SAN DIEGO — One local television station this week banned use of San Diego's longtime slogan -- "America's Finest City" -- until further notice, deeming it too "arrogant and cynical" for a municipality in the throes of national humiliation.
The local paper raised the editorial question Thursday: "Can San Diego sink any lower in the eyes of the world?"
And a neighborhood meeting to discuss the city's budget woes turned into a finger-pointing festival Wednesday night as angry residents demanded to know how City Hall could have come to this: The mayor resigning, the deputy mayor facing trial for a scandal called "strippergate," a pension fund nearly $2 billion in the red and the city's credit rating virtually subterranean.
"San Diego's reputation has been tarnished. There's no question about that.... But I ask you to remember we live in a wonderful city," Councilman Jim Madaffer said Wednesday night as he struggled to stay true to the city's spirit of boosterism, a characteristic ingrained in its civic DNA. "The sky is not falling. Our hair is not on fire. We will get through these issues."
As the second-largest city in California -- and No. 7 nationally -- struggles through its latest crisis, it is engaging in a very public bout of soul-searching. At a town hall meeting convened to discuss the lack of command at City Hall, prospective leaders pondered just who could save San Diego. Maybe someone "with backbone." Maybe someone who can "play well with others." Maybe no one at all.
"All of this happened when we had a mayor, maybe we need a few months without one," said Councilwoman Donna Frye, the co-owner of a surf shop whose write-in insurgency in last year's mayoral race was thwarted by a judge's ruling. "I'm not joking."
But there is a gap between what San Diego needs, said banker Peter Q. Davis, a two-time loser in mayoral primaries, and what it will accept as it works to solve its problems. "This town traditionally punishes risk-takers and punishes new ideas," he said.
It also has routinely gotten into trouble, falling into one crisis after another. Some blame San Diego's history of "cheap provincialism," its desire to get by with as little taxation as possible, for many of its problems, including the current pension shortfall.
"Since Proposition 13, San Diego has thought there was a free lunch and threatened any politician who talked about raising revenue," said Mike Stepner, a city planner turned architecture professor. "We've been robbing piggybanks and now it's caught up to us."
