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Why do you want to be the City Attorney for this crazy city? Well, one of the reasons it is crazy is because of the current City Attorney, and I don’t think it’s working the way it is now. We’ve lost over 100 of our best, most experienced attorneys, who are the people who need to give legal advice to the city workforce to keep us out of trouble. And they’re just gone. The basic business of the city is just not getting done. So I think it’s time to make a change. Everyone knows the City Attorney has to be a fighter, but I think we need someone who doesn’t fight for the sake of fighting, but someone who fights to make solutions. What about role City Attorney appeals to you? There are lots of other places to go. Clearly Mike’s shown how important that role is — and not necessarily in a positive way. In my 15 years as an environmental lawyer, I spent five years as a supervising lawyer in the county counsel’s office. I saw there how a legal office can really work well in a public entity. In a lot of ways it’s really what people went to practice law for. You get to do interesting work, solve problems, sometimes you fight cases, sometimes you settle them. And you can really help things happen when you’re a lawyer. I can help the Mayor, I can help folks like [city councilmen] Kevin Falconer and Ben Hueso, who’ve never really had a lawyer. And if you see wrongdoing, you deal with it the right way. You don’t have to be suing every person as your client to make sure that people follow the law. What has Mike Aguirre done well? Mike had appreciated that there was a concern about openness in government. He had appreciated that there was dissatisfaction with the way the government had been run, and he took advantage of that. I believe that Mike actually thinks he’s doing the right thing. I just think it’s not working because of the antagonism and the lack of professionalism and competence in the office. How can you help the city’s financial worries as City Attorney? I think that the background that I’ve had in the city for the last seven years is going to inform me as an attorney about how to keep things from going wrong, and how to fix things that have gone wrong, in a way that no other candidate’s going to have. And I think I can make sure that the systems work so that legislators and the mayor don’t find themselves caught like sometimes I did. When I was elected one of my colleagues told me that when the City Manager tells you that he doesn’t have the money, don’t believe him. So there was a whole ethic out there that it didn’t even matter what the City Manager said. But now it’s a lot better. Because you have an independent budget analyst who A) has the confidence to go where the money is, so there’s no more hiding the money. But the other thing is B) — and this is good for everyone — she’s the person who credibly says to the city councilmember, “No, councilmember, you can’t afford that program this year.” You can start to see when people are trying to set up systems to hide information, which is what really killed us. Now, what we’ve done with the IBA as a start is to set up a system that trades information in public. So that’s one way the attorney can recognize and improve systems. You voted for one of the measures that put the city in the pension crisis. What have you learned from that experience, do you agree with a report that called your actions “negligent,” and how can voters be sure that your judgment has improved? I don’t have to agree with the Kroll report to agree that we weren’t paying much attention to disclosures or that we were under-funding the pension. And I responded to those charges by fixing those behaviors. People ask me what my biggest mistake was as a legislator. I don’t really think there’s a lot of question about it. What we did was we continued a practice of under-funding the pension that had been established by our predecessors in 1996. It was when the city had a heart attack in 2003 or so that we finally realized hey — none of us had run about the pension system, we hadn’t paid a whole lot of attention to it, and to our embarrassment we hadn’t really listened to people tell us how it should be done. Even before the Kroll report came out, we’d set up a new disclosure system. Even before Mr. Aguirre was elected to make sure that disclosures that we make the market are totally accurate, we set up the IBA to make sure that there’s no fooling anybody. No withholding information. And as I said we’ve set about fixing the pension fund so that now we’re at about 80 percent funding, which is almost the average of all public pension funds across the country. I think everybody’s going to make mistakes and I make mistakes all the time, but you have to really judge people by how they recover and how they respond. So I wouldn’t be able to tell you that I had a good record on the pension in 2003, but in 2008 I can tell you that we really are on top of it in a way that’s made the city in better shape than when we found it. I liken the city to a heart attack victim who was looking in the mirror thinking he looked great but really wasn’t living the right way and then was seized with a heart attack. Now we’re living right, we’re eating our vegetables, our cholesterol is down, we’re getting our exercise, and as a city we’re not just back on our feet — I think we’re close to being a city that other cities will emulate around the country. What’s the single most important quality for a City Attorney? Ethics is the most important quality in any of these relationships. People have to know that they can count on you to do what you say you’ll do not to tell one person one thing and another person something different, and that you’ll abide by the rules. What’s tough about being in politics, and did you expect I had no idea going into it. I actually thought I had thought, boy if you were just logical with people … it’s not that way. I also found people make decisions differently from the way I do. A lot of people feel more than I do, and I tend to be just a thinker and sometimes that gets you in trouble because you might miss something. The other thing is, I’ve learned that people don’t really disagree with a lot of artfulness and you have to be able to say, when someone screams at you about your mother or your heritage, you have to be able to say well OK, this person disagrees with my position. Why did you decide to become a lawyer in the first place? The lawyers seemed to be the people who had the information that people wanted. I was always interested in public service and I always thought that law would be the best background to do that. How do you deal with the stress of serving in elected office? Exercise is probably the best way. It’s better than drinking — Reported by Ian Port, AE
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