No Gaines Regrets : Politics: The former Encinitas mayor and councilwoman is not in mourning as she faces the end of her tumultuous four years in politics. And she won’t miss the drubbings from the press.

Marjorie Gaines sat on the picnic table of her rural Olivenhain home--a rustic ranch house perched on 3 pristine acres--looking more like a sweet grandmother than Marjorie The Terrible.

Her sky-blue eyes still mesmerize. But, with this 59-year-old Encinitas councilwoman, talk rarely centers on holiday pie-baking, favorite grandchildren or the menagerie of pets--the horses, parrot, pigeons, geese, dogs and cat--that keep her company at home.

It’s about politics. Hard-fought, sometimes ugly, battles both won and lost. In the last four years--as Encinitas’ first mayor, then as councilwoman--Gaines has become synonymous with the often uproarious small-town politics of the North County coastal community, a colorful character who always seemed to talk her way into the headlines.

For many, she was a loose council cannon loaded with verbal shrapnel. Most meeting nights, fur flew faster in Encinitas than during a fox alarm in a farmer’s hen house.

With Gaines, it seemed, there was always some new adversary. Marjorie versus the newspapers. Marjorie versus the migrant workers. Or the developers. Or other council members.

Still, the former Girl Scout leader and Cub Scout den mother maintained a strong grass-roots following, constituents who praised her down-home, no-nonsense style and the fact that she always spoke enough of her mind to win the war.

But then, just the other day, Marjorie lost the Big Battle--suffering a defeat that shocked not only her supporters, but her adversaries as well. She got fired.

On election day, after waging a no-growth campaign that stressed a strong stand against the city’s persistent migrant presence, Gaines was voted out of office. Garnering only 18% of the popular vote, she got only about half as many votes as her main rival.

The surprising tally was a far cry from 1986, when Gaines became the newly incorporated city’s first mayor, receiving more votes than the next two candidates combined.

Somewhere along the way, however, Marjorie Gaines fell out of favor with Encinitas voters. She refuses to attribute her defeat to what others call her confrontational style. Instead, she blames the press.

Gaines claims she was subjected to a two-year smear campaign by local newspapers--the Oceanside Blade-Citizen and, in particular, the Encinitas Coast Dispatch--that she says perverted her positions on issues and even used her family in an attempt to damage her credibility.

The way Marjorie sees it, citizens never got to see the real Gaines, only a caricature of her concocted by the newspapers. Council meetings should have been televised like in other cities, she said. So people could see for themselves.

“Looking back, I never gave the newspapers credibility,” she said. “I never thought they could make the difference in the election. I was wrong.”

And now, as other local officials are promising a kinder, gentler Encinitas--saying Gaines got what she deserved--the embattled councilwoman discussed the one aspect of political life she won’t miss after leaving office later this month.

“The lies,” she said. “That’s the one thing that hurts everybody--when people tell lies about them. I don’t mind the rest. Even the constant meetings and the long hours of homework.

“Because I decided that to do a good job, you have to make a commitment. And that usually takes all of your time. But I never learned how to do things half-way.”

None of the council members, migrant advocates, newspapermen and other local political observers interviewed doubted Gaines’ devotion to her job. Or the long hours she spent boning up on issues to be always armed and ready when she took her seat in council chambers.

In the end, Marjorie defeated Marjorie, they said.

“Nobody in this city knows land-use issues like Marjorie Gaines,” said Dennis Lhota, editorial director of the North County Community newspapers, including the Encinitas Coast-Dispatch.

“It’s just that confrontational style of hers. She ruled with blinders on. She didn’t see both sides of the issue at times. She took a limited view of things. And the voters reacted to that.”

The one passionate opinion that Gaines became most recognized for was her stern stand against the presence of the hundreds of migrant laborers who make their homes in the undeveloped canyons and brush-covered suburban crevices of Encinitas.

In local press reports, Gaines was the recognized leader of a city campaign to crack down on migrant lawlessness. She was a reliable ally of homeowners who sought city assistance in fighting littering and trespassing by migrants on private property.

And she was famous for her campaigns. Such as her role in the council’s move to declare a local state of emergency over the migrant presence. Or the passage--later struck down in court--of an ordinance to ban curbside hiring of laborers. Once she proposed the establishment of a federal encampment where immigrants could be housed until their legal status was determined.

Gaines was singled out by the local press for her gaffes as well. She’s the councilwoman who told a packed council meeting that undocumented workers should be “eradicated.” Seconds later, however, Gaines corrected herself to say she meant the squalid camps that workers had built.

She also reportedly said at another meeting that the illegals should be “bused back to TJ.” Gaines denies ever making the statement.

And, although no one is saying that Gaines’ defeat was an outright victory for migrants, it signals the disappearance of one staunch migrant detractor in the continuing City Council debate over the laborer issue.

“I think residents just got tired of seeing their town tarnished by all these migrant proclamations and they blamed her,” said Lhota, whose newspaper endorsed the two winning candidates, Maura Wiegand and John Davis.

“This city, even before incorporation, has always had to have an enemy. First it was the county, then the Board of Supervisors, then the city staff and the council. And finally, it became Marjorie. She became the last enemy on the list.”

Claudia Smith, an attorney for the California Rural Legal Assistance, an Oceanside-based migrants rights group, said Gaines became a visible target not only for some Encinitas voters.

“Some of her attitudes against the migrant workers were downright vicious,” she said. “She blamed them for everything but the global warming trend. And, if she ever found out about El Nino, she would have blamed them for that, too.

“She made Encinitas a byword for a place that wanted to depopulate itself of migrants at any cost. And maybe people felt things were going a little too far, too fast.”

But June Bello, an Encinitas homeowner who regularly appeared before the council to request help cleaning up a migrant encampment near her home, said she had no problem with either Marjorie’s positions or her style in expressing them.

“She was never confrontational--it just may seem so when people are talking to a council member who asks tough questions, ones they have trouble answering,” she said. “For me, Marjorie Gaines was the most fair person around. She told the truth.

“What I really liked about her was that she was steadfast. Nobody could back her down. When she was right, man, she was right.”

Anne Omsted, a councilwoman who over the years became Gaines’ biggest adversary, saw a different side of the woman from the opposite side of the council bench.

“In government, people expect a fair hearing where people hear both sides of the issue. Marjorie was always so firmly committed to the position she adopted that a lot of people didn’t feel they got that fair hearing with her.”

But Gaines won’t be gone from the city’s political picture for long, Omsted predicted. “I fully expect she’ll be out there as an activist. I wouldn’t be surprised to see her in less than a month, leading a group of irate citizens on some issue.

“Actually, she might even have more fun now. Poor Marjorie.”

But Gaines says she is not looking for anyone’s sympathy, especially from Anne Omsted.

She sees the defeat as an opportunity to finally accomplish some work around the home she, her husband, Frank, and their five children built when they moved here from Los Angeles 17 years ago.

“There’s a lot of other things I’d like to be doing than attending night meetings,” she said. “I wasn’t doing it for me. I was doing it for them. But that’s over now.”

Now, Gaines can clean up that long-neglected pile of wood in the front yard and finally finish building a fence around her property. She can tend to the dried-up, man-made lake near her home--the one her family calls Marjorie Pond, with Frank Island sitting out there in the middle. And, perhaps, she can get more serious with her portrait paintings.

“We can have a lot more fun painting together,” said 30-year-old daughter, Dixie as she chased the two geese--Gaggle and Company--around the side yard. “We can go to movies and have talks, and the telephone won’t ring off the hook anymore with people and their problems.”

Even husband Frank, a local private investigator, talked of the time his wife spent on the telephone as councilwoman, advising citizens on the issues. “Marjorie will be home now, and I like that,” he said.

“She’ll fix better meals. And I’ll have clean socks and underwear now. And now, when the phone rings, there’s a remote possibility that it might be for me.”

The man Marjorie calls “Dad” supports her stand on the Mexican and Central American immigrant laborers, who he says get away with breaking laws while all the authorities can say is: “Poor migrants.”

Frank Gaines always stayed away from council meetings because that was always “Margie’s domain.” But, he, too, resents the way his family has been treated in the newspapers. Like the loan the couple made to their son that was misconstrued as their having an unreported partnership in an Oceanside seniors complex, he Gaines said.

All these years, Frank has seen a different Marjorie--a tender woman who protected her family like a mother hen and found time to care for her ailing father-in-law.

“It just makes me mad,” he said of the press reports. “Marjorie is absolutely incorruptable. There’s not a phony bone in her body. This thing is the city’s loss, not ours.”

Gaines, however, did feel the loss on election night. She cried when the results came pouring in--not so much out of sorrow, her daughter says, but because of all the nice things supporters said about her.

She says she got more than 50 calls of support in days following. No one mentioned critics’ charges of her steamroller style at council--that once Marjorie got started on an issue, she would roll over listeners, talking until her point was made.

“That’s just all so much baloney, that I don’t listen to what people have to say,” she said. “It’s garbage. I’m not rude. I’m polite to people. But those critics are out of my life now. I don’t have time for them anymore.”

Politician or not, Marjorie Gaines still has her causes. And she plans to fight for them. She still believes that city councils make a difference in people’s lives.

Eventually, she may test that theory from the opposite side of the council gavel--appearing before the very council of which she was once a member.

And, just maybe, she’ll eventually be able to prove her critics wrong once and for all by showing them that Marjorie Gaines is no racist. “She knows herself. And the people who love her know her, too,” Dixie Gaines said of her mother. “The rest don’t matter.”

And then, in the failing afternoon light, one of the dogs lounging in Gaines’ front yard began barking at two migrant workers treading up the road past the Gaines property.

“Get ‘em,” Dixie said with a laugh.

Then Marjorie Gaines turned to one of her last interviewers as Encinitas councilwoman. “Did you get that?” she said.