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Yesterday I offered a mini-bio of mayoral candidate Floyd Morrow after we chatted for about a half hour. Today, we’re moving on to his politics.
The first question on a lot of people’s minds, I imagine, is why run now? The 75-year-old Democrat last served on the City Council in the late 1970s and ran for mayor unsuccessfully twice in the 1980s.
Here’s what he said:
They’ve screwed things up so badly in the last 20 years I haven’t been active in it, and I think it’s time to get back to a level of where were at least we had it somewhat in hand. We didn’t have potholes, didn’t have a pension system and not fund it, we didn’t overspend our means.
Morrow said he tried to recruit other Democrats, such as U.S. Rep. Bob Filner and Councilwoman Donna Frye, to run, but was unsuccessful.
Ultimately, he said, he didn’t want to have to choose between what he called the lesser of two evils, referring to the two prominent Republicans in the race, Mayor Jerry Sanders and businessman Steve Francis.
Morrow said he’s done a lot of work on water reclamation and energy — one of the reasons perennial mayoral candidate and environmentalist Jim Bell dropped out of the race last weekend to endorse him. He said his most significant work had been in the peace movement. “I broke with Lyndon Johnson,” he said.
I asked Morrow what his main issues would be if elected.
“The unaffordable housing situation and the huge economic turmoil that we’re going through right now, it’s almost reminiscent of the Depression itself,” he said, noting that he was “a baby of the Depression” in 1932 and 1933.
He said one way to help the housing situation and the economy overall would be for the city to utilize its land.
“The city is the largest landowner by far in San Diego,” Morrow said. “… We would have a 10 billion a year income stream by leasing or renting out of the city’s land.
And, with a Democrat likely to end up back in the White House in 2008, Morrow said, it will be important to have a Democratic mayor who can get along with the president.
“We have to go back and start keeping our infrastructure up and in an economic crisis like we’re experiencing I think the federal and state governments are all going to jump into having a recovery program, they’ve got to,” he said. “You either have to have a 1920s-type of CCC, Civilian Conservation Corps, or a Marshall Plan almost on a global level.”
For more, click here to go to Morrow’s website.