Low-Profile Contest for Controller Takes Key Spot in Runoff : Tuttle, Shapiro Try to Overcome Scant Voter Recognition

The Los Angeles city controller’s race, overshadowed during the April primary by other municipal campaigns, will get featured billing in next month’s general election ballot.

The candidates who made it into the June 4 runoff are, however, vexed by a familiar problem.

With only two weeks of campaigning left, Studio City lawyer Dan Shapiro and Los Angeles community college Trustee Rick Tuttle find themselves virtual unknowns to much of the electorate.

In fact, supporters who have tried to enlist campaign help have found that many voters are not even aware that a race is under way for the third-highest citywide office. Other voters, who were interested enough to attend the few campaign debates, admitted that they are unsure what the city controller does.

120 on Controller’s Staff

The controller oversees a 120-person office that audits city departments and pays the city’s bills. He occupies a job that has been a political steppingstone for its last two officeholders--Ira Reiner, now Los Angeles County district attorney, and James K. Hahn, who won election as Los Angeles city attorney in April.

“The issues in the controller’s office, in most people’s minds, are mostly obscure and unexciting, and it will be tough for either candidate to marshal support,” said Alice Travis, a Democratic Party activist from Pacific Palisades who saw her hopes for the controller’s job vanish in the primary.

If anything will lift the race from obscurity in its remaining weeks, it will be the match-up between the aggressive campaign style of Shapiro and the powerful political backers behind Tuttle.

A UCLA administrator, Tuttle, 45, has a low-key demeanor that is more contemplative than combative. He is relying on an impressive list of endorsements that includes Reiner, Mayor Tom Bradley and organized labor as well as the Berman-Waxman political organization--an influential Westside Democratic group.

Both Are Democrats

The 38-year-old Shapiro is a Democrat, as is Tuttle. His backers for the nonpartisan office are politically more conservative, including City Councilmen John Ferraro and Ernani Bernardi and Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich, the state Republican Party chairman.

In a campaign orchestrated by the political consulting firm of Winner, Taylor & Associates, Shapiro has positioned himself as a maverick running against the City Hall establishment.

With both sides scrapping for campaign dollars, neither has launched a media barrage or emerged as a clear front-runner for the $48,424-a-year job.

“I think you have two good candidates with real good campaign consultants. Who does a better job in the mailbox will win it,” said Hahn, who has remained neutral in the contest to pick his successor.

Hahn’s decision to run for city attorney enticed four candidates into the controller’s race.

Shapiro Led in Primary

In the primary, Shapiro led the field with 36% of the vote, followed by Tuttle with 31%. Thirty-five percent of registered voters turned out for the primary, and that figure is expected to drop sharply because the controller’s race and two proposed ordinances are the only citywide issues on the June 4 ballot.

“I think it’s going to be the very hard-core voter who goes out and votes in this election,” said Shapiro campaign consultant Rick Taylor.

Targeting those likely voters is considered a particular skill of the Berman-Waxman organization, led by Reps. Howard Berman of Studio City and Henry Waxman of Los Angeles. The group backed Tuttle and losing city attorney candidate Lisa Specht during the primary. Now its hopes rest with Tuttle, a friend of Berman.

Tuttle was helped by the Berman-Waxman organization in his two successful races to retain his position on the community college board. He was appointed to the post in 1977, replacing Reiner, who had been elected controller.

Reiner’s penchant for publicity and his confrontations with city officials over such issues as travel expenses thrust the controller’s office into the headlines and into sporadic clashes with Bradley.

College Experience Cited

In announcing his endorsement, Bradley said Tuttle’s experience in dealing with the financial problems of the nine community college campuses makes him the best candidate.

But Shapiro, a real estate attorney and president of a San Fernando Valley homeowners group, has sought to use those same endorsements as a campaign issue against Tuttle, questioning how independent Tuttle would be as controller.

“I’m not a team player. . . . Rick is a team player,” Shapiro said. “Rick will not make waves. He will owe his election to the people who supported him, and he cannot afford to offend them.”

That is a prevalent theme at Shapiro’s campaign appearances. Cordial but persistent, he depicts Tuttle as an opportunist.

At a recent debate in the San Fernando Valley, Shapiro told a gathering of two dozen people that Tuttle, a self-described “moderate to liberal,” has “suddenly got religion. . . . He’s suddenly decided that this is a conservative campaign, that the chief fiscal officer of the city has got to espouse fiscal conservatism. . . . “

Tuttle, seated a few feet away, ignored Shapiro’s attacks and merely reiterated his list of supporters and stressed his commitment to be outspoken and independent. An affable man with a quick smile, Tuttle told the audience that his duties as head of the community college board’s audit committee would stand him in good stead as controller.

Position Switched

Tuttle did concede, however, that he had switched his position on one issue involving proposed domestic partnership legislation that would allow unmarried partners to qualify for the same pension benefits and other benefits as the spouses of city employees. The Los Angeles City Council has asked for a study of such a proposal.

Tuttle, considered a longtime supporter of gay and lesbian causes, supported the concept of domestic partnership during the primary but later changed his mind about whether it should apply to city employees. Tuttle said he opposes such legislation because it could lead to an “almost open-ended potential drain on the pension system and on city funding.”

That position brought him closer to Shapiro’s views, and it had repercussions in the gay and lesbian community, costing him the formal backing of the predominantly gay Stonewall Democratic Club, whose endorsement he shared with Travis in the primary.

“It was the key issue,” said Sallie Fiske, the club’s co-chairwoman. “Otherwise, he would have had a clear endorsement.”

Another gay political organization, the Municipal Elections Committee of Los Angeles, which also backed Tuttle during the primary and gave him $2,500, maintained its endorsement but decided not to contribute more money.

‘Message’ to Tuttle

Larry Sprenger, a co-chairman for the committee, said the lack of additional financial support was “a message” to Tuttle that members are unhappy about his turnaround.

“I don’t have the kind of enthusiasm for the city controller’s race that I did have, I can tell you that,” Sprenger said.

Widespread enthusiasm has been lacking for either candidate in a campaign that has focused on dry issues, such as how many more auditors are required or how efficiently the city bureaucracy spends taxpayers’ money.

If elected, Shapiro has said, he will try to implement cost-cutting measures suggested by a blue-ribbon mayor’s committee that he chaired two years ago. The panel identified about $50 million in possible budget cuts, which it said could be achieved by using the city’s work force more efficiently, paring some programs and revising city purchasing methods to take better advantage of bargains. Most of the recommendations were ignored by the mayor and council, Shapiro contended.

Tuttle has promised to set up a citizen’s advisory committee to look for ways to streamline the controller’s office and to strengthen the internal auditing of departments.

Both have pledged to hire more auditors. And both support--Shapiro more reluctantly than Tuttle--Proposition 1, the June ballot measure that would raise property taxes to pay for 1,000 additional police officers.

Fund-Raising Efforts

Since the primary, both have spent most of their time trying to raise the $250,000 that each campaign believes is the minimum needed to woo voters.

Shapiro, who has put $100,000 of his own money into the campaign, has relied largely on family and friends for money, although his efforts are now being aided by Joyce Valdez, a major fund-raiser who usually works for Republicans.

Tuttle, meanwhile, has been helped in his fund-raising drive by such notables as U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston, who was to appear Saturday at a Beverly Hills gathering in Tuttle’s honor.

If money is lacking, television advertising, which Shapiro used effectively in the primary, may be out of the question, although neither side has ruled it out.