Court May Determine Lineup of City Council Candidates : Politics: Two Cerritos council members who have served more than two terms may not be able to run for reelection.

The mayor, who is a three-term City Council member, and a colleague, who has served five terms, may not be able to run for reelection next year if a court rules that a City Charter amendment limiting members to two consecutive terms is legal.

The amendment was approved by voters three years ago but was successfully challenged last year in court on grounds that the effective date was ambiguous.

A lawsuit filed Nov. 1 by backers of the amendment known as Proposition H asks the Los Angeles County Superior Court to enforce the City Charter change. If it is successful, Mayor Diana Needham and Councilman Barry Rabbitt would not be allowed to seek reelection when their terms expire next year.

Hydelita Madula-Soto and Leora C. Einson filed the suit against Cerritos and City Clerk Caroline DeLlamas. Einson said they filed the lawsuit when they learned that Needham and Rabbitt would be allowed to seek reelection next year.

The petitioners said the amendment was aimed at incumbents whose terms expired in April, 1988, and who had served more then two terms.

The dispute centers on one phrase in the amendment: “This amendment will not affect the term of any council member presently in office.”

But the most recent petitioners point out that the amendment also states that: “Any council member who has served two consecutive four-year terms shall not be eligible for a period of two years to seek reelection.”

“We want them to obey the law, and they’re not doing it,” Einson said. “We just want to make a better government, and the people proved that they think the same way, because the proposition passed by an overwhelming vote.”

Rabbitt said he will definitely run for reelection, but Needham said she does not know whether she will run, even if the court says she can.

City officials said last week that the limit on terms for council members may be unconstitutional.

City Atty. J. Kenneth Brown said that in two earlier California cases judges ruled that limiting terms is unconstitutional.

Proposition H backers filed a suit last year when Councilman Daniel K. Wong ran for a third term. A Superior Court judge said the amendment’s effective date was vague and let him run. Wong was elected to his third term.

If voters did not want long-term incumbents, they would not have voted for Wong, Brown said, adding that the amendment’s wording is so unclear that it does not apply to present council members.

“They could have done it right,” he said, “but they didn’t.”

Rabbitt agreed: “They should have had someone with at least sixth-grade English to write it. It might have been all right. There was so much ambiguity and contradiction in the language that nobody knows yet what it means, and the authors turned around and said, ‘Well, we really meant this, don’t worry about what we wrote.’ ”

He said that because the authors of the amendment had run unsuccessfully in the past, they hoped to get the incumbents out of office so they would have a better chance of winning a City Council seat. “Even if there were five vacancies, they weren’t electable in this community,” Rabbitt said.

Bernard Einson, Leora Einson’s husband, was a member of a small group that led the fight to get the amendment on the ballot and was defeated in the last election. He said he ran because he wanted to make people conscious of Proposition H.

“There were no other candidates running who supported Proposition H,” he said. “The city is interested in major developments and is neglecting day care and senior citizen services. I wanted to balance things.”