Out of touch or running scared?

By Kelley Dupuis

In the three years and four months since he became mayor of Chula Vista, Steve Padilla has been called a lot of things.

The articulate mayor. The young mayor. The first mayor-with-a-hispanic-surname. And as recently as last summer, the gay mayor, although Padilla was quick to get it on the record that in his view, being gay and being mayor have nothing to do with each other: he strongly disavowed having any "gay" political agenda.
But just since last fall, Padilla has had to live with a new, unwelcome moniker: the embattled mayor.

While disagreements are a regular part of life on any city council, just within the past few months the spirit of consensus and cooperation long associated with the Chula Vista City Council has gone out the door. Council members have criticized the mayor over his hiring of a private bodyguard, and a member of a community grassroots group has filed a complaint with the city's ethics commission over the appointment in December of a new city councilmember, with Padilla in the spotlight.

Until recently, most open criticism of Padilla has come from groups such as Crossroads II, the growth-watchdog group with whom the mayor has often been at loggerheads. But now, not only is criticism of Padilla coming from a wider range of voices, it's coming from some high-profile figures in local politics, including Councilman Steve Castaneda and Chula Vista Elementary School District Trustee Cheryl Cox, who both have announced their intention to seek Padilla's job in the June election.

Local businessman Ricardo Macias is also running against Padilla.

Castaneda said two issues prompted him to run for mayor: Padilla's apparent flip-flop on putting an eminent domain initiative on the June ballot, and the mess that resulted from the city's hiring a personal bodyguard for Padilla to protect the mayor from threats that were said to be very real but never made any too specific.

The city hired David Kanter as a personal bodyguard for Padilla last fall, at $10,000 a month. After vocal criticism of the expenditure in January from Councilman John McCann, Padilla fired Kanter. When Kanter threatened a lawsuit, the city agreed to go ahead and pay him the $10,000 a month until his contract runs out in June. Then a new wrinkle suddenly turned up this month, when the city suspended Kanter's contract pending investigation of possible irregularities regarding his insurance and his issuance of a firearm to an employee.

Castaneda still doesn't know why the bodyguard was needed in the first place. He says his fellow council members don't know, either.

"We were told from the outset that there were significant and real threats against the mayor's safety," Castaneda said. "To this day, neither myself nor anyone else on the council who voted on that issue has seen what those threats were."

Padilla was critical of a community push to put an initiative on the June ballot regarding the city's right to take residential properties by eminent domain. After resisting the effort, Padilla relented and came out in support of the placing the initiative on the ballot.

Castaneda noted what he perceives as a tendency on Padilla's part to perform such flip-flops, and is among those who feel that Padilla is at least to some extent out of touch with what the public wants. In addition to the eminent domain issue, he points to developer Jim Pieri's proposed "Espanada" high-rise development on H Street, (a project that died after a firestorm of controversy) the city's recently-updated general plan, and the question of what to do with the city's Bayfront property as issues where Padilla and the public have not seen eye-to-eye.

"Steve has locked himself into his office," Castaneda said. "It's happened on Espanada and on eminent domain that he has essentially set a position and a perspective, and when he finds that the public does not agree with him, we are in a position where we spend the public's money to fight the public.

"At the end of the day, on both of those major issues, he has seen that the people of Chula Vista don't agree with his vision, and he has had to relent," Castaneda said. "In my opinion that's not how you represent people. The flip-flops come at a point in time when there's a hammer to his head."

And then there's the issue of interim city councilwoman Patricia Chavez, hired in December to replace Patty Davis, who left the council for reasons of health. The council unanimously appointed the relatively-inexperienced Chavez over more experienced candidates, and there has been speculation that Chavez was Padilla's hand-picked choice for the job. Community activist Peter Watry is pursuing a complaint with the city's ethics commission over Padilla's involvement in the appointment of Chavez.

While pulling up short at accusing Padilla of violating the Brown Act open-meeting law, Castaneda thinks there are, nevertheless, some questions about Chavez' appointment that need to be answered.

"I'm not convinced he was completely up-front with each of the council members regarding his intentions and his involvement with [Chavez] prior to the appointment," Castaneda said, adding that he believes Padilla provided Chavez with access to city hall that others interested in taking Davis' vacated seat didn't have.

"Clearly, she was his pick. I have no idea why," he said.

Cox, a prominent figure in local education and also the wife of County Supervisor Greg Cox, said it wasn't any one particular issue that prompted her to enter the race.

"A combination of events and actions led me to believe that the focus was not on the well-being of the city as much as it was on personal well-being," she said.

And she wasn't talking specifically about the hiring of Kanter as Padilla's bodyguard, either. Cox thinks Padilla just enjoys too many expensive perks.

"When you look at $1,500 a month being paid to the mayor since July, and $2,000 a month in an expense account, on top of $10,000 a month for a bodyguard who has the use of a city car and was given expenses, the events didn't seem to match up to the thinking that you're elected to the office to represent the people," Cox said.

$2,000 a month, Cox claims, is more than any official in California gets for expenses. "From San Diego to Los Angeles, expenses average $650 to $700 a month," she said.

Moreover, she said, the $1,500 a month Padilla received was for attending redevelopment commission hearings that were never held.

"It came to what those expenses mean," she said. "If they're for the personal benefit of one official rather than for the city as a whole, that was what made me more quizzical than any one issue."

Repeated attempts were made to contact Padilla for this article. South Bay Review made a personal visit to the mayor's office, left a series of telephone messages with his assistant Natalie Flores, and even made an attempt to reach him by cell phone. No responses were received, and permission to leave a message on the mayor's official voicemail at city hall was also refused.

Cox has worked with the city's Urban Development Corporation, formed in 2004 to take a look at redevelopment opportunities, especially on the west side. She supports the idea of using redevelopment to stimulate economic growth by bringing in more revenue. She doesn't necessarily oppose the city's use of eminent domain, but feels it should not be a first recourse.

"The first recourse is working with people who have a vested interested in that specific area to come together with a plan that makes sense for them," she said.

Cox said she received many phone calls from people saying they thought she should run, but none of them, she said, came from any "vested interests" such as developers or real-estate people.
Castaneda has the backing of city council candidate Rudy Ramirez, his opponent in the 2004 primary. Cox does not yet have any endorsements, but says she intends to seek some.

She is a long-time member of the Chamber of Commerce, which has already endorsed Padilla.

"I'm not sure what will come of that, but I certainly support business interests," she said. "I hope to get endorsements from individual business people."

Cox points to a lot of construction the city has done recently-for itself. Chula Vista opened a massive new police station less than two years ago and is currently in the process of building an entirely new civic center. She doesn't object to the city spending money this way, but stressed that it should not lose sight of its other priorities as well.

"The new police station and civic center are up and running and were paid for through impact fees and redevelopment money," she said. "I don't begrudge them a new civic center, but we have infrastructure problems we need to deal with as well. And if we didn't have $50,000 committed for the next five months to a bodyguard that isn't going to do anything, we could spend that money on pothole fixing."

Councilman McCann said much the same thing when he slammed the bodyguard expenditure in January.

Castaneda, for his part, thinks that anyone who might replace Padilla in the June election is going to have to restore a cohesiveness to city government that in recent months has become prominently absent.

"The glue's coming undone," he said. There are members of the council that are starting to see first-hand that some of the decisions we have made based on information that we understood to be accurate, were not, and we're starting to see that we need to be a little more circumspect about what we do and what decisions we make. And those decisions don't always coincide with what the mayor wants to accomplish."