ELECTIONS : Candidates Tackle the Issues--and Each Other : Torrance: The crowded field and an investment scandal could reverse the city’s declining turnout.

These are the final days when the political pace quickens, the campaigning gets nasty and mailboxes brim with brochures promising everything to all.

And this year, the campaign finale to the Torrance City Council election Tuesday has become the most hard-driving--and hard-hitting--in recent memory.

In a last-minute scramble, the two incumbents and eight challengers vying for three at-large seats are taking aim at the issues and each other--the better-funded of them with cable ads and mail appeals, the others by walking precincts and ringing doorbells.

Some say the race, with its crowded field and debate about a City Hall investment imbroglio, might snap Torrance out of an Election Day stupor that has produced a decades-long decline in voter turnout.

“Torrance politics have been fairly boring in the past,” said Parke Skelton, a Hollywood political consultant working for incumbent Timothy Mock. But this year, Skelton said, “you’ll probably see a fairly healthy turnout.”

Contributing to the eleventh-hour scramble for votes is a wealth of campaign cash. As of Feb. 15, four candidates were reporting hefty five-figure war chests.

Incumbent George Nakano was far ahead with $36,774 remaining in his account, followed by Mock with $15,353.89; challenger Burton Fletcher with $14,052.68, and challenger Don Lee with $11,598. Fletcher also reported that he had spent $34,047.53 in 1992 through mid-February, the most of any candidate this year.

Four challengers--Michael Botello, Ronald Ellis, Mark Hamblett and Maureen O’Donnell--all had less than $2,000 on hand. And two more challengers, William Cook and Donald Pyles, say they will receive or spend less than $1,000 this year.

Now, Torrance voters are seeing what that money has bought.

Mock launched an extensive cable TV campaign Tuesday on five stations serving the Torrance area: CNN, TNT, USA, Arts & Entertainment and the Discovery Channel.

His commercial opens with dramatic footage of a 1987 explosion at the Mobil Oil Corp. refinery in Torrance and credits him with helping improve the refinery and solve other city problems. The footage finishes on a more upbeat note, showing Mock in front of City Hall and with his family.

With Fletcher also advertising on CNN, cable appears to be playing a growing role in South Bay politics.

“We’ve never seen the volume of dollars that we’ve seen this year,” said Steve Miller, general sales manager for the firm handling advertising sales for Paragon Cable.

Direct mail is also in vogue, to target rivals as well as the issues.

A new Fletcher brochure, for instance, takes aim at incumbents. Featuring a photo of City Hall, it carries the headline: “What they’re telling you just isn’t true. . . . Everything is not ‘o.k.’ at City Hall and everyone is not satisfied with how Torrance is being run.”

Inside is a smorgasbord of criticisms of City Hall.

A new mailer from Nakano takes aim at only one candidate, Fletcher, accusing him of wanting “to give the City Council a big pay hike.” Nakano points to a January proposal by Fletcher to increase council members’ pay.

Fletcher on Friday called Nakano’s mailer “complete falsehoods,” saying he retracted that proposal in Nakano’s presence at a Feb. 3 public forum after learning that council members receive not only $100 a month, but also other benefits such as a car allowance of more than $400 a month.

The finger-pointing among the 10 candidates can, at times, grow convoluted. O’Donnell, for instance, has produced a last-minute piece attacking not the incumbents but fellow challengers Fletcher, Lee and Botello.

“It’s flattering, in some ways. You’re perceived as a threat,” Lee said after hearing of the piece.

Lee has taken a different tack.

Refusing so far to attack his competitors by name, he has put out a new mailer addressing two issues raised repeatedly in the campaign: the millions in city money missing in an investment scandal and the hefty final-year raises granted two high-ranking city officials, boosting their retirement pensions.

“Any candidate can yell about the $6.1 million loss of city funds and the council pension-scam vote. Don Lee offers solutions,” the mailer reads.

Candidates with smaller campaign accounts, by contrast, have had to rely on tried-and-true tactics like ringing doorbells and handing out flyers in supermarket parking lots.

For instance, Botello, who has managed to send out only two mailings, is engineering a last-minute round of doorbell ringing intended to reach 20,000 households.

Said Botello, speaking from a phone booth on Friday afternoon: “If it doesn’t rain, we’re going to make it.”

Whether all the enthusiasm results in strong voter turnout remains to be seen. Turnout for municipal elections has been plummeting in Torrance for years, to lows of 14% in 1986 and 15% in 1988.

A possible cause is that in 1976, Torrance elections were switched from April to March. Since several other South Bay cities have their elections in April, some speculate, the Torrance balloting simply may not catch the attention of voters.

“The lower the turnout, the more it ensures that the incumbents get reelected,” Hamblett said. “If we went to November, I guarantee we’d have at least a 50% turnout.”

On the other hand, Torrance voters have shown they will turn out in a hot campaign. In 1990, a relatively high 28% of voters went to the polls to decide a much-debated initiative to ban bulk use of toxic hydrofluoric acid at the Mobil refinery. The measure was defeated.

And in a possible indication that this year’s campaign is stirring similar interest, a standing-room-only crowd attended a televised debate Thursday among council candidates. The debate will be repeated at 7 tonight and Monday on Torrance Community Television, Channel 59.

But even veteran political observers aren’t sure what to expect on Tuesday--a big turnout or a small one, a wave of anti-incumbent fervor or endorsement of the status quo.

“It’s such an unusual election,” said Dan Walker, who is leaving his council post to run for the state Assembly.

“You talk to one group and it’s, ‘Throw the two incumbents out.’ You talk to another group and it’s, ‘One stays and one goes.’ And others say: ‘What’s all this nonsense. . . . We’ve got a good city.’ ”