I have been reading a few of the diaries about the change of heart that Mayor Jerry Sanders has had about gay marriage. I want to say that I appreciate the gesture he has made.
However, lest everyone here lose his or her grip on reality, please remember that one issue does not a politician make; Jerry Sanders is still a rather corrupt politician with a lot of baggage he'd just as soon you never hear about.
Mayor Sanders was elected in a rather bizarre series of events. His predecessor, former Judge Dick Murphy abruptly resigned after a number of (typical for San Diego) scandals caught up with him. Mayor Murphy was supposed to be the "reform" candidate who would clean up the problems in City Hall.
Those problems are too numerous to mention, but I will touch on a couple:
FIrst, San Diego is teetering on financial collapse. It began in 1996, when then Mayor Susan Golding decided that San Diego should host the Republican Convention. There was a problem: the City didn't have any money to pay for it. Mayor Golding was not deterred though. She saw a big pot of money in the City's pension fund. So, she got the City Council to relax the requirements for the City's annual contribution to the fund, and suddenly there was money. Whoopee! Party! I protested, along with many other people, and had my first experience with a "free speech zone," that is, a pen where we could speak out to no one in particular, for a WHOLE HOUR PER GROUP!
Then, the City heard it couldn't have another Super Bowl because our stadium wasn't big enough or good enough. We'd have to fix it. Now we could have just stood up to blackmail and refused, but somehow, we were convinced that we would have some kind of financial windfall if we had more Super Bowls (a claim famously touted by the NFL, and disputed by everyone else not funded by major sports teams). So, put a little less in the pension fund, and borrow the rest, and we'll have our Super Bowl ready stadium. Everything was great, oh, except for the fact that after the City did everything the NFL wanted, the NFL changed its mind and said we couldn't have another Super Bowl unless we built a whole new stadium. Oops! The money is already spent.
That's not all. Once we spent money on a football stadium, the Padres decided they wanted to suck on the corporate welfare teat too. They wanted a baseball-only ballpark, and the City should pony up $175 million to pay for it. But, wait, where will we get the money? Oh right.
Then in 2002, things began to unravel. A City pension fund auditor warned that the pension fund was in serious jeopardy of being under-funded to pay its future liabilies. The deficit could be at least $1.3 billion. The City rewarded her by by firing her.
Over time, it turned out that the deficit could be bigger. Also, the City's accounting firm refused to certify its financial statements, meaning that it couldn't sell any bonds (including bonds to pay for all those toys it built and parties it threw over the last 6 years).
Enter Dick Murphy, the "reformer" who would get us out of the mess. I won't bore you with the details, but instead, he tried to cover it up. He had to leave, and we were going to have a special election for Mayor. Somehow, people convinced him to run again for the office he had just quit (another interesting waste of money, eh?). There were two other candidates, all (at one time, at least) friends of Murphy's, and if you saw them debate, you'd have been hard pressed to tell them apart, down to their blue suits and red ties. Things looked bleak.
Enter Donna Frye, the lone Councilperson who had ever raised any objection to all the fiscal chicanery. She got in as a write-in candidate, and actually got the most votes in the special election, but alas, not a majority (well, actually she did, but some votes were successfully challenged because a few hundred people wrote in her name, but didn't put an "x" next to it). So, we needed another election.
Frye looked like she could win, but then a new blue suit with a red tie, former police-chief Jerry Sanders jumped in. With the help of the developers and the San Diego Anti-Union Tribune, Sanders won (this is, after all a Republican town).
Jerry was going to clean things up, and be the reformer we'd been told Murphy would be, but wasn't (even though Sanders had the support of most of the same people who shoved Murphy down our throats). C'mon Charlie Brown, this time it will be different.
So now it's 2007, and the City has not STILL not released a verified financial statement for 2006, OR 2005, OR 2004, OR 2003, OR 2002, the one that the whistleblower first warned about. We've spent millions of dollars on lots of reports that have told us lots of things (mostly it's somebody else's fault), but still no reliable balance sheet.
Then it gets better. People began to notice a tall building going up surprisingly near an airport flight path, and wondered how it could be allowed. Turns out, the City gave it a permit even though it knew it violated FAA regulations. Also, Jerry Sanders got several thousand dollars in campaign contributions from the builder. Mayor Sanders insisted everything was fine, but then, well, local reporter and crusader Don Bauder can tell it much better than I. Read about it here.
Jerry's "Mea Culpa"
First it was legal, then it was a mistake, and then finally, we saw that Jerry Sanders was the "new boss, same as the old boss."
A lot of people had figured his career was finished.
Then, he issues his heart felt epiphany.
I am glad to see that Jerry Sanders is not a complete tool of the GOP gay-bashing establishment, but that doesn't make him some kind of crusading politician. He was deep in a muck hole. His change of heart is just a ledge that keeps him from drowning in it.