3 Challengers Face Braude in 1st District

With a trio of challengers eager to dislodge Councilman Evan Anderson Braude from his seat, the 1st District race is the most competitive of the City Council contests and the most likely to result in a June runoff.

Braude’s three opponents sound common themes while differing dramatically in style in their quest to represent a district that ranges across glitzy downtown high-rises, the port area, and crowded slums north of downtown.

Former legislative aide Joy Melton is using homemade lemon loaves and leftover campaign signs from the last election to promote her attacks on Braude, who she says has failed to exhibit leadership on a number of critical district issues.

Bill Stovall, a retired deputy police chief with a booming voice and the backing of the police union, is hoping to ride crime and police issues into office.

And office manager Paul Croshaw has been walking his way through his first political campaign, shunning expensive mailers in favor of thank-you notes and scratch pads describing him as a “neighbor on your side.”

Their projected campaign budgets range from Melton’s $10,000 to the $50,000 Braude says he anticipates spending.

In his campaign for a second term, Braude, 42, enjoys the endorsement of a number of organizations, ranging from the community political group, Long Beach Area Citizens Involved, to the Long Beach teachers’ union and the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor.

Braude, an attorney for Mercury Savings & Loan, is among the most liberal members of the council, taking a sometimes lonely stand on housing and social issues considered too bold or far-reaching by most of the council. He has, for example, favored unsuccessful proposals that would have required landlords to pay interest on security deposits, forced developers to include low-cost units in new apartment complexes and required developers of office buildings to contribute to a housing fund.

His opponents contend that he can’t muster votes for his positions, doesn’t deal with constituent problems until they boil over, and hasn’t paid adequate attention to the crime that has swept across his district and every other corner of the city.

“He hasn’t done very much. He’s the Rip Van Winkle of the district,” asserted Stovall, a 57-year-old 1st District native whose red, white and blue campaign headquarters decorations include a banner with a heart declaring love for the U.S.A.

Stovall says the city’s much disparaged yellow street lights should be changed to brighter ones, and that additional police officers should be paid for out of the general fund rather than a proposed new property tax levy supported by Braude.

“When we’re murdered at a higher rate than in history, I think safety is the basic responsibility of this city,” said Stovall, who maintains the cost of new police hires has been exaggerated by city management, although he could not say what the real cost would be.

Nor could Stovall say what social services he would cut if such budget paring were necessary to pay for new officers. He described the city’s social programs as inadequate but characterized them as extras. “Those are the nice to have things,” Stovall remarked.

“He has to tell us what cuts he’s going to make,” countered Braude. “We’ve done all the taking (from the budget) we can take.”

Appearing ignorant of some of the city’s housing policies, Stovall at first said he was under the impression that the city had adopted or was about to adopt inclusionary zoning requirements, under which developers would have to build a certain number of low-cost units in their projects. Informed that the proposal was actually rejected by the council last year, Stovall at first said he would oppose inclusionary zoning, then said later in the interview that he would probably support such a requirement. In general, however, he said: “I don’t believe that there is a shortage of low-cost housing in this city.”

Melton charged that Braude “doesn’t get out in the community and work with the people,” saying, for example, that he waited too long to help residents complaining about Fender’s International Grand Ballroom, which was eventually shut down by the city as a public nuisance.

“I don’t know of anybody who is in more places trying to deal with more issues,” retorted Braude, saying he met several times with Fender’s neighbors. Nonetheless, he does receive poor marks from the anti-Fender’s group. “We felt he dragged his feet as much as he could,” Scott Hunt, one of the group’s leaders, said in an interview.

A medical office worker who worked as a legislative aide for former 1st District Councilman Marc Wilder, Melton, 46, ran for the seat in 1986 after Wilder decided not to seek reelection. She came in third and is once again pursuing the seat with the help of downtown senior citizens and her family. Her mother makes the small lemon cakes that are carefully wrapped and handed out to voters.

Croshaw, a 29-year-old office manager for Paine Webber, is president of the local Junior Chamber of Commerce and president of the Long Beach Area Democratic Club. He has been walking the district for more than seven months and says he entered the race because “I wasn’t getting phone calls returned from my local city councilman.”

He advocates police foot patrols, the tax levy for more police, inclusionary zoning and the establishment of a city-run shelter for the homeless. He says the city needs to make a greater effort to eliminate graffiti and to enforce housing codes.

“What they’re doing is tearing down old slums and putting up new slums and that’s exactly what we have,” Croshaw complained, saying the new apartment buildings he has seen while campaigning are already falling apart.