Reed’s Loss at Polls Is Her Family’s Gain : Santa Monica: The veteran councilwoman now has time for her son’s basketball games and Jason, her husband of 20 years.

Losing an election is never easy, nor is the timing ever right, particularly for a longtime politician.

But former Santa Monica City Councilwoman Christine E. Reed--who last month lost her bid for a fifth term--is making the best of it.

Since the Nov. 6 city election, she has been able to catch up on some family matters.

She rushed around town running errands for the holidays, she attended her son’s high school basketball games and she spent time with Jason, her husband of 20 years.

Granted, part of the time spent with her husband has been to care for him and a back ailment that has forced him to stay home from work. Still, they have spent more time together during the past two months than they have in a long time.

“Chris has cooked dinner every night since Thanksgiving,” said Reed’s husband, who is not used to such luxuries. He is executive director of Associated Students UCLA, the private organization that runs most of the student services on the Westwood campus, including the student union.

The demands of meetings and constituents during her 15-year tenure on the City Council left little time for those kinds of activities.

Having Reed at home more often is not necessarily good for Reed’s 14-year-old son, Tim, a ninth-grader at Crossroads School.

“Before the election, when he realized there was a possibility that I would not be reelected, he was really bummed out by the idea because he knew I would be home more,” she said. “He is 14, you know.”

“She gets on my case sometimes about doing my homework,” Tim said sheepishly.

Reed’s other child, Peggy, 18, left for Europe two days after the election when there was still hope that Reed would win because a few thousand absentee ballots remained uncounted. Reed said her daughter, who will be in Europe until March, now knows that Reed lost the election, but the change will probably have less of an effect on Peggy because she will be attending college in the fall and will not be at home much.

But although the last two months have allowed Reed’s family some time together, they all know that it is not likely to last.

“I think it is great in the short run, but it’s not what Chris wants to do,” said Reed’s husband. “So it’s not good for the long run.”

Reed said in a recent interview that she is not sure what she’ll be doing. However, she is not likely to run again for the City Council.

“It’s not in my thinking at the moment,” she said, as she sipped a cup of tea. “I am a forward-looking person . . . . I also like learning. If I am going to do something in public service then, for me, it ought to be something new. I hope to be involved in some public policy that touches on issues dealing with transportation or the environment.”

Reed said she has filed an application with the governor’s office for an appointment to a state board or commission dealing with transportation or environmental issues.

But Reed said she is not interested in following the path of many ex-politicians: consulting.

“All my friends are telling me I should be a consultant, but you know, it’s not something that interests me,” Reed said. “I don’t feel like I need to go out and make piles of money. Being a consultant is . . . like . . . so sleazy.”

Meanwhile, she said she would like to get her front yard garden back in shape, and she has six years of photographs to put in photo albums.

Former colleagues--both political friends and foes--say Reed’s intelligence and experience will be missed.

Santa Monica Mayor Judy Abdo, who was often on the opposite side of political issues from Reed, said she and the city will feel the loss of Reed.

“It will be difficult being the only woman on the council,” said Abdo, who is in the middle of her first four-year council term. “We gave each other support as women.”

Abdo is a leader in the tenants political group Santa Monicans for Renters’ Rights, which had targeted Reed for defeat. But Abdo said she voted for Reed in the balloting for three City Council seats last month. Reed finished fourth in a field of nine candidates.

“I had hoped Chris would be reelected,” Abdo said. “Because of her history in the city, and her very quick mind, she had solutions to problems very quickly. Her involvement in regional issues was critical to the city, in such issues as light rail and the environment. Her participation in those boards can’t be replaced, at least not for years.”

Jacki Bacharach, mayor pro tem of Rancho Palos Verdes and a longtime colleague of Reed on many of those regional boards, said Reed was a major force on such agencies as the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission and the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

“It’s going to be a real loss for all those agencies,” Bacharach said. “One of her great qualities is that she is able to see the interconnection between all those agencies. She has a lot of common sense.”

During the campaign, Reed said that one of the main reasons she sought reelection was to remain on the regional boards. Nearly all regional boards require its members to be elected city officials.

Reed will remain as the city’s representative to the Metropolitan Water District and, indirectly, to the Santa Monica Bay Management Project. Abdo appointed herself as the representative and Reed as the alternate. But Reed is expected to attend all the meetings.

“I love that stuff,” Reed said. “It was so rewarding and so satisfying to be a member of the county Transportation Commission, where you are working on major infrastructure projects . . . and you are actually doing it . . . where you are making decisions that will outlast you by a hundred years.

“To me that is satisfying. That is worth all the crap I had to put up with. One of the things I think I am really good at is translating complicated public policy issues and reducing it into the absurd so people can understand it.”

Reed said she has reflected on her defeat, but that it is now part of her past.

“I went through all the stages of grief: denial, blame, anger and regret,” she said. “There is a mourning process . . . and, yes, I am going on and doing something else.

“You can get all morose and depressed if you rehash everything, and that’s not part of my personality. I haven’t really given it a lot of analysis. It’s just generally clear to me that, when you are in office for 15 years, eventually you manage to have voted on enough things that enough people are irritated . . . that they aren’t willing to have you to serve again.

“Clearly, my votes in support of city fiscal policy, which equate to votes for development, hurt me. But I wouldn’t change those votes. I am a direct person.”

Reed said that as the lone incumbent in the race, she was blamed for all that is wrong with city government.

“Actually, I think I took the fall for a lot of city policies, and I told that to Judy (Abdo) after the election,” she said. “People feel closed out of the government process. People are angry with City Hall.”

She also believes that, in the cycles of government, her time had simply run out.

“That’s the irony of public service,” she said. “We fought the things to preserve quality of life in the city and then new people came in and said (trash)on your idea of quality of life, here’s my idea of quality of life. The people who threw me out of office wanted the same things that I have always wanted.

“Now we have SMRR as the new city Establishment, and they are not going to address some of the important issues in the city, and they are going to end up losing.

“I have both the acquired knowledge over a long time of public service and the academic knowledge from having studied political science to know that government is a process that is ongoing.

“People like me, we are like little ants. We come in and out of the process. People like the city manager, they are like great big beetles. They are there for much longer than we are . . . . The city bureaucracy outlasts all council members.”

Reed said that, after 15 years in elected office, she has few regrets. But one of those is the growing homeless problem in Santa Monica.

“If I regret anything, it’s that my communication skills were inadequate to the task to keep us from ending up as the homeless port,” she said. “I’m less compassionate (than other members of the City Council) . . . . I am much more demanding in terms of behavior. If anything, there has been too much compassion for the homeless and inadequate compassion for the residents.”

As for the future of Santa Monica, Reed said she does not see things getting better.

“It’s going to get worse,” she said. “This is not a family-oriented City Council. We don’t have City Council members who really, in their gut, understand the concern and the threat that many of us feel.”