South El Monte Showing Signs of Election Activity : Politics: Forget pollsters, media consultants and costly campaigns. Election time in this tiny city means lawn signs, tight budgets and door-to-door campaigning.

It’s blossom time in South El Monte. From the mobile homes on Rush Street to stucco cottages along Cogswell Road and Merced Avenue, front lawns are blooming with bright new colors. Mostly the colors are red or psychedelic orange or bright blue. Eye-catching colors. Colors to broadcast the name of a political candidate.

“The main thing is to get your name out there,” says Ignacio (Slim) Gracia, a city councilman running for reelection.

He’s talking about lawn signs, of course. On Michael Hunt Drive, he pulls his car over to the curb and frowns at some of his own signs. They have been stapled to pickets and pounded into the grass, and they appear warped and faded. “The rain didn’t do much good to our signs,” he says.

It’s happening all over the San Gabriel Valley. The volunteers are out, knocking on doors, talking up the candidates, planting their colorful lawn signs. They’re getting the names out. Twenty San Gabriel Valley cities will hold City Council elections April 10, with 137 candidates vying for 56 council or mayoral seats.

“This is where politics starts,” says Chuck Bush, a house painter to whom Gracia has just appealed for support.

Bush means his own living room, where he and his wife, Judy, have been interrupted in the middle of their dinner by the arrival of Gracia, a reporter and a photographer.

Big city candidates can have their media consultants, polling experts and television campaigns, suggests Bush, straightening his paint-spattered T-shirt and settling into a straight-backed chair. In towns like South El Monte, campaigns are conducted on front lawns and in people’s living rooms.

“Whatever goes on in a big city, the little person doesn’t get to know about it,” says Bush, who is active in South El Monte’s civic affairs. “Here, everybody knows.”

The buzz these days in South El Monte, a tiny industrial city of 19,000 wedged between the San Gabriel River and the Rio Hondo, is about redevelopment and a trash-hauling franchise.

As with most of the region’s cities, the political temperament is volcanic. There are long periods of dormancy, with a drop-off in voter interest, then something explodes. Suddenly, the voters are fretting about the way their tax dollars are being spent or about rapid changes in their neighborhoods.

People start talking about recall campaigns or grass-roots ballot initiatives.

“It’s been 10 full years without a recall,” marvels Jim Kelly, a 12-year council veteran who is running for reelection. “I can remember two periods when there were just three of us on the council because the other two had been recalled.”

The voter turnout for municipal elections in South El Monte has been falling precipitously in recent years, from 38% in 1984 to 31% in 1986 to less than 25% in 1988. There are 4,843 registered voters in the city. Its council members are paid $375 a month, plus expenses.

But South El Monte is showing signs that it’s coming out of its dormancy. As four candidates go after two council seats, a dissident group is revving up a parallel campaign. The critics want to recall Mayor Albert Perez, Vice Mayor Stanley Quintana and Councilman Art Olmos, charging them with a broad array of abuses, from “cronyism” in granting an exclusive franchise to a local trash hauler to “wastefulness” in giving the city manager a raise.

The three have responded with annoyance. Perez, for example, dismisses the charges as “frivolous” and “trumped up.”

So far, the council campaign--in which a retired salesman, a truck driver, a drug program coordinator and a Caltrans maintenance worker are vying for two council seats--has been relatively tame.

But for the incumbents, the issues raised in the recall campaign seem to loom menacingly.

Both Kelly and Gracia say that they were against the widely criticized trash franchise granted to Modern Service Co. (both abstained in the council vote), and they are taking pains to distance themselves from a controversial redevelopment program, with an eminent domain provision, approved by the council last year.

“I said, ‘I’ll look into it,’ ” says Kelly, 59, a dairy trucker, about the redevelopment project, which he voted for. “Then I said I’d support it. But after I studied and learned about it, I finally made up my mind. Last October, I decided this is not what the city of South El Monte needs.”

Gracia is also giving “serious thought” to the project. “I voted for the concept,” says Gracia, 71, a former salesman who recently came out of retirement to help a friend reorganize his law practice. “Since then, I’ve had second thoughts.”

The challengers, Arthur Jimenez and Raul Pardo, have been circling respectfully, exploiting a vague feeling of malaise that seems to permeate the city.

South El Monte is a largely Latino city--about 80% of its residents have Spanish surnames--that has been indelibly marked by an unusual laissez-faire fiscal structure. With no city property taxes, utility taxes or business license fees, large numbers of businesses have settled in the city. In fact, there is one business for every 15 residents, city statistics show.

But the policies have also strapped the city for operating funds, while bringing in an impoverished immigrant population of entry-level workers.

Last year, a Chicago urbanologist ranked the city as the 15th poorest suburb in the United States. Cities such as South El Monte, with its per capita income of $7,100, represent “the American nightmare,” said Roosevelt University professor Pierre deVise.

City officials responded bitterly that they were being maligned, pointing to South El Monte’s ample middle-class neighborhoods with neat, attractive homes.

But some residents see worrisome signs of deterioration, like graffiti and gang incidents. “This has never been one of the nicer areas,” says Mike Dieguez, standing at the door of his house on Durfee Avenue. “But we never had problems with people.”

After some break-ins on his block and the appearance of graffiti, the area “seems to be getting a little worse,” he adds.

The candidates have had to answer such challenges by carrying their messages directly to the voters, addressing them in doorways or meeting rooms.

The record for spending on a council campaign in the San Gabriel Valley was, by most accounts, the $85,000 dished out in 1985 by Margaret Sedenquist in an unsuccessful run for the Pasadena Board of Directors. None of the South El Monte candidates plan to spend more than $5,000, giving them barely enough for signs, pamphlets and a mailer.

That means a lot of knocking on doors and pumping hands.

Pardo, 30, a drug program coordinator at UC Irvine, seems especially energetic. A short, earnest man with a neatly clipped beard, he draws people out of their houses with his direct approach. “I grew up here, right down the street,” he tells one woman through a screen door, “and I understand some of the pressures that people are feeling.”

Pardo contends that no one on the council is “looking at the bigger picture.” He proposes, among other things, to involve the business community in social problems.

“Business is getting involved at the level of supporting Little League, but that’s not enough,” says Pardo, who has been circulating mail ballot applications to ensure that his supporters’ votes will be registered.

Jimenez, 57, a Caltrans worker who has long been active on city commissions, stresses the need for “a new face” on the council. A friendly man with muscular shoulders and a broad forehead, Jimenez proposes that the city finance another sheriff’s radio car to patrol city streets. Where will the money come from? “Once I get into office, I’ll be able to tell you,” he says.

After years of helping neighbors solve such problems as flooded drains and neighborhood intruders, Jimenez is at ease approaching them for support. “It’s just myself, running on my own,” he says, emphasizing his freedom from “cliques and special interests.”

The two incumbents, each with three successful campaigns behind him, appear more relaxed than the challengers. But appearances can be deceptive, they both say. “You always worry” about an election, says Gracia, 71, a fatherly, white-haired man who is no longer as slim as he was when he acquired the nickname. “People know me out here, but you can’t let down your guard.”

Gracia talks often about his long association with the city--”This was all strawberries and onions right here,” he reminisces, driving through a housing tract--and his big family. He has 12 grown children, including two sons who are sheriff’s deputies.

Kelly, the only non-Latino on the council, boasts of his fiscal conservatism and his involvement in philanthropic activities. “I’m the watchdog of the city’s finances,” says Kelly, 59, a fast-talking, bustling man (“He spends half his life on the phone,” says his wife, Margaret) with swept-back white hair.

Nevertheless, he also wants to squeeze another sheriff’s “black-and-white” out of the city budget. “We definitely need a lot more law enforcement,” he says.

The voters tend to view South El Monte’s politics with good-natured skepticism, particularly when they note that the recall campaign is starting in the midst of an election drive.

“It’s vote ‘em in and throw ‘em out,” says Robert Garcia, an air-conditioning repairman who has stepped out of his house on a cul-de-sac near the Pomona Freeway to chat with Jimenez.

His wife comes out to bring him a jacket, and he chats for a while in the chilly evening air about how South El Monte has changed. “This used to be a hell of a place for business,” he says.

Then Garcia shakes hands with Jimenez. “Good luck,” he says amiably. “Don’t get impeached.”

ELECTION ’90