The Strong Mayor—Looking Back, Looking Forward - Part 1
By Glen Sparrow, SDSU Professor Emeritus
November 2019 will be the fifteen-year anniversary of the passage by the voters of San Diego of Proposition D” Strong Mayor Form of Governance.” It became effective January 1, 2006.
The San Diego County Taxpayers Association (SDCTA) supported this major restructuring of city government and it seems like a good time to undertake a review of this significant change as the nation’s largest council-manager city became a mayor-council government.
Over the next few months in this Journal, I want to: first review the history of the development of the strong mayor plan, second describe its essence, implementation and utilization, and finally analyze its effectiveness and see if it has met the promises of its proponents.
Part 1 The Development
There are in the history of San Diego, no doubt, numerous incidents, individuals and experiences that could be included in any examination of the evolution to the strong mayor. I have selected four specific instances that are more contemporary and seem to provide an explanation for the change of governance.
San Diegans’ first real experience with a strong mayor was no doubt the first term of Mayor Pete Wilson in 1971. The well liked and talented Wilson reshaped and redefined the role of the mayor within a council-manager form of municipal government. He is remembered for exercising a combination of political, policy, and administrative skills that constituted active and successful municipal leadership. However, while being very popular and easily reelected, his attempt in 1973 to change the city charter to a mayor-council form failed at the ballot box.
The next step along the path to a mayor-council form was the vote in 1988 to have council members elected by district. This change in the City altered the membership of the council, its policymaking, and the distribution of city funding. Now that neighborhoods were better represented, city dollars started flowing in their directions. The thought at the time was that “obviously” it was time to strengthen the mayor who would represent the interests of the city as a whole and a “balance” would be achieved. Yet, nothing happened to change the mayor’s role.
In 1994, a member of the city council made a phone call to a former staff member and asked if he could convene some academics who were familiar with municipal government for a discussion of charter change and mayor-council governance. That meeting morphed into a series of Saturday morning meetings that discussed and debated strong mayor government, produced a draft of a strong executive charter, and developed over a decade among an interested set of activists a movement supporting charter change. After laying somewhat dormant this draft charter got into the mind and hands of Mayor Dick Murphy. In 2004, Mayor Murphy had his chief of staff and a member of the City Attorney’s office fashion an amendment to the City Charter from the draft charter that would become the basis of San Diego’s strong mayor form of government. Then, Mayor Murphy got the amendment support on the city council and it was on the November 2004 ballot.
The fourth set of circumstances necessary for an affirmative vote in November of 2004 had little to do with charters, mayoral functions or the structure of government. By Fall 2004, the city faced a mounting pension deficit, federal investigations into its retirement system, and subsequent allegations of illegal accounting and public corruption. And “America’s Finest City” was outed nationally when The New York Times declared San Diego to be “a kind of Enron-by-the-Sea.” The article went on to state what locals who were paying attention already knew. “And the Securities and Exchange Commission and the United States attorney’s office in San Diego opened investigations this year into possible fraud in the city’s financial statement and potential political corruption. Subpoenas were served on a number of city offices and several people confirmed that they had been interviewed by the F.B.I. in connection with the inquiry.” The fiscal calamity along with talk of fraud and corruption went a long way toward destroying peoples’ faith in their government.
The convergence of these four conditions—the Wilson legacy, district elections, the decade long discussions of a mayor-council charter, and the financial morass and corruption—was critical to the creation and eventual electoral support for a strong mayor system. The general election ballot of November 2004 contained the “Strong Mayor Form of Governance” (Proposition D). And on a very crowded ballot a majority (51.4%) of San Diego voters supported it.
One additional hurdle to permanently amending the City Charter remained. Prop D contained a clause calling for a sunset within five years if the voters did not again pass a measure making mayor-council government permanent. At the primary election in June of 2010 61% of those voting supported making the strong mayor system permanent.
Next time with Glenn Sparrow: What changes were required by the amended City Charter, how were they implemented and how did San Diego react?