SAN DIEGO – She has a BA from Penn and an MBA from Harvard University. She’s been a journalist. She has started up two successful tech businesses. She has led such organizations as the Jewish Women’s Foundation and Run Women Run. She has been married twice, has two adult daughters, and, at 70, is a proud grandmother. For the last three years, she has been a San Diego City Councilwoman.
Now, Barbara Bry would like to parlay the many experiences of her life to become the next mayor of San Diego – a position which would make San Diego the largest city with a Jewish mayor, Michael Bloomberg having retired from that position in New York City and Rahm Emanuel likewise having completed his tenure as mayor of Chicago. Serving as mayor of San Diego, Bry says, is a position for which she is more qualified than her opponents because of her business and public service career.
We recently sat down for a lengthy interview at the offices of her campaign consultant, Tom Shepard, near downtown, to discuss those life experiences and how they differentiate her approach to governance from her opponents. We also delved into her Jewish life and values.
Councilwoman Bry was raised in the Bala-Cynwyd suburb of Philadelphia, a town settled early in Pennsylvania’s history by Welsh immigrants. The family belonged to Philadelphia’s historic Rodeph Shalom synagogue, which was founded in 1795 and is the oldest Ashkenazic synagogue in the Western Hemisphere. Bry’s mother, Adelaide, was very involved in the American Jewish Committee, and after her divorce, worked in the advertising industry during an era of sexism and sexual harassment that was later well-portrayed on the television series Mad Men. “She talked a lot about that, and the lack of pay equity, and that has influenced me a lot in terms of what I have done in my life,” Bry said.
Bry’s father, Donald Gregory Bry, was an engineer in a textile business, a position that occasioned the family to move for a year to Charlotte, North Carolina, where Barbara Bry remembers encountering overt anti-Semitism. “In Philadelphia, the anti-Semitism was subtle; in Charlotte it was in your face. We lived down the street from a nice country club called Myers Park. We could not join. The first question people would ask when they met you was ‘What church do you go to?’ Of course, we didn’t go to a church; we went to a synagogue. I was in the 7th grade and my brother was three years younger, and in his age group, some of the kids actually called him “a dirty Jew.” …. At the end of the year, my parents decided to get a divorce and my mother moved my brother and me back to Philadelphia.”
Her encounter with anti-Semitism, both overt and more subtle, “was one of the reasons that I’ve been engaged in the Jewish community in San Diego,” she said. “I’m very proud of my Jewish roots and how it has given me values of wanting to change the world. (Tikkun Olam).”
She was a good student in high school, with grades sufficient to be accepted at Brown University, one of the Ivy League Schools, and to later transfer to Penn, another member of the Ivy League. After she received a bachelor’s degree in sociology, she earned a master’s in education, then applied and was accepted for an MBA program both at the Wharton School of Business at Penn and at Harvard University, a third Ivy League School. She chose Harvard.
During her undergraduate years, Bry worked for a small real estate developer in Philadelphia. The firm “built older houses, mostly around the University of Pennsylvania. It renovated them and rented them out to students. So, I was involved at looking at buildings to buy, helping to manage the construction crews, doing the bookkeeping, showing apartments. It was a small business. I did everything.”
At the Harvard Graduate School of Business, “I was very fortunate to have a professor, Louis Banks, who had been the managing editor of Fortune. He was like a special professor that year, and I actually organized a special class the second year called ‘Business and the Media.’ If you could get enough people together, you could organize a class. We had the publishers of Business Week, Philadelphia Magazine, and a lot of different people come to talk to us.”
Bry expressed a desire to leave the winters of the East Coast for California. Banks knew the managing editor of the Sacramento Bee. “He encouraged me to apply there,” Bry said. “I went there during my Spring break; I met C.K. McClatchy, whose family owned the Bee and some other papers, television and radio stations. They hired me and gave me a great job offer; their idea was that they would teach me the newspaper business starting with being a journalist and eventually I would become a publisher.”
Bry started as a business writer for the newspaper with a desk at the Bee’s state Capitol bureau, so “I also wrote about economic issues of state government.” During her 18 months at the Bee, she was sent to cover a builders’ convention in San Francisco where she met Pat Kruer, a San Diegan who would become her first husband. For a while she commuted aboard Pacific Southwest Airlines from Sacramento for weekends in San Diego. When George Skelton, the Sacramento bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, offered her a job, she made certain that rather than in Sacramento, it was in Los Angeles, closer to San Diego, and her husband to be.
Kruer and Rod Stone co-founded the La Jolla-based Monarch Group, a real estate development and investment firm. Their older daughter, Sarah, 38, currently works with Kruer in real estate investment, while their younger daughter, Rachel, is a specialist in early childhood education in Chula Vista. Rachel has two daughters, aged 5 and 2 1/2 .
In 1993, the Kruers decided to divorce, and Bry started dating Neil Senturia about 10 months later. “I was working at UCSD at the time, and they sent me to a downtown event, sort of the predecessor to the Downtown Partnership’s annual dinner. Neil walks up to me and says, ‘I hear you are getting divorced. So am I. And that was the beginning of now 27 years together.”
Senturia had been a “struggling sitcom writer” in Hollywood, who changed professions after taking real estate and business classes at UCLA. “He started buying small properties, and he then started developing in San Diego because he saw that property values were less here,” Bry said. “He moved here with his wife and two children in 1988 and did some projects downtown. He was in real estate when I met him … I was working at UCSD at the Connect program with high tech and bio tech companies, and Neil started coming to all the things that Connect was doing.”
She explained that Connect was an organization begun in 1985 “to link engineers and scientists with the resources they needed to start companies. City leaders were realizing that we had all these great technologies coming out of UCSD and other research institutes, but we didn’t have a business school – the Rady School didn’t exist at the time – and a lot of these scientists were clueless about business and they also needed access to capital. So, Connect was started to link scientists and engineers with entrepreneurs with the resources they needed for success.
“I was hired in the early days of Connect as the associate director and I was at Connect for the next 10 years.”
In the Fall of 1995, she and Senturia raised approximately $8 million to start a software company together. It was called ATCOM/INFO. “Communications wherever you are at, was our tagline,” Bry said. “We developed software that allowed you to get the Internet in a hotel room – something that you take for granted today. Our first product was an Internet and email kiosk that looked like a pyramid. We sold it to telecom companies that put them in airports. We developed the software that could remotely control each kiosk wherever they were around the country, could display different advertising, and it was actually very novel technology at that moment in time.” Like many high-tech start-ups it was eventually purchased by a larger company, Cisco. Depending on when you sold the stock — $60 million to $70 million — everyone made some money.”
Her next venture was with a friend, Jared Polis, today the governor of Colorado. His parents, Susan Polis Schutz and Stephen Schutz, lived in San Diego, and their two younger children were close to age to Sarah and Rachel. In 1971 the Schutzes founded Blue Mountain Arts, a company that later made e-greeting cards generally available. In the 1990s, “Jared was graduating from Princeton and they were looking for something to develop the company that would fit with the greeting cards and take advantage of the Internet,” Bry related. “Jared came up with the idea for ProFlowers. The idea was that we would ship our flowers direct from the grower to the consumer. We were a gift flower – not for someone buying something for their dining room table – and we would disintermediate the supply chain for a perishable product.” Disintermediate means eliminating the middle men. “That is important,” Bry explained, “because if you are ordering flowers from a flower store, they could have been sitting there for a week or so. So, by the time they get to your mother or your aunt in Chicago, they are only going to last a day or so. So, we reduced the amount of time by being able to ship direct from the grower to the consumer. I joined the company in April 1998 as one of its first employees, and stayed there for almost five years.” She left before the company went public, and a few years later, it was sold to Liberty Media for about $470 million. Since that time, it was sold again to FTD, and “after that, sadly, the company went bankrupt about six months ago.”
In late 2013, Bry went to work for Vistage as its chief marketing officer. Vistage is a company that “works with CEO’s all over the world. You would be in a Vistage group with 15-18 other CEOs, none of them competitive in your industry,” Bry explained. “You would have a group leader and you would meet once a month in a confidential setting to share personal and professional issues and challenges. It is very similar to the Young Presidents Organization (YPO) but in YPO, you had to be young, and there were certain revenue requirements, so this was more available than YPO.”
After that, Bry was asked to serve as the start-up publisher for The Voice of San Diego. “I think I was the right person because I had been a journalist and an entrepreneur, so I could bring those two things together,” she said. “But I realized I had become too partisan to become a journalist again. I was there for Year One. I got it off the ground, and it’s still here.”
The next period in her life was consumed with volunteer work with such groups as the Jewish Women’s Foundation, the Jewish Community Foundation, and Planned Parenthood. “I was also doing some angel investing with Neil, but I had much more time to be engaged in the community.”
At the Jewish Women’s Foundation, where she served as a board chair, “We did a lot with young women teens,” Bry said. “There was a program that Jewish Family Service was running at the time. There was also the Friendship Circle,” a group for children with disabilities, “helping those children get access to opportunities.” Additionally, there was a program to help elderly Jewish women.
Serving on the board of the Jewish Community Foundation, and eventually as that organization’s vice chair, she helped to create a program enabling Habitat for Humanity to scale up its program of building low-income housing. Until then, Habitat was able to “build a few things at a time and sell them, and then get some capital to move onto the next one,” Bry said. “They wanted to raise more capital so they could do larger condominium projects, not just single-family homes or small town home projects. So, many of us at the Jewish Community Foundation invested in a loan fund for Habitat. We get 2 percent interest, and maybe someday we will get our money back, but this is allowing Habitat to scale up. The Jewish Community Foundation also did a similar Women Empowerment Fund to loan money to underrepresented women who are starting businesses. Neil and I invested in both the Women Empowerment Fund and the Habitat Fund.”
Besides investing money,” Bry said, “I played a pivotal role in getting this off the ground because I met with Lori Holtz Pfiler (the former mayor of Escondido), who heads Habitat. She had an idea of what she wanted to do and I introduced her to Beth Sirull (President and CEO of the Jewish Community Foundation.) I think other Jewish community foundations are also doing that now, but I’m very proud that San Diego’s was the first to offer this opportunity to their donor-advised funds.”
Asked about her synagogue affiliation, Bry said she and her husband are members of Congregation Beth El, a Conservative congregation in La Jolla. “I am not active,” she said. “My husband is the religious Jew; I am the secular one. He goes to services many Friday nights, and he also goes to Adat Yeshurun (an Orthodox congregation). He has many friends there.
Bry and her husband live in the Mount Soledad area of La Jolla.
In the fall of 2008, Bry started Run Women Run in an effort “to elect more pro-choice women to office in San Diego. I was on the board of Planned Parenthood at the time.” She also was involved in Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidency and “I saw that women are a minority of elected officials. I was upset at the amount of sexism and so I started Run Women Run. That got me more involved in politics.”
Since 2004, her and Neil’s offices were on Avenida de la Playa in the La Jolla Shores area. “In February 2014 there was some work happening, and it was like, ‘Hasn’t this already been done?’ I was complaining about it at the dinner table and my youngest daughter who had been working in the campaigns of Hillary (and later Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and then Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel) was home for the weekend. She said ‘Time for you to run for City council, and I will come home and run your campaign.’ So I ran, and I won.”
“I think my background has been instrumental in how I view issues differently than someone who has been a career politician, which is one of my major competitors, [Assemblyman]Todd Gloria, and even [Councilman] Scott Sherman, though he had an insurance agency, but that is very different from the kinds of business I have been involved with starting and growing.
“What I think most hit me when I got to City Hall was that there was no accountability and no transparency,” Bry said. “I am a journalist from my early days so accountability and transparency are very important. In my early days at City Hall, the [football] Chargers announced they were leaving and I assumed that the mayor [Kevin Faulconer] would issue a request for proposal for the land in Mission Valley. Instead, we found out that he had been meeting behind closed doors with Soccer City and they had a citizen’s initiative ballot measure. I actually spent the time to read the whole thing. It was my business background that gave me the confidence to oppose it. I realized that it was a scam. I was the first elected official to stand up and oppose it. At first, I was out there by myself. There was no organized opposition, not the Chamber of Commerce, nor Organized Labor, the Lincoln Club, nor any of the groups that eventually came around to oppose it. … It was honestly my business background that gave me the confidence to know that I was right, and an organized opposition emerged.” The opposition included San Diego State University which sponsored a competing ballot proposal.
Another issue which Bry says indicates how different her approach is from her opponents’ is that of rental scooters. “I’ve been an entrepreneur; I’ve raised venture money; I’ve invested in start-ups,” she said. “I understood the business model of these companies which I believed was unsustainable. To succeed, they needed an exemption that adult riders didn’t need a helmet. Mr. Gloria sponsored that legislation; he didn’t understand the bigger picture. San Francisco did a study, finding there was a traumatic increase in head injuries from scooters at twice the rate of bike riders. We don’t have the right to require a helmet under that legislation. I look at the whole — what are the long term implications – rather than just listening to a lobbyist in my office who is telling me this is what they need for their industry to succeed. Andrew Cuomo [governor of New York State] vetoed legislation because it didn’t include a helmet. I think good operators will figure a way to do it.”
Homelessness and climate change are issues that Bry has been stressing in the March 3 primary election campaign. Her proposals on the former have won her the endorsement of Father Joe Carroll, the famed homeless advocate who was the long time director of St. Vincent de Paul.
it’s not just a matter of building more housing, says Bry. “We have to address the root causes of homelessness which are the increases in mental health issues and substance abuse. Some people need housing now. Some people need access to mental health or substance abuse programs, and some people, quite frankly, need enforcement. We have to have a system that addresses each individual. As a council member, I have voted to open four bridge shelters that have taken about 1,000 people – a lot of women and children – off the streets. We have about 5,500 homeless in the City of San Diego, about half of them are sheltered, either in our bridge shelters or doubled up, living on someone’s sofa. The other half are unsheltered.” She predicted that San Diego will have sufficient beds in mental health, substance abuse clinics, temporary shelters, and transitional centers within a year to accommodate the entire homeless population.
As for enforcement, she said, “It’s not a crime to be homeless, but it is a crime if you commit a crime while homeless,” she said. “Public defecation is a crime and a health hazard. If you have tickets and you are homeless and you agree to go to a shelter, we forgive the tickets. In the early days of the program, the police officer would take you and drop you off at the shelter, and you might just go out the back door the next day. Now you have to stay for 30 days. And that is important because that will give the program time and you time to get the help you need.”
Climate change threatens San Diego County in two major ways: rising seas and wildfires, she said. “With sea level rise, we are blessed to have Scripps Institution of Oceanography here, and they now have sensors up and down the coast that are measuring the tides and how fast they are going to rise,” she said. “So I am going to rely on them a lot to advise us as to what areas we should be paying attention to, and that will influence where we allow development. They can advise us on what we can do for mitigation.”
She said a task force of experts on wild fires needs to be convened to similarly help develop policy.
Our conversation turned to issues facing the Jewish community. What can be done to protect houses of worship from the kind of violence that killed one person and wounded three others at Chabad of Poway? I asked.
She responded that San Diego County’s law enforcement agencies already are working closely together to combat terrorism, and she noted that the federal government has been making grants available for houses of worship to install security measures.
Also, she said, electing her, a Jewish woman, as mayor would “send an important message. My Jewish values are very important to me. I have friends in all religions in San Diego. I am very inclusive and I think to have a mayor who is very inclusive but who represents Jewish values sends a message to the world.”
Asked if the City of San Diego has been approached by anti-Israel forces who call for Divestment, Boycott and Sanctions (BDS) against the Jewish state, she responded. “I am against BDS. Eighty percent of what the City of San Diego owns [in investments] is mostly government bonds and there are a few corporate bonds that we are allowed to own. So, the issue is not so much with us, but I am very much against those kinds of efforts.”
Furthermore, she said, she believes there are good reasons to build closer relations between Israeli cities and San Diego, “particularly because of the tech and biotech in our city and in Israel, and also because of water and what Israel has been able to do with water technologies and how that applies to us,.
“There are a lot of reasons,” she said.
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Donald H. Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com