Mail Carriers Shoulder Burden of Council Campaign

In the closing days before Tuesday’s Los Angeles City Council elections, the real campaign in the northeast San Fernando Valley’s 7th District is taking place through the mail.

Candidates have begun a barrage of mailings, including a hard-hitting piece attacking Councilman Ernani Bernardi’s poor attendance at council meetings.

“We appreciate that when someone is 78 years old and has served on the City Council since 1961 that he may have a high absentee rate,” says the mailer--one of seven sent out so far by Bernardi’s leading challenger, Lyle Hall. “But don’t we deserve a full-time councilman who can devote 100% of his time to solving our district’s problems?”

Bernardi actually is 77, not 78.

The heavy volume of mailings is another sign that Bernardi is in a tough race. He is in a largely new district, carved out by the council in 1986. And he has seven opponents.

Usually, incumbents’ opponents don’t raise enough money for mailers. In this race, four challengers have sent out multiple mailings.

The challengers say they hope to peel off enough votes to force Bernardi into a runoff. If no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote, the top two vote-getters will meet in a June runoff.

Hall earlier had pledged not to conduct a negative campaign, but said he changed his mind after learning more about the incumbent’s record. “It may appear negative because his performance is negative, but our pointing out his inadequacies is not, to me, running a negative campaign,” he said.

Hall’s mailings are being designed by Harvey Englander, an aggressive political consultant who engineered Mike Woo’s 1985 defeat of Councilwoman Peggy Stevenson and ran the successful 1981 campaign that helped the late Councilman Howard Finn win election to a Valley district now partly represented by Bernardi.

“In a race like this, voters only start focusing in 10 days before the election,” Englander said Thursday. “Direct mail is the principal method in local elections for people to get information. It is the job of people like me to create a mailer that will be read.”

One mailer that Hall sent out Thursday is directed at voters 35 and younger. The cover of the mailer reads: “Decide for yourself if it is time for a change.”

Inside, it says: “It’s 1961. John F. Kennedy has been President for about 100 days. Dodger Stadium has not been built. The only gangs we knew about were in ‘West Side Story.’ The 405 freeway was under construction. Ernie Bernardi, a 50-year-old developer, is elected to the Los Angeles City Council.

“Today, Ernie Bernardi wants reelection to his eighth term on the City Council, even though our community suffers from problems that didn’t even exist in 1961,” the mailer says.

Hall also sent out a mailer written by his 95-year-old grandmother and aimed at seniors.

Bernardi, who was a home builder before his election, is especially miffed about the Hall mailer attacking his attendance record.

“I think it will backfire,” he said. “I think the people know me better than that.”

Bernardi missed 29 of 135 council meetings between Feb. 1, 1988, and Jan. 31, 1989. Sick with a virus, he was hospitalized during January after falling and hitting his head. He also missed meetings last year to care for his ailing wife. But, he said, even when he missed meetings, he often conducted business from home.

The councilman said he probably has been away from the job less than Hall--an assertion that Hall, a Los Angeles fire captain and a former president of the city firefighters’ union, said is probably true. But, Hall added, when he is absent, another firefighter takes his place. “When Ernie is absent, there is no councilman,” Hall said.

Bernardi, who has developed a reputation as a scrappy fighter, also has sent out mailers. But “all they do is talk about what I’ve done in the district,” he said. Instead, he has used candidates’ forums to respond to his critics, particularly Hall.

Commenting on Hall’s long list of labor endorsements, Bernardi said at a forum in Sherman Oaks on Thursday that he himself refuses to solicit union support because “70% of the city’s budget involves salaries, pensions and fringe benefits. In my estimation, the unions’ endorsement is a flagrant conflict of interest.”

“If you’re looking for a union candidate to rubber-stamp all the pay raises, get Mr. Hall,” he told about 100 senior citizens at Thursday’s meeting, sponsored by Seniors for Action. Bernardi has long contended that Los Angeles city employees are paid more and enjoy substantially better pensions and other benefits than workers in other big cities.

Bernardi is not the only one displeased with some of the mailers.

Irene Tovar, another Bernardi challenger, has attacked one of Hall’s mailers as deceptive.

The mailer, directed at the district’s growing Latino population, is titled “Why Hispanics should vote for Lyle Hall for City Council” and pictures Hall shaking hands with Cesar Chavez, leader of the United Farm Workers.

“Cesar told me personally that he was going to stay out of the race,” said Tovar, a former chairwoman of the Hispanic Caucus of the state Democratic Party. Hall said Chavez has not endorsed any candidate but was aware that his picture would appear in the brochure. Calls to Chavez were not returned.

Bernardi and Tovar also plan to target Latinos in mailers.

Challenger Jules S. Bagneris III has sent out two mailers, including one containing a picture of himself and other residents wearing surgical masks at a demonstration to protest continued operation of the Lopez Canyon Landfill in Lake View Terrace. The mailer, which does not mention Bernardi, says: “Stop the poisoning of our children.”

Al Dib, the only Republican in the nonpartisan race, sent out a mailer aimed at Republicans.

In another campaign development, Bagneris on Thursday attacked Bernardi for voting in favor of the city of Los Angeles’ annexation of the Lopez Canyon Landfill site in 1972. The action was by a unanimous City Council vote of 13-0.

Bernardi, who did not represent the area at the time, said, “I have no problem with that vote.” He said the landfill was originally intended to serve as a dump site for trash collected locally in the East Valley in order to reduce the cost of hauling it longer distances to the Mission Canyon and Toyon Canyon landfills in the Santa Monica Mountains.

He said Lopez Canyon Landfill was expanded after the other dump sites were closed over his opposition. Bernardi said he has voted to reopen Mission Canyon and Toyon Canyon landfills.

“He’s kind of reaching for issues, isn’t he?” Bernardi said.