Honeymoon Over in S.F. as Jordan Takes Office : Politics: Mayor is under fire on inauguration day, and he faces deficit that may frustrate his plans for city.

SAN FRANCISCO — If Frank Jordan were superstitious, he might have seen an omen in his recent Hawaiian vacation. After his election as mayor, Jordan fled to Kauai for some post-campaign rest and sunshine but instead found an island awash in torrential rains and deadly floods.

When Jordan returned home, a wimpy tan became the least of his worries. Picketers circled his headquarters, protesting plans for an inaugural party they deemed elitist. Critics called his 162-person transition team unwieldy. Some even griped that Jordan had already been co-opted by former Mayor Dianne Feinstein, who had lent the mayor-elect her Kauai condo.

“The honeymoon,” said one veteran election observer, summing up the political tsunami that greeted Jordan, “was over before Frank took the oath of office.”

On Wednesday, Jordan got a brief reprieve from all the fuss when he was sworn in as the city’s 40th mayor. Thousands of San Franciscans took part in daylong inaugural festivities that included an old-fashioned sing-along at Davies Symphony Hall, a Jordan speech from atop a miniature replica of the Golden Gate Bridge and a three-hour “meet-and-greet” session with the public at City Hall.

“I come to this office not to advance a political career but to serve the people of this city,” Jordan, 56, said in a feel-good speech that invoked former President John F. Kennedy, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle and God. “. . . My intention is to make the office of mayor as warm and inviting as a living room, where people can come to share their ideas and unite in common action.”

A former police chief who has never before held elective office, Jordan ousted Art Agnos in a Dec. 10 runoff, capturing 52% of the vote and becoming the first challenger to topple an incumbent San Francisco mayor in half a century.

While the lifelong cop’s triumph jarred the political Establishment in this reliably liberal city, most observers credited the outcome to widespread frustration with Agnos, who was blamed for San Francisco’s aggressive panhandlers, dirty streets and economic woes.

Jordan, a slight, genial native who calls himself a “citizen-mayor,” won votes with a populist platform that promised to improve basic city services and “get San Francisco back on track.” That pledge found favor among residents who sense their beloved burg by the bay is losing its luster.

But as he takes the chair of power in San Francisco’s ornate City Hall, some analysts say Jordan is doomed to disappoint, cursed by a host of daunting urban problems and a series of mini-uproars that already have fractured the coalition that hoisted him to power.

For starters, Jordan may have to cope with a $91-million budget deficit. Rooted in the recession, lingering effects of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and declining water sales because of the drought, the deficit could double next year if economic recovery does not materialize, city officials have warned the new mayor.

Jordan has yet to describe a plan for coping with the shortfall, but he pledged in his inaugural address Wednesday to “eliminate wasteful bureaucracy” and improve city services--all without raising taxes.

Whether he succeeds at this or not, the tight times will leave Jordan with little money for the panoply of problems he vowed to tackle while a candidate.

Cleaner streets, for example, were a key theme in Jordan’s campaign message, a theme he once drove home while standing over a dead rat in a San Francisco gutter. In an interview this week, Jordan talked of doubling the number of city trash cans, organizing volunteer cleanup crews and requiring welfare recipients to push a broom for their benefits. But San Francisco’s chief of public works was skeptical, suggesting instead that $5 million more a year was needed to win the war against filth.

As for the homeless, whose numbers here are continually on the upswing, Jordan has retreated from a controversial campaign platform advocating warrant checks, work camps and other tough measures. Now he speaks of hiring the homeless to retrofit quake-damaged buildings and creating a special bank to provide loans for those seeking permanent housing.

“His rhetoric has undergone a significant change, and we’re happy about that,” said Anthony Von der Muhll of the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness. “But he’s under a lot of pressure to ‘solve’ homelessness by sweeping people out of sight. That won’t work, and he’s going to fail if he thinks it will.”

Another conundrum--how to keep the San Francisco Giants from fulfilling a threat to leave the city by 1994--may be one of the most delicate matters on the new mayor’s desk.

Agnos had been pursuing plans to build a new ballpark for the Giants on city land near San Francisco’s airport, but Jordan prefers to retrofit gusty Candlestick Park to make its bone-chilling conditions more tolerable.

Giants officials say that is unacceptable, raising the threat that Jordan could become known as the mayor who let the Giants get away--possibly to San Jose, one of two Bay Area cities hoping to lure the baseball team.

All of these headaches would be bad enough in a tranquil political climate. But Jordan has endured an unusually turbulent interregnum. Take the inaugural celebration.

When news broke that a $1,000-a-plate dinner was planned to raise funds for the ceremony, critics howled, complaining that a pricey fete clashed with the populist image Jordan nurtured with campaign events like neighborhood wiener roasts--dubbed “franks with Frank.” An editorial in the San Francisco Examiner, for example, lambasted the new mayor for planning a “coronation” that represented a “symbolic snub of the nose to the homeless.”

Jordan reacted nimbly, canceling the dinner and, on Monday, giving charities $50,000 of the money raised for the inaugural. With a price tag of about $200,000, however, Wednesday’s celebration remained grand--costing more than twice that of the bash put on by Agnos in 1988.

Aside from the inaugural ruckus, Jordan has been dogged by persistent suggestions that, as a political novice, he is vulnerable to control by powerful influences such as the city’s downtown corporations and more experienced politicians like Feinstein and state Sen. Quentin Kopp (I-San Francisco). Jordan acknowledged in an interview that he repeatedly must assert that “I am the man in charge.”

Jordan has also been saddled with about 30 last-minute appointees named by Agnos to various boards and commissions. Jordan said Agnos promised to make “just a few” such appointments, but Agnos defended the maneuver as his right.

Still, while ruffling his successor’s feathers, Agnos did leave Jordan a little gift--a framed quotation to help him survive the political storms sure to rain on his administration.

The message, titled “Inspiration” and penned by Theodore Roosevelt, declares that it is “not the critic who counts” but the “man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.”

Profile: Frank Jordan

Personal

Born: Feb. 20, 1935, in San Francisco. (Age 56).

Education: Graduated from Sacred Heart High School in San Francisco in 1953 and the University of San Francisco in 1975 with a BA in government.

Professional

Joined San Francisco Police Department in 1957. Served as chief of police 1986-1990.

Political

A Democrat, he was elected San Francisco mayor Dec. 10, 1991. It was his first run for office.