San Gabriel : Overwhelming Sweep for Slow-Growth Slate

In the end, even the losers seemed to concede, it was an appeal to “small-town” values in the face of development pressure that gave challengers an astonishing across-the-board sweep, ousting three City Council members and the city treasurer.

“The voters were just distressed with change and the times and things like that,” said Councilwoman Jeanne Parrish, defeated in one of the most hotly contested campaigns in the San Gabriel Valley.

Voters turned out in droves Tuesday after a brawling, bare-knuckle campaign that in its final weeks became a forum for personal attacks as much as a debate on the issue of rapid development.

According to unofficial returns, more than 5,000 of the city’s 13,000 voters went to the polls, with some precincts recording close to a 50% turnout. In the 1986 council election, less than 10% turned out.

Slow-Growth Group

All of the winners ran on a slate endorsed by the slow-growth grass-roots group Citizens for Responsible Development (CFRD). The new council members, John Tapp, James Castaneda and Frank Blaszcak, constitute what they say will be a reform-minded majority.

In the race for city treasurer, CFRD-endorsed John Janosik easily defeated incumbent Helen Achilles by more than 1,000 votes.

The top vote-getter was Tapp, with 3,097 votes, or 20.8%. Castaneda received 3,090 votes, or 20.8%, and Blaszcak 2,762, or 18.6%. Incumbents Michael Falabrino got 1,934 votes, or 13%; Parrish 1,619, or 10.9%; and Edward Lara 1,501, or 10.1%. Arthur Almaguer got 577 votes, or 3.9%; and Ted Anderson, who withdrew from the race last month, got 287 votes, or 1.9%.

In the race for treasurer, Janosik got 3,165 votes, or 62.5%, to Achilles’ 1,898 votes, or 37.5%.

Castaneda and Tapp won in all 13 precincts, and Blaszcak, who had been accused by opponents of having an unsavory past, won in at least 11 precincts.

The three new councilmen, who could be sworn in as early as next Tuesday, have promised to shake up the way the city is governed. Two of them, Blaszcak and Tapp, called for an immediate financial and management audit.

Ritchie Targeted

“At the first sign of any wrongdoing, I’d like to ask the district attorney to join in the investigation,” said Blaszcak.

They have also intimated that they will fire some key executive staff members, including City Atty. Graham A. Ritchie. Last month, Ritchie agreed to pay $300,000 in fines to settle a civil lawsuit alleging that he had a conflict of interest in bond issues in the City of Industry and Hawaiian Gardens, where he has also served as city attorney.

“You can safely say that, four weeks from today, Ritchie will be two weeks gone,” said Blaszcak. Ritchie could not be reached for comment.

By most accounts, this was San Gabriel’s “dirtiest” campaign in memory. “They accused us of everything,” said the defeated Lara. “They told nothing but lies. In my 42 years in San Gabriel, this was the dirtiest campaign I’ve ever experienced.”

But the incumbents waged a free-swinging campaign of their own, disclosing in widely circulated flyers that Blaszcak had resigned from a job in 1979 as public information officer for the city of Santa Ana after he was charged with giving a police officer a marijuana cigarette and offering to sell him cocaine.

Blaszcak, claiming that the allegations stemmed from an “entrapment” scheme, quickly offered to prove that the charges had been dropped by the Orange County district attorney. A spokesman for the district attorney’s office said records of the charges could not be retrieved until later this week. Blaszcak said Tuesday that he would sue his accusers, asking for a “multimillion-dollar” libel settlement.

In the final days of the campaign, supporters of the incumbents sent out mailers charging, among other things, that the CFRD-endorsed candidates would seek to evict all residents of apartments and condominiums. Some of the flyers were emblazoned with a cartoon of a hapless tenant getting kicked in the seat of his pants.

The citizens group--which Sabino Cici, a spokesman for supporters of the incumbents, continued to refer to on Election Night as “radical extremists”--also circulated hard-hitting materials.

These included a newsletter charging that Falabrino and Parrish, who as council members were frequently called upon to vote on development plans, were “major developers.” Both acknowledged owning property in the city but denied that they were developers.

“They (the citizens group) worked hard, and they had a lot of support,” said Parrish. “They had everybody believing them.”

Enmity between the council and Citizens for Responsible Development surfaced more than a year ago when a battle erupted over a proposal to build a hotel and supermarket complex on the site of the former Edwards Drive-In Theater. The citizens group charged that the plan would clog city streets with traffic and further clutter an overdeveloped city.

The underlying issue has always been growth. CFRD members charged at a series of tumultuous council meetings that elected officials had thrown open the city gates to developers, who have built multi-unit apartment buildings on lots that once held single-family homes.

CFRD has been effective in arguing its case. First, members collected enough signatures for a ballot measure on the drive-in theater plan, only to see the measure killed on a legal technicality. Then they petitioned for a one-year moratorium on all commercial and multiunit residential development, forcing a special election last December. The slow-growth side won that one overwhelmingly, by a better than 5-1 ratio.

Some voters said it was the council’s unanimous opposition to the moratorium that did the incumbents in.

“They all took the attitude of ‘To hell with you,’ ” said Don Lossing, a retired steamfitter who went to City Hall late Tuesday to follow the returns. “You can’t do that to people.”

In any case, the emotional campaign seemed to hurt the incumbents more than it helped.

“People were really turned off to them,” contended Tapp. “I spoke to some voters who were for the hotel project. They said that even though they took a different position from us, they were voting for the challengers because of the incumbents’ campaign tactics.”

Parrish said the incumbents’ flyers had been “defensive.”

“It was a defense,” she said, “trying to expose things that the group knew of. That kind of thing.”

But euphoric CFRD co-chairman Greg O’Sullivan, who has led the battle against the council for the past year, insisted that the incumbents would have lost under any circumstances. “I think their tactics backfired,” he said. “But the community was ready for a change anyway.”