ELLIOTT FOR CITY ATTORNEY IN TOUGH DECISION

AS IS. The words — in all caps — leap off the first page of what this year became the most-criticized real estate deal in San Diego history, a 20-year, $127 million lease-to-own contract to give 1,100 city workers a Downtown office at 101 Ash St.

Or rather the words should have leaped off the page in ways they didn’t when it was approved.

Months in the making, the noxious deal was signed in December 2016, one week into City Attorney Mara Elliott’s time in office. Her predecessor’s typed name was crossed out on the contract, hers handwritten over it, a deputy’s signature scrawled beneath. No one articulated that the city had failed to conduct due diligence, instead accepting an appraisal from the seller as any home buyer would know not to do.

The unusable building is now Exhibit A in the court of public opinion in a contentious city attorney’s race between Elliot and Cory Briggs.

“I am 100 percent involved in remedying 101 Ash and trying to get to the bottom of it and trying to get as much money back as I can for the city of San Diego,” Elliott told The San Diego Union-tribune Editorial Board in an interview with the two Democratic candidates last month.

“The exculpatory language was on the first page of the contract,” Briggs said in the same interview. “If you’re a lawyer with experience in contracts, you know that that’s sending some sort of message . ... I couldn’t have gotten past the middle of page two before I’d have been summoning all of the lawyers who worked on this into my office and saying, ‘Why is this language in there?’”

Elliott, elected in 2016 after serving as the top deputy to her predecessor, Republican Jan Goldsmith, has had an unusually uneven four years in office. The question now is has she made enough mistakes to warrant removal from office and, if so, does Briggs deserve to replace her.

What’s clear is that it is essential that San Diego officials and taxpayers have a level-headed, scrupulous lawyer at City Hall. San Diego is poised to enter into a massive deal to redevelop the sports arena site, approve a new utilities franchise agreement to replace one that has existed for 50 years, and — maybe — adopt a new legal framework for shortterm vacation rentals, on top of the daily work of running a city.

On the plus side, Elliott has been invaluable in decisions about how the city should deal with its Mission Valley stadium site. In 2018, her office provided thorough, helpful reviews of two development proposals. And this spring, Elliott pushed back successfully against pressure from City Hall to quickly approve the San Diego State West plan for the stadium site without sweating crucial details. She also deserves kudos for pressing police to test every rape kit. And she has made her office a pioneering model for the state in using gun violence restraining orders to keep troubled individuals from doing harm to themselves and others. She and her staff provide training on this tactic to law enforcement agencies across the state.

Such accomplishments led the California Lawyers Association to name Elliott the state’s Public Lawyer of the Year in June. They are also why The San Diego Union-tribune Editorial Board endorsed Elliott well before the March primary. But in that endorsement, we also dinged her for unsuccessfully challenging the two stadium ballot measures in 2018, thus costing taxpayers nearly $600,000, and for briefly backing a proposed state law that would have made it more difficult to get public records.

Her mistakes are multiplying. The 101 Ash Street deal could be litigated for years and has already left the city throwing money down the drain. Before Mayor Kevin Faulconer suspended lease payments last month, the city was spending $535,000 in monthly rent on a building that needs at least $115 million in repairs to be occupied.

This builds on another scandal in which no one at City Hall did their homework. In December 2016, on Elliott’s very first day as city attorney, the City Council gave initial approval to a $30 million “Smart Streetlights” contract that was billed as a way to help monitor traffic and parking patterns and improve transportation planning but which became a mass surveillance program without public knowledge. Last month, Faulconer ordered the 3,000-plus cameras turned off pending development of a comprehensive policy on how the data could be used.

Against these failures, which Elliott shakily but with some justification says she inherited from her predecessor, it would have been easy to endorse a reformer, and Briggs offers a powerful indictment of a City Hall that can’t be trusted. But the problem for voters is that the outspoken Briggs has the right message but is the wrong messenger. He has sued the city too many times for even him to count. In 2014, Voice of San Diego labeled him “San Diego’s most disruptive lawyer” because of how he had used often newly created nonprofit groups to file dozens of environmental lawsuits against San Diego and local governments and developers across Southern California. And in February, inewsource outlined how Briggs has told the courts his nonprofits have no assets and can’t pay attorney fees and court costs when judgments go against them.

Briggs says he is merely showing his passion for protecting the environment, that journalists who probe his history are doing the bidding of the powerful interests he has crossed and that the state bar has no issues with his conduct. But he is a maverick more in the mode of City Attorney Michael Aguirre than Jan Goldsmith, and San Diego voters gave Goldsmith two terms and Aguirre just one.

What will voters do this fall? It’s a tough decision. Elliott and Briggs both have baggage, both have made bad decisions and both have a history of unfairly blasting reporters that is unnerving to The San Diego Union-tribune Editorial Board. We briefly discussed making no endorsement in this race, especially since an October surprise is a distinct possibility in the race. But ultimately, we believe strongly that we have a responsibility to endorse in city races, to share our best judgment and be judged for it, as our editorial board has done for decades.

Briggs has never managed a 400-employee, $60 million budget. Can he? If he’s a wild card, should he get the chance? Maybe, and voters who think Briggs is level-headed and scrupulous should vote for him. But Elliott seems more level-headed, has shown she can be scrupulous and already has the management experience. Some voters may believe she has run out of chances, but we believe her handling of SDSU West shows she is capable and committed to protecting the public.

We recommend Mara Elliott for city attorney, as is. And we expect her to live up to what she told us: “I don’t want another Chargers ticket guarantee. I don’t want to be reading the newspaper 10 years from now that ‘City Attorney Elliott really blew it, she missed it.’ And I don’t want the mayor and council to feel like that, either.”

If she wins, let’s all hold her to that.