Vote Donna Frye for Mayor

Hey All,

I'm usually more interested in global news, but this is one issue that I've taken an interest in that is local to my home of San Diego.

For those of you who aren't familiar with San Diego, it's a fast growing city on the U.S. west coast, just above the border with Mexico. It's not as big as Los Angeles, which is right next to us, but it's still pretty big. I think I read recently somewhere that we have around 800,000 voters in the city, and the population actually spreads past the edges of the city into surrounding communities. Our main economies are tourism, the military, and several high-tech businesses. Because we are growing fast, we also have healthy construction and real-estate industries.

One of my beefs about this city is that for several decades now, our city government has been hell-bent to attract as much business as possible. This simply increases the rate of growth. They say they don't want San Diego to become another L.A., but they're doing everything in their power to do just that.

I wish I knew more about Donna Frye, but I'll tell you what I do know. She's lived in San Diego for a long time. Her husband, Skip Frye, is a well know local surfer and he has a surfboard shop and makes surfboards for a living. She joined the City Council about, what, four years ago?, and has gained a reputation for being a maverick. She is pro-environment and anti-growth. She is also fiscally concervative, and was the only council member to vote against under-funding the city pension plan, which has since become a big local issue.

Some things that she's stood for recently: stopping the raking of kelp piles from the local beaches. When I was a kid, I remember seeing these big piles of kelp on the beaches (maybe 3-4 feet in diameter, 2 feet tall), with little flies buzzing all around. They were unpleasant, but they were a natural part of the beach environment. I remember one picture of my cousin wearing a kelp hula dress on the beach. I think she thought she was being a natural California girl. Anyway, after a while, the beaches just got cleaner. I didn't think much about it, but the city had decided to begin raking up the kelp piles to make the beaches more attractive to tourists.

Then, a few years ago, a controversy arose over this practice. Some people were claiming that raking up the kelp piles was inhibiting the grunion from running on the beach. (Grunion are small fish that come up on the beach sometimes in the middle of the night to mate and lay eggs. It used to be considered great sport to go down to the beach and catch as many as you could. Supposedly you could eat them raw and whole. I've looked for them on several occasions, but I've never seen any.)

Anyway, I don't remember what the argument was, but the argument on the other side was that it wasn't proven that raking up the kelp was hurting the grunion runs. This is a common argument that people use to allow them to keep doing what their doing a little longer. In this case the tourist industry wanted to continue raking the beaches, to continue attracting tourists and bringing in tourist dollars. However, I think the burden of proof should be on the tourist industry to prove that raking the beaches doesn't adversly affect the environment. As long as there is any evidence at all, and until they can prove otherwise, they should stop raking the beaches.

Another issue that she's stood behind is allowing the seals to have exclusive use of Children's Cove in La Jolla. Children's Cove is spot of beach (maybe 100 feet long) in La Jolla that has a man-made sea wall protecting it from the full force of the waves. The sea wall was built many years ago, but I'm not sure exactly when. The idea was to create a sheltered area of beach that children could play in.

Recently, seals have begun to make this beach their own. For a while, the city roped off the beach so that people wouldn't disturb the seals. However, local people started complaining that the smell from the seals was to bad, and they wanted the beach opened up to people again.

I should probably also mention that La Jolla is a very wealthy neighborhood.

Now, San Diego has I don't know how many miles of beaches. Much of the La Jolla area is rocky, but most of the rest of San Diego has long sandy beaches, and the waves aren't that bad. Children play in them all the time. I think we can afford to reserve 100 feet of beach for the use of the seals.

Anyway, for many years, I've felt that our Mayor and City Council was owned by the tourism and construction industries. I think if we can elect Donna Frye for Mayor, we can begin to free ourselves of their influences and try to save San Diego from becomming another L.A..

One problem though, is that Donna joined the mayoral race too late to get her name on the ballot. She's running as a right-in candidate, which means people have to know that she's running, and remember to write her name on the ballot. It is my opinion that the vast majority of people barely know our current Mayor's name, let alone the names of the people who are running against him. The vast majority of people will walk into the voting booths and see two names, "Dick Murphy" and "Ron Roberts". If they think things are going okay, they'll vote for the incumbent, Dick Murphy. If they don't like the way things are going, they'll vote for the other guys. Only those people who actually know what's going on will even know that Donna Frye is an option, and with San Diego being a fairly conservative city, many of those will vote for either Dick or Ron anyway.