ELECTIONS : Challenger Narrowly Beats Hecht by Cashing In on Voter Discontent

Thomas S. Levyn, a 42-year-old lawyer with little previous involvement in city government, cashed in on voter discontent with the high cost of the Beverly Hills Civic Center to oust one-term City Councilman Bernard Hecht by a narrow margin in Tuesday’s nine-candidate contest for three seats on the Beverly Hills City Council.

Levyn smiled and said, “I don’t know,” when asked to say what it was that put him over the top. He gave special thanks to “the people who pushed me to go back out and keep walking door to door.”

But Levyn’s friend Sam Storm, the former head of a security firm who introduced the candidate to hundreds of his ex-clients in the final weeks of the campaign, said the voters made it clear that “they thought Beverly Hills was going down the tubes a little bit. They said they want to bring Beverly Hills back to the way it used to be.”

Mayor Vicki Reynolds, 56, who proved to be the most popular candidate with 3,420 votes, said that Levyn’s strongest issue was the high price of the city’s lawsuit to recover cost overruns for construction of the $120-million Civic Center. With the trial yet to begin, the legal fees have already gone beyond $3 million.

Levyn, whose practice includes supervision of legal costs for similar projects, blasted the City Council for failing to come to an agreement before going to court for a lengthy confrontation that could add millions more in legal fees.

“He hit on the Civic Center . . . from a position of a new person being able to frame an issue to his advantage,” Reynolds said, “and his position is very appealing.”

City Councilman Allan Alexander, 51, who was reelected with 3,039 votes, credited Levyn as an articulate speaker who put on a “very aggressive campaign.”

“I think it was a question of the community evaluating Tom Levyn and making the comparisons,” he said.

The vote means that the next mayor of Beverly Hills will not be Hecht, who picked up 2,263 votes to 2,366 for Levyn, but two-term Councilman Robert K. Tanenbaum, an attorney, author and screenwriter who is running for the countywide post of district attorney.

“There’s plenty of time in the day to do it all,” said Tanenbaum, speaking by phone from Houston, where he was promoting his latest detective thriller.

Hecht said that because of the narrow margin of the vote he is not quite ready to concede defeat.

But with 115 ballots left to be counted, City Clerk Jean Ushijima said, there is little likelihood of any surprises when the vote is certified later this week.

“I’ve lived through lots of things, and you win some and you lose some,” said Hecht, 69. “I think that my plans certainly include being concerned about our community and being involved in our community’s future, and bringing the kind of quiet and thoughtful attitude that I think is so necessary for benefiting the city.”

He said he would have liked a little more support from the city’s two weekly newspapers.

The Beverly Hills Post endorsed the three incumbents as well as Levyn. The Beverly Hills Courier, which at first endorsed Reynolds, Alexander and a write-in candidate, later threw its support to Levyn too.

Levyn’s endorsement by the Beverly Hills Police Officers Assn. also carried weight, candidates said. Police officers put in hours of off-duty time calling voters to urge their support for Levyn as well as Hecht and the other two incumbents.

“We didn’t look for people who would just support police issues, because that’s not doing the public any good,” said Detective Joe Chirillo, vice president of the group. “The council members had a track record to go by, and Mr. Levyn’s presentation seemed to indicate he could do the same.”

Former tenants’ rights leader Herm Shultz, 69, was the strongest of the other candidates, picking up 1,127 votes despite, or because of, mailers sponsored by apartment owners warning of Santa Monica-style rent control if he was elected.

“There’s no question in my mind that Bernie’s loss was a result of Levyn and myself. We took a substantial number of votes away from him,” Shultz said.

Despite that, he said, the difference of only 103 votes showed that it could have gone either way for Hecht, who came in for one of the campaign’s few dirty digs when challenger James Fabe, 39, said he was not alert enough to run a public meeting.

Fabe, a dentist who vowed to represent the interests of his neighborhood in the southwest corner of the city, got 633 votes, followed by Dean Lavine, a college student, with 414, Salvatore W. (Bill) Di Salvo, an insurance broker, with 410, and Martin Halfon, an apartment owner and real estate agent, with 336.

BEVERLY HILLS 18 of 18 precincts.Votes (%) CITY COUNCIL 3 Elected Vicki Reynolds * 3,420 (24.4) Allan Alexander * 3,039 (21.7) Thomas S. Levyn 2,366 (16.9) Bernard Hecht * 2,263 (16.2) Herm Shultz 1,127 (8.0) James E. Fabe 633 (4.5) Dean Lavine 414 (3.0) Salvatore W. Di Salvo 410 (2.9) Martin Halfon 336 (2.4) Catherine “Kay” Coleman ** 0 (0.0)

-- An asterisk (*) denotes incumbent candidate.

-- A double asterisk (**) indicates an individual who withdrew from the election but is still on the ballot.