Issue of Growth Dominates Key Local Elections

The political issue of growth dominated key city elections Tuesday from Santa Monica Bay to the San Gabriel Valley as voters decided on their municipal leadership.

Voters went to the polls in 58 of the county’s 85 cities to elect city council members and decide initiatives.

In San Gabriel, three slow-growth candidates were elected, with James Castaneda getting the most votes.

A disappointed Councilman Edward Lara, who was beaten, said, “To a certain extent, the voters don’t understand that you just can’t stop development completely.”

But one of the challengers, John Tapp, cautioned that local issues other than growth might have been a factor in his election victory.

“Slow growth is important, but a lot of people went for us because of all the smear mail. I think that backfired,” he said.

Building Moratorium

In San Gabriel, a citizen-initiated moratorium has virtually halted development of commercial and multiunit residential buildings for the last several months. The moratorium passed in December by a 5-1 margin.

Glendora is an example of how the slow-growth movement has spread to places where, outwardly, there seems to be little growth.

The upscale San Gabriel Valley city has grown at about a rate of 2% a year, has just 43,000 people and most of the new growth consists of large, Tudor-style homes on spacious lots costing between $250,000 and $1 million.

There, slow-growth advocates registered a partial victory. They defeated incumbent John Gordon, a pro-development candidate who was a target of slow-growth citizen groups, such as one called Glendora Pride.

Gordon finished third with all 22 precincts reporting.

David Bodley, a member of Glendora Pride who was endorsed by the group, won one of two open seats. But Planning Commissioner Larry Glenn, who was supportive of the council’s development policies, was the top vote-getter.

Guy Williams, a former mayor, said Bodley’s showing in the election was unprecedented in his memory.

“I’ve never seen an election where a relative newcomer polled so many votes,” Williams said. “It’s a strong, strong message. . . . This is a mandate of the people.”

As in San Gabriel, political leaders were divided on the meaning of the results.

Retiring Mayor Kenneth Prestesater, who is leaving office with this election, said the slow-growth vote that swept Gordon from the City Council was “an overreaction by the people of Glendora based on misinformation.”

Called a Travesty

“It’s a wave that started, and I don’t know if anyone thought it would get this far,” Prestesater said. “It’s a travesty.”

In Manhattan Beach, however, two outspoken slow-growth incumbents, Jan Dennis and Gil Archuletta, were soundly beaten by two newcomers who opposed a June ballot measure restricting commercial parking lots and setting a 26-foot height limit on many buildings in the beach community.

The newcomers, Pat Collins, a planning commissioner, and Steve Barnes, a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department lieutenant, were the top vote-getters. Incumbent Bob Holmes, who also opposes the June measure, retained his seat.

In El Segundo, a growth-control measure was defeated. Among the opponents were Hughes Aircraft, Rockwell International and other big corporations of the bay city. They provided most of the $34,940 to a Chamber of Commerce committee formed to block the measure.

Rockwell sent letters to its employees living in El Segundo telling them of corporate objections. Hughes went even further, urging employees living in the city to vote no, supplying them with absentee ballots and even conducting a public opinion poll in El Segundo to find out public sentiment on the measure.

Backing the measure was Group United for Residential Rights, which estimated that it would spend about $2,200 in the election.

The initiative, Measure C, proposed voter approval for changing density limits and also required parking structures to be included in a building’s square footage. That would result in smaller buildings to meet density limits.

West Hollywood, a city created to preserve rent control and limit growth, demonstrated again it was at the forefront of the growth-limit movement.

Although the local campaign was marked by final days of bickering, all of the five council candidates have put themselves squarely in favor of restricting growth.

So united was the city’s political leadership, that the issue did not figure prominently in the campaign. The general plan now under consideration calls for a significant reduction in development limits.

Major oil companies were big contributors in a $50,000 fund that helped to beat a measure in Paramount that would have levied a business license tax on the city’s only oil refinery.

The 6-cents-a-barrel levy was designed to raise $650,000 a year. Backers said the money could be used for a sheriff’s substation and a satellite Municipal Court in Paramount.

Ethnic politics dominated the contest in Huntington Park.

The city, once heavily Anglo, is now largely Latino. But the council is all Anglo.

Challengers Raul R. Perez and Raul A. Aragon said Latino lawmakers were needed to better represent the city’s population.

The growth issue in the mayor’s race in Long Beach centered on slowing development of neighborhoods, while continuing to back the renaissance of the city’s once-faded downtown.

The three major candidates, among nine running to become the first full-time, citywide-elected mayor since a City Charter change in 1915, all advocated tougher measures to protect neighborhoods from an influx of boxy, new apartment buildings.

In the voting, Mayor Ernie Kell’s hopes of winning a term under the new, popular vote system got off to a rough start with strong challenges from candidates Luanne Pryor and City Councilwoman Jan Hall.

In early returns, Kell, though ahead, faced the possibility of a June runoff against either of the other leaders. The early returns were from precincts concentrated in the coastal area of Long Beach, where Pryor’s theme of overdevelopment has played well.

Contributing to this article were Times staff writers Jill Stewart, Chris Woodyard, Edmund Newton, Jeff Miller and Barbara Baird.