In from SD Tax Fighters....

San Diego - In a 5 May press release, San Diego Tax Fighters strongly endorsed three candidates running for San Diego city council. Carl DeMaio, Phil Thalheimer and April Boling all impressed the SD TF board sufficiently to earn our grassroots organization's nod of approval.

But the race for Mayor was a more difficult choice. Each of the two main candidates - Mayor Jerry Sanders and challenger Steve Francis - bring some positive and negative aspects to the office. At the time, a divided SD TF board could not find a compelling reason to endorse one candidate over the other.

After much subsequent debate and analysis, the board unanimously has made the unprecedented decision to change our neutral position, and formally endorse Jerry Sanders for mayor. Warts and all.

In the board's discussions, over and over, the disturbing parallels between Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Steve Francis kept coming up. Like Arnold, the 2005 Steve Francis (version 1.0) was a solid fiscal conservative, showing great willingness to stand up for fiscal sanity, and to the unions' bully boy pressures.

While the Francis website still includes his stated position on supporting competitive bidding of some government services, his campaign literature and forum presentations barely mention this crucial position. Instead, like Arnold, Francis (version 2.0) is showing a willingness to sell out to the unions to get elected, and for labor peace.

In addition, like Arnold (and former mayor Dick Murphy), Francis seems obsessed with implementing a central planning legacy with numerous goals that will grow city government dramatically. Francis today is showing little interest in the slogging, unpopular work of reining in government spending - especially regarding city employee compensation.

One disturbing indicator as to which way Francis would lead San Diego appears in his strong dislike for Carl DeMaio, the strongest reform candidate running for city council. Our sense was that Francis was pretty much repeating the mantras from the city labor unions.

Francis told our board that DeMaio is "in the pocket of the developers." This is an odd assertion, given that the Establishment (the San Diego Chamber of Commerce and the San Diego County Taxpayers Association) abandoned DeMaio after he started pushing for city reforms back around 2004. Certainly DeMaio has gotten money from many (primarily GOP) sources - including some from the presumed evil developers - but his city hall reform efforts are as strong and principled today as ever.

The board wants to make it clear that our endorsement of Sanders is not an endorsement of some of his ill-advised policies. He is pushing to issue bonds without a public vote, and his hybrid pension plan for new employees, while an improvement, does not go nearly far enough to suit our tastes.

But Sanders has demonstrated the courage to press for controlling city employee compensation. That courage (while perhaps born of necessity) to hang tough deserves our support.

While doubtless whoever wins this race will disappoint our board in the upcoming term of office (we have very high standards), we have come to the conclusion that Mayor Jerry Sanders definitely offers the best hope for San Diego.