Goldsmith for City Attorney

President's Letter

IMAGINE YOU’RE RUNNING a $3 billion company. Many of you are already presidents or owners of companies, senior managers or members of boards of directors. Would you run your company without in-house legal counsel in today’s litigious business environment? Imagine you hired an in-house attorney and he immediately went to your clients and encouraged them to take legal action against you. Imagine your in-house attorney publicly accused you of being “corrupt,” when there was no evidence of corruption.

Unfortunately, that’s what Mayor Jerry Sanders has been dealing with for the past three years. Fortunately, the citizens of San Diego will have an opportunity to help Mayor Sanders keep the city moving forward by voting for Jan Goldsmith for city attorney on November 4.

City Attorney Mike Aguirre was elected in 2004. At the time, the city employees’ pension plan was seen as the catalyst for the financial ruin of the city of San Diego. Aguirre rode into City Hall as the white knight who would save us from this fiscal monster. What did he do? Aguirre filed suit after suit after suit, spending millions of taxpayers’ dollars, to put an end to the legally binding pension agreement. He lost at every turn. After he repeatedly failed to win in court, Aguirre took a flier on the World Wide Web. Briefly, in late summer, you could go to the city attorney’s Web site and vote on whether you thought the pension debt was legal. Never mind the oddity of the city attorney using the city’s Web site to take a poll on such a significant legal issue, his poll didn’t stay posted for long. After the voting began going overwhelmingly against Aguirre, it quietly and quickly disappeared.

Most recently, Aguirre filed a lawsuit against Bank of America and Countrywide Mortgage to prevent them from foreclosing on unpaid home loans — promising to make San Diego a “foreclosure sanctuary.” If the city of San Diego is a “foreclosure sanctuary,” and banks can’t recover property that hasn’t been paid for, who in this world is going to loan us money to buy a home? This latest Aguirre brainstorm made the pages of Business Week. The magazine was not favorably impressed. (Incidentally, Aguirre did not make it publicly known that his own loan from Countrywide went to the brink of foreclosure.)

Mike Aguirre has decided to vigorously support the controversial “Toilet to Tap” proposal to provide San Diego with drinking water. Can anyone tell us why this is a matter for the city attorney? Many of us don’t like the idea of drinking treated sewer water; we know things can go wrong — and often do. Meanwhile, Oceanside is proceeding with a promising desalination plant.

When a portion of La Jolla’s Mount Soledad slid away, our quixotic city attorney frantically claimed, in front of local and national TV cameras, that the city of San Diego was liable — and he was there to protect the taxpayers. If the city was to be ruled liable — and it has not been proven so — it’s the taxpayers who would foot the bill.

Aguirre showed his calm under fire again during the devastating firestorms of October 2007 by calling for the mayor to evacuate the entire city. Fortunately the mayor, police chief and fire chief ignored Chicken Little.

Despite the intrusion and confusion rained on San Diego by Mr. Aguirre, we have managed to reelect a mayor who’s put us on the right track. Now we need a city attorney who will represent the city government and advise the mayor and city council on legal matters affecting the city’s future. Jan Goldsmith is that man.

Goldsmith will bring respect and credibility to the city’s legal office. A San Diego Superior Court judge since 1998, a former state assemblyman, former mayor of Poway and an adjunct professor of law at three San Diego law schools, Goldsmith is eminently qualified to lead the city’s law firm. He has promised investigations by the city attorney’s office will be fair, nonpartisan and professional. He has pledged to offer independent legal advice without political or personal considerations. He says members of the public, judges, city staff, the council and mayor will be treated with respect, even while the city attorney may express disagreement with them.

And most refreshingly, he has pledged to focus the city attorney’s office on the law — not the city attorney. November 4 cannot come soon enough.

JIM FITZPATRICK

President

San Diego Magazine

Do you like what you read? Subscribe to San Diego Magazine »