamber of Commerce was well on its way to irrelevancy. Its membership totaled a mere 2,000, the result of a 20% drop between 1990-92. But due largely to an aggressive marketing campaign, the San Diego Chamber has nearly doubled its membership and emerged as a leader in forging closer ties with burgeoning Baja California and Pacific Rim countries.

“The crisis of the recession was a wake-up call for the business community,” says Gilbert Partida, who has headed the chamber since 1992. “We are now involved in the process of reshaping the city more and more, not just in business but in the whole life of the city.”

This kind of private-sector activism constitutes a critical component of making smaller and less expensive government work. In a devolved political structure, strong grass-roots participation from business, community and religious organizations becomes ever more critical to filling in the gaps left by a shrinking federal apparatus.

But when Republicans talk about gutting federal programs, they too often leave the impression of having no real interest in dealing with the legitimate needs of ordinary working and middle-class Americans. Paul A. Woodruff, a Golding aide and former GOP caucus chairman in the state Assembly, says the party must project a new kind of compassionate conservatism if it wants to attract independent voters. This is especially true in diverse urban areas like San Diego. Seventeen percent of San Diego’s population is foreign-born, roughly twice the national average, and 35% is made up of ethnic minorities, well above the national norm. To survive politically, Golding must court such traditionally GOP-phobic groups as Latinos, African Americans and gays.

Golding’s civility does not mean her tolerant but highly conservative brand of governance elicits universal praise. Critics like author and columnist Richard Louv maintain that San Diego’s focus on economic development and fiscal probity frequently sacrifices the interests of vulnerable groups such as the elderly, immigrants and children. Many schools in the area, including those attended by his children, have not been painted in years, while few services exist for the city’s burgeoning teen-age population.

“This is not a poor city, but we can make the schools that our kids go to as clean as the offices we drive our expensive cars to for work,” Louv says.

Yet, what Louv calls the “San Diego Way,” with its emphasis on private-sector involvement and local initiative, offers more promise for urban regions than the failed, top-down redistributionist solutions traditionally embraced by the Democrats. “The developers who run this place have created units but not a civilization. But San Diego has the potential, in its civic culture, to do it. We still have a spirit of openness and gentle humor that can get us to the next level.”

Ultimately, the big question may be if this form of cosmopolitan Republicanism, with its “spirit of openness” and “gentle good humor,” can be adopted by a party increasingly dominated by a homogenous and a largely anti-urban vision of American life. If the answer from San Diego is yes, the Republican Party’s best days may still be ahead of it.