By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO — At least four Democrats and four Republicans will serve on the San Diego City Council, with the swing-vote contest being in the 1st Councilmanic district between Democratic incumbent Sherri Lightner and Republican challenger Ray Ellis. There is a heavy concentration of Jews in the district, and the election will test some of their traditional loyalties.
A large majority of Jews are Democrats and normally could be expected to vote for Lightner– especially with the balance of power on the City Council at stake– even as a parallel race for mayor pits Congressman Bob Filner, a liberal Democrat and member of the Jewish community, against Councilman Carl DeMaio, a conservative Republican.
Longtime political activist and Jewish communal leader Murray Galinson says he plans to vote for Lightner, notwithstanding the tussles she has had with the Jewish community over such issues as the proposed Hillel House near the UCSD campus and the now-erected eruv in La Jolla for the benefit of Orthodox Jews.
Before she was elected to the City Council four years ago, Lightner led the opposition to both proposals. The eruv–a filament that helps demarcate a large outdoor area–since has gone up over her objections, thereby enabling Orthodox families to carry their belongings outside their homes on Shabbat. Modified plans for Hillel House are going through the community review process, with the same people who were Lightner’s allies on the issue in the past continuing to oppose it. It is expected the matter will get to the San Diego City Council sometime after the November election.
Galinson says he believes that Lightner is a neighborhood activist, who thinks of community plans as inviolate, and that her opposition to both Jewish communal projects resulted from that philosophy rather than any animus toward the Jewish community. He said when he thinks of the impacts of a Conservative majority on the City Council, he is willing to forgive Lightner on the Hillel and eruv issues, and vote for Democratic control.
“I have supported and continue to support her because I think she works very hard to understand the issues,” said Galinson. “She is very bright, and on most issues she votes the way I think. Also I think it would be a really difficult thing, if the very conservative part of the community take over the City Council. I think we need people who are willing to work together and she is willing to do that.”
The Democrats who’ll sit next term on the City Council are Todd Gloria in the 3rd District, Tony Young in the 4th District, David Alvarez in the 8th District and Marti Emerald in the new 9th District.
The Republicans who will be on the City Council are Kevin Faulconer in the 2nd District; Mark Kersey who ran unopposed in the 5th District to succeed DeMaio; Lori Zapf in the 6th District, and Scott Sherman who eeked out a victory in a four-candidate field in the 7th District.
So, as goes the 1st Council District, so goes the technically non-partisan San Diego City Council. The 1st District includes Lightner’s home territory of La Jolla; Ellis’s home turf of Sorrento and Carmel Valleys, with neither candidate having a home-court advantage in the third area of the district, University City.
With Lightner being an incumbent and a known quantity, I sat down with candidate Ellis, who placed first in the primary election, to get a feel for who he is, and how he might stand on the Hillel issue. We also spoke about the large cross on Mount Soledad, now awaiting a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court on whether the cross should be moved off public land or whether the high court, itself, should have a hearing to decide the issue. Lower courts have cited constitutional grounds for ordering the cross removed to private grounds.
Ellis clearly was uncomfortable discussing what he saw as potential “wedge” issues that might drive apart members of his constituency. Asked what can be done to quell any backlash that might arise against the Jewish community, if the Supreme Court rules against the cross, he suggested that a good leader would have sought long before this point to hold discussions among leadership of the Christian and Jewish communities to assure that however the courts decide, both sides will be respectful of each other. The Jewish War Veterans of America are the plaintiffs in that case, having taken over that role after the original complainant, atheist Philip Paulson, died. The case has been litigated since 1989.
On the Hillel issue, Ellis complimented the Jewish community for being responsive to the concerns of the neighborhood, having reduced the scope of the project and having built in such public amenities as dedicated open space, bike and pedestrian paths and a bench. But the candidate studiously avoided committing himself one way or the other, saying to do so would be improper at a stage of the process when community groups still are holding hearings.
In contrast, Ellis declared himself in favor of Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs’ proposal to build a junction from the Cabrillo Bridge at Laurel Street to the parking lot behind the Organ Pavillion in order to clear the Plaza de Panama in Balboa Park of vehicular traffic and make it a pedestrian activity area. The Organ Pavillion parking lot would be placed underground, with its roof turned into a garden under Jacobs’ proposal.
Ellis said that inasmuch as the City Planning Commission has heard the proposal–and voted unanimously to support it–it’s no violation of the community planning process to state what he thinks the City Council should do. Jacobs is a prominent member of the Jewish community for whom the Jacobs Family Campus of the Lawrence Family JCC is in part named, as are other structures and programs both religious and secular throughout the city. Jacobs was an early backer of Ellis’s candidacy.
Since retiring from the mail order advertising business, Ellis has been active on a variety of civic organizations and city boards, among them the Balboa Park Conservancy Board, on which he became familiar with the proposal which Jacobs has offered to help finance.
Ellis described the conservancy board as “an outcome of the Balboa Park Task Force which the Mayor (Jerry Sanders) and (Councilman) Todd Gloria put together, to ask how do we do better raising private funds and deploying them in the park? How do we do a better job providing some governance and some strategic guidance? There are many stakeholders in the park, who are very passionate. How do we all work together? That is still in the early stages, but it is a model that has worked well in other parts of the country — obviously Central Park (in New York City) being the biggest conservancy in that urban park sector , and others around the country.”
In Ellis’s background for serving on the conservancy board is the fact that he also serves on the board of the Parker Foundation, a charity with a corpus of $43 million that is deployed to fund a large variety of non-profit organizations. “We are pretty nimble; we can move quick,” Ellis said of the Parker Foundation. “If an organization is in a crisis situation and needs to get over the hump, we can do that, so it is a big player in the philanthropic community. We see anywhere from 20 to 40 proposals or requests ever four to six weeks, and when you see the landscape of our nonprofit sector you see what is working and where the challenges are. ”
He also is a board member of San Diego Social Service Partners, which is “a venture capital partnership for non-profits,” according to Ellis. “We invest money and more importantly a team goes to the non-profit to help it move to the next level. We pick a different sector each year. Last year was the military; this year, it is organizations that are raising high school graduation rates. So we are working with Pro-Kids Golf in City Heights and working with Barrio Logan College Institute.”
It’s not uncommon for groups like the Parker Foundation and San Diego Social Service Partners to team up with other Foundations such as Price Charities, Leichtag Foundation, Jewish Community Foundation, and private family foundations such as those created by the Jacobs, the Viterbis and the Galinsons to work on charitable projects together, each funding a little piece. These kinds of collaborations were another point of contact for Ellis with the Jacobs and Galinson families, who now are on opposing sides in the 1st Council District race.
Ellis also served on the board of Second Chance, a program that true to its name helps ex-convicts, and ex-addicts obtain a second chance in their lives by helping them to find temporary housing, self-respect and jobs. That organization’s founder, Scott Silverman, is another of Ellis’s active supporters within the Jewish community. So, too, is Hillel activist Bob Lapidus, an attorney.
Some points of contact with the Jewish community for Ellis, a non-denominational Christian, have been serendipitous. He and his wife Gina have a 10-year-old son, Jake, who plays football on the Torrey Pines Pop Warner “Junior Pee Wee Falcons” along with Mo Vanderwiel, son of Andy Vanderwiel and grandson of Waxie Sanitary Supply CEO Charles Wax. Andy Vanderwiel is head coach of that team, which went 10-0 in a recent season, and Ellis, who played in college basketball, not football, serves as assistant coach.
Vanderwiel said after Ellis’s first season as an assistant coach, he was offered the position as defensive coach. However, after the handshake, along came Greg Parker, a man with extensive defensive coaching experience. What to do? Vanderwiel said he and his fellow coaches had a discussion about team strategies, and as Parker reeled off concepts like the 5-4, and 6-2 lineups, and zone defenses, Ellis immediately recognized that Parker has better credentials for the defensive position. Not hampered by ego, Ellis promptly volunteered to return to the position as assistant coach for the benefit of the team. “He’s a guy who knows the right thing to do,” said Vanderwiel.
Mayor Sanders, on the suggestion of his chief of staff Julie Dubick, appointed Ellis to the Pension Review Board, as “hot” a seat as one can find in San Diego City politics. With six members from labor, and seven members from the general public, Ellis says his unanimous election to the presidency of that organization showed that he is someone who can work with people of opposing views and try to bring about consensus.
Recently city voters resoundingly answered “yes” to Proposition B, which asked: “Should the Charter be amended to: direct City negotiators to seek limits on a City employee’s compensation used to calculate pension benefits; eliminate defined benefit pensions for all new City Officials and employees, except police officers, substituting a defined contribution 401 (k)-type plan; require substantially equal pension contributions from the City and employees; and eliminate, if permissible, a vote of employees or retirees to change their benefits?”
Opposed by the municipal employees and the San Diego Labor Council, this ballot measure is expected to be the subject of a lengthy and acrimonious court battle. Support for Proposition B was a keystone of DeMaio’s candidacy, even as opposing it was an important plank in the campaign of mayoral rival Filner.
Clearly, Ellis is in step with DeMaio on this issue. But could he work with Filner, if voters decide to pick the oft-elected Democrat?
“Yes, Bob was very supportive of Second Chance, and I interfaced with him on getting some funding there for veterans, so I’ve worked with him,” said Ellis. Filner had served when Democrats controlled Congress as the chairman of the House Committee on Veteran Affairs, and now, with the Republicans in charge, he is that committee’s ranking Democrat.
“What astounds me is Bob’s position on the pensions. For him to suggest floating pension obligation bonds as a way to solve our pension problem is a financial disaster, and tremendously irresponsible, very low reward and very high risk,”Ellis said. “When I look at the up sides and the down sides, it would be in my view very inappropriate, a short term, political view.
” We need people who aren’t going to look at things through the political prism but through what’s best for taxpayers, best for our city, what is going to foster economic growth, what will allow us to do big things, and allow us to do them successfully,” Ellis said. “That one issue alone is a tremendous red flag for me, and I know pensions better than he does, I can assure you of that.”
Ellis says after graduating Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia, and later getting an MBA from Pepperdine University in Los Angeles, he became sales manager for Southern California, Arizona and Nevada for a forerunner company of MeadWestvaco, one of the largest paper manufacturers in the company, known particularly as an envelope manufacturer.
In 1987, after 25 years with that company, he struck out on his own, starting Mailing Concepts, which later became known at MC Direct. It helped with direct mail campaigns such corporations as Farmer’s Insurance, Wells Fargo Bank, Bank of America, Sysco and Microsoft, and such charitable organizations as the Smithsonian Instituton, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art. Eventually he sold the business to Protocol, a Chicago corporation. After a few years of consulting, he began to concentrate his life on volunteer work.
Ellis, 55, says his run for the San Diego City Council is not to launch an up-the-ladder political career, but to provide the city some leadership “efficiently and effectively and hopefully have a positive outcome. ”
Responding to Galinson’s objection to him, Ellis does not deny he is registered Republican. However, he says “I think it is unfortunate that we put folks in these Republican-Democratic bases. I do view myself as someone who is fiscally responsible. We have to balance our budgets at home; we have to do it in our businesses until we go out of business, and we have to do it in the non-profit sector, or we go out of business. So we simply have to figure out a way to do it in the public sector.”
As for being a person who can work together with others, Ellis says that is what he is all about.
“We have some tremendous challenges still ahead of us in San Diego. When you look at a $2.2 billion pension deficit, and an $800 million backlog in infrastructure and some reports say we are falling further behind, those are issues that need to be tackled, and we need to be honest and frank and we have to have people willing to work with one another to get that done.”
Whether he is talking about Jews and Christians, or differences in La Jolla over whether seals or children have a higher claim to a beach, or about reducing the pension deficit over the objection of labor unions, a word that Ellis regularly employs is “respectfully.” Debates, disagreements, policy discussions should be discussed respectfully, he says. People of good will can solve differences if they work at it.
“There are groups we need to work very closely with and as someone who has run businesses, I can bridge those gaps, and I think there are a lot of opportunities,” he said.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com