Scott Peters

Dialogue with Tom Blair

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SCOTT PETERS, the District 1 city councilman for the past eight years, has two months left before he’s termed-out of office. He’s still mulling his career options, but his experience offers lots of opportunities. A magna cum laude graduate of Duke University, he received his juris doctorate from New York University in 1984. After a year as a Minneapolis tax lawyer, he switched to environmental law and joined Baker & McKenzie’s San Diego office. In 1991, he took his first government job, in the county counsel’s office. He was elected to his first council term in 2000——and then the fun began. Peters lives in La Jolla with his wife, Lynn, daughter, Ellie, and son, Ben.

TOM BLAIR: So, it hasn’t exactly been a tranquil eight years for the city of San Diego. And after two terms on the city council, you’re about to go into political detox. How does it feel?

SCOTT PETERS: Detox? Well, I’m just looking ahead and thinking about what I want to do next. I could do law, which I enjoy. People have asked me to join their organizations, mostly in the environmental sector. And I’d like to stay involved with public affairs. California’s been active in encouraging developers to be more environmentally sensitive in their plans. I think there may be a role for me there. We spearheaded the effort to revive La Jolla’s Bird Rock. It took all of my eight years in office to complete. When I walked the neighborhoods in my 2000 campaign, I heard three things at every door. One was to get rid of the seals at Children’s Pool. Another was to get rid of the overhead power lines——and Toni Atkins and I took steps so that’s happening. And the third thing was [fixing] La Jolla Boulevard through Bird Rock. At the time, it was a total highway through the neighborhood. It was this rundown thoroughfare where a half-block away you couldn’t find a home for less than $800,000. The business investments that wanted to come to Bird Rock were a soup kitchen and a checkcashing store.

TB: You attended the Democratic convention in Denver in August. What was it like being a delegate to the first major-party convention to nominate an African-American for president?

SP: I was there as an observer, not a delegate, but it was just fascinating. I originally planned to be there in support of the first woman candidate for president. Then I sort of figured, “Well, I think I’ll support Obama, though I don’t really know him.” But I was impressed by how well run the convention was. And the messages of the campaign were so clearly enunciated and forcefully made that I really had more confidence in Obama’s ability to lead the country.

TB: Well, I guess it wasn’t your first choice to leave politics. You lost your bid for city attorney. If you had it to do over, would you have jumped into that race?

SP: I’ll tell you what I told my 14-year-old son: I would never be afraid of failure. I’d be afraid of not trying. So I’m glad I ran. I’m obviously disappointed in how it turned out, but it’s not the first time I didn’t get a job I thought I was qualified for.

TB: Did you misjudge the political climate and your chances? The backlash over the pension crisis?

SP: We looked pretty hard at it. The mayor had polling, and I had polling up to the last week that said I was going to be one of the final two. But nobody voted; the turnout was 29 percent, the lowest ever.

TB: You and the incumbent city attorney were the only two Democrats in the race——although the city attorney’s job is supposed to be nonpartisan . . .

SP: Well, my whole point was I thought Mike Aguirre had betrayed the values we have as Democrats——by just going after working people like that.

TB: You certainly had the support of labor. Do you think your labor ties just reminded voters of the deal you and other councilmembers made with labor on the misguided pension plan?

SP: I actually don’t think the pension played as much a part in it as people suspect. I will say that more than any group, labor was willing to work. I was very glad to have their support. I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about why it didn’t go right.

TB: You’re a Democrat; Mike Aguirre’s a Democrat. Yet you’ve endorsed his Republican rival, Jan Goldsmith, for city attorney. Why?

SP: First of all, I do think Mike Aguirre is the biggest obstacle to progress in San Diego today. I’d put him ahead of water supply and our other resource crises. Nothing is going to happen in this city——the wheels just aren’t going to turn——until Mike is out of office.

TB: Why is that?

SP: Because he has decided, inappropriately, that the city attorney’s office is a third policymaking branch. Policy should be left to the people we elect to be the mayor and council. The city attorney should be advising us on how to do it right. But he’s decided that when policies of the mayor or city council violate his personal political precepts. he’s going to oppose us. This doesn’t just create problems for the mayor and council, it means things important to neighborhoods aren’t getting done. It means people are really reluctant to do business with us. So I talked to Jan Goldsmith. I’m satisfied he’s going to be straight, that it’s all about the law——and that’s what I wanted to accomplish as city attorney.

TB: Over the past few years, a lot of city services have been either cut back or eliminated because of the pension crisis. Potholes have become a symbol of a city in financial crisis. Is this city still in crisis?

SP: Well, I think we’re not in a crisis. And not everything’s been cut, either. The fire department budget has been raised from $125 million a year to $185 million a year. The police budget has been raised. The other thing is that the pension has not been cut. For a long time, the city made a policy decision that when things got tough, they wouldn’t pay the pension. That’s not a practice we invented. That’s a practice we stopped. With the help of voters, we’ve made it illegal to underfund the pension. We changed the pension board, removed conflicts of interest, and now the city’s pension is funded at 80 percent, which is about the average of pension funds across the country.

TB: Yet the system is still more than $1 billion in debt——and the service on the debt consumes almost $100 million a year.

SP: That’s a sort of fallacious way to look at it, because you have to look at the assets. If you owed somebody a million dollars, it’d be a lot of money. If Bill Gates owed somebody a million dollars, it’s not a lot of money. So you have to look at the assets in the pension, and they’ve grown tremendously since 2002. What you really have to look at is the pension-funding level. Ours is at 80 percent. And yes, we’re going to have to pay service on the debt, but the point is we weren’t paying it before.

TB: But now we’re paying not only what we owe this year, we’re paying for all those years we didn’t pay.

SP: Yes. And I think that’s appropriate. It does mean you have to make tough budget choices, but we’ve always had to make choices. That puts a premium on efficiency. And in fact, the budget for street and sidewalk repair was tripled last year. I also think you have to be careful about labeling things a crisis. When I took office, the ballpark was totally stalled because of the Valerie Stallings crisis. We had the Chargers ticket-guarantee crisis. We had the beach-pollution crisis and the Highway 56 crisis. And all of those things turned out to be problems that, when we put our minds to it, we solved.

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