SAN DIEGO( special)--In San Diego's perennial "smokestacks versus geraniums" debate, Judge Dick Murphy says he is the only mayoral candidate who favors the geraniums — that is, he would rather preserve San Diego's beauty than to attract harmful economic development.

In a recent interview with HERITAGE, the mayoral candidate said the city's clogged freeways only will get worse if the city pursues unbridled economic expansion. Whereas it may make sense to seek new industries when there is a large amount of unemployment, he said, all that does in a full-employment economy is "attract another 5,000 people from North Dakota to move to San Diego. Is that in our long-run best interest? No!"

Besides modulating economic growth, Murphy said he would attempt to solve traffic logjams by building new freeways, putting monitors on freeway ramps, encouraging carpooling, and seeking staggered work hours for many government and business workers.

On leave as a Superior Court judge, Murphy said although the city has been successful in hiring new police officers, it has at the same time been losing others police officers as a result of attrition. The net gain in the fight against crime has not been sufficient, he said.

The mayoral candidate's radio commercials have emphasized his criticism of the city's ticket guarantee for the San Diego Chargers and his opposition to the downtown ballpark agreement between the city and the San Diego Padres. 

Murphy, who has spent years as a soccer and Little League baseball coach, said he enjoys sports as much as the next guy, but believes the city government has been taken advantage of by the professional sports franchises. With a master's degree in business as well as a law degree, he touts his ability to understand contracts before they are signed.

Such deals for the sports franchises, said Murphy, take money out of the pockets of neighborhoods. He said the City of San Diego has more than $100 million in deferred maintenance. He contended that San Diegans want services where they live and are tired of potholes, brown lawns on recreational fields, and inadequate branch libraries. 

Murphy laughingly called himself the "only mayoral candidate with a foreign policy," telling HERITAGE that having taken a United Jewish Federation-sponsored tour to Israel in the 1980s, he believes Israel must retain Jerusalem as its undivided capital. 

He said he also thinks that Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Barak would be mistaken to return the Golan to Syria. He said he remembers looking down at Israel's agricultural settlements below the Golan and seeing for himself how vulnerable they once were to Syria's attacks

Murphy said he has the support from a number of activists in the Jewish community. Among these, he said, are Norman Greene, former president of Ohr Shalom Synagogue; Si Coleman, former president of Congregation Beth Israel; Phyllis Cohn, a former director of the Federation's Jewish Community Relations Council; her husband Sandy Cohn, organizer of San Diego Jewish Republicans; HERITAGE columnist Gert Thaler, and Leslie Caspi, daughter of the late Democratic party stalwart M. Larry Lawrence, for whose family the Lawrence Family JCC is La Jolla is named.