O’Connor Years in San Diego: A Legacy of Sporadic Energy : Government: Some critics feel she failed to exercise the full power of the mayor’s office--except on pet projects. She was more comfortable with common citizens than with civic leaders.

SAN DIEGO —  The morning of Oct. 22, 1989, dawned cool and overcast as city officials prepared for the opening ceremony of a three-week Soviet arts festival on which San Diego Mayor Maureen O’Connor had staked her political reputation.

O’Connor fretted that the weather could dampen--literally and figuratively--the financially risky civic gamble to which she had devoted the past 16 months. O’Connor need not have worried, however, because the day would end as one of the brightest--politically, if not meteorologically--in her 6 1/2-year mayoralty.

More than 60,000 people jammed into Balboa Park--the biggest single-day draw in the park’s history--to watch colorfully costumed children and a troupe of Georgian dancers perform. As she scanned the growing crowd, O’Connor could not help but beam at what she saw.

“Geez, Louise!” O’Connor said, squinting as she surveyed the scene with several Soviet officials. “This is a long way from Rosary High School.”

If there is a lingering impression of O’Connor’s tenure in City Hall, now that she has left office and Susan Golding has been sworn in as mayor, it is that O’Connor seemed too often to forget just how far she had come. In two decades, she had risen from gym teacher at a Catholic girls’ high school to become the first woman mayor of America’s sixth-largest city.

“It was more important to Maureen to be elected mayor than to be mayor,” said one former staff member. “She loved the title, but I’m not sure she ever looked at it in the way (her predecessors) did--as a way of grabbing issues by the neck and getting things done. There were times when you wanted to say, ‘Hey, you’re the mayor. You could do this. You should do this.’ ”

Although O’Connor and her partisans vigorously dispute that analysis, her performance--her sometimes curious priorities, her unorthodox work habits, her relationship with the City Council, her style--lent some credence to the former aide’s assessment.

While the 46-year-old mayor labored doggedly on pet projects such as the arts festival, she displayed apparent uninterest, or, at best, paid cursory attention to other major urban woes.

The 100-megaton achievements of her mayoralty--the arts festival, resisting mandatory water rationing, blocking Southern California Edison’s plan to take over San Diego Gas & Electric Co.--demonstrated O’Connor’s impressive potential on issues to which she was strongly committed.

What frustrated even her backers, however, was the sporadic nature of that commitment Indeed, the arts festival posed the essential question critics asked about O’Connor’s mayoralty: Why didn’t she consistently bring the same planning, dedication and hands-on approach to the city’s long-term problems that she devoted to assembling the world’s largest public showing of Faberge Imperial eggs?

“Some of those major accomplishments are so significant that one can’t help but wonder if even more couldn’t have been accomplished,” Councilman Ron Roberts said. “When she really set her mind to something, you saw what she could do.”

Given the enormous demands on any mayor’s time, O’Connor’s choices and actions were often puzzling. She regularly found time, for example, to ride along with on-duty police officers and firefighters or for publicity stunts such as working on a garbage truck or a much-chronicled 1988 odyssey in which she spent two days living on the streets disguised as a transient. Yet she eschewed meetings with business and political leaders who complained that they could not even get an audience to try to make their case.

As for the Chamber of Commerce executives and political officials who complained about her inaccessibility, O’Connor responds that she had little patience or sympathy for “big shots who thought they were too good” to line up with other San Diegans for five minutes with her at her twice-monthly “Meet the Mayor” sessions.

O’Connor’s attitude on entree to the mayor’s office is particularly telling, and raises a fundamental question debated throughout her tenure. While O’Connor hailed it as keeping a campaign pledge to put community activists and everyday San Diegans on equal footing with downtown power brokers, critics pounced on it as a naive, ill-conceived public relations gesture that sought to manage California’s second-largest city as if it were Mayberry.

“You don’t squeeze a CEO who’s thinking of expanding his company in between two guys upset over potholes--you just don’t do that as mayor,” said one politically prominent business leader.

By her own admission, O’Connor was always more comfortable conversing with the common man “in the neighborhoods” than meeting in City Hall with the assortment of high-powered business and civic leaders who typically occupy much of a mayor’s calendar.

“I could find out more in five minutes outside this building than I could in five hours inside,” O’Connor said in a recent interview. “The people are the real experts, but that’s something a lot of politicians don’t realize.”

As evidence, O’Connor points out that some of her most notable successes were spawned by the political intelligence she picked up on the streets--where San Diegans, in uncommon displays of public affection that dazzled even her rivals, often shouted “Hey, Maureen!” and approached her for autographs during her noontime walks.

It was on the streets, for example, that O’Connor gained confidence that San Diegans would enthusiastically support an arts festival, which indeed turned out to be an artistic and financial success.

Similarly, her chats with people at shopping malls bolstered her conviction that San Diegans would heed her 1991 call for voluntary water conservation during a lingering drought. And when this spring’s verdicts in the Rodney King case touched off rioting elsewhere, O’Connor spent several sleepless nights with top city officials visiting “hot spots” to help preserve the peace.

“People say, ‘She’s one of us,’ ” said Louis Wolfsheimer, a land-use lawyer and longtime O’Connor confidant.

Elected in a special 1986 race after the felony conviction of former Mayor Roger Hedgecock, O’Connor entered City Hall with a councilman under indictment, with the head of the Housing Commission ensnared in scandal and with the city manager and council at odds.

Thanks in part to changes she helped orchestrate, O’Connor leaves behind a relatively harmonious council with a much-improved public image that has a solid working relationship with City Manager Jack McGrory and the rest of the city bureaucracy.

“If things weren’t in such a mess when I got here, maybe there would have been more time for some other things,” O’Connor said. “But it took a lot of time and work just to restore normal governance to this city. I got this city working again. People might not like everything City Hall does, and probably never will, but at least they think the place is honest again.”