A new street sign honoring the late community leader and former Assemblymember Howard Wayne was unveiled in Linda Vista on Saturday.

The honorary sign reading “Howard Wayne St” was placed at the intersection of Morena Boulevard and Buenos Avenue.

“Howard’s passion to make a positive impact wherever he went and with everything he did  was an inspiration for so many in the community, myself included,” said San Diego City  Councilmember Raul Campillo, who arranged for the sign.

“He truly loved his community, and his community loved him. I’m grateful to be able to celebrate Howard with an honorary street naming in his home neighborhood of Linda Vista,” Campillo said.

Wayne, who died in November 2023, served as a deputy attorney general, assemblymember for the 78th District, and chair of the Linda Vista Planning Group.

The site of the street sign was chosen because Wayne was instrumental in the Morena Corridor Plan and because his wife, Mary, lives nearby.

The life of former state Assemblyman Howard Wayne was remembered by some 150 friends and relatives Saturday as one exemplified by a sharp wit and a deep understanding of government and politics.

His brother, Bob, a Seattle attorney, told the standing-room-only crowd at Elijah’s Restaurant in Kearny Mesa that Howard was born on the day that Harry S Truman defeated Thomas Dewey in 1948, and that Howard died on his 75th birthday in 2023.

“He would take pride that he was born and died on a day that a Democrat was in the White House,” said his younger brother.

Bob Wayne recalled one of the earliest campaigns in which they both took part — in the early 1960s when Murray Goodrich was running for San Diego mayor unsuccessfully against Frank Curran.

The brothers handed out flyers at the Mission Valley mall until security guards escorted them out. Finding themselves with a stack of unused flyers, they put them under the windshield wipers of the cars in the parking lot.

Much later in Howard’s life, his brother reported, a young person at a Democratic club meeting asked Howard: “‘Why should we listen to old white men?’ And Howard stood up and said, ‘You just hit the trifecta — you’ve got ageism, racism and sexism.’”

Ed Millican, who preceded Howard as a president of the Young Democratic Club at San Diego State University, later ran for City Council and enlisted Howard to serve as the campaign treasurer.

“My campaign received a check from an individual who I will not name because he may still be around and have access to hit men, but we needed the money and Howard asked me what shall we do with this.

“I said ‘Keep it, we need it.’ He looked at me quizzically. A few weeks later, he told me ‘By the way, I want you to know I tore the check up.’”

Millican said he responded, “If you did it, Howard, you probably were right.”

Former state Sen. Dede Alpert (D-San Diego) whom Howard has succeeded in the Assembly, commented: “When people wanted actually to understand what a bill did, and what it said, they went over to Howard’s desk to ask because he read everything, he knew everything, he understood everything, and so he really was the person that all of us turned to. What a difference that Howard made for government here in the State of California!”

Besides Alpert, other former and present Democratic legislators, members of Congress and City Council members on hand were Denise Ducheny, Christine Kehoe, Lynn Schenk, Susan Davis, Lori Saldaña and Chris Ward.

Mike Schaefer, a member of the state Board of Equalization — and at 86, the oldest state constitutional officer in California — also attended.

Also recognized in the audience were Rich Leib, chairman of the University of California Board of Regents; former Superior Court Judge Susan Finlay; San Diego Councilmember Dr. Jennifer Campbell, and former San Diego school board member Sue Braun.

Ward, now a state assemblyman, recalled that when he served on the San Diego City Council, on occasion he would see Howard sitting in the front row of the audience “with binders in his lap.”

Howard “always did his homework,” Ward said. “Some of these were complicated issues, but Howard was always right on the positions he was taking.”

When the state Legislature reconvenes after the Thanksgiving break, he said, he will make it a point to honor Wayne by requesting that a session of the Assembly be adjourned in his memory.

Pat Libby commented that she and Wayne co-taught a class about legislative advocacy at the University of San Diego (where Howard years before had graduated from law school).

Howard called her Ms. Outside whereas he as a former legislator was Mr. Inside. She said that they assigned their students the task of getting a bill through the California Legislature — a task that students thought was well beyond their capabilities.

“Because Howard was such a great professor, our students passed many significant laws,” she said.

While Wayne was a member of the Jewish community, he wasn’t very vocal about it, prompting Jim Grant to comment: “Howard was very patient with me. I would explain to him things about my faith, and finally he said ‘Jim, you know I am Jewish too.’ I said ‘Well, I know that now.’ Howard was a mensch and I will say kaddish for him.”

Grant’s anecdote prompted my recollection that when Wayne was first running for office, I was then editor of the now defunct San Diego Jewish Press-Heritage. I asked Howard what connections he had with the Jewish community. He responded, ‘Well let me think. … My mom and dad are Jewish.”

Ken Cohen emceed the event and attorney Jim Spievak served as Cohen’s co-chair, both at the request of Howard’s wife, Mary Lundberg.

Spievak recalled that Howard overcame stuttering so well that he was able to win a speech competition sponsored by the Jaycees, an organization that admitted only male members until Spievak and Howard teamed to admit the club’s first female member over the objections of the national organization.

The co-chairman of the Celebration of Life also reported that Howard “loved the law and the U.S. Constitution. He studied and observed the Roberts Rules of Order and parliamentary procedure.

“How many of you here have the U.S. Constitution and Roberts Rules of Order in your homes, and know where they are? Howard did!”

Donald H. Harrison is editor emeritus of San Diego Jewish World. A version of this story first appeared on San Diego Jewish World, a member of the San Diego Online News Association.

Former State Assemblyman Howard Wayne died Thursday on his 75th birthday at Scripps Green Hospital after lapsing into a coma, his wife, Mary Lundberg, announced Saturday.

Plans were being made for a private burial service and for a subsequent celebration of Wayne’s life and accomplishments, she said.

Wayne served in the state Assembly for three terms — from 1996 to 2002 — and thereafter returned to his job as an assistant state attorney general focusing on consumer fraud.

After retirement, he continued in public service and was a member of the San Diego County Grand Jury when he took ill. He made an unsuccessful run for the San Diego City Council in 2010.

Wayne’s parents, William and Blanche Wayne, were among the early members of Congregation Beth Tefilah, which later merged with Congregation Adat Ami to become the Ohr Shalom Synagogue. William Wayne was a partner with Holocaust survivor Lou Dunst in the Logan Department Store.

A lifelong Democrat, Wayne served on the San Diego County Democratic Central Committee. He volunteered in many Democratic campaigns, among them the recently successful judgeship bid by former Chula Vista Councilman Tim Nader.

Along with his wife, Mary, he traveled in 2006 to South Africa to help the post-apartheid government establish a new legal system.

While in the Assembly, Wayne served as chairman of the Natural Resources Committee and the select Committee on Biotechnology. One of the bills he shepherded into law was to require testing for pollutants caused by runoff along the San Diego County coastline.

He was an opponent of integrating recycled sewage into the city’s water supply, deriding such proposals as “toilet-to-tap” schemes.

In a 1998 interview, Wayne recalled that he was in the slowest reading group in elementary school, but after working with his mother, he excelled at reading and was able to skip a grade.

He entered San Diego State University at age 15, eventually serving as president there of the College Young Democrats. Following graduation, he enrolled at the University of San Diego Law School, where he became an editor of its law review. He joined the state Attorney General’s Office in 1973

He dated his interest in politics to age 11, when a maternal uncle, Hank Freedman, took him one night to the galleries of the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, when John F. Kennedy was nominated for president.

Young Wayne followed the presidential election closely, watching the televised debate between Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

“I knew state by state what electoral votes were: I could make a reasonable guess how they would come out, and one of my happiest days was when JFK won,” he said.

At a meeting of the Kensington College Democratic Club in 1982, he met Lundberg, a former Peace Corps worker in Sierra Leone, who had come to San Diego to head the Peace Corps recruitment office here.

After cuts were made in that program by President Ronald Reagan, she enrolled in law school at the University of California Davis, prompting a long-distance romance. They were married in 1988.

She went to work in the U.S. Attorney’s office. Theirs was a marriage of a Catholic and a Jew — an intermarriage that Wayne said could not have worked if either of them had strong feelings on religious matters. They had no children, with Wayne suggesting that the time for raising a family had passed them by.

Wayne’s interest in politics led him to actively campaign in San Diego in 1988 for having members of the City Council elected by district rather than citywide.

In 1990, Wayne ran unsuccessfully for a City Council seat vacated by Lucy Killea when she succeeded Larry Stirling in the state Senate. He was defeated by Mike Gotch.

In 1996, Dede Alpert vacated her Assembly seat in a successful effort to succeed Killea in the state Senate. That opened a path for Wayne’s victory, in which he defeated Republican Tricia Hunter.

While in the state Assembly, Wayne was named alumnus of the year by Hoover High School.

Speaking to the students there, he said: “They had a great public school in San Diego and I was fighting in the Legislature to make public colleges affordable because I wanted them to have opportunity.

“I also told them two things. One, when you get that achievement, you have an obligation to make sure that the ladder of opportunity is there for those who are after you.”

In a football analogy, he said he also told them “their teachers were coaches, their parents and grandparents were cheerleaders, and they were on the field and were the captains of their team. It was really on their shoulders to take advantage of this and use the opportunity.”

Wayne’s survivors, in addition to his wife, include a brother Robert, an attorney in Seattle, Washington, and a large extended family.

Donald H. Harrison is editor emeritus of San Diego Jewish World. A version of this report originally appeared in San Diego Jewish World, a member of the San Diego Online News Association.

San Diego’s Planning Department, which works for the mayor, is going under the radar to rush through a dangerous land use change. Hiding under the innocuous name “Complete Communities Housing Solutions Initiative,” the scheme would radically and surreptitiously rezone large swaths of San Diego with minimal public participation and potentially reduce affordable housing opportunities in the City.

The premise of Complete Communities is that San Diego needs more housing. But what we really need is more affordable housing. Builders are generating lots of market-rate houses, but young people, first responders, teachers, and especially essential workers are being left behind.

The proposal, built on the department’s false assumption, permits developers to up-zone land permitted for multi-family units — that is, land where five or more homes could be built — and adjacent to a street with a trolley or frequent bus line (called transit priority areas, or TPAs). This up-zoning would permit buildings with four to eight times the square footage of the lot (technically called a floor area ratio, or FAR). While FARs of four are typical for communities north of Interstate 8, FARs of eight — downtown-type densities outside of downtown — are found in neighborhoods south of I-8, where most low-income/minority areas are located.

TPAs could be anywhere there is an existing or proposed trolley line, such as Clairemont or communities where the Orange Line runs.  But they could also happen along existing and proposed bus lines. For example, this up-zoning could happen on El Cajon Boulevard and University Avenue, and on their side streets.  Since the City Council has repealed the requirement for multi-family units in TPAs to have off-street parking, the future for these communities could be walls of high- and mid-rise buildings with cars driving around in search of parking.

How would it happen? If Complete Communities passes, a developer in a TPA would simply go down to city hall and present the building plans. Approval is granted at the counter, regardless of the size of the project, in what is called Process One. The community would not be able to weigh-in on the proposal, there would be no hearing at the Planning Commission, and the neighbors would find out about the high-rise project when the bulldozers show up. In fact, not even the City Council could vote on the project. It would be all up to what the developer wanted to do, with no public accountability.

What would we receive in return? Two things. First, Complete Communities calls for a “public amenity” fee of $9 per square foot of the lot size or, for larger projects, the construction of a public promenade in front of the building. This is a good, primarily because it would be applied in areas where there are huge parks deficits. But it raises the question of why the Planning Department would put the highest FARs exactly in areas with the greatest existing public facilities shortfalls.

Affordable housing benefits, on the other hand, while promoted by the Planning Department, are limited and possibly counterproductive. The department says that 10% of the building would be affordable to those making up to 60% of the area medium income — which is already required by law — and another 10% for those earning up to 120% of the area medium income – which is close to market-rate housing.

The sneaky part of the program is what is meant by 10%. Let us assume a developer uses a TPA to increase density from 10 units allowed under existing zoning to 100 units.  How many low-income affordable units would be required?  The answer is only ONE, because the 10% is based on the density allowed under the prior zoning, not on the up-zoning the developer can get at his or her whim.

But it gets worse than that. There are already parts of San Diego, primarily south of I-8, where there are multi-family units that are already affordable to very low-income households, primarily because these houses are older and smaller (they are not subsidized).  Under Complete Communities, developers are incentivized to buy these properties, scrap the housing, and build medium- to high-rise dwellings. Only a small percentage of these units would be required to be affordable. The process is called gentrification.

The Planning Department is pushing to have the City Council pass its Complete Communities scheme by the end of July. It is up to you to contact your Councilmember and say SLOW DOWN! Take time to think this through, and do not pass something that does more harm than good.

Howard Wayne represented San Diego in the California Assembly and is the Interim Chair of the Linda Vista Planning Group.