With three speeches down and three more ahead, San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders delivered his mid-tenure State of the City address Jan. 14 at the recently restored Balboa Theater downtown. Less fervent than last year’s impassioned election-year plea asking residents to join him in finishing the job of restoring stability to a city fraught with budget woes and crumbling infrastructure, Sanders’ theme this year took the pragmatic stance that even more sacrifice will be necessary to get through tough times ahead. Sanders warned of further reductions to city services that will impact quality of life of San Diegans and the need for a change of the public mindset that expects the city to maintain the same level of service in today’s economic reality. “It’s not enough to say we can’t repeat the mistakes of the past,” Sanders said. “But we can confront the culture that made those mistakes possible. They said it was OK not to care about the city as a whole but only to care about your little piece of it.” A strong theme of Sanders’ speech was community involvement and volunteerism. He called on community members and groups to turn to each other rather than by default going to the city to solve their problems. “We cannot be a city of strangers,” the mayor said. He cited the work done by the San Diego Police Department’s Retired Senior Volunteer Patrol (RSVP) corps and efforts to expand their duties to include the monitoring of foreclosed and abandoned homes and enforcement of select code-compliance issues. Sanders said the city would be eliciting the “public’s help in our pursuit of the public good.” Some highlights of Sanders’ speech: • Sanders said San Diego was able to conduct its first public bond offering in five years on Jan. 13, attracting $157 million from Wall Street Investors — a significant step forward for a city once dubbed “Enron by the Sea.” • Sanders said San Diego will continue to support efforts to make the area a leader in renewable energy by further supporting the CleanTECH San Diego campaign and the San Diego Clean Generation Program, an initiative to provide property owners affordable conversion to solar energy with financing spread over 20 years of property tax payments. • Through its Business Process Reengineering (BPR) effort and managed competition, Sanders said the city is continuing to evaluate the core services that it provides and evaluate whether these are delivered as economically as private entities could. • The proposed downtown library project, which was at risk of being scrapped because of inadequate funding, may have been given a second chance, Sanders said. The city is currently investigating a joint-use proposal with the San Diego Unified School District under which two floors of the building would be occupied by a downtown public high school. “I liked (Sanders’) focus on the need to make tough decisions and the need for everyone to pull together,” District 2 Councilman Kevin Faulconer said. Faulconer also said he sees the beach communities as great potential leaders in the solar energy program.
