ELECTIONS / BOARD OF SUPERVISORS : Erickson Kildee’s Campaign Leaves Rivals in the Dust

Running for her fourth term, county Supervisor Maggie Erickson Kildee was startled in March when two challengers with proven constituencies filed against her.

Since then, however, veteran Santa Paula Councilman John Melton and Ojai environmentalist Stan Greene have found that promises of support don’t pay for mailers or put volunteers on voters’ doorsteps.

While Erickson Kildee began door-to-door canvassing in October and expects to spend up to $60,000 this year alone to retain a seat on the powerful Board of Supervisors, Melton and Greene said last week that their campaigns have not yet gathered momentum.

With the June 2 election just three weeks away, neither Melton nor Greene have begun to work the 160 precincts of the sprawling 3rd District, which includes Camarillo, Ojai, Santa Paula, Fillmore, Piru, Newbury Park, west Thousand Oaks and the sparsely populated north county.

The challengers say they have each raised less than $5,000 to mount campaigns--not enough to mail a single flyer to the district’s 65,000 registered voters. A third challenger--teacher Zoe C. Nolan of Camarillo--said she expects to spend less than $1,000.

And neither Greene nor Melton is sure how many volunteers each can count on to walk neighborhoods during the waning weeks of the campaign.

Melton had intended to begin door-to-door solicitations 10 days ago. But a spider bite put him in bed for several days and left him too weak to walk the district, he said.

“We’re kind of getting started a little late,” Melton said last week. “We hope the interest will pick up. But at least Maggie is running a campaign this time, and that’s healthy for the process.”

Erickson Kildee, first elected to the Board of Supervisors in 1980 with 59% of the vote, was unopposed in 1988.

Greene, longtime president of the 700-member Citizens to Preserve the Ojai, had hoped for early support from environmental groups and from Patagonia, a Ventura company that contributes to environmental causes and political campaigns.

But until the Sierra Club officially backed him Thursday evening, Greene had only the endorsement of his own environmental organization. Individual members of the Environmental Coalition of Ventura County also have said they support him.

“I could use 95 people to just hit the larger precincts, and obviously I will not be able to put together that many,” Greene said. “We have had limited success in getting people to commit to work for us. Everybody has their own problems and jobs that take their time.”

The lack of active campaigning so late in the election season has surprised some who had anticipated becoming involved in the supervisorial races.

“It’s weird. I suddenly realized that it’s May and nothing’s happening. The radar’s blank,” said Paul Tebbel, who monitors local political campaigns for Patagonia. “It’s going to be hard to accept new candidates as being viable if they don’t get out there and do something.”

The question of whether any of her challengers had a chance to beat Erickson Kildee probably helped delay the Sierra Club’s endorsement of Greene, said Joy Kobayashi, chairwoman of the club’s local political action committee.

“Stan Greene is a very strong environmentalist, and I’m sure he’d make a wonderful member of the board,” Kobayashi said. “But Maggie Erickson Kildee is the incumbent, and (some members) weren’t sure she was really threatened. . . I personally don’t think he really has a chance.”

Despite their late starts, Greene, Melton and Nolan said they think Erickson Kildee is vulnerable and that a flurry of late activity could deny her a majority in June, forcing a two-person runoff next fall.

All three challengers said that many constituents, echoing a nationwide anti-incumbency mood, have complained to them about officeholders in general, and Erickson Kildee in particular.

And all three said they favor limiting the number of terms a person can serve as supervisor, a full-time job that pays $50,232 a year.

Greene, 62, an aerospace engineer who owns a small refrigeration business in Ojai, charges Erickson Kildee with indecisiveness on key issues such as development of a landfill at Weldon Canyon near Ojai--a project he opposes.

“She is very likely the swing vote on Weldon Canyon, and she needs to tell the people where she stands on that issue,” Greene said. “She seems to be very good at refereeing and chairing committees and studying, but I think she is a non-courageous leader.”

Melton, 62, a retired area manager for Southern California Edison, said Erickson Kildee betrayed Santa Paula by voting last month to build a new jail on farmland near that city.

“Agriculture is the No. 1 industry in the Santa Clara Valley,” Melton said. “And not only is the jail a violation of the county’s greenbelt agreement, it is starting a cancer that is going to eat away at farmland and create problems for ranchers.”

Nolan, 68, a Hueneme School District speech therapist, said she is running partly because county officials have infringed on her right to use her 3 1/2-acre farm near Camarillo.

Nolan and her husband pleaded no contest to maintaining illegal rental dwellings on the farm in 1988 and 1990, and paid fines of $1,700 and $3,000, according to the county counsel’s office. Nolan remains on probation.

“I don’t want to start a smear campaign,” Nolan said, declining to talk about her problems with the county. “I’m emphasizing equitable codes and zoning. A lot of problems could be corrected by listening to what the people want.”

Erickson Kildee, a 59-year-old former sixth-grade teacher and school administrator in Camarillo, has stuck to a campaign strategy that emphasizes her record, high profile in the community and role as consensus builder.

She has helped form committees to work with farmers to preserve agricultural land, improve relations between cities and the county and to promote cooperation between the county and its business community. She is generally credited with helping to put the debt-ridden county hospital on sound financial footing.

The supervisor said she attends perhaps three community meetings a week, even in non-election years. She said she has knocked on thousands of doors since last fall and has put up hundreds of yard signs. She hands out folksy “Maggie Magnets” for refrigerator doors at every stop.

“I’m out there so they can nail me if they want, and that’s important,” she said.

Her schedule for the next two weeks includes daily canvassing and nine events, including a candidates’ forum, three fund-raisers and the introduction of Peter V. Ueberroth, head of the Rebuild L.A. task force, as a speaker at a county meeting on economic recovery.

While walking a precinct one evening last week, she talked with dozens of central Camarillo residents and was recognized by almost every one. Several residents hugged her, and two brought her up to date on the activities of their children, whom she had taught in school.

“I appreciate you,” Ken Lee, a private school principal, told her. He said later that he had seen the supervisor at many community and school activities. “And I just appreciate the candidate walking the beat,” he said.

Erickson Kildee said she is running hard--not scared--despite a mood of discontent that she has detected among some voters.

“I try to say, ‘What is upsetting you?’ What would you like me to change or do?’ ” she said. “But I think voters are most upset with incumbents they don’t know, not the ones they do.”

Erickson Kildee has been endorsed by a variety of labor unions, including the county firefighters’ and deputy sheriffs’ associations. She said she is also backed by the county auditor, assessor and tax collector, the Greater Ventura Chamber of Commerce, the Conejo branch of the National Women’s Political Caucus, the Conejo Valley Board of Realtors, and all city council members from Camarillo, Thousand Oaks and Fillmore.

But she has just two endorsements from Ojai council members and none from the Santa Paula council. And it is in those two small cities--where her positions on the Weldon landfill and new jail have rankled residents--that Greene and Melton say they draw their greatest support.

Greene, who began distributing yard signs last week, said he will virtually have to close down his business during the next three weeks to tell voters about his qualifications and to hammer away at what he sees as Erickson Kildee’s weaknesses.

He sees his technical knowledge about environmental issues and his 21 years as a small-business owner as important assets. And he thinks Ventura County has grown too fast.

“I have a vision and an affection for Ventura County,” he said. “I think it still has the potential to be a nice place to live. I don’t want to see what happened to the San Fernando Valley happen here.”

As 10-year president of Citizens to Preserve the Ojai, Greene has worked to lessen traffic and pollution in the Ojai Valley by limiting growth. A 1988 federal lawsuit by his group forced the county to adopt a more aggressive air pollution policy, and another suit blocked expansion of a petrochemical plant at the mouth of the Ojai Valley.

The group is now fighting to stop construction of the Weldon Canyon landfill, which Greene says will sully the valley’s air and affect the area adversely in nearly a dozen other ways.

He does not accept Erickson Kildee’s position that she cannot judge the Weldon Canyon proposal until public hearings are concluded and all the information is before her.

“I just don’t agree with that hedging,” he said. “She will not take controversial positions.”

Erickson Kildee joined the rest of the board last month in putting the Weldon Canyon proposal on hold. The board ordered more extensive study of alternative sites and said it wanted to look at the possibility of hauling the west county’s trash to Utah.

“Stan and I stand for a whole lot of the same things,” Erickson Kildee said. “Stan gets impatient because I don’t make decisions as quickly as he would like.”

But Greene said: “It’s not impatience; it’s a matter of philosophy and concern for this area that I question her on.”

Erickson Kildee said she took a controversial--and potentially damaging--position just last month when voting to build a new county jail near Santa Paula.

“For me, this has some political consequences,” she said before the vote. She rejected an alternate plan to expand the existing Central Jail at the County Government Center in Ventura, saying it was more costly and offered little opportunity for future expansion.

“Nothing would make me happier than to be able to build it here . . . because it wouldn’t be in my district,” Erickson Kildee said at the hearing, her voice wavering with emotion. “But that would be sheer hypocrisy.”

Shortly after the vote the supervisor bought time on local radio to defend her vote and further explain the reasons for her vote.

She said that the jail issue was the most volatile of her 12-year career, noting that her position had drawn Melton into the race.

Melton, a five-term Santa Paula councilman, credits Erickson Kildee for working hard, “but you have to represent people too.”

A Santa Paula city survey found that more than 90% of respondents thought it was very important to preserve the agricultural greenbelt that surrounds their city, he said. “So she’s not listening to people in the area.”

Erickson Kildee said that the jail, which will be built on 43 acres of a 157-acre orchard, is on the edge of an industrial area and does not jeopardize the farmland she has worked to preserve.

Greene, who also opposed the jail site because of greenbelt considerations, said he does not think that Erickson Kildee’s jail vote was a gamble politically.

“Consider the support she receives from the Sheriff’s Department, the district attorney’s office and the criminal justice system,” he said. “In her mind that may have been more important than whatever votes she’d lose in Santa Paula.”

Erickson Kildee said she was supported by county law enforcement agencies long before she backed the Santa Paula jail, which Sheriff John Gillespie favors and will operate.

Still, when the supervisor officially kicked off her campaign Feb. 1, many sheriff’s deputies attended. And about a dozen deputies, whose union supported the new jail, were among her canvassers. Several top sheriff’s officials have contributed small amounts to her campaign.

Both Melton and Greene say their greatest frustration has been the difficulty of getting enough support to reach most voters.

“It’s a tough nut to crack,” Melton said. “Maggie’s the incumbent and has the backing, and it’s hard to get any of that money. It’s funny. People tell you, ‘Hey, go for it.’ But when it comes time for them to stand up, they are hesitant. They don’t want you to fail and leave them standing there by themselves.”

Greene said he did not believe advisers when they told him in March that three months might not be enough time to wage a campaign.

“I thought that was a long time,” he said. “But now I don’t. I can tell you that on the issues and capabilities, I would be a better supervisor, but I can’t tell you I’m a better campaigner.”

CANDIDATES Q&A;: B6