THE CAMPAIGN WINDS DOWN : City Elections : Race That Started as Intense Contest Ends in Easy Walk

A Los Angeles municipal election campaign that began with prospects of a citywide debate on growth, traffic, pollution, poverty and crime ends Tuesday in a series of one-sided races that seem to have stirred little enthusiasm among the voters.

As the year began, chances for an intense discussion of the future of the city were bright.

The agenda was laid out late in 1988 by the Los Angeles 2000 Committee, composed of business, political and community leaders and academics. In a report called LA 2000, the committee called for new structures of government to prevent the Los Angeles area from becoming “a balkanized landscape of political fortresses, each guarding its own resources in the midst of divisiveness, overcrowded freeways, antiquated sewers, ineffective schools, inadequate human services and a polluted environment.”

An ambitious Los Angeles city councilman, Zev Yaroslavsky, armed with more than $1 million in campaign funds, was promising a mayoral campaign run on just those issues. “Are you safer in your neighborhood than you were five years ago?” he asked at a fund-raising event for his anticipated mayoral campaign. “Are the streets and highways you drive on less congested . . . is the air you breathe (safer) and is the water off our coast safer to swim in?”

But Mayor Tom Bradley inherited an apparently easy ride to reelection in January, when Yaroslavsky dropped out after public opinion polls persuaded him the mayor was unbeatable.

Bradley remains heavily favored for a fifth term despite facing questions in the last two weeks over revelations that he earned up to $24,000 a year for serving as director of a savings and loan and $18,000--which he later returned--as an adviser to a bank. Both financial institutions did business with the city.

Only one of Bradley’s foes, City Councilman Nate Holden, has vigorously campaigned citywide--and he is badly handicapped by lack of funds and a late start.

Two of the eight Los Angeles City Council members up for election--Marvin Braude of Brentwood and the Pacific Palisades and Gloria Molina, a central city lawmaker--have no opposition at all.

Veteran City Councilman Ernani Bernardi, who represents the eastern San Fernando Valley, is the only candidate that political analysts say may fall below the 50% margin election night and be forced into a runoff.

Yaroslavsky, deciding to remain in his Westside City Council seat, has faced scrappy and loud opposition candidates, whose campaigns have cited the warnings of the LA 2000 report. But he is favored to win Tuesday. So is Councilman Michael Woo of the Hollywood-Hollywood Hills area, who also has contentious opponents who have raised the same issues.

Gilbert Lindsay, representing South-Central neighborhoods containing some of the city’s poorest residents, is considered safe, as is Joan Milke Flores, whose constituency includes South-Central’s poor and harbor area homeowners who have expressed unhappiness with the quality of Los Angeles life. Complaints of traffic, unrestricted growth and congestion have been raised against Councilwoman Joy Picus in the West San Fernando Valley, but she, too, is expected by her supporters to win.

Low Profile Races

There are closer contests in elections for three of the seven seats on the board of the 646-school Los Angeles Unified School District. In these races, the teachers’ union is trying to gain a board majority sympathetic to its demands for better pay and more say for teachers in education matters. But campaign consultants involved in those races say interest among voters seems generally low.

The contests for three seats on the Los Angeles Community College Board are even more low profile. The only incumbent in the race, attorney Lindsay Conner, has no opposition, and candidates for the two open seats have not generated widespread attention for their campaigns.

Los Angeles City Atty. James K. Hahn faces no opposition and City Controller Rick Tuttle is expected to win easily.

Also on the ballot are four Los Angeles city bond issues and two amendments to the City Charter. Only two of these propositions--bonds for libraries and for police facilities--have active campaign organizations behind them. Others call for bonds to finance loans to improve old low-cost housing and to finance installation of sprinklers in city-owned high-rise buildings. The two City Charter amendments would change procedures for transferring money within a city department and for enacting employee pay raises.

None of the six propositions has organized opposition.

Saturday, Bradley spoke at a rally at his Crenshaw District headquarters and from a motorcade in a convertible that moved through the streets of South-Central Los Angeles. But the streets were empty in the noon-day heat.

Meanwhile, the bank issue continued to follow Bradley, with reporters questioning him about it while he campaigned.

Bradley criticized news coverage of the issue when he was asked about a story in The Times that Far East National Bank held about $500,000 in Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency funds last year, when Bradley was a paid special adviser to the bank.

“I think it was clear from the article that the bank had been receiving investments from the city since 1962,” he said. “I know nothing about that. That’s a matter of the treasurer or the agency making the decision.

“I think that the important question, which somehow the reporters refuse to raise, is did I exert influence or even ask the treasurer to deposit a dime, any money, in any of the banks of the city and the answer is ‘No, no, no.’ I wish somehow you would get that message across rather than picking on some contradiction or some speculation that the reporters seem to raise.”

However, Bradley has admitted he did telephone City Treasurer Leonard Rittenberg last month to inquire about city investment policies after the mayor received a phone call from Harold Hwang, president of Far East.

Hwang called, Bradley said, to inquire about rumors that the city was planning to drop its policy of depositing its funds in local banks.

After that conversation, the city doubled its deposit in Far East to $2 million.

Bradley has consistently denied that there was any relationship between the telephone conversation and the doubling of the Far East deposit. However, in an interview with The Times on Tuesday, he admitted that he had asked Rittenberg if “had they (Far East) in the past” held city deposits.

That, Bradley said, was merely, “for the purpose of confirming the statement that had been made to me that they did have deposits.” Bradley said he then returned to the bank all the consulting fees he received in 1988 along with a letter saying his relationship with the bank had ended in December.

Bradley’s aides have objected to an account of Tuesday’s interview in The Times, which indicated that Bradley did not sever his relations with Far East until after last month’s conversation with Rittenberg. Press secretary Dee Dee Myers said Bradley had quit the bank last December. But she said the action was done verbally and not documented.

Holden also made campaign appearances. Earlier in the week, his campaign mailed out pamphlets to about 500,000 homes. Republicans got a pamphlet showing him with GOP Gov. George Deukmejian. Democrats on the Westside received a pamphlet with a picture of him and popular area legislators. And in black areas, the pamphlets had a picture of the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Bradley, too, campaigned through the mails. But there was no indication that this last-minute flurry would result in a big increase in voter interest. The only polling in the race has been done privately for some of the candidates. As a result, there is no firm estimate of voter interest--or reliable estimate of turnout.

But primary election turnouts in Los Angeles have been dropping over the years. In 1973, when Bradley and then-Mayor Sam Yorty were locked in an intense contest, 60% of the registered voters went to the polls. In 1977, when Bradley faced state Sen. Alan Robbins (D-Van Nuys) in what was expected to be a close race, it was 42%. But it dropped to 37% when Bradley was favored in a rematch with Yorty in 1981 and to 35% in his strong 1985 election victory over City Council President John Ferraro.

And reporters who have been covering the campaign have seen small turnouts--20, 30, 35 people--at candidates’ forums all over the city. In addition, the discussions at these meetings have been locally oriented: the proposed trolley line through the Valley, planned destruction of homes to make way for new South-Central Los Angeles schools, dangerous intersections, overdevelopment in the Westwood area.

Small Turnouts

While of vital importance to the neighborhoods involved, these meetings have not produced much broad debate or even an examination of the regional concerns raised by the LA 2000 report.

In March, about 35 people gathered at a community center in Van Nuys to hear the mayoral candidates. The audience was small at the Saturday afternoon forum, even though it was sponsored by every major homeowner organization in the area. Bradley skipped it, as he has done with other forums.

Last Wednesday, two dozen people attending a candidates’ forum in Pacoima barely outnumbered the candidates and their families. Pacoima, a poor, black and Latino section of the San Fernando Valley, is hard hit by crime and poverty. Reporters covering the area have found deep community concern about these issues. But those attending the session heard few specific solutions. Again, Bradley did not attend.

The same phenomenon has been observed in Hollywood, the harbor area and in other parts of the city.

Political analysts offered a number of reasons, ranging from the reluctance of political office holders to gamble on losing their present jobs by running for higher office, to a feeling on the part of voters that present governmental structures cannot solve the complex problems of the Los Angeles Basin.

“There is low turnout because there is little competition,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, senior associate at the Center For Politics and Policy of the Claremont Graduate School. As an example she cited Yaroslavsky, who would have had to give up his council seat to run against Bradley.

“What Zev typifies is the new breed of full-time politician, professional politicians, whose only career is the office they hold,” she said. “This professionalism has come down to the local level. We see people whose first goal, whose only priority, is to maintain the job they have. They are loath to risk that job, so they are more inclined to stay in place.

“If Zev’s seat were not up, he would be in the race, and at this point in time he would have had a decent opportunity to make a dent.”

Richard Weinstein, dean of UCLA’s Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning, and a member of the Los Angeles 2000 Committee, said one reason for low participation is the fragmented nature of the region’s system of government.

“I think the political landscape is so complicated and so overlapping and divided into so many smaller pieces that I think it is hard for the electorate to think that any election is so consequential because they know the accountability is too complex and diffused,” he said.

“The aggregate experience of the average citizen is that he can’t figure out who the hell to blame or who the hell to reward,” Weinstein said.

That is why, he said, that interest in elections, particularly statewide balloting, often centers on initiative races. “Nobody is going to pass the buck,” he said.

Political science Prof. Bruce Cain of Caltech said he shares that view.

Responsibility Unclear

“Traffic, pollution, toxic cleanups, the bay, a lot of these issues are not the single responsibility of any one single level of government or any individual,” he said. “As a result, there is enough ambiguity of responsibility so that those who are responsible can be deft enough to make sure they do not shoulder the blame.”

Cain also said low interest can be blamed on the change in local politics, from low-budget campaigns run by friends and conducted door to door to expensive operations dependent on mass mailings that require computer technology.

“We have a political system that depends on mass communications and money rather than the localization of politics,” he said.

That sort of politics depends on money, and big contributors give to those in power--the incumbents, he said. “There has been a movement away from precinct organization, get-out-the vote kind of things. These were labor intensive, done by activists. Campaigns are now run by consultants, not amateur activists.”

Another reason was offered by Alan Heslop, who heads the Rose Institute of Claremont-McKenna College, a political think tank.

Heslop said that City Council districts, like legislative districts, are drawn so awkwardly--to preserve the advantage of incumbents--that voters have little sense of their elected representatives.

These districts, with boundaries carefully drawn to preserve incumbents’ strength, ignore communities, and make communications within them difficult, he said.

Heslop, however, said there could be a rise in interest after the 1990 Census, which he, and others, predict will show a sharp increase in Latinos and Asians in Los Angeles County.

Those Census findings, he said, will require a major reapportionment of the City Council and Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors seats.

If that happens, incumbents will be threatened, elections will tighten up and voter participation will increase, he said.