Builders Fielded a Well-Oiled Army in Growth Victory

As politicians and slow-growth activists fumed about the construction industry’s “distorted” advertising during the final days of last week’s election campaign, the builders were quietly nailing down a crushing victory over slow-growth Propositions B, D, H and J the old-fashioned way: with legwork.

The builders’ political leaders, beginning the weekend before Election Day, telephoned about 200,000 pro-construction voters in a huge get-out-the-vote effort they said they consider the key to their landslide victory over the slow-growth measures.

The effort in the final days, run with the assistance of hundreds of building-industry employees who were given time off from their jobs to work against the measures, followed months of careful preparation. Campaign workers conducted extensive polling to identify sympathetic voters, distributed 30,000 registration applications to sympathetic voters, held 300 speaking engagements, and organized 200 “neighborhood parties” in volunteers’ homes.

“If you have watched me operate politically in the last four or five years, I have encouraged the building industry to get back to grass-roots politics,” said Jean Andrews, political consultant for San Diegans for Regional Traffic Solutions, the builders’ political committee. “And you’re seeing exactly that. . . . I think that’s the way you win.”

Richard Carson, economic adviser to Citizens for Limited Growth and an angry critic of Andrews’ “illegal” tactics throughout the campaign, conceded that the builders’ get-out-the-vote effort was worth “5 or 10” percentage points on Election Day. The four slow-growth measures, all of which would have limited home building and protected environmentally sensitive lands from construction, lost by 11 to 17 points.

“My assessment is 5 or 10%, which is a big effect for get out the vote,” Carson said. “That’s not taking anything away from them.”

But Carson hastened to add that “this is not a volunteer effort in the sense that the Dukakis people had a phone bank going. No one was paying the Dukakis people to call. Employers were not giving the Dukakis people time off to make phone calls.”

And, noting that the builders spent $208,000 on phone banks before the final campaign finance disclosure deadline, Oct. 22, Carson said that “it’s just one more indication of what having that much money will do for you. Anybody would like to be able to run that sort of operation.”

Lopsided Campaign Funds

All told, the builders spent $2.4 million on the election, dwarfing the campaign budgets of their two major rivals. Citizens for Limited Growth spent about $75,000 attempting to win passage of Propositions D and J. The Coalition for a Balanced Environment spent about $182,000 supporting Propositions B and H.

There is also some evidence that unknown fund-raisers used threats to raise some of the builders’ money.

In an Oct. 27 memorandum obtained by The Times, Building Industry Assn. executives William Davidson and Robert Morris said, “We’ve been told by certain members of the industry of overt threats that business would be withheld if the supplier, subcontractor or service provider did not contribute to the San Diegans for Regional Traffic Solutions campaign.”

In an interview, Morris said he sent the memo to the BIA’s 900 members after receiving “two or three” complaints from member companies about the threats. He refused to identify the members who said they were threatened.

The memo also asserted that the builders’ political committee had been soliciting funds in the name of the Building Industry Assn. Because of its tax charter, the BIA cannot participate in partisan politics.

Andrews refused to comment on the memo.

But she is quick to admit that her expensive, inflammatory ads were crucial in reaching voters outside the building industry.

“We knew we would not be able to win just talking to our own industry,” she said.

Nevertheless, the builders’ campaign is noteworthy if only for its size and the way leaders were able to mobilize members of an industry convinced--rightly or wrongly--that their livelihoods were on the line Tuesday.

If the essence of political organizing is maintaining and using lists of voters, the builders were way ahead of the game by the beginning of last week.

With a paid survey operation that had been working through the fall, San Diegans for Regional Traffic Solutions had identified 100,000 voters likely to support its opposition to all four slow-growth propositions, Andrews said. In addition, the campaign had compiled a separate list of 35,000 voters whose jobs were dependent on the construction industry, she said.

On top of that, the builders reached out to allied industries--the Associated General Contractors, the San Diego Board of Realtors, the San Diego Apartment Assn.--and urged them to prepare lists of members who could be contacted on Election Day.

During the week before Election Day, the builders’ paid phone banks, operated by the phone-banking firm Competitive Edge, telephoned targeted voters to remind them to vote against the measures, said Mary Tietz, volunteer coordinator for the builders’ political committee.

Watching for Trends

The builders’ tracking polls, conducted over the past three weeks, told them that rival Propositions B and D--which would have applied to the county’s unincorporated areas--and city Proposition J were headed for defeat.

Proposition H, sponsored by the San Diego City Council, had less than 50% support. But the builders’ polls also showed 15% of the electorate undecided, a total that could have given Proposition H the majority it needed, Andrews said.

All 900 Building Industry Assn. companies--where a total of 50,000 people are employed--and the more than 2,000 allied industry firms received letters and phone calls in the waning days of the campaign, reminding them to urge their employees to vote.

In most cases, that wasn’t necessary.

“Everyone here is fairly intelligent, and they understood the impacts of the various items on the development industry,” said Katy Wright, manager of community relations for EastLake Development Co.

At about 150 Building Industry Assn. firms, the campaign selected “election coordinators” who were responsible for making sure that employees voted, even taking names and phone numbers that would be forwarded to Election Day phone banks.

Checks with some of the companies showed that few, if any actually needed to resort to that tactic. However, some developers allowed employees to arrive late to work so that they could vote.

Army Mans Phones

By early afternoon on Election Day, an army of 400 volunteer poll watchers and 600 more volunteer phone callers was assembled. The phone callers were scattered at 50 separate building industry firms around the city. About 400 phone lines also continued to be manned by paid workers.

The campaign decided to cover 1,200 of the county’s 1,600 polls. Poll watchers were given three blue folders. Each folder had a map showing the location of the poll, a list of sympathetic voters scheduled to vote there, and a phone number for a phone line manned by another volunteer, Tietz said.

“We wound up closing up shop here, and sent 30-some-odd volunteers out to do the poll watching,” said Bill Greiner, vice president of Expo Builders Supply.

“We saw (the initiatives) as a direct threat to the economic viability of the company. We saw the four initiatives--B, D, H and J--as having dire consequences for our economy,” he said.

Each poll watcher went to three polling places, checking posted lists of who had voted and noted which pro-industry voters had not cast ballots by 4:30 p.m. They telephoned that information to phone-bank volunteers who had red folders containing the same names.

By 4:30, the phone banks, in places such as the Fieldstone Co., Davidson Communities Inc., and McMillin Communities, began to contact those all-important voters, with each volunteer making an estimated 35 calls an hour. Others started as early as noon.

“I was shocked how well it worked,” Tietz said. “It was like a military operation.”

By 7:30, the 100,000 sympathetic voters, the 35,000 industry voters and at least some of the members of the 200 allied industries had been reminded to vote--a get-out-the-vote operation that Andrews insisted is the largest in county history. She estimates that 200,000 contacts were made in all.