Council Race Heats Up; School Candidates Battle Apathy : Russell Mailer Paints Galanter as ‘Too Radical’

Endorsed last week by the Los Angeles Police Protective League, Ruth Galanter, homeowner, businesswoman and leader of her Neighborhood Watch, looked like the kind of City Council candidate who could have passed muster at an American Legion Fourth of July picnic.

Yet, as her race against City Council President Pat Russell enters its final week, Galanter is being peppered by charges that she is “too radical” for residents of the heavily middle-class, suburban 6th Council District.

“A Radical Turn to the Left Is the WRONG WAY to Protect Our Community,” reads a bright yellow brochure mailed over the weekend to voters in the district. It is the latest in a series of like-minded attacks on Galanter by a Russell campaign team that clearly believes the tactic is more effective than a debate on the issues of growth and commercial development, which gave rise to Galanter’s candidacy.

There are ironies aplenty in Russell’s left-bashing strategy that, up to now, has focused on a handful of Galanter’s closest supporters but found little in Galanter’s own political past to impugn. One letter accusing her of leftist excesses was written by a former police official who later admitted that he did not know Galanter “from a hole in the wall.”

Moreover, the strategy is being crafted by a council incumbent who has described herself as a liberal Democrat and who, along with her campaign staff, has endorsed left-of-center candidates ranging from Assemblyman Tom Hayden to Sen. Alan Cranston.

Yet there are people, some of whom have worked with Galanter, who believe that she deserves what she is getting.

“People referred to Ruth as Madame deFarge,” said Bob Ryan, referring to the character in Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” who happily knitted while victims of the French Revolution were guillotined.

Ryan, who served with Galanter on the South Coast Regional Planning Commission, said he clashed with her over the issue of low-income housing in Rancho Palos Verdes, where Ryan lives.

“She was so ideologically pure on the subject, she and her cohorts on the commission mandated a sixfold increase in density on the coast just to get that housing in. And she calls herself an environmentalist,” Ryan said.

Others, including some developers, take a different view of Galanter’s work.

“She was honorable, fair, and intelligent,” said Joel Landau, one of the largest residential builders along the Southern California coast. “She was not somebody who was flat-out against development.”

Landau negotiated with Galanter over a 340-unit condominium project in Venice. Her conditions--a scaled-down development and more low-income housing--boosted construction costs by 5%, Landau said. But he said Galanter was a reasonable negotiator.

“You could deal with her,” he said. “She was willing to compromise. She knew how not to pull the pin and blow up the whole thing.”

Born and raised in New York City, Galanter, 46, was educated at the University of Michigan and at Yale, where she received a master’s degree in urban planning. Divorced, she moved to California in the early 1970s and took a job with the National Health Law Program, which worked to expand medical benefits for poor people.

But it was as an amateur environmentalist that Galanter came to be noticed by former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr., who appointed her to the regional coastal commission in 1977.

“Ruth is a classic example of the urban environmentalist, someone more concerned with the human impacts of overdevelopment or gentrification or pollution than she is with trying to preserve the pristine beauty of the landscape,” said Robert Gottlieb, an old friend who is an adjunct lecturer with the UCLA urban planning program.

“Ruth has always been less concerned about saving snails than she has with saving the homes of old people threatened by urban renewal in Santa Monica,” said Allan Emkin, another friend who works as a pension consultant for a local financial services firm.

Actually, Galanter has fought on several environmental fronts. In the early 1970s she joined a successful popular uprising to save the Santa Monica Pier from falling victim to a grandiose Miami Beach-style redevelopment plan. She helped lobby for statewide coastal legislation that protected public access to California beaches. And she joined a lawsuit to protect the Ballona Wetlands, the wildlife habitat next to Marina del Rey, which has been threatened by commercial encroachment.

Galanter won the chance to face Russell in a runoff on the strength of a primary performance that stressed her commitment to improving both the human and the natural environment in a district that borders the coast. But Galanter’s efforts to build on early momentum have been handicapped by a brutal disruption of her campaign. She has been hospitalized since she was stabbed in her home by an intruder on May 6.

Galanter’s following is an odd coalition of Westchester suburbanites and Venice dissidents joined in a common revolt against an incumbent’s perceived capitulation to big developers. Galanter’s forces began acquiring added respectability with a series of recent mainstream endorsements from City Councilmen Marvin Braude and Ernani Bernardi and Rep. Mel Levine (D-Santa Monica).

But none of that has deterred Russell from concentrating her firepower on the bohemian quarter of the Galanter camp. Russell has targeted three people, Jim Bickhart, Galanter’s press secretary, and Patrick McCartney and Moe Stavnezer, advisers to Galanter.

McCartney was once a member of the Socialist Workers Party.

All three have written for the Venice Beach Head, a homespun journal that routinely sneers at “President Rambo,” endorses Peace and Freedom Party candidates and in one article last May accused the U.S. government of being “the most open proponent of state-sponsored terrorism in the world.”

In addition, Stavnezer once chaired a meeting of the Venice Town Council, a militantly anti-establishment group that considered bestowing sister-city status on Tehran. At the time, February of 1980, 50 Americans were being held hostage in Iran.

Galanter herself was a member of the council for about a year until last February. Supporters say she joined mainly to aid in the council’s fight against the proposed Playa del Rey development south of Venice, the same project that would fill in a portion of the Ballona Wetlands.

Moreover, Galanter’s supporters argue that Russell’s insistent “red-baiting” is a diversionary tactic intended to lead voters away from the councilwoman’s record on development.

“The idea of Pat Russell accusing Ruth Galanter of being a leftist is ridiculous,” said David Shulman, a close friend of Galanter. “When you study their views on social issues, there probably isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Russell and Galanter. But when you look at what this race is all about, the debate over controlled or uncontrolled development, that’s where they differ.”