Builders Grab Recall Tool in Mission Viejo Campaign

Mission Viejo City Councilman Robert A. Curtis, a slow-growth proponent in fast-growing South Orange County, wasn’t surprised when his foes launched a recall campaign against him last year.

Those foes included powerful Orange County developers, whom Curtis irritated in his first year in office. Soon after, those developers helped raise more than $190,000 to oust him.

“I knew they were gunning for me,” said Curtis, a lawyer who makes $500 a month as a council member and who faces a recall vote Feb. 27. “They didn’t make any secret of it.”

Curtis’ battle has frayed tempers, divided loyalties and stirred Mission Viejo’s political waters for months. But the campaign, while impassioned, is far from the first of its kind. For more than a decade, developers have been deeply involved in recall campaigns against local elected officials, bringing big money to bear on a process originally designed to thwart powerful private interests.

As a result, some political observers worry that the development community is undercutting the spirit of California’s recall laws, crafted in the early 1900s as a populist tool for controlling the power of big business and its ability to influence politicians. Now, critics say, that weapon often is used by the interests it was meant to restrain.

“I don’t think that the people of California who voted for the recall reforms had this in mind,” said John Larson, chairman of the Fair Political Practices Commission. “They weren’t casting a vote to make it easier for business interests to control the process.”

In 1976, Sonoma County Supervisor Bill Kortum became one of the first elected officials in California to feel the wrath of the development community in a recall. Elected in 1975, Kortum, a veterinarian who supported slow-growth positions, was the subject of a recall a year later; his official, written response called it “a power play by land development interests.”

Kortum was heavily outspent in the recall campaign, and he lost the election, ending his political career. “They (developers) bring in a lot of money, and they play very rough, believe me,” Kortum said in a recent interview.

Kortum and others say that they find a disturbing shift of political power in the way developer-backed recalls often unfold.

The days of outraged voters banding together to circulate petitions against a recalcitrant elected official are waning, they say. In their place have emerged well-oiled political machines, equipped with political consultants, high finances, glossy campaign materials, and legions of paid petition-circulators and phone-bank operators.

But after a decade during which slow-growth advocates eagerly took advantage of the initiative process, developers and their lobbyists describe the recall battles as a sign of democracy on the rebound.

“For a long time you had a slow-growth movement that was moving through a vacuum, without significant opposition,” said Bart Doyle, general counsel of the Building Industry Assn. of Southern California, which has contributed $5,000 to the Curtis recall. “It was sort of a free ride for 10 years, and suddenly you have that opposition. What you’re seeing now is a shift in the balance of power. We’re competing.”

Big-Money Campaigns

Lynn Wessell, a Burbank political consultant who represents business interests in recalls and many other kinds of campaigns, echoed those sentiments.

“We’re really in an era where these land-use issues are getting a thorough debate,” he said. “You’ve got this clash of interests, and these are ways for people to work out their disagreements at the ballot box.”

Advocates of slow growth and environmentalism are far less sanguine. The bottom line in developer participation, they say, is big money. That, they say, skews a process intended to empower citizens and grass-roots organizations.

Recent Southern California recalls--one in Moreno Valley in 1986, for instance, and the Mission Viejo contest that is still under way--demonstrate how big the financial stakes have become: With only relatively small-town officials being contested, pro-development forces raised more than $140,000 in each of those campaigns.

Other cases also illustrate the point. Four council members in Agoura Hills were outspent by better than 3 to 1 in last year’s developer-backed recall attempt. Former San Clemente Mayor Karoline Koester and one of her council colleagues were outspent by about 15 to 1 in 1980; Koester won the recall election by a nose, but her colleague died during the campaign. Curtis is currently facing a fund-raising disadvantage of almost 10 to 1.

“It’s frankly terrifying,” said Judy Corbett, executive director of the Local Government Commission in Sacramento. “How can you have a democratic system when one side has such an advantage in resources?”

Irvine Mayor Larry Agran, a well-known slow-growth proponent, also worries about developers co-opting the political process with big contributions. “Developers have enough strength economically that they ought not be holding the political process hostage as well,” he said.

Developers and representatives of building groups liken those sentiments to political sour grapes.

“It’s the wonderful thing about democracy,” said Doyle of the Building Industry Assn. “It cuts both ways. The no-growth proponents are saying that certain people should be allowed to vote and be involved in politics and others should not.”

Alex Galuzezski, project supervisor for The Frost Group, a development firm in Laguna Niguel, was equally impassioned.

“I say, ‘God bless this country and the system that we have,’ ” Galuzezski said. “I see this basically as an extension of the public expressing its views. . . . Parting with some money in this way may in the long run pay us some dividends.”

The Frost Group, which contributed $10,000 to the Curtis recall, builds $10 million to $15 million a year worth of residential developments in Orange County.

Growth as a Key Issue

With the stakes high and resources such as those at their fingertips, developers rarely enter the recall process halfway. By backing a recall, they automatically earn a local official’s enmity, so they play to win, observers on both sides say.

“I compare this to a dam,” said Santa Cruz Supervisor Gary A. Patton, who has informally monitored developer-financed recalls since he fought off an attempt to oust him in 1978. “The pressure really starts building up when you get a group of environmentalists taking control of their local government. Once that pressure starts building, it looks for a weakness. If there’s the slightest weakness for it to exploit, the money comes rushing through the hole.”

For their part, developer and real estate proponents tend to downplay the significance of contributions in recall campaigns. Dana Riccard, local governmental relations manager for the California Assn. of Realtors, cautioned that “money only goes so far.”

“I don’t think that the process is any more skewed toward developers just because they have money,” she said. “There’s a lot of political clout that can be generated without big bucks.”

Indeed, some recall efforts fail despite big contributions, and others led by homeowners succeed even though developers and others contribute heavily to protect incumbents. In Moreno Valley’s 1986 recall, for instance, three pro-development councilmen received overwhelming backing from the development community and outspent recall advocates by a margin of 50 to 1, all to no avail. The recall won easily.

But campaign war chests still are a big part of building clout, and political scientists worry that developer participation in recalls may skew the outcome on behalf of a narrow special interest.

“I certainly think there’s reason to be concerned,” said David Hadwiger at the UC Berkeley Institute for Governmental Studies. “It’s clearly an extension of the initiative battles and election contests that have been raging for years. The growth-control struggles have been so fierce that it’s not surprising to find similar battles in recall elections.”

What most needles some local politicians is not just that developers have taken a growing financial interest in recall campaigns. Rather, they say, recall efforts backed by developer interests often try to hide the real issues--growth and growth management--behind a political red herring.

Criminal reform, tax increases, rudeness to constituents and drug use have all been central topics in recall efforts in which observers privately acknowledge that the real issue is growth. In Santa Cruz, the successful recall of two slow-growth supervisors ostensibly was based on their rudeness to the Navy, an allegation that Patton and other observers consider laughable.

A failed recall effort last year listed San Luis Obispo County Supervisor David Blakely’s past use of marijuana as the reason to seek his ouster, but Blakely and other political observers say the councilman’s drug use was not the real issue.

Recall supporters showed up at public hearings on a slow-growth measure and handed copies of their petitions to citizens who spoke out against growth limits, Blakely said. Several local construction and banking notables were among the recall supporters, and the recall campaign treasurer also ran a construction company.

Blakely, who called the recall attempt “the worst thing that’s ever happened to me in my life,” escaped a prolonged contest when the petitioners failed to round up signatures in time to force an election.

Edric Guise, a legislative policy analyst for the Building Industry Assn. of Southern California, said that educating the public on the dangers of growth controls is a time-consuming and expensive process. It is more cost-effective, Guise said, to focus on other issues on which the official is more vulnerable.

“Nobody wants to spend millions of dollars (on a campaign) educating people if they don’t have to. . . . You end up with a huge education curve, and you don’t want to put yourself in that situation,” Guise said.

“That,” he said, “is politics.”

Exercising Their Rights

In Mission Viejo, Curtis’ recall organizers say he should be ousted because of his intolerance of constituents, his divisiveness on the council and his support for a controversial annexation on the city’s border. But nearly all political observers in Mission Viejo agree that growth and growth management are the important issues driving the huge developer contributions in the race.

The Mission Viejo Co., a wholly owned subsidiary of New York-based Philip Morris Cos., has chipped in more than $57,000.

“We invest millions of dollars in this community every year, and we have an interest in how it’s run,” said company spokeswoman Wendy Wetzel. She denied that the company is interested in pushing a growth agenda but added that it would fight what it considers Curtis’ unwise proposals to annex additional area to Mission Viejo’s borders.

In addition to cash, the Mission Viejo Co.’s contribution involves the loan of political consultant Wessell, who has done other work for the company.

Wessell, an articulate and philosophical observer of local politics, won his stripes in the development community with a string of political successes on behalf of his business clients.

Among others, he helped guide the hotly contested fight against Measure A in Orange County. That initiative, which would have tied growth to the ability of local roads to handle it, was soundly defeated.

Noting Wessell’s involvement and the enormous fund raising in his race, Curtis wastes few chances to blast the Mission Viejo Co. and its fellow developers.

“This is a heavy-handed, bare-knuckled attempt to force me off the council,” Curtis said. “I can’t believe the people of Mission Viejo want developers to control the life of this city, and that’s exactly what they’re trying to do.”

Helen Monroe, who chairs the pro-recall Alliance for Mission Viejo, said she has no problem with taking large contributions from developers. “He has opposed development rather vehemently,” she said of Curtis. “I’m not surprised that they’re fighting back. They certainly have that right.”

As developers exercise their rights, however, officials who have faced such recall attempts warn of myriad fallouts. Most obvious is the removal of the official from office; most insidious, say the office-holders who survive, is the chilling effect the recalls have.

“Officials find themselves looking over their shoulders at the developers,” former Supervisor Kortum said. “It’s at the local level that land use in this state is being decided, and it’s there that it’s hardest to resist that kind of influence. It’s dangerous.”

That fear is central to California’s tradition of progressive populism, whose patriarchal figure, Hiram Johnson, gave the state its recall laws.

“This is clearly not in the spirit of what Johnson thought he was doing,” UC Berkeley’s Hadwiger said of developers making use of one of the former governor’s most highly touted reforms.

And though developer groups note that they, too, are blessed with democratic rights, Johnson’s legacy seems to leave little doubt about where he would come down in the dispute.

“In some form or another, every governmental problem . . . has arisen because private interest has intervened or has sought for its own gain to exploit either the resources or the politics of this state,” the governor proclaimed in his 1911 inaugural address. “I take it, therefore, that the first duty that is mine to perform is to eliminate every private interest in the government.”