L.A. CITY COUNCIL ELECTIONS 12TH DISTRICT : Voters Courted 1 by 1 as Campaign Nears a Close

For voters in the 12th City Council District, there was no question an election was under way this week. Their mailboxes were stuffed with campaign brochures. Political signs sprouted like weeds. And candidates appeared on their doorsteps, smiling and trawling for votes.

With only days left before Tuesday’s city election, incumbent Hal Bernson and his five challengers picked up the pace of their campaigning in the district, which covers the northwest San Fernando Valley. The field of rivals is the biggest Bernson has faced since his 1979 election.

Those seeking to replace Bernson are: Los Angeles school board member Julie Korenstein, Chatsworth businessman Walter Prince, Northridge printer Allen Hecht, Los Angeles Police Detective Arthur (Larry) Kagele and Leonard Shapiro, who publishes a newsletter about city government from his Granada Hills home.

Bernson has predicted he will get the 50%-plus-one majority of the vote he needs to win outright in Tuesday’s city primary election. If he does not, the two top vote-getters will face each other in a June runoff.

The central issue in the campaign has been Bernson’s support for the massive Porter Ranch development in the hills north of Chatsworth. When completed, it will house 11,000 people. It also will include 850 hotel rooms and a regional shopping mall.

Bernson has claimed the development is a well-ordered one in an area where construction is inevitable. But his challengers say the project is too big and that it will aggravate traffic congestion and air pollution and strain schools, sewage treatment and other city services.

Over a period of several days last week, a Times reporter followed the candidates through some of their last-minute campaigning. Here is a sampling of their activities:

Julie Korenstein was a little lost. Clutching an armful of campaign flyers, she picked her way through a labyrinthine condominium complex in the Porter Ranch area, hoping to catch a few voters at home late on a Saturday morning.

“I think we have to go back the other way,” she said, marching around under an increasingly hot sun in search of a certain condo listed on her precinct-walking sheet.

“That’s the problem,” she said, surveying a street that twisted down and away from her. “We have to go down; we’re up too high. It’s very, very, very confusing, these houses. There must be a better way to do this.”

Earlier, Korenstein had met her volunteer precinct-walkers at a supporter’s home. They were outfitted with campaign flyers and tally sheets containing names and addresses of voters who cast ballots in the last two city elections--the kind most likely to go to the polls Tuesday.

Their mission was to contact as many of these treasured voters as possible, pitch them on Korenstein and press them about whom they will vote for. Korenstein supporters would later be called by phone and nudged toward polls on the day of the election.

But first Korenstein and one of her volunteers, a doctor from Hollywood named Pauline Furth, had to find a few likely voters at the Park Northridge complex on Tampa Avenue.

Korenstein struck out at the first condo; no one was home. Furth emerged from her first condo looking a bit downcast.

“Were they home?” Korenstein asked.

“Yeah, but . . . I’ll tell you later,” Furth said. She glanced back at a reporter but decided to say it anyway. “Well, they were for Prince.”

Korenstein had better luck at her next stop. The occupant, JoAnn Villone, eagerly took Korenstein onto her back porch, where a sweeping view of rolling green ridgelines was marred by one ridge that has been bulldozed flat and brown--preliminary grading for the Porter Ranch development.

Villone gazed at the flattened ridge. “The dust,” she said angrily. “And the people up here have respiratory problems. And skin things.”

Out on the street again, Korenstein carefully circled “yes” next to Villone’s name on her tally sheet.

Hal Bernson stood by the kitchen counter in a supporter’s house, munching a macaroon. A dozen friendly constituents milled around him, seeming a little unsure of what issues to discuss with him despite a rare, face-to-face opportunity at a coffee klatch.

“Sometimes I think my mailman has dyslexia or something,” ventured Ralph Crouch, a Granada Hills real estate consultant. “I get mail for people on three or four other streets.”

But soon the guests got rolling, seated in the living room of their hosts, Donna Melnik and her husband Carl, a Granada Hills doctor. They questioned Bernson for more than an hour, ignoring a white poodle that wandered around sniffing their ankles.

How severe would water rationing get? Why weren’t they informed when the city erected new stop signs? Would the state budget shortfall affect city revenues?

And one man asked about “the police thing.” Hours earlier, the city Police Commission had placed Police Chief Daryl Gates on a 60-day leave of absence after the videotaped beating of a black motorist by police officers.

“We had hundreds of calls come in today, and virtually all were supportive of the chief,” said Bernson, a staunch Gates supporter. “A lot of people were saying, ‘Why doesn’t the mayor resign?’ I think there’s going to be a backfire on him.”

The guests nodded their heads in agreement and talked about crime in their area. Donna Melnik said she was frightened about gang activity.

“I’m frightened to go to the malls because I’ve seen gang things going on,” she said. “We have people moving in from all over L.A. They get a taste for our area and they move into Pacoima.”

Someone wanted to know who Bernson thought would run for mayor in 1993. He ticked off a list of likely candidates: Assemblyman Richard Katz, City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky and others.

“How about Hal Bernson?” asked a grinning man in a mustard-colored jacket.

“Hal’s not interested,” Bernson said. “Hal’s only interested in getting re-elected.”

It was three minutes to air time, and Leonard Shapiro was still scribbling notes to himself. Before he knew it, a radio talk-show host would be asking him his deepest-held opinions about . . . what?

“Probably gonna ask me about the cops, aren’t they?” said Shapiro, a spry, outspoken 71-year-old whose newsletter frequently takes city bureaucrats to task for what he views as their stupidity, laziness and unresponsiveness.

“I never have enough time,” he muttered, bearing down on his notes.

Show time. The host, John Swaney of KGIL-AM, introduced Shapiro and immediately asked if he believed Gates should resign.

Without hesitation, Shapiro--in his raspy, New York-accented voice--said the chief should quit. In the next few minutes, he also declared that Los Angeles police officers routinely use excessive force; that his opponent, Bernson, is essentially a captive of developers, and that city taxpayers should pay for radio, TV and newspaper ads for local political candidates.

The interview ended.

“How was that?” Shapiro asked a reporter. “Did I hem or haw?”

Twenty minutes later, the diminutive candidate was walking briskly--trotting, nearly--along a quiet Granada Hills street, handing out hot-pink-colored leaflets declaring: “The City Council Deserves Leonard.”

“You meet all kinds of people doing this. One time I met a guy and I said, ‘I’m Leonard Shapiro and I’m running for City Council,’ and he said, ‘So why are you walking across my lawn?’ ” Shapiro said, laughing.

He confided a precinct-walking tip: “You don’t walk across lawns when people are looking.”

Then he proceeded to cut across someone’s lawn.

The homeowners filed into the school auditorium, spoiling for a fight. A handbill lying on a battered school piano left no doubt about their position:

“They’re Dropping a ‘Development’ Bomb on Our Street--Don’t Let It Happen!” it read, referring to a landowner’s proposal to build an 80-unit apartment building in their quiet Northridge neighborhood.

Walter Prince, a veteran of homeowner battles against developers, strode up to the meeting’s organizer, a bearded, bespectacled man named Mark Mrohs.

“The first thing you need,” he told Mrohs, “is a sign-up sheet.”

Prince insisted that he was at the meeting not to campaign but only to advise residents on how to deal with builders and City Hall planners. Nonetheless, he wore a big button that read, “Prince for City Council.”

Without further prompting, he told Mrohs and other neighbors how to play hardball with the landowner.

“You guys gotta face facts: It’s logical to put an apartment building there; there are already others on the other two corners,” he advised, standing at the piano. “What you’re shooting for is the best deal for the community. But don’t ask for anything until he tells you what he’s willing to give.”

After the full audience had arrived, Prince walked to the podium to speak. When he was introduced, none of the 35 people present applauded.

Unfazed, he told them they had no chance of halting the development but that they could extract important concessions from its builder. His manner was patient and logical, and his talk lasted about 20 minutes.

As he finished, the group gave him a warm round of applause.

Allen Hecht grabbed a stack of campaign postcards, squared the edges and shoved them under the blade of the paper-cutting machine.

The cards carried the slogan: “What the Heck, I’m Voting for Hecht!” In minutes, he had cut hundreds of them in the back of his Northridge print shop.

“It’s a tremendous equalizer,” he said, referring to his presses. “Where the other candidates have money, I can print. . . . The only thing I’ve got to pay for is paper and postage.”

By Tuesday, Hecht expects to have printed 150,000 pieces of campaign literature--a blizzard of brochures usually beyond the financial reach of a first-time candidate such as Hecht.

Hopping into his Chrysler LeBaron, he drove the cards to a house in Sepulveda, where a family of Sri Lankan immigrants busily stuffed them into envelopes.

“You’re killing me, Al,” said the mail-house owner, grinning broadly, as Hecht dumped three heavy boxes of literature behind the house.

Driving back to his shop, Hecht spotted a row of bright-red political signs posted along the street. They read, “Who the Heck is Hecht?”

“I’ve got twice as many signs up as everyone else,” he boasted happily. “People told me, ‘The whole problem is you don’t have enough name recognition.’ . . . By the time this is over, they’re going to be sick of my name.”

“What are you handing out?” asked the middle-aged woman as she stuffed empty soft-drink cans into a recycling machine outside a Northridge supermarket.

“Dollar bills!” kidded Arthur (Larry) Kagele, as he passed out leaflets promoting his City Council candidacy.

“They can’t be dollar bills; they’ve got your name on them,” the woman rejoined, taking one nonetheless.

Shoppers streamed past Kagele, lugging bags of groceries. Some averted their eyes as he approached, some took his flyers. A few even stopped to ask about his political views.

A first-time candidate running on a shoestring budget, Kagele often seemed uncomfortable speaking before large groups. But at the market, talking to voters individually, he was loose and appeared to be enjoying himself.

“You’ve got a very nice-looking face,” he told a well-dressed woman, who broke into a wide smile.

“You from Boston?” he asked a young man wearing a Kelly green Boston Celtics T-shirt.

“You a good driver with that thing?” he asked a young woman, who nearly bowled him over as she pulled up to the front door aboard a motor-scooter.

A man and a woman marched out of the store, arm in arm, looking happy. Kagele gave them one of his flyers.

“Oh, thank you,” said the man. “But let me ask you something: Who the heck is Hecht?”