Interview

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Donna Frye talks dirty laundry and clean water

Interview: Larry Knowles

February 6, 2006

Vyuz editor Larry Knowles sat down with City Council member Donna Frye and discussed San Diego's pension plan crisis, new leadership, and clean water initiatives.

How would you characterize your working relationship with Mayor Sanders right now?

Oh, it’s good. I’ve been for two rides already in the mayor-mobile, which I’d never done with Dick Murphy. We’ve been tandem bicycling together. We’ve done river walks together. He’s accessible to my community. On a personal level, it’s been really good.

There are certainly going to be issues we don’t agree on, but it’s respectful. And I like him.

Solving this problem wasn’t sound-bitable, and I wouldn’t make it sound-bitable because I think it did a disservice to the public. So, it was pretty blunt and harsh, and put everything out there.

Would I have done it differently? No. Because I can’t. I can’t not tell people what’s really going on. That’s just part of it. When I’m asked a direct question, I’m usually pretty blunt in answering it.

Do you think the lay voter wants to be told a plan in sound bites, just so it’s easier to digest?

Yeah, I do, because people have busy lives. You don’t have to time to sit down and go over fifty pages of intricate, sort of mind-numbing, numbers. So what I tried to do—and I really did try to simplify by just using the general fund and saying there’s this much money in the general fund, this is how much revenue, here’s what’s already spent: We’re already in the hole.

It was kind of like this [motioning to a nearby chart]. This we actually did at a committee meeting. But this was just to give us an idea of what the pension deficit was. When you started to hear the numbers going higher, it was a result of this chart we did with the retirement systems actuary.

Essentially what this said was What is the actuary for the retirement system? Here it is, one-point-three-seven billion. We know that we have to add another sixty-three million because of the Corbet settlement and they’re going to roll that into the total, and we know that if you use a different method of calculating, which is a more normally accepted practice, which is the Entry Age Normal—and you see, this is where it can get kind of mind-numbing….

Basically what we said was, these are the numbers that we believe are going to have to be added up in order to really understand what it is that the city owes and how much debt we’re in, just on the unfunded liability and the retiree health benefits. We’ve calculated about one-point-seven billion, and with the health, about two-point-three billion. That’s not even counting what’s going on with the general fund.

So, yeah, I think that people don’t like to hear bad news, and I also think sometimes that people don’t like being asked to help solve the problem. It’s sort of like, “We hired you to solve the problem. Go solve it. Leave me alone.” I think there’s some of that, too, and my plan involved a lot of public participation,…and some pain, and suffering, probably, too.

Do you think you were mostly outspent in the election, or outmaneuvered?

I think it was both. Certainly the ability of any campaign to be able to contact the voters, the more voter contact you have, obviously, the better it is. And so, the more money you have, and the more contacts that you can make, the better you can get your message out. So that’s always a problem. So, I guess if that’s being outmaneuvered by being outspent, then sure….

…You never know the exact answer, though. You know what I mean? No one ever knows why a certain person votes a certain way, and sometimes the voters don’t know. Sometimes, they vote a certain way because they look at you and they don’t like the way you look. Sometimes they say, “I’d never vote for a man,” or “I’d never vote for a democrat,” or “I’d never vote for a republican.” So there’re all sorts of reasons. It’s hard to know.

City Council has been blamed by some people for the pension plan crisis, and the term “Guilt by association,” whether it’s fair or not, could be applied to you. How would you comment on that?

By looking at my voting record. I think that there’s perception and appearances, and then there’s reality. So the thing is, to separate perception from reality. Quite frankly, I’m proud of my voting record and how I voted on this issue, and the fact that while pretty much everyone around me was saying the house wasn’t burning down, one person came and said the house was burning down, and I made the right decision.

Before the final curtain dropped, I said, “Wait a minute. Here’s somebody saying there could very likely be a problem.” And we still had another year of denial. It was very difficult. So, I would say, look at my voting record.

In one article I read, you had voted nine times for underfunding of the pension.

What happened is—

And, walk me through this, because I’m not trying to lead you into anything here.

It’s even hard for me to walk myself through it. Essentially what happened is, there are resolutions, and there are certain processes that you go through before you have the final approval of a particular issue. That was the case in labor negotiations. At the time we were going through it—and some of the stuff I can talk about, some of the stuff I can’t—there was nothing indicated to me, prior to Diane Shipione showing up, that there was anything illegal, that there was any kind of problem, that the pension system was not well funded. Everything was exactly the opposite.

And so, you have to go back to what it was like then.

Were you being lied to, or just having vital information withheld?

Lied to! Both. Well, to me, if you withhold vital information, that’s lying, because that does not allow people to make an informed decision.

If you don’t fully disclose and you lead me to make a certain vote, or believe a certain thing because I don’t have half the information I need—no one ever stood up and said, “You know what? This may be illegal,” until Diane Shipione showed up.

And the minute I heard the words “corruption” and “potentially illegal,” I said, “Well, could we answer her question?” And so, even then, I got a lot of flak for that.

When you mentioned that you were lied to, who was doing the lying?

A lot of it, I’m still finding out about. But, city staff—and I’d just assume not name names. They’re already indicted.

When I would look at certain reports that would come out, and certain e-mails that would come out, and I would read them and see what was going on, it made me really angry.

When did you have access to these e-mails?

It varied. It was well after….

The pension plan crisis had been exposed?

Years after. Oh, yeah. They’re still trying to figure out what happened. We still have investigations going on. We still have the SEC, and the U.S. Attorney, and now the I.R.S. People are still trying to figure out what happened.

It’s like, “Well, you should have known.” People look at what knowledge they have now and say, “Well, how could you not know that?” So, they spend years trying to figure that out.

Like I said, it’s very interesting to see how it was done. It’s interesting to see how information is controlled when you’re trying to make a decision. I’ve learned quite a bit.

City Council members have been implied, if not implicated, in the pension scandal. Working so closely with and alongside these folks, how could you not have sensed something was amiss?

I could walk you through the Clean Water Act—I’ll use that for example—and I could give you a stack of documents. I could walk you through something on the Clean Water Act, and you would say, “Makes sense to me.” You would not question it. There would be nothing that would make you go, “Wait a minute!” Nothing that would shock you, depending on how information is presented and what I want you to know about it.

It’s hard to explain. If I were to talk to you about Entry Age Normal and P.U.C., and all these things, and I’m just walking through them, and you have attorneys, and you have outside attorneys, and you have bond council, and you have all these people [telling you], “This is the normal course of doing business. This is the way we’ve always done it.”

That’s what people are telling you?

Sure. Yeah. It’s like trying to put a puzzle together, like they give you some of the puzzle pieces, but they never give you the picture of the puzzle on the front of the box. You’re trying to put something together. There were moments, quite frankly, where little epiphanies, I guess I would call them, where somebody would say something and I would just go, “Oh…my…God!” Or somebody would hand me a document that nobody had ever given to me.

Like I said, I’m not trying to be cryptic, but suffice it to say, there was a situation where my Clean Water world, and my bond world, and my pension world all collided.

If such issues are so complex to an elected official, how can city government make these issues more understandable to the voters?

That’s what I’ve tried to do. That’s one of the things I think I do fairly well is to take very complex issues and get them down to their simplest form. For example, I’ll use the Clean Water stuff, because I’ve been doing that for so long: I could say to you, “The City of San Diego has water bodies that are impaired under Section 303d and the total maximum daily loads and that we need to start addressing those,” and you’d be sitting there going, “Okay.”

Or I could say to you, “Polluted runoff, caused from the runoff from our homes and our businesses, could possibly make you sick because all of it goes untreated into the beaches and we need to address that.” It’s all in the presentation, and I think I’ve done a pretty good job of taking very complex issues like the budget, like the pension, and being able to talk to people in the communities and help them understand better.

It’s hard. It’s hard to do. It’s hard to do especially if you don’t want people to understand.

Now walk me through this culture of secrecy in City Hall that’s been referred to. How can elected officials break through this culture of secrecy?

Part of it, we have.

In what ways?

In one way, I think it was back in March of 2004, myself and one of my colleagues, Toni Atkins, I talked her into boycotting a closed session meeting. I said, “We just can’t do this anymore. We can’t take it anymore. We just can’t go on like this.” And I think this was during [San Diego] Chargers meetings, and there were just so many closed session meetings.

So, we boycotted, and then I put together a permanent change to the rules of council about how we conduct business in closed session because it was driving me nuts.

One of the biggest changes is that we have a court transcriptionist now in every single meeting. Every single word that is said in those meetings is transcribed, and there’s a record of it, so that when someone says, “Well, how could this happen?” or “Why did they make this decision?” now all they have to do is go back [to the record].

We didn’t have any such luxuries when we were having these labor negotiations discussions. All there are is really sloppy minutes and people’s recollections of what they think happened from 2002. Do you remember it from happening then, or from something that you read three years after the fact?

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