One is a sun-worn surfer-activist who wants to open the long-closed doors of local government. The other is a clean-cut, Harvard-educated business attorney with a penchant for frankness.

They seem like an unlikely pair. But Donna Frye made a great decision when she brought in friend and first-round opponent Pat Shea as an adviser, adopting parts of his shrewd plan for San Diego’s recovery into her platform.

He may look like a square, but Shea has one of the brightest minds in the city these days. It’s often overlooked that this San Diego boy earned both an MBA and a JD from Harvard — not one after the other, but concurrently.

The Ivy-Leaguer lends one more awesome credential to the Frye camp: He’s got the only perspective on the city’s problems that’s clear enough to work. (Whether or not that will get Frye elected is another story.)

Why do Frye and Shea hold the only key that will work? The city’s mess is fabulously complicated — few even pretend to understand all of it — but the years of ugliness present us with one glaring fact: The city owes at least $1.7 billion more than it has.

The recipients of that money are now set to be city workers — many of them union members — whose leaders basically took pension benefits instead of bigger pay increases.

Since the leaders, who were on the pension board, were going to benefit (far more than the workers), the benefits are probably illegal — although the question of their legality and how to determine it is still a fiery topic among many, including the candidates.

So San Diego has thousands of workers who were guaranteed more money than the city can pay them. This leaves two clear options: Cough up the money, or find a way to pay the workers less. Since parts of the workers’ pensions are probably (definitely, according to the city attorney) illegal, and San Diego is a rather poor city these days, Frye and Shea’s answer is: Get the benefits declared illegal, and find a way not to pay them.

That last part is trickiest — getting workers to show up to a meeting and discuss how much of their pay they are going to give up. That’s the part that Pat Shea — and now Donna Frye — have a good plan for.

Shea’s original plan was to take the City of San Diego through a court-ordered Chapter 9 Municipal Reorganization. Some call it bankruptcy, though Shea shied away from that term in primary debates for obvious reasons.

That was a good plan for one reason: The task of coaxing workers — for whom the semilegal pension benefits are earned — to the bargaining table to give up their pay is impossible. A restructuring would reverse the situation: If workers want pensions at all, they would have to negotiate with the court-appointed bankruptcy agent — the city council.

Under that plan, the same corrupt group that got the city into this mess would be the one responsible for getting it out. So Frye did Shea one better: Instead of a bankruptcy proceeding, Frye plans to get the voters to pass a multifaceted ballot measure that would, among other things, reduce the benefits to an affordable level, easing the city out of the huge pension deficit.

There are other ways to do it: Frye’s opponent, Jerry Sanders, wants a court to decide the legality of the benefits while mortgaging city land and issuing more debt in the form of pension-obligation bonds to pay down the deficit. He also wants to fire 300 city workers to trim the fat … though he doesn’t know who just yet.

Sanders thinks he can get the union leaders to the bargaining table by showing them that the city is making a good-faith effort to fairly solve the problem by paying off some of the debt itself. He thinks he can end the self-interested standoff in the city just by being a good leader.

It might work. That’s really the best that can be said. Because when it comes down to it, what motivation is there really under Sanders’ plan for workers to give up the pay they earned?

There really isn’t any. The pension board has already completely refused to give up documents necessary to get the city going again out of consideration for its own self-interests. What’s to keep them from saying they earned their benefits and the city can sell “surplus real estate” and make payments for the next three or four or five decades to make good on the money it promised them?

So perhaps it is funny that the Harvard Republican and the Sunny Activist have teamed up against another Republican — especially when they’re on the shrewd side.

Unfortunately, a good plan will not even come close to guaranteeing Frye the victory. In my next column, I will explore why the candidates’ plans may actually have very little effect at all on their success.