Jerry Sanders’ Checkered Legacy Stands as a Warning to Mayor Gloria

Former San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders announced earlier in the month that he would be retiring at the end of the year as the head of the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce and, as he has been lauded, “capping a career of public service of more than 50 years.”

It’s true that Jerry Sanders has had quite a career — most of it, yes, in the public arena that began in 1973 when he joined the San Diego Police Department. Twenty years later he became Chief. He retired as Chief in 1999 and then headed the United Way of San Diego and then the local Red Cross in 2003. Sanders first ran for elected office in 2005 for San Diego Mayor — and won. He had two terms as Mayor and then went on to lead the Chamber where he’s been for the last 12 years.

The Chamber is and always has been quite a partisan (Republican) establishment network of powerful business and corporate interests — and Jerry became its face for over a decade — but it’s difficult to call that “public service.” But still ….

So, with his retirement from public service, Jerry has built quite a legacy.

Yet, from a progressive point of view, that legacy is a checkered one — and now stands as a warning to our current mayor, Todd Gloria. This appraisal will not follow the lavish praise Jerry Sanders has achieved from most media and press since his announcement — you may have guessed that by now.

But no, Sanders does have a checkered history with San Diego — and two events — stand out to cloud the shiny armor of a retiring public knight.

The first event occurred during San Diego’s most horrific mass shooting in 1984, the “McDonald’s Massacre.” Here’s La Prensa‘s summary of the incident in their own fairly friendly farewell to Sanders:

In 1984, Sanders was the SWAT commander during the massacre at a McDonald’s restaurant in San Ysidro by shooter James Huberty that led to the deaths of 21 people, including four minors from 18 months to 11 years old. A SDPD SWAT sniper eventually shot Huberty to end the standoff 77 minutes after the first shot was fired.

Sanders was criticized for delays in moving in on Huberty, but a SDPD report issued two weeks later by Police Chief Bill Kolender concluded that the delays did not impact the eventual number of people killed by Huberty. Kolender said he believed “the operation was handled the way it should have been handled.”

Citing his involvement in the response to the McDonald’s massacre, a 2005 editorial in La Prensa San Diego by then-Publisher Daniel L. Muñoz during Sanders’ first run for office called him “unfit to be Mayor.”

For more details of the massacre and questions raised about Sanders’ performance in delaying police response, go here.

This is not the event that we are lingering on for today. It’s the second “event” — or series of events while Sanders was mayor — this is the warning for our current mayor.

Three years into his first term as mayor, Sanders and the rest of us were hit with the Big Recession. Sanders — faced with a huge budget crisis — wanted to solve it by making substantial cut-backs to key public services. And he chose San Diego’s libraries.

In order to balance the city’s budget, he threatened to close all San Diego libraries — including the OB Library, of course — or seriously cut back their hours.

The first community to push back and respond was Ocean Beach. The Rag, the OB Historical Society, People’s Food, and of course, Friends of OB Library, staged a series of very public rallies to protest the library’s closure or steep cutback in hours. Other neighborhoods also rose up and there were demonstrations at local libraries all across San Diego.

OB residents even formed a committee of mainly older women who were willing to sit-in inside the library to prevent its closure. It would have been an act of civil disobedience. (At an organizing meeting, a police officer showed but claimed she was just a reporter.)

Finally, Sanders relented in 2009 and took cutting the libraries off his agenda. And he said the reason he changed his mind was the reaction in Ocean Beach.

One would have thought that an elected would have learned their lesson — but no. In 2011, Sanders tried to do it again. Here’s part of a Rag report from April 20, 2011:

The Friends of the OB Library met on Tuesday, April 19th. The current chair – George Murphy – has reported to us that the meeting had the largest attendance that he’d ever experienced. The group was riled up because of the draconian library closures and staff cuts  proposed – once again – by San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders in his latest budget presented to the City Council.

Apparently, the Friends are mobilizing to prevent these proposals and have put together the following plan of action, which they will carry out and now plead with their fellow neighbors of Ocean Beach to join them in doing.

The mobilization worked. Again, Sanders relented.

Yet still — really? Two attempts to close some of the most valued public services — our libraries — to balance the books.

So, the lesson is clear for Mayor Gloria — who is currently contemplating where to make budget cuts. History and Sanders’ legacy are waving red flags. Don’t cut libraries and other basic services just because a history of bad real estate deals and the defeat of Measure E now plague the city. There will be hell to pay, Mr. Mayor, if you do.

Learn from Jerry Sanders’ legacy.