San Diego Unseen: An Urban Portrait
Donna Frye
- Photo by Donna Frye
Two week ago, CityBeat published a story that quoted former San Diego City Councilmember Donna Frye as saying that while she doesn’t want to be San Diego’s next mayor right now, she reserves the right to change her mind in the months ahead.
We’d like to nudge her in that direction. There are currently four viable candidates running toward the June 2012 primary: Democrat Bob Filner and Republicans Carl DeMaio, Bonnie Dumanis and Nathan Fletcher. When Christine Kehoe announced that she wouldn’t run, it left just one choice for Democrats who won’t vote for a Republican. Republicans and potential crossover Democrats, meanwhile, have three distinct options.
Much can, and probably will, change during the course of the next 11 months, but at this early stage, our not-so-earth-shattering prognosis is that Filner, DeMaio and Dumanis are the frontrunners to reach the two-person November runoff, with Fletcher needing to make a big splash. Conventional wisdom would have Filner at the top in June because the others would split the Republican vote. However, this 2012 will be the first time a gay person has an excellent chance to become mayor of San Diego, and while we’d expect ideology to trump sexual orientation for most voters, a candidate like Dumanis, a lesbian, could steal some votes from Filner. We wouldn’t rule out the possibility that both DeMaio and Dumanis could finish ahead of Filner in June.
We love Filner’s progressive voting record in Congress and would almost certainly endorse him in a one-on-one race against Dumanis or DeMaio. However, scandal has found Filner before, and if any negative revelations were to emerge just before June, progressives could be left with no dog in the hunt.
Also, while we can imagine what kind of mayor Filner would be—one who’d prioritize working folks over well-heeled establishment interests and community needs over developers’ desires—we wouldn’t need a crystal ball to know what Frye would stand for. Nearly 10 years on the City Council and runs for mayor in 2004 and 2005 told us everything we need to know.
Frye’s two overarching passions remain environmental protection and government transparency—improving coastal water quality and making sure the public has access to information and its representatives will override all else.
But we also know that she’d make sure new development has the necessary infrastructure and can pay for itself before putting it in the pipeline (her on-faith vote for the new Downtown library was a notable exception). And we know that she has ample heart capacity when it comes to homeless people and other struggling citizens. And we know that she works extraordinarily hard, carefully reads and makes notes on every document that reaches her desk and asks questions until she fully understands an issue.
A matter that will loom much larger than any of that in the campaign, though—thanks to DeMaio and his army—will be the influence of public-employee unions in city government. Filner might come up with a good response when challenged on his coziness with unions, but Frye has a track record to cite.
Long a supporter of union rights, Frye nonetheless irritated San Diego’s employee unions on a few occasions during her City Council tenure. In the early years of the city’s current fiscal crisis, Frye voted against wage increases before it was popular among the council’s Democrats to do so. That fiscal crisis? It was brought on in part by votes to shortchange the employee-pension fund while at the same time enhancing retirement benefits. It’s well-known by now that Frye voted with the rest of the council to under-fund the pension system, but she then cast the lone vote against the increased benefits once a member of the pension board warned the council of the crisis to come.
By the end of her council stint, Frye had earned the respect of the city’s leading fiscal conservatives for her sober stance on financial responsibility. We believe she also has the respect of the bulk of the current council—particularly if Sherri Lightner and Marti Emerald survive election challenges next year. We don’t know if Frye can get to the 50-percent-of-the-electorate hump she couldn’t clear in 2005 against Jerry Sanders, but a lot has transpired in the last six years.
Again, we’re fans of Filner, so this is not to disrespect him, but we think voters should have the fullest array of choices possible. Frye won’t get in the race unless she decides that she really wants it. But, for what it’s worth, we hope that day comes—and sooner rather than later.
What do you think? Write to editor@sdcitybeat.com.
