8 Candidates Enter Race for 58th Assembly District Seat

Eight candidates, among them Huntington Beach Mayor Thomas J. Mays and Long Beach City Council members Jan Hall and Jeffrey A. Kellogg, met the filing deadline Wednesday in the race for the 58th Assembly District seat held by Dennis Brown (R-Los Alamitos).

The deadline was extended five days after Brown, a conservative nicknamed Dr. No for his staunch opposition to spending measures, announced March 5 that he had decided not to seek reelection in the heavily Republican district.

Joining Mays, Hall and Kellogg in the wide-open race for the Republican nomination in the June 5 primary are Dr. Seymour (Sy) Alban, a Long Beach physician, and Peter von Elten, a Huntington Beach banker and businessman.

Joel Bishop, a systems analyst for Orange County who lives in Long Beach, and Luanne W. Pryor, a Long Beach public relations consultant, will square off for the Democratic nomination.

Scott Stier of Long Beach has filed as a Libertarian Party candidate.

The Assembly district straddles the Los Angeles-Orange County border, taking in Seal Beach and Signal Hill and parts of Huntington Beach, Los Alamitos and Long Beach. With district residents being hit in recent months by the oil spill and malathion spraying, environmental issues are likely to be a focal point in the race.

Mays, 36, is hoping that the publicity he received in the days after the Feb. 7 oil spill will catapult him to victory.

On Wednesday, Mays was back where he has often been since the American Trader leaked 394,000 gallons of crude oil in the ocean off Huntington Beach--at the beach holding a news conference, this time to declare the last stretch of shoreline open.

Now that the cleanup effort is over, Mays will not have the same access to the media he has enjoyed the past few weeks. But the mayor says that won’t be a problem.

“I’ll probably be better off,” he said. “This takes a lot of time. I’ll spend more time on the streets meeting people.”

Hall, meanwhile, said that she, too, will make the environment a main issue in her campaign.

“How do we manage our environment so that we don’t destroy it?” she said. “Since I’ve been in public office, that’s been an important issue of mine.”

Hall lost a bid for mayor of Long Beach two years ago. She is chairwoman of the California Commission on the Status of Women and is a former president of the Southern California Rapid Transit District.

Hall’s recent departure from the RTD board stirred up a controversy after other board members learned that she went to work for a Torrance consulting firm that had just been awarded a $99,500 lobbying and public relations contract by the transit district’s general manager.

The board killed the contract. Members said that although the arrangement was technically legal, its ethics were questionable.

Hall said Wednesday that she realizes that the RTD matter “was and is” controversial but that she doubts that it will hurt her chances measurably.

Kellogg, 36, was elected to the Long Beach City Council in 1988 and was appointed to the Republican State Central Committee by Brown. Kellogg also said the environment, along with crime, is an important issue.

Although Kellogg said he intends to make government ethics a focal point of his campaign, he said he will not zero in on Hall’s RTD dealings. “I’m running for the 58th District, not against anyone,” said Kellogg, who is the author of a recent ethics package for the city of Long Beach.

Von Elten, a 46-year-old Vietnam veteran and executive vice president and general counsel for the Mola Development Corp. in Newport Beach, wasted no time in establishing himself as a candidate who favors protecting the environment. He issued a statement Wednesday pledging to refuse any contributions from companies involved in offshore oil drilling or shipping.

“The environmental issues in this campaign are too sensitive and important to be tainted by political contributions to candidates by the same people who foul our beaches,” Von Elten said.

Alban, 65, said he had considered running for the Assembly seat two years ago but figured that there was no way to defeat the incumbent Brown.

This year, though, he sees the race as anybody’s. “There’s room for successful professional and business people, and I want to be involved,” Alban said. He is running on a pro-choice platform. His other main issues, he said, will be the environment and ethics.

“I’m against government control, but we should insist on double-hulling tankers,” Alban said.

Bishop, who works for Orange County, is the only candidate who filed for the race before Brown announced that he would not run. “I felt at the time that he needed a strong challenger,” said Bishop, 32, who is active in Long Beach Democratic politics. “I’m still in the race.”

Pryor, 61, the only other Democrat in the race, said that the 58th District is one in which “often only a token type of campaign can be run” by the Democrats. But with Brown out of the picture, she said, it could be a different story. “This is going to be a very serious campaign,” she said.