Council Election Loss Lingers for Gray: She’s Still Paying Off Debts

In political life, election losses have a nasty way of lingering.

It has been two months since Mary Lee Gray suffered a more than 2-1 defeat against Ruth Galanter in the contest for Los Angeles’ 6th District City Council seat. But campaign reports show that Gray is still paying for her defeat. Literally.

The onetime Los Angeles County supervisor’s aide had $17,700 in debts and just $8,300 in cash at the end of June, according to a report filed with the city clerk’s office last week. Gray said this week that IOUs have continued to accumulate, so that her campaign has nothing left in the bank and owes about $20,000.

The lingering deficit has also exposed, for the first time, Gray’s mid-campaign falling out with her campaign consultant, Harvey Englander.

Englander said this week that Gray has refused to pay $4,600 she owes him. Gray said she will pay, but accused Englander of abandoning her campaign.

Galanter, meanwhile, is safely ensconced in her second term with more than enough cash in her campaign fund, $18,200, to pay her outstanding debts of $1,400, her report showed.

With heavy backing from developers, entertainers, professionals and union officials, Galanter outspent Gray by nearly 4 to 1 in the race to represent the district, which encompasses Westchester, Playa del Rey, Venice, Mar Vista and the Crenshaw District.

Galanter spent $411,000 to win, much of it on a flurry of glossy color mailers attacking Gray. With her $114,900 in expenditures, Gray was left to run a more rudimentary campaign that featured personal appearances, lawn placards and black-and-white brochures.

Gray, who recently left her job as an aide to county Supervisor Deane Dana to become associate administrator of the county’s Long Beach Comprehensive Health Center, said she does not want to dwell on the past campaign. But she said her chances were hurt badly by the lack of funds and Englander’s exodus as consultant less than a month before the April primary, in which her second-place finish forced Galanter into a June runoff.

“The bottom line is, if you have money and you have incumbency, it is very difficult to overcome,” Gray said.

The former candidate could not conceal her displeasure with Englander, who, she said, told her just two weeks before the primary that he was leaving the campaign. “When he found out that we did not have the large Republican dollars that he thought we would, he quit the campaign, pure and simple,” Gray said. “Basically he said we didn’t have the resources.”

She said the Orange County-based consultant estimated that it would cost $200,000 to $300,000 to run an effective campaign.

“After dropping us, he found someone with more money and he went with him,” Gray said--a reference to the campaign Englander successfully engineered for Councilman Hal Bernson in the 12th District.

Englander said he had been out of the Gray campaign for several weeks before deciding to join Bernson.

The veteran political consultant said he found himself unable to work with Gray “for two reasons: She wasn’t listening to my advice, and the funds were not available to run the type of campaign I wanted to run.”

Gray had pledged to voters not to take money from developers with projects within the 6th District. Englander said he told her, “ ‘That is great, if you can raise money elsewhere.’ When she couldn’t, I asked her to revisit her decision.”

But Gray refused, saying that reneging on her pledge would ruin her credibility.