A

At issue was Proposition B, approved by San Diego voters in 2012 by a nearly 2-to-1 margin. The measure required that all city employees who began their jobs on or after Jan. 1, 2013 – except for police officers – get 401(k)-style retirement benefits instead of the defined benefit pensions that left San Diego finances in near ruins more than a decade ago because of City Council decisions to underfund them.

But San Diego employee unions and the California Public Employees Relations Board (PERB) argued even before the measure reached the ballot that it violated state collective bargaining laws because the campaign for the pension changes was led in 2011 and 2012 by then-San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders. He claimed that his role in the Prop. B campaign was as a private citizen – not as mayor – and thus he faced no obligation to collectively bargain with public employee unions before touting the direct-democracy initiative.

Before reaching the state high court, a trial judge first disagreed with Sanders and San Diego, then an appellate court sided with the city. But all seven state justices joined in a ruling that found that city leaders had not met their requirement to first seek changes at the bargaining table before seeking to impose them through direct democracy.

“Allowing public officials to purposefully evade the meet-and-confer requirements of [state collective bargaining rules] by officially sponsoring a citizens’ initiative would seriously undermine the policies served by the statute: fostering full communication between public employers and employees, as well as improving personnel management and employer-employee relations,” the court held. It ordered the case be sent back to the appellate court to determine how San Diego should untangle its mess.

Elected leaders may be less likely to lead ballot fights

The decision seems likely to change the nature of direct democracy going forward – at least at the local level of California government.

Direct democracy, brought forward in California by Gov. Hiram Johnson in 1911, has greatly benefited from the active participation of elected officials. They are often more able to win public approval of sweeping reforms through the ballot box than they can through the Legislature or city or county governing boards, which are often allied with deep-pockets special interests.

For example, Earl Warren – the former U.S. Supreme Court chief justice and California governor – repeatedly led ballot campaigns as Alameda County district attorney that directly affected many areas of California life.

But similar efforts by a politician in 2018 would face a different kind of vetting than Warren faced. Going forward, any ballot proposal that affects public employees in any way is subject to a potential court veto if it can be established that it were led by elected officials who didn’t live up to their collective bargaining obligations.

The California PERB Blog’s analysis noted that justices “did leave open the possibility that government officials can separate their official actions from their private activities. However, the court did not provide any guidance on what a government official would have to do to make such a distinction clear.”

For the fourth year running, San Diego had the lowest murder rate among the country’s ten largest cities.

The department investigated 32 homicides, down from 39, giving San Diego, the eighth largest city in the nation, a murder rate of 2.4 killings per 100,000 residents, according to data compiled by U-T San Diego.

By comparison, Phoenix, which has a slightly larger population than San Diego, had a murder rate of 7.7 per 100,000, while San Antonio, another city of similar size, had a rate of 7.3. Philadelphia had the highest rate of the nation’s ten top cities, with 16 killings for every 100,000 residents.

But this good news has an unusual subtext: If San Diego is so safe, why is there bipartisan agreement that more must be done to widely boost compensation for current San Diego police officers and to make the force bigger? This story is from Feb. 6:

San Diego and its police officers labor union announced on Friday a tentative agreement for compensation increases that aim to help reverse recent struggles with recruiting new officers and retaining existing staff.

The five-year pact doesn’t include salary hikes until July 2018, but most officers would see large jumps in their take-home pay starting this July because the $92 million deal includes sharp increases in benefits for veteran employees.

Those include thousands in higher stipends for uniforms, additional holiday pay and lower health insurance contributions.

“We’ve had a real crisis when it comes to recruiting and retaining some of our best and brightest police officers,” Mayor Kevin Faulconer said at a Friday morning press conference in City Heights announcing the deal. “That ends today.”

The recruitment and retention issues are backed by the numbers. The San Diego Police Department has about 180 budgeted, unfilled positions, and the agency says 249 officers left the force from July 2013 through last month. An independent survey shows the city has low police pay relative to other jurisdictions.

But if the city is enjoying such a safe run, why would its leaders consider the status quo unacceptable?

We’re in a strange new era when it comes to the social sciences and crime, which has gone down for three decades for reasons that researchers cannot agree on. Old theories about declining exposure to lead in childhood, increased incarceration because of tougher sentencing laws and the increase in abortions of unwanted children after the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling are still around, but there are plenty of new ideas. Vox last month cited 16 different explanations offered by researchers with varied backgrounds and different levels of hard evidence.

Police union supported by both parties

In San Diego, however, this esoteric debate never came up. Instead, the police union’s strong ties with Republican Mayor Kevin Faulconer, the Democrats who make up the majority of the City Council and the city’s downtown establishment resulted in a consensus that more, better-paid officers are needed.

Faulconer also needs a less polarized environment at City Hall if he hopes to achieve an agenda that includes funding an expanded convention center, possibly helping build an NFL stadium and bringing coastal prosperity to minority neighborhoods south of Interstate 8. Having a good relationship with by far the city’s most powerful union can only help this agenda.

Outside of San Diego, there is a presumption that Faulconer wants to run someday for statewide office as a moderate, can-do mayor with plenty of Democratic allies. The pay deal with the police union fits this narrative.

But inside the city, Faulconer fits a familar mayoral archetype, not necessarily that of a man with big statewide ambitions. Affable Republican moderates have led the city for most of the last 40  years, from Pete Wilson to (then moderate) Roger Hedgecock to Dick Murphy to Jerry Sanders.

And though currently popular, Faulconer could face a tough re-election fight in 2016. While initial media reports depicted the GOP councilman winning election easily in a February 2014 special election against Democratic Councilman David Alvarez, his final margin of victory was only 5 percent, in an election with poor Democratic turnout.

]]> https://calwatchdog.com/2015/03/09/is-san-diego-safest-big-city-or-having-a-police-crisis/feed/ 8 74874 https://calwatchdog.com/2014/09/16/chamber-of-commerce-touts-pension-reform-backs-pension-arsonist/ https://calwatchdog.com/2014/09/16/chamber-of-commerce-touts-pension-reform-backs-pension-arsonist/#comments Tue, 16 Sep 2014 18:00:04 +0000 http://calwatchdog.com/?p=68089 The U.S. Chamber of Commerce stunned a lot of people last month when it endorsed Democrat incumbent Scott Peters over Republican challenger Carl DeMaio in the 52nd congressional district race in an affluent swath of San Diego and its northeastern suburbs. Peters may be a relatively moderate Democrat in Congress, but his record of fiscal irresponsibility while serving two terms on the San Diego City Council looks awful compared to all that DeMaio accomplished in his one term on the council.

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.

But San Diego unions have not joined the calls for Filner to resign, starting with Richard Barrera, the head of the regional labor council who is also somehow a city school board member.

But if social justice sometimes isn’t the priority it normally is for unions when it comes to harassment of women, what about mistreatment of non-whites? And now Filner has a spectacularly stupid and ugly anecdote on that front, as well.

Take it away, UTSD:

“Mayor Bob Filner’s signature brashness was on display during a trade mission to Mexico City, a four-day trip aimed at building business relationships and discussing projects like a planned binational airport terminal and cruise ship arrivals in Ensenada.

“The April trip, in its eighth year, drew nearly 60 business execs and officials.

“But instead of putting his best statesmanlike foot forward, Filner ended up with it in his mouth, according to an account related to the U-T by former Mayor Jerry Sanders, who now heads the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce that organizes the annual trip.

“One incident, which became ‘the talk of the mission’ afterward, took place at a meeting of the San Diego-area attendees and their Mexican counterparts.

“’We were in Mexican customs and border protection, and we’re in Mexico City, and he stood up and demanded they speak in English,’ Sanders said.

“’I think everybody was a little bit shocked,’ Sanders said. ‘I know that the business people were shocked that he would say something like that representing us.

“’We’d go to other meetings. If people missed it, they’d say, ‘Was there another Bob event?’”’

What an ass.

By Chris Reed

It doesn’t take long before the L.A. Times’ profile of new San Diego Mayor Bob Filner in Sunday’s paper makes it clear that we’re in for a piece that poses as a warts-and-all portrait but is more akin to hagiography. I know and like the reporter who wrote the piece, Tony Perry, who is an outstanding war correspondent when he’s not covering San Diego. But I’m surprised that Perry largely buys Filner’s narrative that he’s a well-meaning liberal trying to shake up a backwards city, and that if he’s brusque and a bully, it’s always for the greater good.

This is a good angle with a powerful hook. But the narrative is fundamentally wrong. Under Republican Mayor Jerry Sanders and with an increasingly pragmatic Democratic-majority City Council, San Diego has made great strides since 2005. It’s in much better shape than most big cities in California. Perry doesn’t mention this until late in the story after first giving Filner room to insinuate the city is in the hands of a corrupt elite.

San Diego also has been an innovator in public-employee benefits reform and making government more efficient, with both efforts endorsed by voters. Perry doesn’t mention that Filner has made clear he will sandbag the push for efficiency — i.e., smaller government. Is this what a heroic populist does? Defy the electorate?

Cherry-picking to serve the Noble Filner narrative

But the problems with the profile don’t end with its failure to challenge the false premise of Filner’s narrative. There is lots of cherry-picking of facts to serve the narrative.

Starting with the lede:

“SAN DIEGO — Under a pro-business Republican mayor, it was a no-brainer: allocating millions of dollars each year to buy national advertising for the tourism industry — a major economic driver in this vacation mecca.

“Then Bob Filner got elected, and he had questions: Why couldn’t Sheraton and Hilton buy their own advertising? And why should the cash-strapped city lavish funds on an industry that pays low wages to bottom-rung employees like maids and bellhops?”

The problem with this is the policy wasn’t driven by the “pro-business Republican mayor.” It’s been a bipartisan policy embraced by the San Diego City Council, which has a Democratic majority. The story goes on …

“The new Democratic mayor also thought the city attorney should provide him with legal guidance on the matter in private, not in front of reporters.

“So he crashed Jan Goldsmith’s news conference.

“‘You not only have been unprofessional but unethical,’ Filner scolded the city attorney, ‘and I resent it greatly that you’re giving your advice to the press.'”

Just who was ‘unprofessional’?

The problem with this is that Goldsmith is elected, not a mayoral appointee, and unless the issue is a sensitive legal negotiation over personnel, contracts or real estate, he has an obligation to talk to the media about pressing city issues. He is the attorney for the city of San Diego — not the attorney for the mayor of San Diego. If the article had brought up that point, Goldsmith becomes the good guy — and it’s obvious who’s being “unprofessional.” But no — we’re following Filner’s narrative.

However, here is where the profile goes most off the tracks:

“Confrontation has long been a Filner political trademark. At congressional hearings he regularly derided Veterans Affairs officials over poor care, making him a favorite of veterans groups.”

So we are reading a long piece about the abrasive liberal who is trying to force constructive (allegedly) change down the throat of a resistent city, and we look back at his actions on behalf of a key constituency during his 20 years in Congress. So isn’t the most important takeaway here that Filner’s badgering of the VA accomplished nothing? That the VA he so challenged and derided is the most criticized federal agency of all? That his management style did nothing to stop a disliked agency from becoming a pariah agency?

If you’re writing a piece about a mayor struggling to get his way with the leadership style he used as a congressman, of course.

And if you’re writing about Filner’s political history, isn’t it worth at least mentioning in passing that perhaps the most memorable fact about Filner’s 20 years in Congress was his channeling of hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign finances to his family bank account by using his then-wife as his paid campaign treasurer? Well, no — not if you’re treating Filner’s narrative about his nobility as an accurate framework.

A civil rights hero on another crusade? Or an ineffective bully?

I think the reason Filner gets such favorable treatment is obvious in the final third of the article, which repeatedly notes Filner’s work as a courageous civil-rights activist a half-century ago. The implication is that he’s still a courageous champion of the powerless, no matter what he does.

“Filner honed his approach in the 1960s as a Freedom Rider in the segregated South. He spent two months in a Mississippi jail, refusing to pay bail. He knew the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez and says they taught him that conflict and confrontation are often necessary to accomplish change.

“On one of his congressional websites, Filner posted the mug shot from his arrest in Jackson, Miss.”

But sometimes a bully is just a bully. And sometimes righteousness spoils into obnoxiousness.

“Filner and Goldsmith have sparred over medical marijuana, city pensions, Port Commission appointments, even over whether to allow seals on the beach in La Jolla. Filner unveiled a budget that would cut 13 jobs at the city attorney’s office — more than in any other department — including that of Goldsmith’s top assistant. After several acrimonious meetings, Goldsmith refuses to let any of his staffers meet with the mayor without a witness.”

That’s amazing. And if you heard the stories about Filner’s abusive behavior toward those he considers the “little people” around him, you’d say it’s wise.

There’s also this detail about Filner that is omitted that undercuts the profile’s main narrative: The top assistant of Goldsmith whom Filner targeted is Deputy City Attorney Andrew Jones, an African-American who had the temerity to disagree with the non-lawyer mayor’s legal analysis in a meeting. How does Jones, a soldier turned lawyer, feel about it, according to a published report?

Filner to black city attorney: Go sit in the back of the room

“’He’s (verbally) attacked me in closed session to the extent that at one point he asked if I would sit in the back of the room,’ said Jones, who is black. ‘I, of course, considered it something similar to asking Rosa Parks to sit in the back of the bus. I was extremely offended by it but in deference to my boss I decided not to make a big deal out of it. But clearly he has a problem with me. I’m not sure why.'”

But as the profile wraps up, it seeks to leave no doubt that that’s not the real Filner. The real Filner? He plays civil rights anthems! Oh, the humanity.

“One recent night, radio station KPRI-FM invited Filner in as a guest disc jockey.

“Among his selections was ‘We Shall Overcome,’ by Mahalia Jackson. Filner recalled being arrested in Jackson, Miss., and summoned to meet the police chief; he thought he might be in for a beating, or worse.

“‘As I was walking to his office, I heard in the back all my fellow Freedom Riders singing “We Shall Overcome,” and it gave me courage to face that police chief,’ he said. ‘It was the music, it was the music, that gave me the courage to keep going.'”

All you can do is groan. How long is Bob Filner going to get away with current behavior because of past performance? Maybe forever.

Or maybe just until someone with a smartphone catches him savaging an underling who gets in his line of fire. Then we’ll finally have our overdue “have you no decency, sir?” minute in San Diego.

By Chris Reed

San Diego’s recovery from its self-induced pension debacles a decade ago has been sufficiently vigorous that the state’s second-largest city is arguably in better shape than Los Angeles, San Jose and many big cities in California. But now the bipartisan coalition that got a lot done in recent years is mostly gone. GOP Mayor Jerry Sanders has been replaced by Bob Filner, a liberal former congressman who is blocking innovative, voter-backed efforts to reduce the cost of government services. And last week, a vacant City Council seat previously held by pragmatic Democrat Tony Young was won by a union official who was plucked from obscurity and powered to victory by union money and muscle.

But Myrtle Cole’s triumph over community activist and fellow Democrat Dwayne Crenshaw in the southeast San Diego district race wasn’t a tidy win. It was extraordinarily ugly.

Just as they had done with Republican mayoral candidate Carl DeMaio, unions and their allies played innocent while offering up frequent reminders that Crenshaw was gay. But they also played the race card, raising utterly discredited allegations that Crenshaw — who is African-American — liked to hang out at a crack house. This is from the Voice of San Diego:

“’It was 3:30 am and Dwayne was sitting outside a crack house,’ the mailer reads. It goes on to imply that Crenshaw, who was attending San Diego State University at the time, was lying about being there to rescue a friend. It quotes a San Diego police officer saying Crenshaw was making up a story. “Everyone found outside a crack house at 3:30 am says they’re there for a friend and not for themselves,” the mailer says, under a banner called ‘The Truth.’

“The mailer is a rehash of a claim the San Diego Union-Tribune thoroughly discredited more than a decade ago when Crenshaw ran unsuccessfully for a council seat. Crenshaw’s opponent at the time, Charles Lewis, sent out a similar mailer. The officer quoted in the mailer, Lawrence Cahill, told the U-T in 2002 that Lewis’ mailer took his comments to San Diego State’s student newspaper about the incident out of context and that he was ‘very angry’ about it.

“‘That night I saw Dwayne 10 years ago, you could tell he wasn’t into the drugs, he was deeply concerned about his friend,’ Cahill told the U-T.

After being elected May 21, Cole refused to apologize for the ad and its ugly implications about Crenshaw, even though Cole is also African-American and presumably opposed to playing on ugly stereotypes about black men and drugs. The ends justifies the means. Another triumph for “social justice.”

School board member works for unions. Literally.

But that wasn’t the only union, er, mischief in San Diego. There was this:

“In California, it’s not just conservatives who think labor has too much power. In 2005, for example, The Los Angeles Times endorsed Proposition 75, which would have required public employee unions to obtain written consent from members before using their dues and fees for political purposes. Why? Because ‘public employee unions’ in many local governments ‘have gained control over both sides of the negotiating process,’ the Times’ editorial page noted.

“Eight years later, we have a glaring local example of this problem. San Diego Unified school board member Richard Barrera has been named to lead the San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council, an umbrella group of 135 unions. Barrera intends to remain on the school board, a part-time post, where he may recuse himself from voting on contracts with unions that are his bosses at his full-time job but can’t help but influence overall policies that affect those unions. The labor council’s executive board includes Bill Freeman, president of the San Diego Education Association (the city’s teachers union), and Jane Bausa, an official with the California School Employees Association.

“How tidy.”

Private sector far more accountable than public sector

That’s from my U-T San Diego editorial. For all the very appropriate anger about Wall Street’s mendacity and its central role in our recent recession, it can’t be pointed out enough that behavior is tolerated in the public sector that would be criminal or banned in the public sector. Whether it’s CalPERS asserting the pension crisis isn’t real, the rail authority lying the bullet train bond to passage or gross conflicts of interest like the Barrera case, the government is unaccountable.

Great. Just great.

By Chris Reed

The hypocrisy of the power-mad left of California’s Democratic Party has never been more on display than in the attempt to destroy the 2012 mayoral candidacy of San Diego gay libertarian Republican Carl DeMaio. The power play involved people from both parties, but the ultimate beneficiary was Democrat Bob Filner, who narrowly defeated DeMaio in November. This U-T San Diego report should sicken people on the left who really care about gay rights, as opposed to those who pretend to care when political advantage results:

“Some of the city’s biggest movers and shakers waged a clandestine campaign last year during the San Diego mayor’s race to gather and disseminate damaging information on candidate Carl DeMaio and his longtime partner, an effort that resides in the legal gray area of campaign disclosure.

“The group — financially backed by businessman Fred Maas — spent more than $33,000 to hire a true crime author to dig up dirt on DeMaio, which resulted in a 200-plus page dossier of court records and other documents that was distributed to nearly every local media outlet in early 2012 on the condition of anonymity.

“Those working on the project behind the scenes included a top aide to then-Mayor Jerry Sanders and at least three other people with ties to the mayoral campaign of Nathan Fletcher although Fletcher denies any involvement.

“The information dredged up went largely unreported because many in the media considered it old, irrelevant and an untoward attempt to draw attention to DeMaio’s homosexuality during the race. The records focused mainly on legal problems involving his partner — San Diego Gay & Lesbian News Publisher Johnathan Hale.

“Opposition research on high-profile candidates is commonplace in politics, but Maas and his cohorts may have run afoul of state and local campaign laws when they raised money for the project and failed to disclose its financial backers or spending activity. The group continued to resist subpoena attempts by local and state investigators for information throughout the mayor’s race as those involved tried to keep their roles in the project from being made public by saying it was a journalistic endeavor.”

Will gay Democrats complain about this?

Will John Perez, Christine Kehoe, Toni Atkins, Mark Leno, etc., say this reeks?

Don’t hold your breath.

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.

By Chris Reed

In 2006, San Diego voters gave a landslide win to a ballot measure that would force groups of city workers to compete against private firms for the right to provide city services in a process known as “managed competition.”

For four years, union supporters on the City Council stymied the adoption of the innovative reform. One of those supporting this undemocratic delay game, Councilman David Alvarez, told me flat-out that he didn’t care what the voters wanted when he was a first-time candidate in spring 2010.

Finally, later that year, when a moderate Democrat, Tony Young, took over as council president, managed comp was implemented. And just as expected, it produced millions in savings in a series of bid processes in which city workers — who knew how much waste there was and how to root it out — won every one of the competitions.

Filner: First lies, now obstruction

Now, however, Republican Mayor Jerry Sanders is gone. His replacement, Democrat Bob Filner, has made clear he doesn’t care what the voters want. First, the former congressman was caught fragrantly lying about what managed comp had wrought in San Diego.

“To illustrate the pitfalls of managed competition, San Diego Mayor Bob Filner has repeatedly cited the devastating effects the competitive bidding process has had on fleet services, the city division in charge of maintaining 4,000 vehicles including fire engines, garbage trucks and patrol cars.

“On at least three occasions, Filner has described a Nov. 27 visit he made to see the mechanics in fleet services. Each time he said the division had its workforce slashed through managed competition and that long lines of broken-down vehicles have resulted, forcing employees to arrive to work early to do the repairs on their own time. He’s touted it as an example of how ‘we have cut the level of service so drastically as to cause us problems.’

“The basic premise of his story — that cuts made through managed competition have decimated fleet services — is untrue. The city has yet to implement the proposed changes, according to internal memos and public testimony from two members of the mayor’s staff.”

Now he’s taking steps to kill it with the old tactic of bureaucratic delay — which he pretends is actually a period to examine the process and make it better.

San Diego’s other dramatic reform of recent years — the June 2012 vote by city residents to end defined-benefit pensions for most new city workers — is under assault by an obscure state agency, as CalWatchdog has been detailing. In an interview Wednesday, City Attorney Jan Goldsmith told me that he doesn’t think Filner can impede that reform, since it’s now part of the City Charter, the equivalent of San Diego’s constitution.

A true believer, not just a stooge

But don’t underestimate Filner’s readiness to go the extra mile for organized labor. With some elected Democrats — such as as San Diego state lawmakers Ben Hueso, Toni Atkins and Marty Block — their devotion to unions seems transactional. They’re doing what they have to do to get elected and re-elected.

However, Filner, a child of the 1960s, appears to truly believe that whatever unions want is automatically the equivalent of social justice. And if that means undercutting the will of the voters of the city he leads, he won’t hesitate.

Hip-hip hooray.

By Chris Reed

SAN DIEGO — On Tuesday, ground zero in the unions’ war on California taxpayers will be here, fought on three fronts.

In the mayor’s race, there’s a fascinating four-way campaign pitting county District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis, endorsed by incumbent mayor and fellow Republican Jerry Sanders; veteran Democratic U.S. Rep. Bob Filner; Republican-turned-independent Assemblyman Nathan Fletcher; and City Councilman Carl DeMaio, a libertarian Republican.

Dumanis lags, but polls are otherwise close, making a November runoff certain, and organized labor has gone all out to try to keep DeMaio from advancing. Driving the animus: The 37-year-old Georgetown graduate has been a powerful advocate for basic changes in how government works, pressing for outsourcing, an end to generous defined-benefit pensions and a renunciation of the pay practice under which workers get automatic “step” raises many years just for showing up on the job.

This assault on the San Diego City Hall status quo has produced a vicious response from individual union members and union organizations. DeMaio and his supporters were taunted and harassed while gathering signatures for a sweeping benefits reform measure that’s on Tuesday’s ballot as Proposition B. The first-term councilman, who is gay, has also been baited for his sexual orientation and subjected to an ugly whispering campaign. Last week, the city police union began airing a grossly misleading attack ad that implied DeMaio didn’t think the families of dead cops should get survivor benefits.

Union partner

But the perverse twist is which mayoral candidate has been the unions’ main partner in assaulting DeMaio in defense of the status quo. It’s not Filner, the abrasive, in-your-face traditional 1960s liberal. It’s Fletcher, a photogenic 35-year-old Marine war hero who until two months ago was a conservative Republican with some maverick trappings.

After DeMaio shocked many observers by capturing the local GOP’s formal endorsement over the more experienced Dumanis and more conventional Fletcher, Fletcher dropped his party affiliation and insisted it wasn’t driven by expedience but by his conscience. To the cheers of New York Times columnist David Brooks, Fletcher declared he could no longer in good faith be a member of a party that was part of a dysfunctional political dynamic dominated by “extremists.”

Ever since, Fletcher has offered up DeMaio as an example of the “extremists” who are polluting California’s body politic — even as Fletcher has supported Proposition B, the sweeping benefits reform measure largely authored by DeMaio that can fairly be described as radical. It would shift all new city hires but police to 401(k)-type retirement benefits and seek to impose a five-year cap on the “pensionable pay” of all employees. This dual, dueling Fletcher stand doesn’t add up. Call it Fletcher Logic.

Meanwhile, he’s kept his opinions to himself about the extremism on display in the union-led campaigns against Proposition A, which would ban the city’s use of project labor agreements unless doing so would lead to the loss of state or federal funds, and against Proposition B.

Union clout

To undercut Proposition A, unions got the Legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown to enact a law that takes state construction funds away from charter cities with PLA bans. That’s extraordinary enough, but it doesn’t compare to Sacramento’s reaction to Proposition B.

The state Public Employment Relations Board, controlled by union allies, sought unsuccessfully to keep the measure off the ballot and has made clear its intention to scuttle the measure should it pass. Why? On the grounds that since some elected officials helped draft Proposition B, it amounted to a violation of collective-bargaining rights. By this bizarre standard, just about any attempt by the public to use the ballot process to directly control public employees’ pay and compensation can be deemed as a violation of employee rights.

For those on the outside looking in, this union bullying and intimidation may seem so grotesque and over the top that it verges on the comic. But for those who live anywhere else in California, don’t feel inclined to cackle. Today the target is unlucky San Diego, but soon it will be your community.

That’s because the battle to preserve public employees’ jobs, pay and benefits is the defining fight of early 21st-century state politics. As far as the unions are concerned, it should be against the law to even consider reductions. Because, after all, the state’s primary role is not as a provider of public services. It is as a provider of well-paying government jobs with great benefits. That’s the California way.

Or so the unions believe. On Tuesday, we’ll find out if San Diegans agree.

Reed is an editorial writer for the U-T San Diego newspaper,  formerly the Union-Tribune, and runs the Calwhine.com politics website.