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 GOP Mayor Jerry Sanders has been replaced by Bob Filner, a liberal former congressman who is blocking innovative, voter-backed efforts to reduce the cost of government services.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

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.