Schaefer, Stratton Gain Leads in Local Races

Ventura County Supervisor Ed Jones, fighting to overcome the shadow of a vice arrest, was trailing Thousand Oaks Councilwoman Madge Schaefer in partial returns from Tuesday’s election.

With two-thirds of the vote counted, Schaefer held a steady lead over Jones, who was running for a fourth term.

Jones, saying he was “not overly optimistic,” predicted that, if he won, it would be by a narrow margin. He blamed “the incident 18 months ago,” when he was arrested in a Studio City motel on suspicion of lewd conduct and indecent exposure.

Although Jones eventually pleaded guilty to lesser charges and was placed on probation, he admitted publicly at the time that he had a drinking problem and was engaged in an extramarital affair when he was arrested.

In Simi Valley, where a heated battle over future development dominated the local ballot, early returns gave the lead to two propositions written by the City Council, over stricter controls pushed by a citizens’ group.

In the race for Simi Valley Mayor, incumbent Greg Stratton, who began as the front-runner but found himself fighting an energetic and free-spending campaign by Tom Ely, was holding a steady lead over Ely with about a quarter of the votes counted.

In a complex of races in Moorpark, all involved in the debate over the city’s growth, the earliest returns gave the lead to proponents of growth control, running against two incumbent City Council members. The first returns favored one of the two initiatives backed by the growth-control faction.

Jones, 56, a part-time college instructor and former Thousand Oaks city councilman, was first elected to the Board of Supervisors in 1974, representing the 2nd District, which includes most of Thousand Oaks, south Camarillo, south Oxnard and the southern beach areas of the county.

Schaefer, 44, began her political career in Thousand Oaks during the mid-1970s as a City Hall watchdog and self-described “rabble-rouser.” After winning her first term on the City Council in 1978 by a scant 88 votes, she finished first among the three council members elected in the 1982 race.

Jones set a Ventura County record by spending more than $138,000 on his campaign. Schaefer, a two-term Thousand Oaks City Councilwoman, raised slightly more than $50,000 in her first bid for county office.

With his financial edge, Jones had hoped to counter the political damage he suffered from the highly publicized 1985 arrest.

Schaefer made no direct reference in her campaign to the incident and did not mention it during several debates with Jones. But several groups, including Ventura County firefighters’ and sheriffs’ associations, indicated that they endorsed Schaefer because of Jones’ arrest.

During the weekend, some Conejo Valley voters reported receiving an anonymous campaign mailer that described Jones as a “proven pervert.” Schaefer condemned the mailer.

In the fast-growing Santa Clarita Valley, voters were deciding six ballot propositions that would impose taxes on developers, averaging about $6,000 for each new residential unit, to pay for school construction in five school districts.

The measures--Propositions M, N, FF, G, HH and Z--required approval by two-thirds of the voters to pass.

An estimated 30,000 new residential units planned by developers are expected to bring 12,000 new elementary school students and 7,000 high school students into the area by the year 2000. School administrators said they needed about $200 million to build the 24 new schools that will be required for so many students.

Developers, organized as Santa Clarita Valley Residents Against Unfair Taxes, vigorously opposed the measures, maintaining that the responsibility of school construction rests with the state. They spent at least $100,000 on a deluge of last-minute mailers and ads.

In Moorpark, the race for three City Council seats and the fate of three local ballot measures turned into a referendum on growth policies that have transformed the once-sleepy, semi-rural town into Ventura County’s fastest-growing city. This year alone, Moorpark has issued a record number of building permits that will increase the city’s current 16,000 population by at least 50% in the next few years.

Five challengers ran against incumbent City Council members Leta Yancy-Sutton and Albert Prieto for four-year terms.

In the first returns, Prieto and Yancey-Sutton were running fifth and sixth respectively behind the front-runners for the three seats--John Patrick Lane Jr., E.A. Brown and Clint Harper.

Four others ran for the remaining two years of the City Council seat left vacant by former Mayor James Weak, who resigned for medical reasons. Leading in that race was John Galloway.

The earliest returns gave a small lead to Measure F, which called for a yearly limit of 250 new building permits, with exceptions granted to affordable housing projects and developments of four units and less. It was sponsored by the Committee for Managed Growth, which complained that rapid residential development created congested streets and overcrowded schools.

Opponents of the measure, who included incumbent City Council members Yancy-Sutton and Prieto, said Measure F would unnecessarily stunt needed new development. Yancy-Sutton and Prieto both supported the City Council-sponsored Measure H, calling for an annual growth ceiling that averaged about 411 new building permits a year, up to a population ceiling of about 34,000. In first returns, the measure was being rejected.

Developers, anticipating that one of the growth measures would succeed, collected more than 2,400 building permits this year, enough to increase the city’s population well beyond its 1990 limits of 23,000, city officials said.

But the earliest returns also showed voters rejecting Measure G, also put on the ballot by the Committee for Managed Growth, which asked voters to decide on a development agreement between the city and Urban West Communities, a Santa Monica-based firm, for the 2,500-unit Mountain Meadows housing tract.

The agreement, which received City Council approval last spring, called for Urban West to provide approximately $7 million in improvements to roads, schools and parks in exchange for a guaranteed annual building permit allotment of 325 and exemption from any city growth restrictions.

A healthy city budget, low crime rates and a long list of proposed civic improvements favored the campaigns of the two Thousand Oaks City Council incumbents.

With nearly half of the returns counted, Mayor Alex T. Fiore, 60, a retired Rockwell International finance executive, and Councilman Lawrence E. Horner, 56, a Northrop executive, held comfortable leads.

Among the 10 challengers running for the third council seat left vacant by City Councilwoman Schaefer’s bid for a spot on the Ventura County Board of Supervisors, Tony Lamb was leading.

In the Camarillo City Council race, incumbent Sandi Bush, 46, was first elected in 1982. City Councilman Thomas Martin, 59, was seeking a third term. There were six who ran for the council seat left open by the retirement of City Councilman Francis (Tad) Bowen.

The growth-control issue dominated the election in Simi Valley, even eclipsing campaigns for mayor, two seats on the City Council and a pair of advisory-only measures on building an arts center.

The controversy surrounding two sets of competing growth-control initiatives pitted members of a slow-growth group, who supported the two more restrictive ballot measures, against the city’s political establishment, who supported two less drastic measures drafted by the City Council.

All candidates on the Simi ballot were measured by their positions on curbing future development and reducing congestion in the city of 93,000.

One of the two initiatives proposed by the citizens’ group, Measure D, was designed to place year-to-year controls on the amount, distribution, quality and type of housing development in the city at least through the year 2010. The other, Measure E, was written to prevent the city from approving industrial, commercial or high-density housing projects for hillside or rural areas.

Measures A and B, written by the City Council, dealt with the same issues but put fewer restrictions on development.

Despite the sometimes bitter rhetoric, proponents of the two more restrictive measures declared near the end of the campaign that they would be victorious even if voters passed Measures A and B.

“No matter what happened, we knew we won because there would be growth control in Simi Valley,” said Louis Pandolfi, co-chairman of Citizens for Managed Growth and Hillside Protection.

In the race for Simi Valley mayor, Stratton, a city councilman who was the early front runner, faced an aggressive campaign by Ely, president of the governing board of the Ventura County Community College District.

Ely spent more than $33,000, a record for a Simi Valley election and three times as much as Stratton spent.

Overshadowed by the rancorous debate on the growth and the mayor’s race was the election for two Simi Valley City Council seats.

Incumbents Vicky Howard and Ann Rock, who were targeted for defeat by the slow-growth group which complained of their voting records on development, held leading positions over challengers in the earliest returns.

The group endorsed David Penner, a financial controller for a Woodland Hills videotape manufacturer, and Mike Stevens, a math teacher at Simi Valley High School. They were trailing in early returns. Both have been active in the city’s neighborhood council, but had never run for office.

Others in the race for City Council were Bill Jones, a salesman; William M. White, a supervisor in an electronics laboratory, and Joseph Wierzbicki, a welder.

Growth was not the only issue decided by voters in Simi. Measures C1 and C2, proposals that asked voters to advise on whether a performing arts center ought to be developed in the city’s civic center and suggesting a financing mechanism, were advisory-only and generated little discussion.