VOSD Monthly | June 2012 Preview

How Carl DeMaio Made His Money: The Playbook that Led Him to Fortune in Washington

www.voiceofsandiego.org

JUNE 2012

Vol. 1 No. 2

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DEMAIO VS. FILNER

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By eschewing the traditional moderates, San Diegans have set up a rare partisan battle in the November mayoral election.

BY LIAM DILLON Voice of San Diego is a member-based news organization. Join our community and get a subscription to this magazine. Learn more at vosd.org/join-members ▸▸

June 2012

Volume 1 Number 2

18 POLITICS

How DeMaio Made His Money The playbook that led Carl DeMaio to fortune as a businessman in Washington, D.C., bears remarkable similarities to the one he’s followed in San Diego. BY LIAM DILLON

10 ELECTION

It’s DeMaio vs. Filner San Diego has long had a tradition of electing moderate, often center-right, mayors. That won't be an option this year with Carl DeMaio and Bob Filner headed for the November runoff election.. BY LIAM DILLON

Inside 2 EDITOR’S NOTE | Andrew Donohue Our Craft

3 RAISE YOUR VOICE

25 EDUCATION

The Insolvency Guy Scott Barnett is one of five members of the San Diego Unified school board. He says the district’s broke, his colleagues are incapable of fixing it and it’s time to surrender to the state. BY WILL CARLESS

VOSD Launches Community Partner Program

4 ON THE STREET

Mayoral Rivals Break Bread | Liam Dillon A Call Into the District Attorney | Scott Lewis Off to Prison | Kelly Bennett A Forgotten Pollution Problem | Rob Davis

17 FACT CHECK | Keegan Kyle

The Pension Initiative’s Initial Costs

35 COMMENTARY | Scott Lewis

The New Republican Coalition Is Validated

30 ARTS + IDEAS

Scientists Want Young Violinists’ Brains A new scientific study to explore how the brain changes in the first five years of playing an instrument hits the compelling intersection of science and art in San Diego. BY KELLY BENNETT June 2012 VOSD MONTHLY

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Editor’s Note EDITOR

Our Craft

Andrew Donohue STAFF WRITERS

Kelly Bennett, Will Carless, Rob Davis, Liam Dillon, Keegan Kyle CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Ashley Lewis

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER

Scott Lewis

VICE PRESIDENT, ADVANCEMENT & ENGAGEMENT

Mary Walter-Brown WEB EDITOR

E

LECTION SEASON REALLY TESTS OUR DISCIPLINE. Hundreds of worthy storylines, people and issues deserve to be explored all around this county.

We have to pick our sweet spots — the areas where we’ll be best and where we’ll have the most impact. As a nonprofit, we have to add value in everything we do. There’s no sense in doing work that everyone else is doing, that doesn’t separate us from the pack. Just popping in on a race for a one-off story doesn’t do much.

We can’t pretend to offer quantity, and don’t want to. We go for quality.

So we focus. This year, that’s meant Liam Dillon has become an expert on the mayor’s race. Will Carless has taken his deft knowledge of education’s pressing issues and applied them to the school board races.

Keegan Kyle’s kept the Fact Check machine humming (or perhaps we should thank the candidates for that). We’ve all pitched in to get to know the neighborhoods and candidates in the City Council districts. And we’ve tackled Propositions A and B. Since this is San Diego, the renowned craft brewery capital, think of our operations like breweries.

A daily newspaper is a little like Anheuser Busch. It makes a product with hopes of reaching the widest, most popular audience around.

Think of us then like Stone Brewery. We make limited amounts of really good stuff for those with discerning tastes.

That doesn’t mean we don’t want to grow, just like Stone.

It just means we’ll do it our way.

Now, back to those elections. Cheers.

ANDREW DONOHUE

Editor

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Dagny Salas MEMBER MANAGER

Summer Polacek FOUNDERS

Buzz Woolley & Neil Morgan BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Reid Carr, Bob Page, Bill Stensrud, Gail Stoorza-Gill

June 2012 | Volume 1 Number 2 Subscriptions and Reprints

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Thank you to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for supporting innovative journalism.

News and Updates from Our Member Community

VOSD Launches Community Partner Program THIS MONTH we’re officially launching our new VOSD Community Partnership Program.

As you’ve probably noticed, we’ve never put a great emphasis on selling traditional advertising.

Almost all of the sponsorships on our site have come from companies or organizations that reached out to us because, 1: they support the service we provide, and 2: because we have intelligent, affluent and engaged readers.

Often, these businesses aren’t only interested in promoting themselves, they also want to raise awareness about a cause they support. Sometimes they just want to promote their support of VOSD, which we very much appreciate.

Now we’re formalizing a community partnership program that provides businesses and organizations several different options for raising awareness.

Like our individual Raise Your Voice membership program, community partners have four different levels of sponsorships to choose from. Each level offers different platforms for delivering their messages and different products and content to sponsor, including email blasts (Morning Report, Arts Report, Member Report), various sections of our website (Politics, education, Arts...), as well as prime sponsorship options in this magazine.

If you would like to take a fresh approach to raising awareness about your company, service or an organization you support, please contact me at mary.brown@voiceofsandiego.org.

We can help you with messaging, design and a customized social media strategy. Together we can build a partnership that will make us both proud.

Thanks!

MARY WALTER-BROWN

Vice President, Advancement & Engagement

Are You Ready to Raise Your Voice?

Go to vosd.org/join-members to learn more about the benefits of membership. Get in the loop! Join the VOSD community today.

QUESTIONS? CONCERNS? Write to mary.brown@voiceofsandiego.org

RECENT EVENTS

May Member Coffee

VOSD members Jamie Edmonds, Silke White, and B.J. Debusschere shared a laugh and a few good ideas.

Members Henry Williams and Jocelyn Maggard continued their lively discussion afterward.

UPCOMING EVENTS JUN 20

One Voice at a Time

6:30 P.M. | BIRD’S SURF SHED

VOSD CEO Scott Lewis will go one on one with former City Councilwoman Donna Frye in the first of our new conversation series. Members at the Inside Voice level and above get in free. General admission is $5. Beer, wine and light snacks will be served.

JUN 28

Member Coffee

8:00 A.M. | VOSD OFFICE

VOSD members are invited to join us for coffee, a light breakfast and lively discussion with CEO Scott Lewis and our reporting staff. Space is limited. Please RSVP to summer@voiceofsandiego.org.

June 2012 VOSD MONTHLY

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HAPPENINGS

On the Street

SAM HODGSON FOR VOICE OF SAN DIEGO

SAM HODGSON FOR VOICE OF SAN DIEGO

Mayoral Rivals Break Bread ON A SUNDAY NIGHT in mid-April, two men who wanted to be San Diego’s next mayor went to Zia’s Bistro in Little Italy to have dinner together.

The meal culminated had been 10 months of campaigning for Bob Filner and Nathan Fletcher. They didn’t know each other before last June. Since then, they have appeared side-by-side dozens of times at community meetings, forums and debates, often the only two of the four major candidates who would show up.

Filner’s fiancée, Bronwyn Ingram, suggested they have dinner with Fletcher and his wife, Mindy.

“We’ve become friends,” Filner said.

It’s a relationship you can see every time Filner, a Democrat, and Fletcher, an independent, are together.

They whisper back and forth and make each other laugh. They can finish each other’s sentences.

“We almost have a standup comedy routine,” Filner said. “I said at one thing, ‘Nathan you forgot to tell this story.’ And he said, ‘Oh yeah let me tell it.’ I said, ‘No, I’m going to tell it.’”

Filner picked the restaurant. Zia’s is one of their favorites. The chef always makes Filner something off the menu: pasta with garlic and oil.

Filner said he didn’t remember what Fletcher ordered (it was lasagna), but the congressman joked that the choice seemed “strange” to him.

“It didn’t seem in character for a Marine,” Filner said.

Told Filner’s quip, Fletcher replied: “There was no MREs there, no meals, ready-to-eat.”

During dinner, Filner talked about his time in Congress and fighting in the civil rights movement.

Fletcher discussed his time in the military. They talked about how hard it was for politicians’ significant others. They brought up their mayoral rival, City Councilman Carl DeMaio, who led both of them in the polls.

After their dinner, it became increasingly likely that Filner and Fletcher would battle it out for the right to face DeMaio in the general election.

Filner has admitted that he underestimated Fletcher. But he also got help from barrage of advertisements DeMaio is leveling at Fletcher that attack the assemblyman’s lack of liberal credentials.

June 2012 VOSD MONTHLY

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On the Street

— Liam Dillon

GET OUT

A Call Into the District Attorney

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LOCAL REPUBLICAN PARTY Chief Tony Krvaric got fired up over a tweet from Keith Jones, the owner of Ace Parking.

Jones had tweeted that his grandfather, super booster Malin Burnham, had asked District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis to leave the race.

Krvaric seemed to think this was a problem for Assemblyman Nathan Fletcher, whom Burnham supported for the job.

I agreed it would be at least interesting if Burnham had sent this message to Dumanis. So I called to ask him.

Indeed he had.

He said that well before the race he had advised her not to run for mayor.

She could do a lot more good for San Diego as district attorney.

And he decided recently to try again.

“I did send a message to her last week suggesting it was time for

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Mayoral candidate Bonnie Dumanis shows her “I Voted” sticker after voting on election day.

her to consider vacating the race. If she dropped out of the race, a large majority of her voters would switch to Nathan Fletcher. Therefore, I asked ‘Do you want to be a spoiler in this campaign or a hero?’” he said.

He said she hadn’t responded.

“But she did ask Nathan to tell me to quit calling. I’m not making a campaign out of this. I’ve sent my message and, as far as I’m concerned, I don’t have to send anymore.”

Soon thereafter, Dumanis got noticeably feistier. That would indicate the plea from Burnham had the opposite effect on her.

— Scott Lewis

FRAUDSTERS

Off to Prison IT’S BEEN THREE YEARS since we exposed a $13 million mortgage swindle involving more than 80 condos in North County cities Escondido and San Marcos.

Now, the man behind it all is behind bars. Federal courts sentenced

the swindle’s mastermind, James McConville, to nearly eight years in prison in May and ordered him to pay more than $7 million in restitution.

He’d pleaded guilty in January to fraud and money laundering charges.

The swindle’s effects still linger. The crash from more than 80 foreclosures in three complexes caused surrounding condos’ value to plummet. McConville’s scam units sold in 2008 for more than $300,000 each. Today, there are units in one of the complexes, Sommerset Villas, currently for sale for $64,900 and $80,000.

When my colleague Will Carless and I worked on this story, one of the things that stood out the most was the timing. McConville’s fraud happened at the same time the country’s big banks and the federal government were touting their crackdown on the excesses of the housing boom that had led to a global financial collapse.

U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag noted the timing in her comments.

“Mr. McConville’s actions during our country’s financial crisis caused financial institutions to lose millions of dollars,” she said. “What he thought

SAM HODGSON FOR VOICE OF SAN DIEGO

DeMaio knew that a DeMaio-Filner runoff is much more favorable to him than DeMaio-Fletcher.

At debates, the 69-year-old Filner attempted to magnify the 35-yearold Fletcher’s inexperience by jokingly offering Fletcher work in his administration. Fletcher, Filner said, could be his “czar of innovation,” for instance.

But Filner said he was serious. He would hire him. Fletcher said he’d find a job for Filner, too.

“If I was mayor, I would absolutely try to find some way to keep him involved,” Fletcher said.

Though they may be friends now and work together in the future, one bit of formality remained when their dinner ended last month.

They split the check.

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

“I wouldn’t marry Carl DeMaio.”

— Mayoral candidate Nathan Fletcher, explaining his same-sex marriage views to San Diego CityBeat

would be a big payday for him, instead resulted in an extended prison stay.”

— Kelly Bennett

RESTRICTING INFO

A Public Charge MAYOR JERRY SANDERS wants to charge more money for public records, adding another hurdle for the public to get information about the inner workings of San Diego’s city government.

The little-known proposal working its way through City Hall would add fees for copies of public records like PDFs and computer data. Today, these records are often provided for free.

The city is required under state law to provide copies of many records upon request. This process is crucial to public accountability of government.

News media and other watchdogs rely on it daily.

While the city must release records, the law provides discretion to recoup the cost of making copies. The city gives PDFs and other scanned documents to the public for free. Under Sanders’ proposal, the city would start charging 25 cents per page, the same as it costs today for paper copies.

City Clerk Elizabeth Maland worries the new fee could hamper accessibility to public information. In some cases, Maland predicted the fee could actually end up costing the city more money than it would take in.

“So much of what we’re trying to do is make information more available, accessible, easier for people to get,” Maland told an April 25 City Council committee meeting.

The city would also add a flat rate for electronic copies of computer data, a fee that’s been used by other government agencies as an insurmountable hurdle to effectively allow some information to be kept

secret. For example, San Diego County told us in 2010 that copying data about gang-related crimes from an archaic mainframe would cost roughly $8,000.

Under the mayor’s proposal, eight hours of work would cost $336 (or 70 cents per minute), a charge that would depend entirely on how long it takes the city to copy the data into a readable format. The charge greatly depends on the city’s own competence. Outdated IT systems or poor knowledge of city technology can make copying data a more tedious process and therefore more costly to the public.

Mayoral spokesman Darren Pudgil said the city already charges for PDFs and data today, but doesn’t do it consistently. The new policy would standardize the rates and require the fees across city departments, he said.

“We look at this as a minimal increase. It’s something that just has to be done,” Pudgil said. “We’re not going to take money from other city functions to offset the cost to provide that service.”

The step comes from a mayor whose office has at times struggled to comply with the state’s open-records law. We

Number of the Month

9 Number of the city of San Diego’s 16 business improvement districts that failed to properly notify the public of their open meetings.

had to threaten to sue Sanders in 2009 to obtain copies of routine e-mails that had been illegally kept secret.

A council committee approved the fee hike, but it must still be approved by the full City Council, which is expected to discuss it in mid-June.

— Keegan Kyle

THE BAY

A Forgotten Pollution Problem THE WHINE of the man sanding the boat cut across the shores of San Diego Bay. Clouds of dust flew loose, drifting toward the water below.

Gale Filter, the executive director of San Diego Coastkeeper, a local environmental group, raised the camera strapped to his chest and started firing.

Once a week since last July, Filter has gone out on the group’s small boat, sliding quietly through the waters of local marinas. And each week, he says he’s seen similar problems. A boat being dismantled in the water, allowing debris to seep into the bay. Painters flicking their brushes. And plenty of people sanding off paint with nothing in place to catch the dust.

What he’s seen is illegal. State law prohibits anyone from allowing what it terms “deleterious material” — bad stuff — to go into the water. But each week, Filter says he sees it happening.

“This is the death by 1,000 cuts,” Filter says.

Boat paint contains copper, which by design leaches out to prevent barnacles from building up on hulls. But the copper from paint can accumulate in sediment and kill creatures like young fish, starfish and mussels. Scientists have found harmful levels of copper throughout San Diego Bay and the marinas lining its shores.

June 2012 VOSD MONTHLY

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On the Street

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It’s one of many pollution problems facing the bay, which for decades served as a dumping ground for toxic chemicals and raw sewage.

While most copper found in the bay comes from leaching paint, boat owners are supposed to use tarps to prevent paint or sawdust from getting into the water or to do the work while the boat is out of the water. That doesn’t always happen.

Marinas play a role, too. They’re voluntarily supposed to ensure boat owners take the proper precautions to keep pollution out of the bay when they’re doing repair work.

Filter said some marinas do that well and others don’t. He said he’s seen the most problems at Driscoll’s Wharf in Point Loma.

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“It’s just a nightmare,” he said. On the day we cruised through it, we saw paint flakes dangling off one barnaclecovered boat whose name, High Roller, was partly obscured by rust.

Filter lauded the Sunroad Resort Marina on Harbor Island as a model

“It’s just a nightmare.” for others. Jim Behun, the marina’s general manager, said he tries to be selective about which boats he allows into its 610 slips. Behun said he and an assistant dockmaster walk the marina and talk to boat owners if they’re doing improper work. It’s an ongoing

outreach effort, he said.

“You clean up the issue before it even happens,” he said. “We’re maybe more proactive than some other marinas, and if there is an issue, we jump right on it.”

The port conducts annual inspections of marinas and other waterfront businesses but rarely issues fines or citations for pollution violations, handing out two fines (for $250 and $600) and five citations last year.

Two of its environmental officials pledged to investigate Filter’s concerns.

— Rob Davis

ROB DAVIS FOR VOICE OF SAN DIEGO

A rusting boat that caught the attention of San Diego Coastkeeper’s leader during one of his regular pollution patrols in San Diego Bay.

Mayoral candidate Bob Filner addresses supporters at Golden Hall on Election Night.

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DEMAIO VS. FILNER

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BY LIAM DILLON

SAM HODGSON FOR VOICE OF SAN DIEGO / ISTOCKPHOTO

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HANGE OF THE KIND NOT SEEN IN DECADES is coming to San Diego City Hall.

When Republican City Councilman Carl DeMaio and Democratic Congressman Bob Filner advanced to the mayoral runoff earlier this month, it set up a partisan fight San Diegans aren’t used to seeing when they pick their leader.

“What we have had really in the entire post-World War II era has been center-right and center-slightly left mayors,” said Steve Erie, a UC San Diego professor who wrote a recent book on the city’s political history. “They don’t fit the pattern.”

DeMaio and Filner defeated the two other candidates who did fit the pattern. Fletcher, whose Republican-turned-independent bid in March was the race’s biggest surprise, lost ground throughout the night.

Republican District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis, who had courted the same moderate support as Fletcher and backed it up with nearly 40 years of history in San Diego government, never caught fire during the campaign.

June 2012 VOSD MONTHLY

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