CITY COUNCIL ELECTIONS 12TH DISTRICT : Questions of Unethical Conduct Bedevil Both Candidates : Korenstein: While saying big money has undue influence, she is accused of a conflict on that very score.

Candidate Julie Korenstein is trying to take the high ground on the ethics-in-government issue in the Los Angeles City Council 12th District race amid signs of voter displeasure with how Councilman Hal Bernson received and spent his campaign contributions.

In a recent interview, Korenstein said she was sympathetic to a system of full taxpayer financing of elections to wring the influence of big-money interests out of the political process.

But Korenstein, a Los Angeles school board member, has found her own political ethics challenged by Bernson, who accused Korenstein of a “direct conflict” in voting in 1989 to back a lucrative teachers union contract after her election campaigns had been heavily funded by the union.

Public records also show that Korenstein led a bloc of school trustees who shelved a 1987 plan to have a campaign reform code applied to school board races. The code would have crippled the financial clout of the teachers union in elections.

Korenstein has embraced the issue of political reform with stinging attacks on Bernson’s ethical conduct and by securing the endorsement of Geoffrey Cowan, a UCLA law school lecturer and a leader in the city’s political reform circles.

A staple of Korenstein’s ethics-in-government complaint goes to the issue of the proposed Porter Ranch development, a controversial building plan for 1,300 acres. “I think Bernson was inclined to vote the way he did on Porter Ranch because of the large amount of money he got,” Korenstein said. Bernson got at least $26,000 from the developers, their immediate relatives or their companies.

Korenstein also hammers at Bernson for using his campaign funds to travel extensively and to pay for meals at some of the city’s better restaurants. Between 1987 and 1990, for example, Bernson spent more than $120,000 of those funds on travel.

And when Bernson replies that he has never been officially charged with any illegal activities, Korenstein scoffs. “That’s a very foolish statement for him to make,” she said recently. “People want clean politics. There are some things that are legal but not ethical.”

Bernson has just recently begun to chip away at his opponent’s image as a reform candidate. In campaign literature mailed last week, Bernson accused Korenstein of being a tool of teachers union interests due to their financial support for her campaigns.

In her 1987 school board election drive, Korenstein received a total of $72,436 in cash and non-cash contributions from three teachers union sources. The amount received represented 67% of her total campaign budget. The West Valley board member got another $22,838 from teachers union sources during her 1989 reelection campaign, according to records.

In 1989, Korenstein was part of a board majority that agreed to settle a rancorous teachers walkout by offering a three-year contract with 8% raises each year. The same year, Korenstein voted with a new, more liberal board majority to enact a rule requiring that non-union teachers pay union dues, a measure labor had sought in vain for more than a decade.

“She accepted more than $70,000 from the union and then voted for their massive pay increase. I think that’s a direct conflict,” Bernson has charged. “I refused Porter Ranch contributions for a 2 1/2-year period while the plan was before the city.”

Korenstein sees a difference between her vote to support the teachers’ pocketbook interests after getting major donations from their union and Bernson’s support of the Porter Ranch Specific Plan after receiving political donations from Porter Ranch interests.

“It’s not the same,” she insisted. “Hal Bernson can say what he wants to, but I don’t see a comparison. We needed to attract the very best teachers for our children and that meant paying them more. I would have voted that way with or without the contributions I got. I’m proud of what I did.”

Although Korenstein has said that campaign reform is needed at City Hall to reduce the influence of big contributors, in 1987 she voted to quash a plan to limit contributions to school board candidates that was identical to one overwhelmingly adopted by voters in 1985 for City Hall candidates. That law bars City Hall lawmakers from taking contributions of more than $500 per election from a single individual.

In June, 1987, the school board voted 6 to 1 to ask the City Council to find a way to impose that reform on school district candidates. The request was initiated by board members seeking to neutralize what they said was the financial clout wielded by the teachers unions in board elections.

But by October, 1987, three new board members elected with union support, including Korenstein, wrote the city to say that they had doubts about the reform plan. Later, the city attorney’s office opined that the proposed law probably could not be implemented but that the school board could set up its own campaign contribution rules.

On Nov. 23, 1987, a Korenstein motion to rescind the previous board’s request to have the city law imposed on it was approved. The issue was legally too muddy, she said. During the ensuing bitter debate, board member Roberta Weintraub said: “For us to say we can’t live by the same rules as the City Council lives by is obscene.”

When asked recently to explain her 1987 vote, Korenstein said the city’s campaign reform law, which was endorsed by California Common Cause and the League of Women Voters, was a “sham” and “not meaningful.” Its ceiling on the size of contributions actually favors incumbents, she said. Incumbents have wider contacts than private citizens who run against them, and thus they can raise more money, Korenstein said.

But Korenstein in 1987 not only voted to drop a specific reform plan, she also voted against a motion by former board member Alan Gershman to set up a three-member board committee, chaired by Korenstein herself, to explore other ways to achieve reform.

Korenstein said recently that she could not recall that vote.

Eventually a modest reform was imposed on the school board by the electorate, which voted in November, 1988, to back Proposition 73, a campaign contribution limits law that is generally more lenient than the Los Angeles city statute.