BOOK REVIEW: SAN DIEGO'S JUDGE MAYOR

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By Nadin Abbott

January 14, 2013 (San Diego)-- “This book is both an invitation and a warning. The invitation is to seek to be all you can be and try to make a difference. The warning is that the best intentions can be misunderstood and sidetracked by events beyond your control.” Dick Murphy writes this near the beginning of his memoir, a remembrance of his life in San Diego city politics.

Why would a resident of the East County even care? The book also details some of the projects that Murphy was involved in his decades in San Diego city politics that have directly affected our region, not just San Diego city. Some of these issues  are still resonating today, around ten years after Murphy left the political arena.

Have you ridden the trolley recently? You can thank Dick Murphy for having the vision to deploy a fixed rail system in San Diego that now reaches to East County Communities. His love for rail comes from having grown up around it. We hope that soon it will expand to both the North County and UCSD. But he is one of the people who had the foresight for the trolley system.

How about hiking in Mission Trails--a modern day urban park that is a national example of what an urban park should be? Again, he was one of the people with the vision. His political career started in the advisory board that helped create the vision for the park. As he writes in his memoir “this land was almost all privately owned at the time, and I was interested in preserving it for future generations.”

Those of us who follow San Diego city politics hear the echoes in the book to what will become an argument in the coming mayoral campaign. Whether to support rooftop solar or not? It was during his administration that the first San Diego City building became grid independent.

But there are also things he failed to accomplish. Not long ago, former City Attorney Mike Aguirre was talking about the need for our region, not just the city of San Diego, to become water independent. Murphy writes in his eplilogue: “The only certain way to guarantee adequate water supplies for the region in the long run is large-scale water desalinization.” The irony is that there is no love lost between Aguirre and Murphy, yet on this issue they are of like minds.

Murphy also  delves into his personal life. You will learn that Dick Murphy was not just a moderate Republican who liked the environment, but also a deeply religious man. He frames his successes and failures in his life not as luck, but as God opening and closing doors for him. It is not skill, but God’s hand. In parts that got a little thick, but this is his bio, not mine.

You will also learn some of the details of the pension scandal that drove him out of office. He chose to resign, since he saw that as the honorable thing to do when he could no longer lead the city.

That might be too much inside baseball for many readers, but if you are so inclined to learn where some of our current problems come from, this is an important read. Given that the city is about half of the county’s population, what happens in San Diego affects the rest of us.

 

Sunbelt Publications published the book in 2011. It is available in both print and electronic formats.

 

http://www.sunbeltbooks.com/

 


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