LOCAL ELECTIONS SAN DIEGO MAYOR’S RACE : Underdog Navarro Gets a Boost From Voter Discontent : Politics: Supporters are cheered, foes dismayed as support for activist mayoral candidate appears to be growing.

After four years of political frustration, no one could blame Peter Navarro if he retired to his classroom to lick his wounds--another underfunded, overmatched activist who went up against the city’s most powerful interests and was put in his place.

The 42-year-old UC Irvine economics professor has tried and failed three times since 1988 to win passage of a ballot measure that would address the problems associated with San Diego’s painful, rapid growth into America’s sixth-largest city.

Every time, he has been thwarted.

Yet, with every loss, his stature has grown.

Today, the founder of Prevent Los Angelization Now! has become a credible if underdog threat to take home a bigger prize by becoming San Diego’s next mayor--without ever holding elected office in his life.

To the delight of his disaffected supporters and the despair of his baffled detractors, Navarro, perhaps the most controversial figure in local politics today, is considered strong enough to fight his way to an expected November runoff election for mayor.

He has achieved that potential by positioning himself as the most powerful agent of change in the mayor’s race, an aggressive maverick and true outsider in a year when almost everyone expects a spring cleaning of incumbent politicians at all levels.

“Navarro is change,” said Doug Case, president of the San Diego Democratic Club, a gay and lesbian political group that has endorsed one of Navarro’s rivals, businessman Tom Carter. “I think he’s fresh, he’s innovative, he’s intelligent. He will bring in new coalitions.”

Navarro is “an effective speaker, he’s galvanizing loyal supporters, his volunteers are true believers,” added former Mayor Roger Hedgecock, now a radio and television talk show host. “He’s mobilizing the kind of energy that it takes to win a campaign.”

But Navarro’s critics--and there are many--are equally perplexed and incensed that a man they view as a menace to the San Diego economy has acquired enough cachet to be considered a potential leader of the city.

Blaming Navarro’s rise on clever, empty politicking and lack of careful scrutiny by the media, Navarro’s opponents warn that he is a chameleon who has dramatically altered his positions to win election.

“How is it that someone who has been so contradictory can get away with those contradictions and not be dismissed as an inconsequential leader?” asks Robert Lichter, president of John Burnham & Co., and the business community’s point man in anti-Navarro jousting. “How can he make a statement and then refute it the next day, and then refute it again the day after and retain any credibility?”

“I think he makes everybody nervous,” said Joe Francis, director of organized labor’s Committee on Political Education for San Diego and Imperial counties.

Even without a record in office, Navarro is a magnet for such charges. He is a self-proclaimed free market economist whose 1988 initiative would have placed a severe and artificial cap on home building; his opponents claim that his proposed impact fees on business and new development would wreck the city’s economy.

He is an independent who was formerly a Republican and, before that, a Democrat. He proudly boasts of a “grass-roots” campaign that represents the people of San Diego, but less than half its money comes from the public. So far, about 60% of Navarro’s campaign funds have come from his own bank account.

He accuses his incumbent opponents of selling out to special interests, but his alliance with a plumber’s union proved the undoing of his 1991 initiative. The labor union heavily funded the campaign for the Planned Growth and Taxpayer Relieve Initiative, which included a brief section guaranteeing a certain wage level for construction workers. A Superior Court judge struck it down.

He has called former Councilman Wes Pratt a “developer dog,” publicly accused mayoral rival and City Councilman Ron Roberts of taking payoffs from a development company and regularly labels various groups “fronts” for the development industry.

“He’s really a demagogue when it comes to using the words ‘lying’ and ‘cheating,’ ” Lichter said. “You come up with a couple of key buzzwords that the press finds makes a good lead line, and, by the time you have to defend yourself, no one’s interested.

“He gets away with that, and he has been very effective at painting the developers as the black hats of the community,” Lichter said.

“I don’t see in Navarro any consistency that makes me feel confident with where he’s going to be in the long run,” said Rick Moore, communications director of the San Diego Democratic Club.

But perhaps the crowning irony of Navarro’s political life is his failure at the one task that has defined his career: Managing the city’s growth.

The two 1988 growth control initiatives for which he was chief spokesman and economic adviser--but not author--were clobbered at the polls. He has since disavowed the philosophy of artificially capping the number of housing units allowed in the city.

His 1989 measure did not qualify for the ballot, when PLAN! pulled its petitions off the streets after promises that the City Council would enact some of its ideas. Navarro says those promises were not kept.

In 1990, PLAN! led the campaign that succeeded in defeating two initiatives placed on the ballot by the building industry.

But the 1991 initiative was ruled illegal by the court. And his 1992 measure, which links the size of the city police force and the city’s growth rate, appears dead in the water, with PLAN! idled by debts stemming from its court loss.

Still, the paradox of Navarro’s mayoral aspirations is that such losses have not hurt his efforts.

Four years of quixotic struggles with the building industry have earned him invaluable name recognition and credibility as a lightning rod for opposition to traffic congestion, pollution, vanishing open space and other local ills attributed to growth. The support has allowed him to pressure the City Council to adopt some of his program.

For example, Navarro and his organizations were early proponents of comprehensive protections for the environment, some of which the city later adopted.

“People can say Peter Navarro never has gotten an initiative passed, and that’s maybe fair,” Navarro said. “But no one can deny that the role of PLAN! and (Citizens for Limited Growth) before it was to propel the issue into the foreground and keep the heat on.”

On the stump, only Supervisor Susan Golding is in Navarro’s league as a speaker, and none of his opponents has anything close to his measure of passion or charisma.

When Navarro is rolling, he commands attention with the force of his words and the clarity of his ideas, a key attribute in a weak-mayor system where the city leader’s power derives primarily from the use of the bully pulpit the office provides.

Navarro has mastered the symbols of politics, from the “No L.A.” moniker of his growth management organization to sound bites that sum up public frustration in a few words.

“We live in a city where pizza gets to the door faster than the police,” he likes to tell community forums. Another favorite is a quote he attributes to the late baseball pitcher Satchel Paige: “If we don’t change our direction, we’re gonna wind up where we’re headed.”

Navarro’s overriding theme, in a contest where he faces Carter, Roberts, County Supervisor Golding and two minor candidates, is that he is the only person running who will effect fundamental change in the way San Diego plays politics and formulates policy.

“Peter Navarro represents a new breed of politician,” said Michael Shames, head of the Sierra Club’s Political Committee, which has endorsed Navarro. “He doesn’t immediately think ‘what’s politically expedient,’ or ‘whose oxen are going to be gored’.”

John Pinto, a Navarro volunteer who walked a section of Rancho Bernardo with the candidate recently, said he had no involvement in politics before joining Navarro after Navarro helped homeowners fight migrant housing slated for part of the city’s urban reserve.

“He stands up for some basic rules, and he’s not afraid to take a stand,” Pinto said. “I don’t like wishy-washy people who walk the fence, who cannot make up their mind, and so, when pressures come, they go with the pressure.”

In one of the most succinct summations of his posture, Navarro told a March public forum that “there’s nobody in this room who thinks that they’re safer on the streets than they were when my opponents took office, or that the air is cleaner, or the ocean’s clearer, or that they’re safer in their homes, or that their jobs are more secure.

“I’m asking you to hold the people accountable who got us there, which are the incumbent politicians who have been there collectively--supervisor, council, Planning Commission--for over 20 years. . . . I’m the only person in this race who’s the candidate of change. I’m the only person in this race who’s going to take this city in a different direction from where it is inexorably headed.”

Raised in Palm Beach, Fla., and Bethesda, Md., primarily by a single mother who held a succession of low-paying retail jobs, Navarro was a high school basketball and football player and went to Tufts University on a scholarship.

He served three years in the Peace Corps in Thailand, and, after returning, earned his doctorate in economics at Harvard University. He has written books on public policy and electric utilities and lectured widely. He is married and lives in Del Mar Heights.

Aggressiveness and determination in almost every setting have been traits throughout Navarro’s life, said his mother, Evelyn Littlejohn.

“He doesn’t stop until the job is well done,” she said. “He’s very persistent.”

Though he is still the most combative of the candidates, Navarro has toned down his rhetoric and spruced up his image, shedding the running garb he once wore to council meetings for a suit and tie.

“My role in this whole process . . . has been to point out repeatedly that the emperor’s got no clothes,” Navarro responds when questioned about his style. “I am part of a movement that is fighting the most powerful special interest group in this state . . . (and) an incredible system of corruption, lies and greed.”

But he claims that “I know very clearly the difference between playing that role as PLAN! chairperson and playing the role of mayor.” Navarro said he has skills as a “conciliator, consensus builder” and spokesman for the public’s needs that he would use in office.

At the same time, Navarro has attempted to broaden his message to include positions on crime, jobs, the airport, economic growth and the other major issues in the campaign, trading heavily on his doctorate in economics. The extent to which Navarro is able to persuade voters of his expertise will be a key to whether he wins or loses.

“To be elected mayor, he has to be more than a one-dimensional, one-issue candidate,” Shames said. “He has to be multidimensional.”

Navarro’s stands on the major issues of the race are detailed and specific. The PLAN! Police Initiative calls for no approvals of new development if that growth would reduce the level of police staffing per capita.

Navarro has called for more community-oriented policing, which would put regular beat cops in neighborhoods, and transferring more duties, such as examining crime scenes, to civilians in order to put more sworn officers on the street.

Navarro’s business and industrial policy proposes to reverse what he sees as the city’s slide toward a service-sector economy, by promoting small business and entrepreneurship, preserving the city’s manufacturing base, calling on the expertise of the city’s academic community, managing growth and devising a plan for the city’s inevitable economic conversion as the defense industry declines.

Navarro believes in requiring developers to make at least 20% of the housing they construct affordable to moderate-income buyers or renters, a concept known as inclusionary zoning. He wants to see 20,000 units of housing built downtown by the end of the century, and more housing put up around transportation nodes.

He opposes any construction in the city’s urban reserve without a master plan that would be put to a vote.

Navarro has called for a comprehensive re-examination of the city’s controversial $2.5 billion sewage treatment upgrading, a study that would devise a plan based on engineering, environmental and economic concerns. He has proposed that the Utility Consumers Action Network be appointed a permanent watchdog over the program.

He favors locating a new sports arena in Mission Valley, near San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium, which he asserts would be much cheaper than a downtown site and not interfere with construction of housing downtown.

Navarro opposes the TwinPorts airport straddling the U.S.-Mexican border now being studied as a replacement for Lindbergh Field or the use of NAS Miramar for a civilian airport.

Navarro believes San Diego should link up with the Tijuana International Airport via a passenger and cargo terminal on the U.S. side, a trans-border taxiway, and “fast track customs.”

He has also promised to “knock down” at least the top three floors of the controversial Laurel Travel Center at the foot of Lindbergh’s runway, probably by using Port District funds to compensate the building’s owner.

Navarro endorses allowing gay marriages, supports free needle exchange to combat AIDS and promises to hold evening council meetings throughout the city to allow working citizens time to appear before their representatives.

In PLAN!, Navarro has developed what is essentially a small political party, a valuable asset in a nonpartisan race where each candidate is a political entrepreneur who must create his own organization from the ground up. PLAN! has supported City Council candidates, and some of its staff members are working in Navarro’s campaign.

The campaign relies heavily on volunteer support, because, Navarro claims, he lacks the money to combat a blitz of television and direct-mail advertising by opponents that he expects in the race’s final weeks.

Opponents regularly question that assertion, noting that Navarro has already plowed more than $65,000 of his own money into his election effort. Navarro will not comment on how much of his money he is prepared to spend, but claims it is a substantial portion of his life’s savings.

According to field coordinator Peter Andersen, a San Diego State University professor of speech communication, the campaign is targeting voters in 250 “environmentally sensitive” precincts, where Navarro’s basic stances are well-received, areas such as Rancho Bernardo and Penasquitos.

The campaign also is reaching out to gays, minorities and disenfranchised groups believed receptive to Navarro’s message that he is not responsible for the mess city government is in.

In a race in which perhaps 200,000 to 250,000 people may vote, 70,000 to 80,000 votes should secure a candidate a spot in the runoff, aides to candidates estimate. But recent victories of grass-roots candidates such as Councilwoman Valerie Stallings have been confined to small, district elections. No one knows how such a strategy may play across the entire city.

“Honestly, I think (Navarro) is a lock” for one of the runoff spots, “because the discontent out there is so significant,” Shames said.

“The alienation people feel toward politics nationally and locally is profound,” Andersen added. “It runs across race, it runs across party, it runs across ideology. People are fed up, and they have a right to be fed up.”