Recall Effort Divides Fresno

FRESNO —  The first mayor of this freewheeling farm town was a pimp who held office for 10 minutes. Mayor No. 2, an undertaker, never found favor, either. He was succeeded by a millionaire who sold lead-lined coffins and was chased out of town in midterm by an angry mob of Presbyterians.

All through its colorful 100-year history, Fresno has shown a wonderful weakness for the offbeat. Almost anyone, it seemed, could be mayor: an Olympic discus champ, a collector of Pony Express memorabilia and a milkman overwhelmed by federal probes of police corruption. Then, when their inevitable shortcomings became too much to bear, they were given the boot.

Jim Patterson, the owner of an evangelical Christian radio station, seemed headed for a different fate. He was elected mayor in 1993. Four years later, he won again, this time as the city’s first strong mayor with a broad range of new powers.

But the 49-year-old Patterson, a rising star in the Republican Party, now finds himself the target of an ugly recall campaign that is carving a deep trench in the political landscape.

The effort to remove Patterson from office has nothing to do with his pursuit of a religious agenda. Except for arranging a $75,000 city subsidy to entice the Promise Keepers to hold a convention here, the mayor has largely kept his born-again enthusiasm out of City Hall.

Rather, the chief complaint against Patterson--leveled by the same business community that launched his political career--is that he is sabotaging economic development to get back at his enemies. It is a charge he vehemently denies.

Voters in this city of 400,000, the state’s sixth largest, are being asked to choose between two portraits, worlds apart, of their mayor.

To supporters, he is Gentleman Jim, the gutsy populist who removes graffiti, arms the citizenry with 200 fresh police officers, tells a powerful land developer “no” and then finds himself the target of a vindictive recall campaign.

To his critics, he is Jaundiced Jim, the petty peacock who fixates on his hair and suits, turns a blind eye to laundered campaign funds from a friendly developer, and kills a downtown baseball stadium and a large industrial park for no other reason than personal vendetta.

As opponents prepare to gather the 16,000 signatures needed to place the recall measure on the November ballot, the debate over the dueling Jims rages on. Community leaders square off against community leaders, developers against developers.

“Adrenaline is flowing. They’re drawing up sides,” wrote Fresno Bee columnist Jim Wasserman. “And nobody can seem to stop this creaking momentum, heading for holy war.”

Slicing across party lines, the recall has brought together Democrats in labor and Republicans in business under the “Patterson Must Go” banner. Even the soft-spoken sheriff has jumped into the fray.

“I’ve dealt with him on a number of law enforcement issues,” said Fresno County Sheriff Steve Magarian. “And his word does not mean anything.”

Patterson says the recall is nothing more than payback for his refusal to kowtow to special interests, in particular Ed Kashian, a wealthy developer whose long friendships in City Hall have enabled him to sprawl the city northward to the San Joaquin River.

The mayor said he angered Kashian by turning down his request for a large industrial park. “This recall is about me saying no to one developer . . . and I think the people of Fresno are going to see through it,” he said. “They’re interested in this city improving, not in changing mayors in 1998.”

Kashian does not deny playing a role in the recall but said Patterson is fooling himself if he thinks the campaign--and the discontent that it taps into--is limited to one man and one scorned project.

“He’s trying to make me the focus of this recall, and I’m not going to fall for it,” Kashian said. “He keeps saying that I’m the leader and I have the power to call it off. I’m sorry he feels that way, but it isn’t true.”

Patterson is a third-generation broadcaster with roots in the religious right. He bought radio station KIRV-AM (1510) in 1974 and hewed to his father’s fundamentalist line. In the mid-1980s, after earning a political science degree from Cal State Fresno, he became a force in the local Chamber of Commerce.

When he set out to become Fresno’s 22nd mayor, some worried that he might turn City Hall into a pulpit for his antiabortion and anti-gay rights views. Patterson vowed to steer clear of religious politics, and he has kept his promise--with one notable exception: the Promise Keepers.

Last summer, Patterson worked hard to persuade the largest men’s evangelical Christian movement to hold a two-day rally. But soon after the mass revival left town, City Council members discovered that the mayor had channeled $75,000 in city funds to pay for the group’s stadium rental.

Patterson defended the secret subsidy, reminding critics that Promise Keepers had pumped millions of dollars into the local economy.

In a city where one out of three children lives in poverty, Patterson’s greatest challenge may be balancing population growth with good jobs. Fresno has practically doubled over the last two decades and still offers an abundance of houses in the $100,000 range.

But the unemployment rate continues to be one of the highest in the nation at 14%, and the jobs that have come are mostly of the Wal-Mart and Target variety.

Growth is not paying for itself, officials concede. The new suburbs cost the city more in services--sewer, water, roads, schools, police and fire--than they bring in through property and sales taxes.

In a quest for jobs, business leaders cheered last year when Kashian proposed to turn a rundown area into a 1,200-acre industrial park. But Patterson said the developer presented him with steep demands, including changing freeway access and forcing out existing businesses under the heavy hammer of eminent domain.

Patterson said the developer has been a powerful force in Fresno’s housing and retail projects and he was determined not to give Kashian the same influence over industrial development. “It was a heavy-handed, openly self-interested proposal, and I rejected it.”

Kashian disputed that he was asking for special favors. “The purpose of redevelopment is to take blighted land, clean it up and make it available at market prices,” he said. “Nothing about my request was extraordinary. In fact, it’s the only offer that the city ever got on any business park.”

By itself, the blocking of an industrial park hardly makes the case for impeaching a mayor. But critics cite the mayor’s push for housing on the San Joaquin River bottom and his flip-flops on building a downtown exhibit hall and Triple A baseball stadium.

They say the city has wasted $7 million in infrastructure costs preparing both downtown sites for construction, only to have Patterson kill or stall the projects by playing last-minute politics.

The exhibit hall mess especially pains Patterson. He and fellow council members ignored warnings from a public watchdog group and awarded the $29-million project to a familiar developer. They went forward without requesting a single competitive bid. In the end, the developer couldn’t get a bank to finance him. This, after the city gave him a check for $2.5 million.

More than a year after groundbreaking, the exhibit hall construction site is nothing more than rusted pipe and empty dreams. Patterson now concedes that he failed to ask the developer tough questions or give a fair hearing to an out-of-town builder with a competitive plan.

“Because I’m a private-sector guy, special interests sometimes play me. They say, ‘Be innovative Jim. Lead. Get the job done.’ All the while, they’re hiding really suspicious, poorly conceived plans.”

Getting burned on the exhibit hall, he said, was the reason he changed his mind late in the game and helped kill a $30-million downtown baseball stadium that developers wanted to build with almost no private financing. “It was a patent raid on the treasury.”

The Fresno Bee, which wrote editorials supporting the public financing of a stadium, didn’t see it that way. The newspaper that endorsed Patterson’s reelection now charges that Fresno “cannot stand another three years of his divisive leadership” and that he lets his “ego and a quest for power get the better of good judgment.”

Patterson’s supporters see a different mayor, one who has grown more far-seeing in office. “I was part of the group that warned him not to circumvent competitive bidding on the exhibit hall,” said businessman Richard Erganian. “But I see some real changes in his leadership over the past year.

“He’s starting to stand up for the little guy. He is learning to say ‘no’ to the special interests who care only about lining their pockets at the city’s expense.”

Even supporters concede that a lot of Patterson’s problems come down to style: His desk-thumping lectures reminding opponents that he is “the only at-large elected official” in the city; his stylish new wardrobe and carefully coiffed hair; the blurring of public and private business.

Patterson does not apologize for any of it. For instance, during city-financed trips to China and Mexico to explore export markets, he said he kept an eye open for personal business. “While conducting the business of mayor, if I find business opportunities for my family, I will engage in them. . . . If I see an opportunity that is worth getting into, then I’m going to get into it.”

Critics say that is a curious stance for someone whose ties to developers have gotten him into hot water. Patterson has acknowledged that he expects to be fined by the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission for not reporting the sources of $13,180 in political contributions. In addition, one developer was fined $84,000 by the commission for funneling money to Patterson and other candidates through third parties.

If the recall comes to a vote, Patterson is confident that residents will focus on his accomplishments such as landing a giant Gap warehouse and distribution center.

But even he concedes that the truth about his administration lies somewhere between the two caricatures, the Populist and the peacock. “The real Jim Patterson is somewhere in the middle,” he says.