By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO — Now that City Councilman Todd Gloria is serving as acting mayor, he needs to do his very best to unite the people of this city and to put the recent unpleasantness behind us.
He can do that by seeking consensus among his fellow city councilmembers on important initiatives that have been languishing while City Hall was enmeshed in the now successful effort to force Bob Filner to resign.
For example, Gloria can turn our attention to the centennial of Balboa Park — which is less than two years away — and help to devise ways that San Diego can not only celebrate the important anniversary in 2015 but also profit from it by generating increased tourism to our city.
He also can recommit the City of San Diego to a cross-border partnership with Tijuana, finding more and more ways to have the two municipalities engage with each other face-to-face instead of back-to-back.
The recognition that San Diego and Tijuana are a single region should extend beyond the two border cities to other parts of the three Californias. I believe the United States and Mexico both would benefit from developing a program to increase the number of cruise ship ports that can be reached from San Diego on one- or two-week itineraries to Baja California and Baja California Sur. Having served for nine years as the executive director of the San Diego Cruise Industry Consortium, I am convinced that San Diego should follow the Port of Miami’s example in the development of Caribbean ports, and apply such strategies to new ports in Mexico, particularly along the warm-water Gulf of California. For starters, the Port of San Diego could help Mexico to identify and develop a suitable “private island” where cruise ships from San Diego can stop and provide to their passengers a day of activities on unspoiled beaches and in pristine waters. The more interesting ports San Diego-based cruise ships can go to in Mexico, the greater the number of cruise lines that will be incentivized to base their ships in our city. The result will be economic stimulation both for us and for Mexico.
There will be a lot of craziness during the upcoming special election and –one assumes–run-off election to choose Filner’s successor. Acting Mayor Gloria can be a hero–and build credit with voters for the future – if he stays above the fray, tending to business, while the candidates engage in their inevitable hyperbole and silliness. It’s a hard role to fill, being the dispenser of sane, measured judgment when everyone else is trying hard to grab headliners, but if Gloria can live up to a higher standard, he will earn a place in San Diego history as a constructive force in a time of political destruction.
*
Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com