Little Guys Win City Hall Tussle : Small Group Ousts 3 Members of Council in Moreno Valley Dispute

MORENO VALLEY, Calif. — Chalk one up for the little guys.

Outspent nearly 50 to 1 and hit with a libel suit, a handful of local residents mobilized a grass-roots recall campaign that ended last week in the ouster of a majority of this Riverside County community’s first City Council.

The recall drive in Moreno Valley, a booming city of 65,000 incorporated just 14 months ago, was mounted last May by a group called the Alliance for Responsible Government.

The group accused three councilmen of failing to respond to complaints about a surge of high-density development, crowded schools, inadequate parks and congested highways. Their perceived failure to take an early position against a plan to build a toxic waste incinerator just outside the city limits may have been the last straw.

“This is a real inspiration, because so many feel they can’t fight city hall and win,” said Mary Faust, director of a child care center and a co-founder of the alliance. “Can you imagine that we beat them with $3,000 and they spent $145,000?”

No one was more astonished by the outcome than Mayor Marshall Scott and two other council members, David Horspool and Stephen Webb, who lost their positions by a crushing 2-to-1 ratio in a recall election last Tuesday.

Mayor ‘Totally Surprised’

“I was totally surprised,” said Scott, owner of a Moreno Valley insurance company. “We failed to get our message out.”

“There was a post-mortem survey done by an independent group which showed a lot of people were turned off by the money we spent,” said Horspool, a Redlands attorney.

“You can’t have a group spreading lies about you without having your reputation harmed,” he said. “They (alliance members) were telling people we were for hazardous waste. . . . That is a lie.”

Webb could not be reached for comment.

The three will remain on the job until their successors are elected, because otherwise the five-member council would be without a quorum, city officials said. New council members probably will be chosen in the June 3 primary.

Ken Emanuels, legislative director of the League of California Cities, a Sacramento lobbying association representing 441 cities, said the recall here was extraordinary.

“It is quite unusual for a majority of a City Council to be recalled in its first term,” said Emanuels, who has been with the League for 15 years. He noted, however, that “growth issues” are becoming common sources of contention in newly incorporated cities across the state.

Sends ‘Overwhelming Message’

For John Jackson, a sales representative and president of the alliance, the recall sends “an overwhelming message to all politicians in Riverside County.”

“People can have local control,” Jackson said. “All they have to do is organize.”

That message was not lost among officials of neighboring communities, where rapid growth has meant crowded schools, congested highways, inadequate sewer facilities and a host of other problems.

Arta Valenzuela, mayor of nearby Lake Elsinore, which has seen its population double since 1980, said the recall was “scary, very scary.”

“If people elect you, then they should not, for emotional reasons, be able to recall you and ruin your reputation,” Valenzuela said. She compared recall efforts to “terrorism--one happens and how many more happen?”

“The lesson we can learn is to keep our communication channels open to newcomers as they arrive in our community,” said Jessie Washington, associate planner for the City of Perris, which expects its population to swell by 9.7% this year.

If it is anything, Moreno Valley is a community of newcomers--and commuters.

Attracts Young Families

Located about 10 miles east of Riverside, it has become a mecca for young families seeking affordable housing and safe neighborhoods. About half of its working residents drive long distances to work in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

County officials say Moreno Valley’s population could double in 15 years, placing even greater strains on an area already suffering from acute growing pains.

Alliance members say they initially had a hard time persuading local residents that Scott, Horspool and Webb--all of whom drew heavy financial support from builders and developers in their council campaigns--were not doing enough to control growth.

The targeted council members, meanwhile, maintained all along that much of the development now taking place is the result of decisions made by the county before Moreno Valley was incorporated.

It wasn’t until the alliance accused the councilmen of being slow to act against the proposed toxic waste incinerator that the group began to attract a sizeable following.

Wolfskill Recycling Technologies had proposed a $60-million hazardous waste treatment facility in a box canyon a few miles east of the city. Opponents feared the plant would be vulnerable to earthquakes, bring trucks laden with toxic chemicals into the area, and possibly pollute the atmosphere and reduce property values.

Alliance Activities Described

Alliance members Ron and Mauri Hauser spread the word at night meetings in homes and city parks. Faust and Jackson bought home computers to log information on toxic waste treatment plants and council activities. Volunteers circulated flyers in neighborhoods and supermarket parking lots warning about the dangers of having a toxic waste plant so near to town.

Meanwhile, in defense of the councilmen, a group calling itself the “No on Recall Committee” launched its own door-to-door campaign and received contributions from local residents as well as builders and developers.

The committee and its predecessor, the Moreno Valley Voters Committee, raised $144,350. About $21,000 was used to hire a Los Angeles political consulting and public relations firm, which produced campaign literature intended to discredit the alliance.

Despite the firepower, the alliance by October had collected more than the 4,000 signatures needed to force a special recall election. Two months later, Wolfskill Recycling bowed to a wave of opposition and dropped its plan to build the plant near Moreno Valley.

The three council members may have sealed their own fate in early October, Jackson said, when they filed a libel suit against five leaders of the alliance. The suit was based, among other things, on a political cartoon circulated by the group suggesting that the councilmen were doing little to stop the toxic waste incinerator from being built.

‘Little Guys, Big Guys’

Jackson said the lawsuit made the alliance appear like “little guys against the big guys” in the minds of many local residents.

Shortly after the lawsuit was filed in Riverside Superior Court, the American Civil Liberties Union announced that it would defend the alliance at no cost on grounds that it “could have a very serious effect on people’s ability to exercise their First Amendment rights (to freedom of speech),” said Toni Cordero, the ACLU attorney handling the case. A hearing on the suit is scheduled Friday.

On March 4, all three council members were trounced in a vote that drew 36% of the city’s 25,000 voters to the polls. The totals varied for the three recall targets, but in each race, about 5,900 votes were cast in favor of the recall and about 3,000 against.

Scott predicted that Moreno Valley may now be headed for a “catastrophe.”

“Very quickly the perception will be that Moreno Valley is a ‘no-growth’ city,” he said. “Industry and community services will not come here.”

The alliance, which has begun lining up candidates for the June primary, disagrees.

“I’m proud to be a resident of Moreno Valley now,” said Faust. As for the councilmen, she added, “They should have listened to their voting constituents--not to their paying constituents.”