Simi Valley Mayor Appears Likely Successor to Fiedler

Simi Valley Mayor Elton Gallegly has new fame these days in the young suburb bursting with tract homes. He is known as the man who defeated Bob Hope’s son.

His Republican primary win in June over Tony Hope made Gallegly the heir-apparent to Rep. Bobbi Fiedler (R-Northridge), the hard-edged conservative from the 21st Congressional District who left her seat to run for the Senate. Fiedler was one of 12 to lose out in the primary to Rep. Ed Zschau (R-Los Altos), creating an open seat for her successor.

Gallegly’s general election contest with Democrat Gilbert R. Saldana, a city councilman from Avalon on Santa Catalina Island, has so far proved a low-energy affair. Republicans outnumber Democrats in the district 4 to 3, and Gallegly has raised five times more money than Saldana. Few Democratic strategists expect Saldana to win.

But while Gallegly may win with ease on Nov. 4, it wasn’t easy for him getting to his present position.

The lure of Southern California’s only open congressional seat drew several Ventura County Republicans and Hope, a Washington-based lawyer and lobbyist originally from the San Fernando Valley.

Hope became the early favorite. He had the glamour of the Hope name on his side, the Hope money and blue-chip endorsements, including that of former President Gerald R. Ford.

But Gallegly, 42, stayed in the race, a feisty contender.

He informed reporters that Hope had failed to vote for 10 years in Washington. He painted his opponent as a carpetbagger who returned to the Valley for a free ride to Congress.

Hope fired back. He disclosed that Gallegly canceled his Republican affiliation between 1974 and 1976, during the Watergate era. And his radio ads chided Gallegly for accepting contributions from developers, even as the mayor was voting on their projects in at least two instances.

A Reagan stalwart with no state or federal political experience, Gallegly answered Hope’s panache with down-home folksiness.

“My style is to be more methodical with issues, rather than going in like a bull in a china shop,” he said in an interview.

Born to a modest family in Southeast Los Angeles, he relishes telling how he left college without a degree, studied real estate at night and then launched a successful real estate firm in Simi Valley.

His Horatio Alger story played well at Rotary luncheons and kaffeeklatches across the rambling district, a mainly white, affluent area that stretches across the northern San Fernando Valley and southern Ventura County and includes Catalina.

Gallegly won the primary nomination, taking 50% of the vote to Hope’s 34%.

In the present campaign, opponent Saldana has sought to capitalize on the past GOP rancor, targeting mailers to Hope admirers and portraying himself as politically moderate. He assails Gallegly’s support from developers--who contributed about one-third of Gallegly’s primary war chest--as improper and out of step with anti-growth drives popular in the fast-growing region.

Saldana, 27, finds himself in a district generally hostile to his mainstream Democratic views. Another disadvantage stems from the isolation of his electoral base, Avalon, a town of 2,000 situated 55 miles from the mainland.

In 1980, when he was 21 and a sophomore at California State University, Long Beach, Saldana captured national attention as one of the country’s youngest city councilmen. A Latino whose grandfather arrived in Catalina in 1915, he has received endorsements from several Latino groups, including the Mexican-American Political Assn. Now, Saldana works as a real estate salesman and manager of a 12-room hotel on Catalina.

“The odds have typically been against me, but I’ve run successfully in a conservative, non-Hispanic district (Avalon) and won,” he said recently.

Philosophically, Gallegly and Saldana tend to split along conventional partisan lines.

Supports Balanced Budget

Gallegly, for example, supports a balanced-budget constitutional amendment, “Star Wars” weapons development and aid to the anti-Communist contras in Nicaragua, all of which Saldana opposes. Gallegly opposes amnesty proposals for illegal aliens and financing for Metro Rail, saying the transit system will fail to get Californians out of their cars. Saldana takes the opposite view.

In six years as Simi Valley’s mayor, Gallegly’s pro-building policies have promoted rapid population growth in the city of 93,000, a doubling of the sales tax base and a sixfold increase in industrial jobs. It has also roiled homeowner activists into pushing two slow-growth initiatives aimed at upstaging less-restrictive council plans on the November city ballot.

At times, Gallegly has sought to make the race a virtual referendum on Simi Valley’s development. His mayoral term saw Simi Valley transformed from a blue-collar backwater to the Ventura County city with the highest median household income.

Also running for the congressional seat is Libertarian Party candidate Daniel Wiener, a 38-year-old engineer from Simi Valley.