2 Seek to Be 1st Full-Time Long Beach Mayor : Jan Hall Looks to the Past for Her Vision of the Future

She stood outside a Caltrans trailer with her three young children, handing out leaflets to stop construction of a freeway that threatened to slash across central Long Beach.

Nearly 20 years later, as City Councilwoman Jan C. Hall stumps to become the city’s full-time mayor, she still recalls her days as a homemaker leading the charge that successfully blocked a massive superhighway.

Then as now, her public and private lives are often intertwined. One moment she may be describing the fine points of zoning, then skip to an anecdote about a daughter’s wedding without missing a beat. The license plates on her telephone-equipped burgundy-colored Cadillac read, “6 JAYS,” representing the first letter of each member of the family.

She often conducts political business out her kitchen. Gov. George Deukmejian, a fellow Long Beach Republican, has strode across the tiled floor. Rep. Daniel E. Lungren (R-Long Beach), once debated his political future while seated at her breakfast table.

Her campaign carries a nostalgic tint. She has no grand vision of the future, but instead talks of returning Long Beach to its 1950s past, when she was growing up in a comfortable, uncrowded suburban atmosphere.

In public, her rhetoric is wrapped in a sugar coating reminiscent of her past as a PTA president and Girl Scout leader. It belies the harsher, no-nonsense tone she takes in private between puffs on a cigarette.

Hall has spent 10 years on the City Council. She is also board president of the Southern California Rapid Transit District and chairwoman of the state Commission on the Status of Women.

While adding to her resume, the prestigious assignments have opened her to allegations that she is increasingly inaccessible.

“If she did not feel the person was important, she did not return the call,” said Nina Spradling, who worked as Hall’s aide until being fired last year.

Spradling says she knows that calls were not returned by Hall because people would call back, sometimes repeatedly or for days on end.

Hall denied that she is inaccessible and said she makes an effort to return every phone call and respond to every letter.

Hall is disliked by merchants who say she ignores their needs while catering to homeowners. She is the kind of politician that people either love or hate, an observation she readily acknowledged.

“If you never take any chances,” she said, “you don’t become controversial like I am. You also never get anything done.”

Accomplishments Listed

She said she has accomplished many things. She has downzoned residential areas of her Belmont Shore and Belmont Heights district, slashed residential densities and forged agreements between homeowners and city government to divide the cost of making civic improvements.

Despite those accomplishments, Hall, 45, is a decided underdog for mayor. A Los Angeles Times Poll taken May 8 found her trailing runoff competitor Ernie E. Kell by a margin of 63% to 29%, among voters most likely to cast ballots.

Her campaign has been dogged by questionable management, failed strategies and most recently, a lack of money.

Hall refused to acknowledge that her campaign is in trouble. She said her own polls show her within a few percentage points of incumbent Mayor Kell.

If she loses, she still has two years remaining on her present District 3 council term.

Hall remains deeply ambitious, a trait clearly evident in her family. Hall’s husband, Jack, jokes about plans “to cultivate the Rose Garden” at the White House. And her mother, Marie Choura, says Hall will at least become governor. Choura said she remembers being called in by young Jan’s first-grade teacher: “She said, ‘You have a leader on your hands here.’ ”

Hall said her mother is the person she most admires because “she taught me (as) a woman there isn’t anything I can’t do.”

An A student at Lakewood High School, Hall chose a scholarship to UC Berkeley over an offer from Stanford University. She said she wanted to study engineering but was told that the major was open only to boys.

Gave Up on Engineering

“I followed the rules, whatever the rules were,” Hall said. She became an English major instead.

She quit college a year later to come home and marry the boy who proposed to her on the steps of the Lakewood Village Church, insurance broker Jack Hall.

She attended Long Beach City College and Cal State Long Beach, though she never received a bachelor’s degree. At 21, her first daughter was born, and within a few years there were two other daughters and a son. In the middle 1960s, the Halls moved into their present house in College Park Estates and met neighbors Chuck and Carol Greenberg.

Charles E. Greenberg, a prominent lawyer, said that one day his wife and Hall got to talking about a story they had read in the newspaper about the California Department of Transportation’s plans to build an east-west superhighway dividing Long Beach along about 7th Street.

Hall mobilized. She organized a protest and at one point positioned herself outside a Caltrans public information trailer--with kids in tow--and passed out leaflets to people who had shown up to ask about the project. Greenberg was impressed. “It was the first time that I saw Jan had unusual abilities,” he said.

Narrowly Lost to Simon

Hall ran for the City Council in 1972, narrowly losing to Renee Simon. Undeterred, she plunged back into activities that ranged from heading her homeowner association to leading a Girl Scout troop. Six years later, she dislodged Simon in the election of 1978. Since then, she has managed to retain the seat despite two strong challenges by dentist Jim Serles.

As a councilwoman, Hall said she has made a name by getting citizens to pitch in and aid a financially strapped city government--so-called public-private partnerships.

She said her proudest achievement came when such a partnership was formed in 1985 to restore the handsome boardwalk alongside Alamitos Bay. Hall said residents furnished the materials, a summer youth employment project supplied the labor, Long Beach City College employees supervised and the city loaned tools and inspected.

She takes credit for reducing in densities in the Southeast Area Development zone, an anvil-shaped area east of Marine Stadium and south of Cal State Long Beach. Instead of the requested 32,000 houses, apartments and condominiums, construction was limited to no more than 3,200 units.

But she has also amassed her share of enemies over the years, including some of the merchants along 2nd Street in Belmont Shore.

John Morris, proprietor of the Legends bar and restaurant in the Shore and the new Mum’s restaurant downtown, said Hall “hasn’t been very responsive to the businessmen’s needs.”

When a group of business people sought Hall’s help in bringing the famed Anheuser-Busch Clydesdale horses to town for a Mother’s Day promotion, they were so dissatisfied with her lack of support that they turned to City Manager James Hankla.

Hall said she has tried to work with business and has brought parades back to 2nd Street.

Despite heavy demands on her time, Hall continues to accept new assignments away from the city. Her highest-profile job is as a member of the RTD board of directors.

Colleagues on that board gave her high marks and said she has been effective. “I’ve watched her work in a very, very difficult environment and do a very, very good job,” said RTD board member Marvin L. Holen, a Los Angeles attorney and active Democrat. “She’s very intelligent and perceptive.”

All the while, however, the RTD has been rocked by scandals. Starting in the summer of 1986, the giant bus agency was beset by bus accidents, some of which involved drivers who tested positive for drugs.

Since then, the agency has been blamed for employing drivers with improper licenses, failing to account for its inventory of spare bus parts, being inattentive to an insurance fraud scheme and permitting high employee absenteeism.

Hall acknowledged that bus operations were mismanaged during a period when administrators were focusing most of their attention on planning for the downtown Los Angeles Metro Rail subway. “A lot of things were let slide on the operations side,” she said.

Two Long Beach residents who wrote unrelated letters to Hall to complain about RTD bus service said they never received replies.

Joanne McCaslin said she wrote Hall three times from October to February to complain about an RTD express commuter line: “She’s never written to me once, not once, and I just don’t understand it, particularly since I live in her district.”

RTD rider Elsie Lackey said the petition of bus riders she mailed to Hall’s City Hall office should have merited “some kind of response.”

Hall denied being inattentive to constituents, be they bus riders or Long Beach residents. She said her duties outside the city are an “extention of my job, whether I’m a council person or mayor” and she puts public service first.