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Why Barbara Warden could be mayor
She's the sweetest and least presumptuous of the mayoral candidates, a newly minted grandmother and "she is a candidate," advises a friend. Barbara Warden, the woman who could be mayor, just has one big thing going against her.
She's a woman.
And a few big things going for her, the most important of which is:
She's a woman.
The winning wisdom is this: If several male Republicans get into the race for mayor, or just Republicans Ron Roberts and Pete Davis, they'll chew each other up and allow the strong-woman vote to carry Warden into the general election.
The losing wisdom presumes the public is disenchanted after living under women mayors for four consecutive terms. Maureen O'Connor did not distinguish herself because she usually didn’t work long hours. Susan Golding didn’t distinguish herself, because, well, the public still has a problem with the Chargers deal, and the (mostly male) press and her (mostly male) fellow elected officials perceive her as too much of a control freak, negotiating late behind closed doors. Never mind that she dropped out of the U.S. Senate race as (mostly male) civic leaders pleaded, never mind that she helped engineer last year’s voters' approval of the expansion of the San Diego Convention Center and development of a Padres ballpark as (mostly male) civic leaders pleaded. A fickle (often male) public sentiment that she contributed too little to these successes will auger poorly for any woman successor.
Under the winning or the losing wisdom, Warden benefits from what may be the most valuable block of district voters, North City residents with a high propensity to vote. Consider: In 1991, the last time Ron Roberts ran for City Council against a relatively unknown, Rich Grosch, Roberts won with 9,775 votes for 57 percent. In 1993, when Warden was first elected to the City Council, she ran against a higher profile school board member, Fred Colby, and she took 16,790 votes, or 56 percent. She was re-elected unopposed in 1996 with 25,453 votes.
And while Pete Davis lives in La Jolla, he's strongly identified with Downtown. Warden would be the only candidate among the three — Roberts, Davis and Warden — with a strong North City identity. (Roberts lives in Mission Hills.)
Rather than accepting blame for North City's traffic congestion, as Pete Davis would try to fix on her and Roberts, Warden will brag rightly that Caltrans assured there would be no money to complete Route 56 and so she went out and assembled $90 million. A groundbreaking will be held this year. Likewise, Caltrans assured her there would be no money spent on Interstate 15 improvements in San Diego’s North City for many years. Yet, she's assembled about $39 million from Sandag and has her eye on another $40 million to construct 14 auxiliary lanes — those lanes that go only from freeway entrance to the next exit — up and down I-15's North City route. Plus, "we just restriped the bridge over Lake Hodges, and that bridge needs to be widened." No one has demonstrated an ability to get it done sooner than Warden. Her determination hardens when people tell her no.
She's enjoyed three library groundbreakings since taking office, has preserved open space in the San Pasqual Valley and elsewhere, has been to two recreation center ribbon-cuttings, is starting work on a third, helped create a teen center in Mira Mesa in an old library and is about to break ground in Linda Vista on a child care center, the funding for which Warden identified.
All the while, she's remained in synch with (mostly male) civic leaders Downtown on the big central or regional projects, such as the convention center expansion and Padres ballpark. She's good.
As for sentiment that it’s Ron Roberts' turn to be mayor because he's been working at it three times longer than Warden, a former community newspaper publisher, Warden assures, "It’s nobody's turn to be mayor. It should be the best qualified person.
"I'd consider myself more of a consensus builder than Ron, and in order to move forward in the next decade we’re going to need every agency in town to be at the table to make these decisions. I'd be a better mayor."
OK. Remember, you read it here first.
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