Local Elections : Down and Dirty : Oceanside, Carlsbad, Solana Beach Engage in Election-Eve Mudslinging

With only a few days left until Election Day, the political fur is really beginning to fly in North County, with hit-piece mailers flooding the post offices and campaign hatchet jobs hitting the headlines.

Perhaps the biggest political flap has erupted in the Carlsbad City Council race, but candidates in normally staid Solana Beach have also squabbled as have those in Oceanside.

While growth and other weighty issues have continued to dominate the political agenda across North County, several races in recent days have deteriorated into mudslinging contests.

In Carlsbad, a year-old videotape used to recruit prospective city managers has turned into a campaign liability for Councilwoman Ann Kulchin. In the tape, which was released earlier this week by Kulchin’s chief opponent, the incumbent expresses hope during an on-camera interview that the city’s elderly slow-growth activists will soon die off.

“You will always have those people,” Kulchin said in the interview taped by an executive recruiting firm. “Fortunately, they’re few and they’re getting old and maybe they’ll pass on to their maker soon.”

Led by Elders

The city’s slow-growth movement was led by, among others, octogenarian Nelson Aldrich and former Councilman Anthony Skotnicki, 68.

Although Kulchin insisted that the comment was made in jest, rival candidate Dan Hammer said the statement was indicative of the councilwoman’s attitude toward the growth issue.

“I think it’s just symptomatic of Mrs. Kulchin’s feelings about the opposition and the controlled-growth movement,” said Hammer, who confronted Kulchin about the remark last week during a radio debate. “It’s just one of the many pieces of evidence that contradict the picture she has tried to paint of herself--as the champion of controlled growth. The fact is she is contemptuous of slow growth.”

In an interview Thursday, Kulchin said she would not have made the statement had she known the tape was going to be dragged out for political purposes.

“It was a flip remark,” Kulchin said. “I’m human. God has not finished with me yet. . . . I said some things on the tape that I probably wouldn’t have said had I known it was going to be viewed like this.”

The councilwoman lambasted Hammer’s use of the tape, saying it typified what has been a “dirty campaign.”

Mayor Claude (Bud) Lewis, a Kulchin ally, took up that theme during a mid-week press conference, criticizing Councilman Mark Pettine, a Hammer supporter, for turning the tape over to the council challenger.

Lewis accused Pettine of breaching faith with his council colleagues by sharing the tape, which the mayor said was meant to be shown strictly to prospective city managers during the search for a successor to retired Chief Administrator Frank Aleshire.

Pettine, however, rejected Lewis’ charges.

“I think the mayor’s statement is ridiculous,” Pettine said. “This tape is clearly public information. It was prepared at City Hall, at the taxpayers’ expense for the expressed purpose of being sent all over the U. S. I can’t understand why the mayor seems to think it’s all right for people all over the country to know about this, but not the people of Carlsbad.”

Money Came From Afar

Kulchin, meanwhile, said she is eager for the spotlight to turn on Hammer. In particular, she points to the fact that 50 of the 84 contributions Hammer has received so far in the campaign were from people outside of Carlsbad.

“I’m concerned that his money is coming from outside the city,” Kulchin said. “Why should people living in San Francisco, Santa Monica, San Jose, send money to a candidate who’s running in a Carlsbad election. What’s behind it?”

Hammer said the campaign contributions are “a non-issue,” explaining that he received a fair share of financial support from outside the community because his mother and sister held a fund-raising cocktail party in his hometown of San Jose and invited relatives and old friends from throughout that area.

While Carlsbad has been abuzz over the videotape episode, it is the mail that has them riled in Solana Beach.

Political rivals of Councilwoman Marion Dodson have questioned the legality of an Oct. 17 letter signed by the incumbent and sent on city letterhead at the taxpayers’ expense inviting more than 250 beach-area homeowners to a meeting to discuss law enforcement issues and other problems.

Councilwoman Celine Olson, a staunch Dodson foe and rival candidate, suggested that the letter may violate a state law prohibiting individual council members from making such mass mailings at city expense.

“It certainly appears to me to be a mailer that gave 262 voters the idea that this one council member and no others had an interest in their problems at a time that we’re running for reelection,” Olson said. “It was unfair not only to the other incumbents running, but to the challengers. I just don’t feel it was a proper thing to do.”

Dodson could not be reached for comment, but in a written statement sent to The Times and other newspapers the councilwoman said the meeting was typical of many she has held to discuss problems with city residents.

“I would hope that the normal course of city business is not to be interrupted because of an election of its officials,” Dodson wrote. “Surely the problems don’t cease to exist.”

Dodson said there “may have been an error in noticing the meeting, but the intent of the meeting was to help solve a neighborhood problem that exists, pure and simple.”

In the meantime, Olson has come under fire from the Dodson forces for a post office scrap of a different sort.

A local real estate agent, Pat Vollman, included campaign literature from Olson and Councilman Richard Hendlin in one of her monthly mass mailings to her clients.

Olson opponents contend that the mass mailing violates the city’s campaign contribution limit of $100 per individual. Vollman, along with her husband, had already made a cash contribution of $100 to Olson. Dodson supporters say the mass mailing of the campaign literature constitutes an additional “in-kind” contribution, putting Vollman over the cap.

Vollman called those charges “a frivolous thing,” saying she had talked to officials with the state Fair Political Practices Commission, who assured her the mailing was well within legal bounds.

“There’s no problem with it,” Vollman said. “The problem is, anyone can make allegations. I believe they’re just trying to take the heat off Marion.”

Nonetheless, Solana Beach City Clerk Debra Harrington has forwarded the issues, along with a separate dispute over a mass mailing by candidate James Hennenhoefer that failed to include his name on the outside of the envelope, to the district attorney for review.

Linda Miller, a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office, said that Harrington’s letter has been received but that the disputes would not be reviewed until after the election.

Oceanside Joins Fray

Never ones to be outdone on election-year charges, the candidates for elected office in Oceanside have fired many political rounds at one another, with Councilman Sam Williamson and one of his strongest opponents, former Councilwoman Melba Bishop, suffering the most severe wounds.

Several days ago, Williamson was hit with a raft of bad press for using a picture of himself with several Oceanside firefighters in a campaign brochure. A state regulation prohibits the use of photographs of uniformed police officers or firefighters in campaign material.

Bishop, meanwhile, was hit Thursday by the first of what her supporters feel will be a series of last-minute hit-piece mailers aimed at the council candidate.

The brochure mailed to city residents by the Concerned Taxpayers of Oceanside, a recently formed group opposed to Bishop, suggests that the former councilwoman, a leader of the successful 1987 slow-growth fight in Oceanside, is actually responsible for the recent development boom in the city.

It notes that more than 14,000 residential units were approved by the city from 1980 to 1984, the years Bishop served on the council. The mailer also attacks two Bishop allies, mayoral candidate Don Rodee and Nancy York, a candidate for the council.

“It’s full of lies and distortions,” Bishop said of the mailer. “I voted against a great many of those developments. To blame me for what was approved largely by other council members is ridiculous.”