Write-in mayoral bid has fresh hope

March. Voters themselves appeared split over the ongoing battle which may now be heading for another decision in the courts if Frye decides to file a lawsuit by a Jan. 7 deadline.

In a Monitor interview soon after the election in her mom's small, ranch-style home where she grew up, Frye explains her rise from environmental activist to city councilwoman as being less about the city's need to change leadership or political persuasions than about changing the very nature of how city government interacts with its citizens.

"San Diego had become a place where city officials were marginalizing, undermining, underestimating and not taking its citizens seriously," she says. Frye, the owner of a local surf shop and the wife of well-known surfer Skip Frye, began lobbying city council about polluted ocean water in 1988. "They treated me as a lowlife and someone with no brain because I was from the surfing community and I saw they were doing that to others as well."

She fought to control pollution runoff from storm drains, for the monitoring of discharges and for a multimillion dollar clean up of Mission Bay. After winning battle upon battle, the Frye surf shop became a kind of gathering point for citizens with beefs to level at city hall.

She says she began to notice other patterns of avoidance by city officials. They often held hearings after members had decided key policies. "People would get up to talk and no one would be listening."

After being drafted to run for an unexpired city council term in 2001, she departed from standard operating procedures - many times declining to attend closed sessions - and was reelected for a four-year term in 2002 with 65 percent of the vote.

She attributes her popularity to her standing up for the Ralph M. Brown Act - a California law which states that the public's business shall be held in public - and holding her ground in front of lobbyists, lawyers, and others who often try to badger public officials with legalese and procedural maneuvering.

Tanned, sandy-haired, and more comfortable in jeans than dresses, Frye has been described as a firebrand - frank sometimes to a fault - as she reprimands officials in hearings for needless pontificating.

"This is a total change to the way things have been going and people are excited to see what she can do," says Michael Kearney, sitting in Nico's Taco Shop at the corner of Marina and Cushman, just a block from where Frye's husband designs custom surfboards.

Dede Vanderwe, standing outside the Coronado Hotel, dismisses her as "just a bohemian and an obstructionist... If people like her were in power, we probably wouldn't have a new stadium downtown and a growing skyline that puts us in the big league of cities."

Indeed, if she wins, the question is whether Frye can forge consensus and build coalitions. "That requires a different set of skills than she has yet demonstrated," says Steve Erie, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego. "That will be the challenge."

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