George Mitrovich has a nice life. He spends his time shuttling between two of America’s most desirable cities, San Diego and Denver, arranging speeches and discussion groups for people who care about the communities they live in.
San Diego and Denver are enviable places where a lot of people would choose to live if they could.
But, frankly, San Diego would seem to have more going for it.
It’s America’s seventh largest city, much bigger than Denver, and it has gained, rather than lost, corporate headquarters. The weather is sublime: sunny, never too hot or too cold. There are rolling hills, tile roofs and palm trees around a sheltered bay.
The airport is almost within walking distance of downtown, where new residential units are sprouting like geraniums. There are new shopping areas, a fairly new convention area and a brand new baseball stadium driving downtown development. The popular light rail lines are being expanded.
But there are corrosive factors at work under that sunny exterior.
The city budget is in shambles, including a $1.5 billion gap in the pension fund for city workers. The city manager and city auditor left in disgrace, followed two months ago by Mayor Dick Murphy. A third of the city council seats are vacant.
The interim mayor lasted only a few days before he was convicted in the city’s “Stripper-gate” scandal and resigned. He and another councilman had been accused of taking bribes to repeal the city’s no-contact lap-dance law.
The city may have to sell off public lands to save itself from bankruptcy. But as the San Diego Union-Tribune has been pointing out in a series of stories this month, the city doesn’t even know what it owns.
All this has happed in a place that likes to call itself “America’s Finest City,” a virtual Eden that had a reputation for cleanliness and wholesomeness.
Not now, says Mitrovich. “That reputation was based upon appearances, not upon reality. This is a town that has done things on the cheap.” He agrees with a Union- Tribune front-page headline that called it “America’s cheapest city.”
And that, he says, is where Denver has the edge.
“Denver is the most progressive city in the country. San Diego is not in Denver’s league.”
He thinks Mayor John Hickenlooper “may be the greatest mayor of any large American city.” And look at what Denver has accomplished: A new airport, library, museums, convention center, even a jail.
Mitrovich, who is president of the City Club of San Diego, was a driving force behind an initiative to change San Diego from a city manager to a strong-mayor form of government. That’s what Denver has, and San Diego will have it beginning in January.
“My experiences in Denver greatly buttressed my conviction that in city governments you have to have someone who’s accountable, someone elected by the people,” Mitrovich said.
San Diego also needs citizens who care more about the way they’re governed. I was there last weekend, and people just weren’t interested in talking about the city’s problems. Of course, that tends to be the case anywhere.
“There is embarrassment, but there is also a huge disconnect,” Mitrovich said. “People are overwhelmed by the weather and the beauty.”
But they’re also in danger of being overwhelmed by underlying problems. A quarter of the city’s residents are below the poverty line; 2,000 high school students are homeless. A house costs $600,000, while San Diego County has California’s second lowest average income.
“People are shockingly disengaged from what goes on,” said Mitrovich. “They want to enjoy the weather, but they don’t want to be involved.”
Maybe it’s an advantage to have an occasional scorcher and early frosts and blizzards. It’s invigorating.
“The sense of civic involvement in Denver is equal, I think, to any city in the country,” says Mitrovich, who was born near downtown San Diego. “Denver provides kind of a balance for me as to how you should run a city. … Do you know how lucky you are to live in a city like Denver, Colorado?”
Fred Brown, retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a former national president of the Society of Professional Journalists.
