The only theory that makes sense is that it was former GOP Mayor Jerry Sanders holding a grudge. Sanders is now chair of the San Diego-Imperial counties Chamber of Commerce. He dislikes DeMaio because they both claim credit for a lot of the reforms accomplished in San Diego in recent years, and because DeMaio — much younger and relatively new to San Diego — was anything but deferential to Sanders, who is 64 and has been a San Diego fixture for decades.

Whatever drove the decision, it is sure making the U.S. Chamber of Commerce look foolish. Consider a recent essay highlighted on the chamber’s website:

The most important issue you probably won’t hear about during the run up to this year’s election is public sector pension liabilities. Even though it accounts for billions of dollars in spending and affects millions of state and municipal employees, the sad state of many pension funds barely makes a blip on the radar.

At its core, adequately funding pensions is about keeping a promise. Public sector employees were told while they were working what they would receive when they retired. Governments have a responsibility to ensure that they put enough money away to meet those obligations.

Pension deceit and ‘likely’ securities fraud

An institution that believes this shouldn’t be endorsing pension arsonists. But that is what the U.S. chamber did when it endorsed Scott Peters, who in 2002 voted to raise pensions while reducing funding. What did a 2006 fact-finding investigation conclude?

A culture of obfuscation and denial so corrupted San Diego’s financial management that its meltdown reached the historic levels of such poster children of governmental and corporate malfeasance as Orange County, Enron and WorldCom, according to a long-awaited report released Tuesday.

The report likely cements San Diego’s collapse as one of the greatest in modern municipal history, stating that eight former city staff members likely committed securities fraud in acting with “wrongful intent” to withhold important information from the investing public – a finding that could foreshadow potential enforcement actions from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Mayor Dick Murphy and a number of current and former City Council members acted negligently in approving false financial statements released to investors, the report states, a finding that would put their behavior on the bottom rung of the three levels of potential securities fraud.

In all, the report paints the picture of a culture premised upon “non-transparency, obfuscation, and denial of fiscal reality” that repeatedly sought to delay the impact of tough decisions, ignored pertinent advice time and again, and failed to inform investors of the consequences of its actions.

That’s from the Voice of San Diego. Among the negligent City Council members: Duke Law School grad Scott Peters.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce: We’re for pension reform. Also pension abuse.

Peters was elected in 2012 despite running in an affluent district ranging from Coronado to Rancho Bernardo that voted for Mitt Romney. He benefited from having a rough-edged GOP incumbent, Brian Bilbray, who had rubbed a lot of people the wrong way over his years in Congress and as a local politician.

DeMaio has also rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Though he helped bring major reforms and efficiencies to San Diego during his four years on the City Council, his hard-charging style offended even some Republicans, including then-Mayor Jerry Sanders. This may have led to the out-of-left-field decision last month of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to endorse Peters over DeMaio; Sanders now leads the San Diego chamber.

An architect of ‘Enron by the Sea’

But what’s peculiar and disheartening about the campaign is that Peters’ history isn’t coming back to haunt him. In 2002, he was part of a City Council majority that made the disastrous decision to underfund pensions while increasing benefits. It doesn’t get much dumber than that. This decision so undermined city finances that it led to national embarrassment — San Diego was dubbed “Enron by the Sea” — and to the 2005 resignation of Mayor Dick Murphy.

Incredibly, Peters didn’t think contrition was appropriate for his role in this debacle. At times, he’s depicted himself as a victim in the scandal. At other times, he’s suggested it was much ado about nothing. Here’s what I wrote in 2006 after an independent report by the Kroll firm blasted the 2002 City Council for negligence and malfeasance:

I’ve watched the City Council’s reaction to the Kroll report and its fallout with a steadily escalating sense of disbelief and fury. It’s obvious the five still-serving council members named as culpable in the 2002 pension scam hope that Kroll’s particulars will be forgotten and that their political careers will not suffer as a result. If that happens, that will be a disgrace.

The five should be running scared for their political lives. Recall petitions should be making the rounds. Instead, incredibly enough, Toni Atkins, Donna Frye, Jim Madaffer, Brian Maienschein and Scott Peters are all reportedly interested in seeking higher office.

All but Frye offer a weird variant of the Nuremberg Defense for their malfeasance. Instead of saying they were only following orders and were therefore not responsible, they say they were only following staff advice and were therefore not responsible.

Guilty pols advance to Congress — and Assembly leadership

But some of the City Council members didn’t just blame staff.

Even more ridiculously, Peters and Maienschein imply they are victims.

“People are really tired of looking backward and they really want to see some progress,” Peters told the U-T in a story in which he said “his lawyer advised him to be critical of the report.” Got that? He’s just too noble to point out the flaws in a report that makes a slam-dunk case he did such a horrible job as councilman in 2002 that it will haunt San Diego for decades to come.

Maienschein is much worse. In a published letter responding to a critical editorial, first he grossly misrepresented what the Kroll report said about his culpability, then he whined about those whose superior reading-comprehension skills led them to conclude the report said he and his colleagues were rotten public servants:

“[To] consistently attack the very people who make personal and professional sacrifices in order to serve their city on the City Council only does a disservice to our city by keeping honest, community-oriented people out of politics,” he wrote.

So much for my assumption that incompetence compounded with blame-ducking would hurt the careers of those involved. Atkins is now Assembly speaker. Maienschein holds a safe seat in the Assembly. And while Peters is in a difficult re-election fight, the super PAC ads targeting him don’t mention his 2002 fiasco and bizarre subsequent comments on it. They focus on his votes in Congress.

In San Diego, political karma is nowhere to be found.

By Chris Reed

Well, that didn’t take long.

Bob Filner — a paleoliberal former Democratic congressman who was elected mayor of San Diego in November — is embracing the same sort of ridiculously generous public-employee compensation policies that led to his city’s immense fiscal crisis a decade ago. That crisis amounted to an early warning of the now at-hand pension tsunami afflicting local and state governments around the nation. It was so severe that it led to San Diego being called “Enron by the Sea.”

However, since 2005, seven years of prudence from Republican Mayor Jerry Sanders have actually left San Diego in far better shape than many other California cities. But Filner is determined to change that:

“City politicians already have voted themselves the richest pension benefits of any city employees, but under a new proposal by Mayor Bob Filner, city politicians will have even more to look forward to once they leave office.

“Mayor Filner is asking the City Council to pass an extraordinary law this month to allow former city politicians to “double dip” by collecting full city pensions while being eligible to be rehired by the city with full salaries simultaneously. …

“Filner’s proposal for ex-City Council people is not the only effort to expand pension ‘double dipping’ at City Hall.

“In December 2012, the city’s pension system announced that city employees could retire, start collecting a full pension, and return to work at City Hall on a full salary – provided that they simply wait six months.

“The city’s pension system formulated this policy to help retired city employees thwart IRS efforts to impose a pension penalty tax of 10 percent on government employees who retire and then return to work at the same government agency.”

That’s from Thursday’s U-T San Diego column by former San Diego Councilman Carl DeMaio, a libertarian Republican who lost narrowly to Filner in November.

Buyer’s remorse is likely to set in soon. When Sanders left office, he was very popular.

But despite Sanders’ endorsement, DeMaio was effectively demonized by public employee unions as a radical. Still, it’s doubtful that many of Filner’s voters wanted him to re-embrace the city’s old ways.

A city with a pothole problem that reminds many residents of life in the Third World doesn’t want to see the further enrichment of already well-paid public employees.