Golding Banks on Experience, Contacts to Become Mayor : Election: But the county supervisor must face critics that say her political stands are motivated by ambition.

After two long years of frustration with city government, the Pacific Beach Town Council tried another approach to remove the knot of migrant workers who congregate at Grand Avenue and Noyes Street, looking for work, frightening pedestrians and annoying local business owners.

“We went to Susan (Golding) and we said, ‘We know this is a city problem, but it’s been handled very badly,’ ” recalled Linda Lopez, president of the council. “ ‘Maybe the county can help. It’s really a county problem, too.’ ”

Two years and many meetings later, an agreement for a hiring hall in a county-owned motor home is at hand, a solution that will eliminate the nuisance and help the workers find better jobs, Lopez believes.

And Lopez is now supporting County Supervisor Golding for mayor of San Diego.

“That’s what we need is someone who has the clout and will work for the community,” Lopez said, “and Susan has always worked for Pacific Beach and the community.”

Voters may be angry at incumbents of all stripes this year, but, as the day of decision in the mayor’s race nears, Golding’s years of experience in local government remain a powerful advantage and, from her perspective, one of the main reasons she is best qualified to run the city.

From transportation to trauma care, from killer bees to community planning, Golding and her staff have been turning the nuts and bolts of government for the past eight years in a supervisorial district that covers the northern stretches of the city of San Diego.

The links forged during those years may pay dividends as Golding reaches for the city’s highest office, seeking support from a broad array of constituencies that include women, minorities, Democrats and labor, along with the Republican Establishment of which she has long been a part.

“Every elected official should be doing what Susan Golding is doing,” said Jim Madaffer, past president of the Tierrasanta Community Council and a Golding supporter.

“She got it done,” Lopez added.

But, in a race that is in many ways a personality contest, the flip side of Golding’s acknowledged diligence in office is the frequent criticism that her motive is primarily political.

More than any of her opponents in the June 2 primary, Golding has had to cope with the image of the ambitious politician, one driven by the lust for more power.

“I see in her a reprise of John Dean’s book ‘Blind Ambition,’ ” said retired appellate Judge Ed Butler, a veteran of City Hall politics. “She’s enormously ambitious. She sticks around for a while and jumps off.”

“Her lack of compassion, her lack of understanding for the average person is terrible,” said Nick Sylvester, a former Golding press secretary who was fired after four months in 1989. “She’s molded out of a political machine, and that’s all she thinks about. She’s a megalomaniac.”

The 46-year-old Golding, who has had to counter such charges for years, responds that “I don’t think ambition is a bad thing. I think doing something only for ambition is a bad thing.

“If the challenge of solving urban problems is ambition, then I have ambition,” she said.

To her supporters, Golding’s efforts on dozens of boards and commissions during two terms as a supervisor and two years as a San Diego City Council member represent a legitimate marriage of politics and constituent service.

From the Southern California Earthquake Preparedness Project to the Regional Alcohol and Drug Abuse Prevention Task Force to community planning groups throughout her district, Golding has made converts with hard work and intelligence.

Since 1987, when she was considering a run for the mayor’s office, Golding has hosted monthly luncheons for community leaders from throughout her district. In those gatherings, she brings together community planning group leaders, town council leaders and heads of other interest groups to hear speakers on topics such as jails, sewage or landfills--and to take their gripes directly to the 3rd District supervisor.

“It was an incredibly smart move,” said Madaffer, who has attended the group for years. “Those people are her eyes and ears from the community standpoint. She’s very receptive to what people have to say, and usually she acts on it.”

And it’s no accident that most of those people now support Golding for mayor.

“I wouldn’t call it naked politicking,” Madaffer said. “I would call it public service, and there’s a touch of politics in there.”

The contest for mayor pits Golding against financier Tom Carter, growth management advocate Peter Navarro, San Diego City Councilman Ron Roberts, magician Loch David Crane and accountant Bill Thomas. If no candidate captures more than 50% of the vote in the June 2 primary, the two top vote-getters will compete in a Nov. 3 runoff election.

As Golding became the race’s front-runner, she has had to answer questions about her motives.

Golding’s image stems in part from deliberate attempts by some of her opponents to link her to her ex-husband, Richard T. Silberman, who is serving time in federal prison after a conviction for his role in laundering what he believed was drug money.

Some also believe that, by trying to be all things to all people, Golding serves no one but herself.

Michael Shames, chairman of the Sierra Club Political Committee, recalled meetings with Golding in which she promised to come out strongly against Roberts Ranch, a proposed East County housing development, and to put a plainly worded referendum on the ballot asking county residents whether they favored the merger of San Diego Gas & Electric Co. with Southern California Edison.

Instead, Golding backed mealy-mouthed compromises, he said.

“There are too many examples . . . in which she promised a Cadillac and we got a Yugo,” Shames said. The Sierra Club has endorsed Navarro.

The county employees union has also endorsed a Golding rival, Roberts, despite the obvious risk of coming out against the supervisor in the midst of difficult labor negotiations. But union leader Eliseo Medina said Golding essentially ignored his union’s needs until the past six months.

“From our perspective, we never knew her well enough to know whether we trusted her or not,” Medina said. “We never had much contact until the last six months.”

Widely acknowledged as highly intelligent, a perfectionist and hard-charging, Golding has been through five chiefs of staff and four press secretaries in less than eight years in office. Sylvester claims that Golding seeks out “flunkies” and “tramples” people without the power to oppose her.

But Golding and her defenders say some people are uncomfortable with a successful woman who sets goals and attains them.

“She really is in it for the public good,” said former chief of staff John Dadian, a continued supporter. “There’s really no doubt in my mind, and I saw that not day after day, but every minute.

“When you get ambitious and you set yourself a goal, and you attain it, a lot of people are going to throw that label at you,” he said.

Golding says her experience at bringing groups together, her vision, her leadership and her capacity to move initiatives through government are the prime characteristics that set her apart from her opponents.

Voters want the next mayor “to get hold of this city, get it moving,” she said in a veiled reference to Mayor Maureen O’Connor’s hands-off style. “They want someone who has a vision of where she’s going, where the city needs to go.”

Golding also believes that she is the sole candidate in the race who “can guarantee a decent working relationship between the city and county for the first time in history.”

Positioning herself between the wholesale change advocated by Navarro and the defense of city government that Roberts often espouses, Golding has adopted reform themes while reminding voters that she knows how government works.

“I can go in and take a fresh look, but also a fresh look that has the knowledge of experience,” she said.

Critics scoff, however, when Golding calls herself an outsider, as she does in the ballot statement that has gone out to city voters. Appointed to the City Council in 1981, she has, throughout her career, been closely tied to the city’s Republican power structure and Gov. Pete Wilson.

“She’s a Republican’s Republican,” Supervisor Brian Bilbray said shortly after Golding took office along with him in 1985. “Susan is a product of the system. She is part of the San Diego Establishment.”

Born in Oklahoma and raised in Indiana, Golding holds a master’s degree in romance philology from Columbia University and is the daughter of former San Diego State University President Brage Golding. Now divorced from Silberman, she is the mother of two children from a previous marriage.

Two years after joining the City Council, Golding took a job as deputy secretary for housing in the Deukmejian administration. But, 10 months later, she left that post to successfully campaign for supervisor in a bitter race that spawned the second of two lawsuits over campaign tactics against Golding.

Upon winning election, she quickly made her mark by scuttling, through behind-the-scenes efforts, an office, hotel and restaurant complex proposed for the parking lots flanking the County Administration Center.

She founded the county’s International Trade Commission, created a special “drug court” for repeat offenders and claims leadership in the opening of 3,200 new jail beds during her eight-year tenure on the board. That number will increase significantly if the county is successful in opening the East Mesa jail during the coming fiscal year, as planned.

But recent events have not been kind to Golding.

Opponents continually remind voters that the East Mesa jail sits empty. In recent months, the county grand jury has issued blistering reports condemning the county’s Child Protective Services and welfare fraud operations.

Later, the supervisors were stung by a $68,000 severance payment to outgoing Chief Administrative Officer Norman Hickey at a time when all county employees were being asked to take voluntary time off without pay to help fill the county’s budget gap.

Golding has sought a centrist, moderate position on many of the more prominent campaign issues.

She proposes to put more police on city streets, but reminds listeners at public forums that the city must spend more time attacking the causes of crime by putting added emphasis on education, job training and social services.

Her economic plan relies in part on creating a bridge between the public and private sectors through the creation of a new City Council committee on business and economic development.

Golding also promises to establish an office for small business at City Hall, streamline the city’s permit process, create a private-sector commission to recommend cost savings in City Hall and foster a “pro-business attitude” throughout city government.

Golding proposes to use the city’s bonding capacity to finance the expansion of the expanding biomedical industry, and wants San Diego to become the telecommunications, banking and financial services headquarters of what she calls the emerging North American common market.

“We are not Detroit. We are not some city that has lost its tax base,” she said. “We have a good tax base here. We’re just not stimulating it.”

She advocates more transitional housing for the homeless, opposes rent control and would support requiring developers to build some portion of their housing for poor and moderate-income buyers if builders were granted tradeoffs that lowered their costs.

Golding has criticized the City Council for abandoning the waiver that exempted it from having to build the costly secondary sewage treatment upgrading. She claims the city has squandered the $100 million spent on the $2.5-billion project so far by recently reversing its position and attempting to downscale the effort.

She has taken a variety of positions on the future of the regional airport, including a call for construction of a second runway at Lindbergh Field, but maintains that the city will have to rely on the small Point Loma airport for some time and should expand it to accommodate more travelers.

Golding endorses a downtown sports arena and proposes creation of neighborhood councils or liaisons to help bring neighborhood concerns to the attention of decision-makers downtown.