The campaign for San Diego city attorney has several emerging themes.
Independence vs. collaboration.
Many big endorsements vs. very few.
Practicing attorney vs. non-practicing attorney.
Republican vs. Democrat.
That last one might seem odd, given the only two candidates on the ballot are Democrats. More on that later.
Assemblymember Brian Maienschein and Chief Deputy City Attorney Heather Ferbert are the only two candidates running to replace Mara Elliott, the San Diego city attorney who is facing term limits.
That gives them an automatic to the November general election, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t making appeals to voters for the March 5 primary and tangling with each other at a distance, even if it’s more of a trial run for the fall showdown.
Maienschein, a former San Diego City Council member, has locked up endorsements from the local Democratic Party, Mayor Todd Gloria, City Council member, law enforcement organizations and much of the Democratic and political establishment, including the San Diego & Imperial Counties Labor Council. He also has a lot more campaign money at his disposal.
Ferbert is backed by Elliott, the Municipal Employees Association, and various lawyer groups.
Maienschein stresses his backing at City Hall, noting many of those people have worked with Ferbert but chose him instead. He emphasizes his ability to work with those officials, often mentioning he will take a “collaborative” approach.
In part, he uses that to highlight some of the clashes between Elliott — and by extension Ferbert — and the mayor and council. He noted that Ferbert is the City Attorney’s Office liaison to the council.
“I think it’s about bringing people to the table to try to avoid problems in the first place. . . and oftentimes it hasn’t happened,” he told The San Diego Union-Tribune editorial board earlier this month.
Ferbert frequently uses the term “independent” when talking about the interaction between the city attorney and other elected officials.
“The city attorney’s role as a watchdog sometimes can be messy, but it’s critically important,” she said in a separate interview with the Union-Tribune’s editorial board.
It’s impossible to say how voters will view the relationship between the current city attorney and the council and mayor — and whether it has become dysfunctional and hurts the city as Maienschein suggests. Over at least the past two decades, disputes between city attorneys and other officials have been commonplace in San Diego.
Ferbert suggests Maienschein would lack the arm’s-length distance from policymakers necessary to give objective legal advice, rather than what they want to hear.
These distinctions are not black and white. Maienschein has talked about a more aggressive posture, if needed, with elected officials and others to do what’s right for the city. Ferbert suggested steps can be taken to improve working relationships.
Ferbert said she likely would make some changes within “the current structure.” That was a reference to a dormant idea from some council to ask voters to create two city attorneys, one appointed to provide civil law counsel to the city and an elected one to prosecute mostly misdemeanors. Both duties currently fall to the elected city attorney, as they have for decades.
Ferbert and Maienschein oppose the proposal.
Much has been made, by Ferbert and others, about the fact that Maienschein hasn’t been a practicing attorney for years. They even challenged whether he could legally run for the office. An outside attorney hired by the city concluded he could.
But Ferbert continues to press the issue.
“I have a lot of problems with trying to report to a city attorney who doesn’t understand the law and hasn’t practiced in over 20 years,” Ferbert told the U-T editorial board.
Maienschein dismissed the criticism, contending his experience trumps Ferbert’s “so-called legal skills.” He noted that he sits on the Assembly Judiciary Committee, and served as its chair, in addition to teaching law at the University of San Diego.
“For the state of California. . . I’ve been at the center of every single legal issue,” said Maienschein, who was elected to the Assembly in 2012. “We oversee the state bar. We oversee the evidence code. We oversee the civil code. Every one of these have to through the Judiciary Committee,” he said.
Maienschein said he has been endorsed by California Attorney General Rob Bonta. Bonta, who served on the Alameda City Council, was a member of the Assembly when he was appointed attorney general by Gov. Gavin Newsom. Whether or not Bonta was a practicing attorney at the time, it’s doubtful he was spending much time in a courtroom, given his full-time job in the Legislature.
Ferbert has been at the City Attorney’s Office for 10 years. Before that she was an attorney for the San Diego Housing Commission. If elected, Ferbert said she plans to create a “housing protection unit” aimed at protecting existing affordable housing.
She also says she has helped open shelters and drafted the city’s controversial public camping ban ordinance at the direction of the City Council.
Maienschein said he was integral to creating Project 25, a program established by nonprofits and city and county agencies that was widely deemed successful at housing chronically homeless people. It has since been disbanded amid shifting policies and focus.
His campaign website says Maienschein has taken the lead on many of the laws related to domestic violence, sexual predators, illegal guns, and environmental and consumer protections.
He also said he obtained $2 million in state funding for the signature program of the person he often criticizes, Elliott’s nationally recognized gun violence prevention program.
Ferbert’s campaign is focusing on a different Maienschein record — the one he compiled as a Republican.
Maienschein switched parties in January 2019. In the years before that, he received some rankings that hardly would be conducive to running in heavily Democratic San Diego, including a 4 percent rating from the Planned Parenthood Action Fund in 2014 and a 93 percent rating from the National Rifle Association Victory Fund that same year.
Like some other Republicans, he was prompted to leave the GOP at least in part because of then-President Donald Trump. But Maienschein said there was more to it than that.
“As the Republican Party has drifted further right, I — and my votes — have shifted,” he wrote in a February 2019 op-ed in the Union-Tribune.
In this campaign, he touts the endorsement of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund of the Pacific Southwest.
How much that earlier record resonates with voters — if at all — could be a key factor come November.
