From left, Stephen Kirkpatrick, city of National City acting director, Public Works and Engineering Department; Don Condon, acting fire chief, city of National City; and National City Mayor Nick Inzunza get ready to break ground for the new National City fire station.

On East Plaza Boulevard, the first hint of the new National City is reflected in the banners hanging along the street. “Mabuhay,” they say. “Welcome” in Tagalog. Under the leadership of National City Mayor Nick Inzunza, Plaza Boulevard, with its scores of Filipino shops, restaurants and other businesses, is destined to become a beautified Filipino Village, the first of its kind in San Diego.

The whirl of redevelopment won’t end there. Highland Avenue, distinctly Hispanic, will be dressed up and landscaped — all 40 blocks — to showcase its 38 Mexican restaurants and its tortilla shops, panadería bakeries and markets. New condominiums and houses are planned where hardly any were built before. New public buildings. New educational institutions. A new hotel. Altogether, National City has about $500 million in projects either under construction or in the planning pipeline.

The leadership in National City is looking at nothing less than a top to bottom overhaul of this South County city and its image. “The buzz is out that National City is hot and happening,” says Paola Hernández, Inzunza’s chief of staff since April 2003.

Hernández is part of a new order in National City’s government staff, more reflective of Inzunza’s philosophy of change and the city’s ethnic diversity. With a population of roughly 55,000, 59 percent of National City’s residents are Hispanic, 19 percent are Filipinos or other Asians and Pacific Islanders, 14 percent white and 5 percent African American.

Hernández was working in an Encanto career center operated by the San Diego Workforce Partnership when she was invited to apply for the mayor’s chief of staff position shortly after Inzunza took office in December 2002. Experienced in working with the media and supervising a staff, she had the credentials he wanted. Moreover, she fit in well with the mayor’s goal of improving the city’s business climate. Active in the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of San Diego County, Hernández is the organization’s president this year.

Two other Latinos have been hired for key positions in a city government with 315 full-time employees and 100 part-timers. Earlier this year, Chris Zapata became the new city manager, moving to National City from Glendale, Ariz., where he held the same job. Zapata says he is especially pleased with the opportunity to build a new executive team for National City. Top-level turnover under Inzunza is so sweeping that Zapata can help choose a new fire chief, police chief, parks and recreation director and city engineer. And in January, Benjamin Martinez took over as executive director of the National City Community Development Commission, the city’s redevelopment arm.

An eight-year veteran of the agency, Martinez had previously served as its assistant director and says he has experienced firsthand the dramatic turnaround in developers’ attitudes toward National City under the current City Council. “I can remember the days in the ’90s when developers were not interested,” says Martinez. “We literally spent time and money to market their interests into the city. With the mayor leading the charge, we have more than enough interest. It’s hard to keep up.”

Business leaders picked up on — and heralded — the changes. Banker Al Garcia, who served as president of the National City Chamber of Commerce 11 years ago and is president again this year, sees enormous differences in his two tenures. “In 1993, there was much more of a traditional feel to the business community,” says Garcia, a sales and marketing executive for the Neighborhood National Bank, a community development financial institution.

“Latino enterprises were there, and they were growing, but there was not a whole lot of attention placed on them, and they were growing at a kind of moderate pace.” By comparison, he says, the current City Council, and particularly the mayor, have brought “a tide of new, more progressive, more aggressive planning in terms of what is happening in the city.”

While Garcia and others acknowledge past economic successes — for example, Plaza Bonita shopping center and the Mile of Cars — expectations are starting to soar in the National City business community. Even the Chamber of Commerce has upgraded its image, recently building itself an eye-catching office in the center of town on National City Boulevard.

Meanwhile the city, with a $55 million bonding capacity, is moving ahead with public projects. Among them are a $17 million, 54,000-square-foot library due for completion next summer, and a fire station on East 16th Street.

Also under construction is a $22 million educational complex at 8th Street and National City Boulevard. It will house an urban campus of Southwestern Community College, with space for the San Diego County Office of Education. Inzunza is particularly delighted that a bookstore and a Living Room Coffeehouse will be built into the complex. Even so, he views the new building as the first steps in a larger education village that eventually would hold an adult education campus, four-year university classrooms and a high tech high school.

The city also is attracting millions in private investments. A Wal-Mart store — one of the city’s goals — recently opened near the intersection of Plaza Boulevard and Highland Avenue. Meanwhile, the city has reeled in a major development prize for its proposed Marina Gateway Place west of Interstate 5. The Sycuan tribe, which purchased the U.S. Grant Hotel in Downtown San Diego, has agreed to build a three-star, $30 million hotel on land near the 24th Street exit from I-5. “We had to recruit them,” explains Inzunza.

The mayor extends a municipal hand to developers willing to build housing in National City. The goal is to increase the home ownership rate in a city where 67 percent of the residents are renters. “We probably have one of the most open environments,” says Inzunza, adding that city officials try hard to eliminate red tape. “We actually sit down with developers with a calculator and a piece of paper and figure things out.”

Tony Pauker, managing director of the Olson Co., a Seal Beach-based development company with projects throughout California, praises National City’s efficiency and helpfulness. “I’d rate them extraordinarily high on their business friendliness,” he says. “They’re a very, very good group.”

Olson is building four condominium projects with a total of 123 units in National City. Before Inzunza, the Olson CO. was not building in National City, says Pauker. The developer plans 40 lofts on city-owned land across from the proposed Sycuan hotel site in Marina Gateway Place. The three other projects are privately funded condo complexes, including 28 condominiums at the intersection of East Plaza Boulevard and Interstate 805 overlooking the future Filipino Village. Olson has agreed to let the city use the outer walls of the complex for public art to enhance the Filipino Village.

The Filipino Village and Cocina Mexicana (Spanish for Mexican kitchen) improvements are designed to give a thematic twist to the natural evolution of National City’s neighborhoods. In this small city, Filipinos own 500 businesses — many along Plaza Boulevard — while Hispanic-owned businesses number more than 1,000. “It is like taking the same thing we had before but giving it a new perspective,” Garcia says. “It allows us to talk to people outside our community and tell them to come down to Highland and check out our Mexican cuisine because it is fabulous.”

For Ditas Yamane, president of the Filipino-American Chamber of Commerce of San Diego County, the willingness of Inzunza and the council to create a Filipino Village signals an era of neighborhood celebration, and she has confidence in the city’s commitment to the project. After all, she notes, Inzunza calls himself “the Latino with the heart of a Filipino.” Already, $2 million has been spent on planning the Filipino Village, with $10 million to be spent installing the public improvements. Once completed, says Yamane, a 25-block stretch of Plaza Boulevard will be beautified with medians, public art, trees, a veterans’ memorial, an orchid walk and a garden of sampaguita, the fragrant, white national flower of the Philippines.

Similar improvements — medians, landscaping, angled parking, 13-foot-wide sidewalks, among other amenities — are planned for the Latino business clusters along Highland Avenue at a cost of $20 million. Work on both the Filipino Village and the Cocina Mexicana is slated to begin late this year.

Yamane is so enthusiastic about National City’s future that she hopes to become part of the official team. She is running for a seat on the four-member City Council in November. A native of the Philippines, she moved to the United States in 1989, acquiring along the way an array of skills that propelled her into community leadership. The fourth eldest child in a family with five sons and five daughters, Yamane grew up in poverty. But she was determined to better herself and went on to hold a variety of jobs, ranging from television production in the Philippines to international flight attendant for United Airlines. A self-described workaholic, she enjoys organizing events, and she was asked to host last year’s visit to San Diego by Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, president of the Philippines.

She and her husband, Rey, own a National City business, the Phone Shop Inc., which operates in a D Avenue building that the couple renovated. They also have a real estate brokerage and a small marketing firm. The Yamanes, who have two children, live in an apartment behind their offices.

Yamane gets high marks for her cooperative spirit, says Garcia. In February, she and Garcia joined each other’s chambers. “That’s more than a symbolic effort because she sits on our board,” notes Garcia. “Ditas Yamane has been a breath of fresh air. She’s taken the same approach I have: Why don’t we work together because together we can do so much instead of competing for each other’s members.”

Nick Inzunza couldn’t have said it better.