Wilson Struggling to Make Oakland Mayoral Runoff

Haunted by a costly failed attempt to lure the National Football League’s Raiders back from Los Angeles, Mayor Lionel Wilson found himself struggling Tuesday to win a fourth term against an aggressive field of challengers.

Early returns showed the 75-year-old mayor--a former judge and civil rights activist--in a close race for the second of only two spots on the ballot in November, when a mayoral runoff is expected.

His top challengers in a sometimes raucous race for the nonpartisan mayor’s post were fellow Democrats: Assemblyman Elihu Harris, 42, who held a commanding lead in early returns, and City Councilman Wilson Riles Jr., 44, the son of a former state superintendent of public instruction. Riles was in a tight race with Wilson for second place.

“If it hadn’t been for the Raiders, the opposition wouldn’t have had enough votes to get us into a runoff,” Wilson campaign manager Paul Cobb said a few days before Tuesday’s vote.

The Raiders abandoned the Bay Area city for their present home after the 1981 season.

In an effort to lure them back, Oakland offered team owner Al Davis a combination of ticket sale guarantees, loans and grants worth more than $600 million.

Wilson contended that the city and county would make $50 million over 15 years from the contract. But Riles and Harris moved quickly to capitalize on public concern that the deal was too costly for a city plagued by crime, poverty, a scandal-ridden school district and the massive damage caused by last October’s earthquake.

Still, Wilson went into Tuesday’s election hoping to benefit from what his campaign manager termed “the Jackie Robinson effect”--a reference to the former Brooklyn Dodger who broke major league baseball’s color barrier. When he was elected in 1977, Wilson became the first black mayor of this city of 360,000, where blacks make up half of the population.

During the campaign, Wilson stressed his accomplishments under a city Charter that gives the mayor little real power and an annual salary of only $15,000. (The next mayor will get $80,000.)

Harris boosted his chances by carrying legislation that permitted a state takeover of city schools--a measure that won him wide support, but also some criticism from militant factions within the black community.

Oakland and the rest of Alameda County also voted on an initiative to make the county a nuclear-free zone--one of the most far-reaching such measures in the nation. If the initiative takes effect, it would require a five-year phase-out of weapons research at the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. Early returns showed the measure trailing.

In another local election of note, Orange County’s controversial Measure A, which called for placing all future county jails in the city of Santa Ana, was losing in early returns Tuesday. The initiative underscored ethnic and economic differences between predominantly Latino Santa Ana and other parts of the county. Its foes branded the measure racist, a charge proponents denied.

In the Orange County city of Irvine, meanwhile, Mayor Larry Agran, a nationally known environmentalist, held a narrow lead in early returns over his longtime City Council antagonist, Sally Anne Sheridan.

Jacobs reported from Los Angeles, Herron Zamora from Oakland.