Hawthorne Harmony in Jeopardy as Council Member Steps Up

On Nov. 25, council member Betty Ainsworth will vacate her seat to become this city’s first woman mayor. How to replace her--and with whom--has become a leading item on the city’s political agenda.

“Everybody is in his own little corner speculating on what is going to happen,” City Treasurer Howard Wohlner said.

Wohlner, the city’s senior political figure with 12 years in office, believes that the issue could revive the divisiveness that was a hallmark of politics in Hawthorne before the present council took office 2 1/2 years ago.

“There has been harmony, isn’t that the word?” said Wohlner, who ran unopposed Nov. 5. “I would like to see it remain that way. The city is heading in the right direction. I don’t want to see it have to deviate and get back into the old days when there was all this controversy and name calling, shouting at everybody.”

Special Election

The council has until Dec. 5 to appoint a replacement or call for a special election to be held within 90 days.

Three of the remaining four council members are maintaining publicly that they have not made up their minds.

“I’m not leaning any way,” said reelected Councilman Chuck Bookhammer, who called for the public to speak its mind before the City Council on Nov. 25. Steve Andersen, who did not face reelection this month, said he has not made up his mind on the issue. “I don’t really know,” Andersen said. “I’m just kind of waiting.”

David York, the other reelected incumbent, said he had not made up his mind but indicated that he was leaning toward a special election.

Only Ainsworth, who will retain a council vote as mayor, has been unequivocal about her position.

She said both before and after the Nov. 5 election that she would support the third-place finisher.

But City Clerk Patrick Keller said Bookhammer, York and Andersen have “have indicated for personality reasons they don’t wish to appoint” Ginny McGinnis Lambert, a longtime critic of City Hall who came in third in the Nov. 5 election after a hard-hitting campaign for one of the two seats at stake.

Instead, they are leaning toward a special election, Keller said, citing as evidence “the fact they haven’t announced they were going to appoint” anyone.

In 1983, Bookhammer, who finished third in a council election, was appointed to the council after Guy Hocker, elected mayor in the same election, vacated his seat.

Not in Favor of Lambert

A veteran observer of Hawthorne politics, who insisted on anonymity, agreed with Keller that the three councilmen do not favor appointing Lambert. “I’m sure that if the third-highest vote-getter was a different person, it would have been easier for the council to appoint,” he said.

For her part, Lambert has adopted an uncharacteristically subdued attitude, pledging cooperation with council members and modifying campaign positions that attacked incumbents. She also denied reports from Keller, Andersen and Bookhammer that she or her supporters are circulating petitions urging the council to appoint her.

“I’m not doing anything right now,” she said. “I am waiting . . . I obviously hope to be appointed.”

Responding to criticism that she had alienated council members, Lambert said, “As a taxpayer and citizen of Hawthorne . . . from one side of the microphone . . . I have no other opportunity but to voice my opinion loudly when I have a complaint. When I am on the other side of the microphone, I have an opportunity to work with them. As a single voice out there, it is not easy to be heard.”

If the council decides to stage a special election, Lambert, fifth-place council candidate Ray Pearcy and former councilman Larry Guyer have already said they are possible candidates.

Mayor Hocker, who did not run for reelection and leaves office Nov. 25, said he hopes the council will appoint Lambert to avoid a bitter special election that he predicted she would win.

“If this person is not appointed, she will become a martyr and she will become the darling of the community and she will win hands-down in an election which will not benefit the city at all because it could have been done so simply by appointing her,” Hocker said.

On the other hand, the mayor said, if Lambert is appointed, she would feel that she had received what she deserved and arrive on the council in a less vengeful frame of mind than if, because of unyielding opponents on the council, she had to wage another campaign.

The mayor said sentiment was “widespread” to “appoint somebody and get on with the business of the community.”

Two of the losing candidates in the council race, Dick Mansfield, who came in fourth, 38 votes behind Lambert, and Kathy Corsiglia, who came in last, announced last week that they supported appointing Lambert.

Corsiglia, addressing the City Council, said it would not be right to spend between $25,000 to $35,000 to hold a special election for a seat that pays $250 a month, and that the work of the council would suffer with an unfilled vacancy.

Mark Young, son of a former police chief, countered Corsiglia and Mansfield by presenting the council with a petition signed by 220 residents favoring a special election.

Young, security coordinator for Mattel Toys, said that supporters of Bookhammer and York would be “disenfranchised” by an appointment because they used their two votes to support the incumbents Nov. 5 and had no opportunity to indicate whom they liked third-best.

Precedent Set

Supporters of appointing Lambert say the Bookhammer appointment set a precedent that the council should honor.

But Andersen said, “This is not a comparable situation, certainly not a mandate.”

He explained that Bookhammer ran a close third in 1983, beating the fourth-place finisher by hundreds of votes. In the recent election, Lambert finished 38 votes ahead of Mansfield. Both were about 400 votes behind the top two finishers, York and Bookhammer.

Bookhammer said half a dozen callers cited the narrow gap between Lambert and Mansfield as reason for favoring a special election. Two other callers favored Lambert’s appointment, he said.

Closeness of Race

York said the narrow gap between the third- and fourth-place finishers “would almost dictate to me that there should be a special election, but I hate to say that prematurely.”

“What do the voters want? I don’t feel that I have that right to try to determine for the city’s people who should represent them for two years.”

In addition to the debate over the significance of the Nov. 5 vote totals, political maneuvering over the appointment appears to be under way.

Bookhammer said that someone claiming to speak for Lambert had told him “that Ginny has agreed to bury the ax and she can be a team player.”

“I haven’t heard it from the horse’s mouth,” he said. “I intend to meet with her . . . to find out where she is coming from in terms of the issues of the past which were really not issues.”

In particular, Bookhammer said he wanted to know if Lambert included commercial redevelopment, which he supports as a way of building the tax base, in her blanket campaign condemnation of “overdevelopment.” In a campaign brochure attacking York, Lambert charged, “redevelopment becomes overdevelopment.”

Lambert now says she does not oppose commercial redevelopment. “My only concern is that it would be encroaching on communities. . . . Those problems that have shown up can be resolved,” she said.

She said she had not directed anyone to contact Bookhammer, adding that she would be happy to meet with him.

“I didn’t know there was a hatchet to bury,” she said.

Keller tied the councilmen’s attitudes to the 1982 recall of three council members, including Larry Guyer.

“The recall has put an air of responsiveness on the part of the council,” Keller said. “They are not insulated as the former council was. They can no longer afford to take that type of attitude. They are looking for a mandate. They are putting it back on the people. It may be a contest to see who gets the most signatures.”

The recall was triggered after Guyer, then-Mayor Joseph Miller and Councilman Bruce Gies voted to consolidate the April, 1982, municipal elections with the November, 1983, school board elections, extending by almost 20 months the council terms of Ainsworth, Gies and Miller. The action, which was not on the council agenda, was taken about midnight in a deserted council chamber with no one present except officials. Hocker and Ainsworth voted against the consolidation.

Swift Reaction

Political reaction was swift: Four weeks later, a petition with 3,200 signatures asked that the extension be put on the ballot.

Guyer rebuffed the petitioners. “We had, especially me, done an awful lot of studying. I felt I knew the subject backwards and forwards and they had been getting some misinformation from somewhere,” Guyer said recently.

The three councilmen who had voted to extend their terms were ousted in a recall election in November, 1982.

One of the originators of the recall movement, Wolfgang Baumann, spoke up at the council meeting last week, urging that the council follow the Bookhammer precedent and appoint Lambert.

But his main point was that the council has not provided leadership, failing to resolve the procedural question for replacing a council member who becomes mayor.

“I cannot but point the finger at the council, which had two years. You don’t know what to do--put it on the ballot or have a special election,” he said.