ELECTION TORRANCE : Political Newcomer Adds Choice to At-Large Race for 3 Council Seats

In a city where voters are accustomed to choosing from among as many as a dozen candidates for City Council, no one quite knows how to act when only one challenger shows up.

Torrance incumbents are used to spending $10,000 on their campaigns as they walk precincts, flood mailboxes with brochures and circulate among civic leaders, stumping for votes.

This year, however, challenger Donald Pyles has thrown the three incumbents for a loop. As they spend thousands in contributions preparing for the March 6 election, he has shelled out only $300 of his own money to put a few brief words on the sample ballot.

Incumbent council members Bill Applegate, Dee Hardison and Mark Wirth say the lack of a financial challenge from Pyles makes little difference. They are running the same campaigns they have in previous years.

Each has dutifully made the rounds of candidate forums, appearing at seven homeowner group meetings to answer questions. Wirth and Hardison have been going door-to-door in the city, asking for votes.

Applegate, who says he does not walk precincts because his large, 6-foot-4 frame intimidates people when he unexpectedly appears at their door, plans to send a mailer to the city’s 45,000 households with registered voters. Supporters also have been staging gatherings in private homes where Applegate can meet residents.

“I don’t care if it’s one challenger or a dozen, I will run the same campaign I always have,” Applegate said. “I think you’ll find four years from now, there will be open seats and there will be many more people interested in running.”

Even Mayor Katy Geissert, who has no opponent in the last campaign of her 16-year political career, plans a citywide mailer seeking support for her second term as mayor.

Also running unopposed are City Clerk John Bramhall, who was appointed to the position last year after the death of City Clerk Don Wilson, and Treasurer Tom Rupert, who was first appointed to that position in 1964 and is running for his seventh full term in office.

Torrance council seats are elected at-large by the city’s 72,300 registered voters. The top three vote-getters will claim the three available seats.

All the campaign spending going on around Pyles, a 34-year-old grocery checker, has not fazed him, he says, because he firmly believes that his status as the lone challenger assures him victory.

“Being the only challenger . . . has allowed more attention to focus on me,” Pyles said. “I can’t see that people can be completely satisfied with where the council is going.”

Despite the unusual shortage of challengers, however, this year’s election seems to be repeating an old Torrance refrain that a candidate need worry only about the “Three T’s--Traffic, Trash and Trees.”

The debate on how best to improve safety at the Torrance Mobil Oil refinery has scarcely touched the candidates, all of whom oppose a ballot measure that would effectively force Mobil to stop using highly toxic hydrofluoric acid at the facility.

At several of the candidate forums, not a single question was asked about Mobil. At those where Mobil did come up, the issue was only a brief sidelight to an evening focused on the city’s development and traffic problems.

“When people do bring Mobil up, they bring it up because they’re confused,” Wirth said. “It just doesn’t seem to be a die-hard issue for people out there.”

What voters want, all four candidates agree, is a safe, balanced city in which to raise their families and run their businesses. Voters want the council to control dense development, solve traffic woes and keep Torrance’s open space from dwindling further.

The incumbents believe that describes what they already have been doing and that the dearth of challengers means voters are happy with their direction.

Pyles believes more needs to be done to create the Torrance that residents would like to see.

“There are an outstanding number of cases where Torrance is in expensive litigation, and I don’t think the public is real impressed with that,” he said.

So far, he noted, the city has spent more than $1 million on its lawsuit seeking greater control over the Mobil refinery; has appealed an $8-million judgment against the Torrance Police Department for a cover-up of an officer’s involvement in a fatal 1984 traffic accident; is negotiating a settlement with the victim of a 1988 police shooting, in which three officers allegedly conspired to make the accidental shooting appear to be justified, and has been sued for $14 million by an office building owner who charges the council deliberately thwarted his efforts to lease space to the Los Angeles Municipal Court system.

“There is plenty of dissatisfaction out there . . . about the legal cases, about too much development, about too much traffic,” Pyles said.

Although he says he has had to do some studying to catch up on local concerns, Pyles calls himself “a fast learner and . . . a good listener.”

A checker at Hughes Market on Rolling Hills Road, Pyles grew up in Torrance and lives with his wife, Lola, and four children in the Victoria Knolls section of the city.

A one-time legislative intern in the office of former Mayor Jim Armstrong, Pyles graduated from Torrance High School in 1973 and studied political science briefly at UCLA. He has continued his education at Lutheran Bible Institute of California in Anaheim and Harbor College but has not yet earned a degree, he said.

He moved his family from San Pedro to Torrance in July.

Applegate, a councilman since 1978, said his central focus in the campaign has been safety.

“People are very concerned with having the ability to enjoy their lives,” he said. “They want to walk down the street, to sit in the park, to know that they are safe in their homes.”

Applegate, 46, believes the low voter turnout of recent years--15% in 1988 and 14% in 1986--and the sparse field of candidates indicates that people like what they see in their city.

The owner of Applegate Co., a Torrance firm that negotiates commercial and industrial real estate sales, Applegate says his reputation as one of the council’s pro-development members is not justified.

Pointing to his votes against several large office projects--the Computax project on Hawthorne Boulevard and the Park Beyond The Park on Crenshaw Boulevard--as well as the city’s Cultural Arts Center, he argues that he has been “harder on the development community than anybody else.

“Just because of the way I earn my living, they shouldn’t paint me with that brush,” he said.

Applegate’s campaign reports show that he started the campaign with $28,294 in previous donations, mostly from developers, contractors and real estate-related businesses.

Reports filed by Feb. 20, the last financial statements required before the election, showed Applegate spent more than $2,500 on signs and flyers for the campaign.

Hardison, 52, is seeking her second term on the council after finishing first in a field of eight candidates in 1986. A special education program coordinator for the Torrance Unified School District, Hardison said this campaign probably will be her last, because she will be nearing eligibility for early retirement from her job in 1994.

Trying to maintain the popular style that swept her into office four years ago, Hardison has been walking precincts on weekends for about a month. She expects to visit as many as 1,000 homes before the election.

Most people seem generally pleased with the city’s direction, she said, although they often question her about construction projects and traffic problems in their immediate neighborhood.

“Nobody really has an ultimate answer for traffic and density, but people continue to want to let their policy makers know that it’s a concern,” she said, noting that she was the council member who proposed last year’s stricter residential building standards.

Hardison began this year’s campaign with $11,176 on hand from previous elections and has collected $2,629 more, largely from small donations. Her largest contributions were $500 from the Torrance Police Officers Assn. and $300 from Torrance municipal employees.

She had spent about $1,830 on campaign literature by mid-February.

Wirth, 39, has shaped his campaign for a third term around the need to maintain Torrance’s “quality of life.”

“As dull as it is, the key issue is that for years and years, people have liked living here and they would like to keep it that way,” said Wirth, who works as a telephone lineman. “No one has ever been elected to the City Council because they wanted to change Torrance . . . I knock on doors and people laugh and say, ‘Oh, yeah, you’re doing fine.’ ”

Wirth said that during the past four years he has tried to focus on improving traffic circulation in the city, in part by pushing for expansion of the Torrance Transit system and by helping to create a new South Bay bus system.

Campaign statements show that Wirth started with $9,278 from previous contributions and has collected nearly $10,000 more this year, largely from various labor unions and local developers.

He received $1,000 contributions from the Torrance Firefighters Assn.; Bayco Financial Corp., a Torrance office building developer; and Watt PAC Inc., a political group formed by Santa Monica-based home developer Ray Watt, who built the condominium portion of Park Del Amo.

He also received a total of $900 from three separate branches of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union, which represents workers at Mobil’s Torrance refinery.

A two-time Democratic candidate for state Assembly, Wirth said this year’s campaign race ranks as his “dullest ever.”

“Thank God for Don Pyles,” Wirth said. “At least he’s creating a little something to worry about.”