Pringle Lost but Isn’t Finished

For the mayor of California’s 10th-largest city, a high-profile court battle against the home team was hardly a welcome fight, especially in an election year.

The legal crusade led by Anaheim Mayor Curt Pringle against the Angels baseball franchise will cost the city millions of dollars, at the least. It may also cost it the goodwill of team owner Arte Moreno. It has made the city, for a year, the butt of jokes.

And when a jury decided last week against the city, saying the team could legally call itself the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, the city’s pride took another drubbing.

For the 46-year-old mayor, it was an unavoidable fight. “I think it was very necessary, that we did what we had to do,” said Pringle, who had the approval of the City Council. “Our action was a response to another action.”

Despite his highly public defeat, most believe Pringle, who commands both broad political capital and a sizable war chest, will emerge virtually unscathed. Ten months from election day, no one has yet stepped forward to challenge a mayor who late last year at a fundraiser was able to raise $300,000 in one night.

Even Pringle’s opponents agree that in renaming the team the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, Moreno backed the mayor into a corner.

For many residents of Anaheim -- home to Disneyland, a huge convention center, a growing business community, and professional baseball and hockey teams -- the renaming was the clearest possible demonstration of the city’s perceived second-class status compared to the metropolis to its north.

Pringle said he believed there would have been a great backlash from residents had he simply acquiesced. “Saying ‘Go ahead, throw our name overboard’ -- that would have been met with a tremendous political response,” Pringle said.

Though he received a couple of calls from residents decrying the suit, Pringle said, there were scores more that supported it.

“I’d be very surprised if he suffered for it,” said John Pitney Jr., a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont and a former Anaheim resident, who has followed Pringle’s career for years. “People like their mayor to stand up for them.”

The city says it has tallied $2.7 million in legal costs, but the final amount is expected to be much higher. The figure doesn’t include costs of the five-week trial, and does not account for Moreno’s own legal fees, which the city might be made to pay.

“While some people may be unhappy with the costs of the litigation, I think a lot of people in Anaheim think it was a fight worth making,” Pitney said.

But some residents saw the lawsuit as a loser from the get-go, an unforgivably expensive mistake. Allan L. Davis, 57, a real estate developer, said he planned to launch a campaign to recall Pringle, seeking signatures at local grocery stores.

“There’s no reason they should have ever sued Arte Moreno,” Davis said.

“It’s in the lease, black and white. As long as Anaheim’s in the name, it doesn’t have to be in the first part of the name. Instead of treating him like a prized entrepreneur owning one of the best assets of the city, they sued him.”

Davis said he voted for Pringle and has no beef with his politics, but he cannot forgive what he perceives as the squandering of taxpayer dollars.

“I think he’s dead,” he said of Pringle’s political future. “Anything Pringle tries to do, I’ll never contribute to him.”

Davis worries Moreno may decide to move the Angels to another city. “They’ve made an enemy of Arte Moreno,” Davis said. “It takes away the love he might have had for Anaheim, owning the team here.”

Pringle, who grew up in Garden Grove in the family drapery business, has two teenage children and has been married for 22 years.

In 1988, he won a seat in Orange County’s 71st Assembly District, though the victory was marred by controversy. On election day, the local GOP posted uniformed guards in Latino neighborhoods in Santa Ana, ostensibly to discourage illegal immigrants from voting.

Though Pringle denounced the tactic, it dogged his career, and it took years to repair relations with Latino constituents. He became speaker of the California Assembly in 1996, though term limits forced him from the Assembly two years later.

In 2002, he took part in a successful charge to bring the Mexico-based supermarket Gigante to Anaheim, despite resistance from the city. The same year, he was elected mayor. He remains well-connected to Sacramento power circles, in a way few mayors are.

Amin David , a 30-year resident of Anaheim and the president of Los Amigos of Orange County, a Latino-rights group, said the poll-guard incident made him initially distrustful of Pringle.

But he does not think Pringle was to blame, and likes the mayor’s record on pushing “resident-friendly” ordinances in Anaheim, such as decriminalizing code enforcement and dropping a ban on motel stays of longer than a month.

David said he did not support taking the Angels to trial, but believes Pringle was merely enacting the residents’ will. He said that with Anaheim’s tax base -- drawn from Disneyland, the Arrowhead Pond, and the convention center -- the city can afford the legal costs.

“Fortunately, I think our city is one of the most financially secure in Orange County,” David said.

Esther Wallace, chairwoman of a decade-old citizens group on the city’s west side, is no Pringle fan. She didn’t vote for him last time and she plans to support anyone who challenges him in November. But she doesn’t blame Pringle for fighting the name change.

“He went for it, he did try to get the name back and I think people will say he did his best,” she said. “We taxpayers built that stadium and Arte Moreno is using it. I give Pringle and the city credit for not buckling under.”

Still, Wallace said, she thinks the mayor has turned his back on West Anaheim.

“He won’t work with us, but he certainly works with developers,” she said. “Every empty lot, it seems like we’re getting 18 condos.”

Anaheim Councilman Harry Sidhu said he doesn’t think Pringle’s decision will come back to haunt him.

“I don’t think losing this case will have any bearing on his credibility,” he said. “But of course, people will try to take him down over it and I believe it will be a campaign issue for anybody who’s running against him.”

Pringle is running for his second four-year term. Because of term limits, it will be his last. He said he does not intend to seek higher office.

“There’s no political job I can envision that I’d ever want or run for,” Pringle said, “other than reelection as mayor.”