ELECTIONS : Close Finishes in Pomona, Pasadena Races : Pomona: Charges of dirty campaigning accompany two hot contests. Mayor Donna Smith edges Tomas Ursua, and Nell Soto defeats a challenger with absentee ballots.

Mayor Donna Smith won reelection Tuesday by a narrow margin over Councilman Tomas Ursua after a bitter campaign in which each side accused the other of exploiting racism.

In another close race, Councilwoman Nell Soto won reelection after getting a big boost from absentee voters. She was trailing after votes at the polls were counted Tuesday night but took most of the absentee ballots to edge teacher Bob Jackson in Council District 1 by a tally of 782 to 716.

Paula H. Lantz, an infant educator, was an easy winner in Council District 4, defeating businessman Bill Shelton by a vote of 1,163 to 807.

In the fiercely contested mayoral race, Smith had a 445-vote lead after votes cast at the polls were counted. Then, election officials began counting more than 1,400 absentee ballots and the lead dwindled dramatically.

Final unofficial returns gave Smith 4,530 votes and Ursua 4,425, with an additional 117 absentee and provisional ballots to be counted today. Ursua believes that there are not enough uncounted ballots for him to overcome Smith’s 105-vote margin, but he could ask for a recount.

Smith and Ursua complained bitterly after the election about the tactics used in the race.

No one in Pomona has ever run a campaign “as dirty and lowdown as this one,” Smith said. She accused Ursua of running “a racist campaign” by targeting minorities. She said campaign workers for Ursua, who is Latino, were telling Latino voters “you better vote for your own kind.”

Ursua said that his efforts were merely to encourage minorities to vote but that Smith supporters were fomenting racism. For example, he said, a woman who identified herself as “Rosa” was calling white voters to tell them that Ursua intended “to fire all the whites in city government.” Smith said nobody in her campaign would do something like that.

Attention in the final days of the campaign focused on a cartoon of a sombrero-wearing man that appeared in a newsletter of the Pomona Valley Republican Women Federated that invited club members to hear Smith’s annual State of the City address. The cartoon was labeled by Ursua and his supporters as racist because it depicted Latino illegal aliens draining taxpayers by lining up for medical benefits.

Smith said that the cartoon was deplorable but that, although she was a member of the Republican club, she was not responsible for its newsletters. She said Ursua supporters unfairly linked her to the cartoon in mailers sent to voters.

Smith said use of the cartoon in the campaign engendered so much hatred that she was literally chased down the street in one neighborhood by people waving the cartoon while she was campaigning over the weekend.

Councilwoman Soto said this year’s mayoral and council campaigns were “the worst and most vicious” she had ever seen in Pomona.

Soto said she was worried as early returns showed her trailing in the voting but added that she was preoccupied by concern about her husband, Phil, a former state assemblyman, who suffered a heart attack Saturday and is hospitalized.

She said her husband’s illness put politics in perspective on election night. “I was losing, but Phil was alive. That was all that mattered,” she said.

ELECTION RETURNS POMONA Some absentee ballots not included Mayor 25 of 25 Precincts

VOTE % Donna Smith (i) 4,530 52.2 Tomas Ursua 4,425 49.4

City Council District 1 4 of 4 Precincts

VOTE % Nell Soto (i) 782 52.2 Bob Jackson 716 47.8

District 4 5 of 5 Precincts

VOTE % Paula H. Lantz 1,163 59.1 Bill Shelton 807 40.9

(i) incumbent