STATE ELECTIONS / ASSEMBLY RACES : 4 Incumbents Face a Tough Primary : Voting: While Steve Peace and Robert Frazee deal with party challenges, Carol Bentley goes for the state Senate and Tricia Hunter campaigns in a new district.

Redistricting, political ambition and anti-incumbent fervor have combined to produce primary opposition for four state Assembly members from San Diego County in next week’s election.

Assemblywoman Carol Bentley (R-El Cajon), who is trying to move up to the state Senate, faces a Riverside County assemblyman in the June 2 Republican primary, while Assemblymen Steve Peace (D-Rancho San Diego) and Robert Frazee (R-Carlsbad) also face challenges from within their own parties--in Frazee’s case, for the first time since he was elected to the Legislature 14 years ago.

Another local incumbent, Assemblywoman Tricia Hunter (R-Bonita), is leaving her North County district to run in a newly drawn desert district, and the race for an open seat in another northern district has become a confusing 11-candidate scramble.

Although Hunter faces primary opposition, her political fate will be beyond the control of San Diego County voters, because she is running in the new 80th District in Riverside and Imperial counties.

While most public attention has been focused on four state Assembly contests here in which Republican moderates backed by Gov. Pete Wilson face hard-line conservatives, the primaries in a handful of other districts offer more than the normally somnolent pace seen in San Diego County state legislative elections.

In the new 37th state Senate District, Bentley confronts Assemblyman Dave Kelley of Idyllwild in a GOP showdown that party leaders tried to avert--because it removed two seasoned veterans from the Legislature and set the stage for divisive primaries to succeed them in their current Assembly seats.

The sprawling district covers southeastern San Diego County, Imperial County and eastern Riverside County, with nearly two-thirds of its 174,950 registered Republicans living in the San Diego portion--creating, on the surface, a considerable demographic advantage for Bentley.

Bentley, however, faces political problems on her home turf, having angered the potent far-right faction of the San Diego County Republican Party by endorsing several abortion rights advocates in local Assembly primaries. Despite the fact that Bentley, like Kelley, opposes abortion herself, many ultra-conservatives are backing Kelley--even though he, too, endorsed a pro-choice candidate in Riverside County.

If Bentley is unsuccessful, it would be the second time that the volatile abortion issue has blocked her path to the state Senate. In 1989, Bentley was a strong favorite in a special state Senate election in a heavily Republican district, but lost to Democrat Lucy Killea when then-Catholic Bishop Leo Maher transformed Killea into a national cause celebre by prohibiting her from receiving Communion because of her pro-choice views.

With few philosophical differences between the two solid conservatives, Kelley and Bentley have spent much of the spring trying to outflank each other to the right and to make the other appear to be the more entrenched incumbent in a race in which each expects to spend about $175,000.

Although Kelley, a 63-year-old citrus farmer, has been in the Assembly since 1978, his radio commercials describe Bentley, who has been there only four years, as a “career politician”--a charge that he defends by pointing to her 16 years as a legislative aide before her own election.

Billing himself as a “citizen legislator,” Kelley adds that, because of his citrus farming operation, “I live in the same world as ordinary citizens. I feel the impact of all legislation passed. I’m still out in the real world running a business.”

“I’m working full time for my constituents, so I don’t have time to run a business,” the 47-year-old Bentley responds. “Plus, if he calls me a career politician, I guess that makes him an eternal politician.”

Like other local legislators, Bentley complains that San Diego County has been shortchanged by tens of millions of dollars annually by unfair state revenue formulas. Though resolution of that dispute, via either lawsuits or legislation, could be years away, Bentley argues that her familiarity with the issue--and, equally important, her San Diego County residency--make her the better candidate.

“San Diego needs maximum representation in the state Legislature, not less,” she said.

But Kelley has tried to appeal to San Diego County voters by emphasizing his own expertise on another critical local issue: water reclamation and distribution.

“San Diego County has benefited from my legislation probably more than any other county,” Kelley said.

Democrat Jim Rickard and two minor-party candidates--Libertarian Craig McElvany and Peace and Freedom Party member Renate Kline--are uncontested in their respective primaries. Given the Republicans’ 49%-37% edge among registered voters in the 37th District, however, the victor of the Bentley-Kelley primary will be heavily favored in November.

In the two contested Assembly primaries, incumbents Frazee and Peace have daunting name-recognition and fund-raising advantages over their opponents in the new 74th and 79th districts, respectively.

But both concedew that they are at least mildly discomforted by having the word “incumbent” in front of their names in a year when that could prove to be more of a political pejorative than an asset.

“I think (anti-incumbent sentiment) helps explain why I have primary opponents,” Frazee said. “This seems to be the year for things like that.”

A former Carlsbad mayor elected to the Assembly in 1978, the 63-year-old Frazee was weighing retirement this year when redistricting shifted much of his old North County district into two other newly drawn districts stretching into Orange and Riverside counties.

But, at Wilson’s urging, Frazee decided to seek reelection to an eighth two-year term, explaining that he was also reinvigorated by “the promise of some real change in Sacramento” because of redistricting--in particular, to Republicans’ chances of gaining a majority in the 80-seat Assembly, where they are now outnumbered 47-33.

Neither of the two first-time candidates opposing Frazee in the GOP primary--Kathleen Wilcsek, a retired registered nurse from Solana Beach, and Walter Urbach, a real estate agent and developer from Encinitas--fault the particulars of Frazee’s record.

Urbach, in fact, goes so far as to say that he has “a great deal of respect for the man and what he’s done,” adding that he might not have run had he known that Frazee intended to do so.

Because of reapportionment, Frazee had to move from northern Carlsbad to southern Carlsbad to reside within the 74th District’s new boundaries, which extend from Carlsbad to Del Mar along the coast, north to Vista and inland to San Marcos and Escondido.

Wilcsek, meanwhile, takes less exception to Frazee’s record than to what he has not done.

“He’s been there 14 years, served on a lot of committees, but I don’t see that he’s accomplished much,” said Wilcsek, 67. “It’s like he’s just putting in his time.”

While disputing that, Frazee concedes that there “have not been many headline grabbers” in his legislative work. As highlights of his record, he cites his leading role in passage of consumer-protection legislation, including one bill tightening registration requirements for telephone-solicitation firms, and cost-cutting measures dealing with courts, ranging from video arraignment to evidence storage.

Frazee and his two challengers are philosophically compatible on many major issues, including abortion rights, the death penalty and regulatory cuts, which each supports. One of their rare distinctions deals with a controversial proposal that would allow public funds to be used to send students to private schools, which the challengers favor but Frazee opposes.

Emphasizing economic issues, Wilcsek argues that California’s attractiveness to business could be enhanced by establishment of a “one-stop process” for environmental and other regulatory permits. Tighter border controls, she adds, could halt illegal aliens’ “drain on our social services.”

Education and budget cuts top the 35-year-old Urbach’s agenda. Students’ performance could be improved, he argues, if schools were kept open longer during after-class hours for studying purposes, and prison reform could help alleviate the state’s budget woes.

“We should stop building new prisons and just jam-full the ones we have now,” Urbach said. “I don’t believe jail overcrowding is cruel and unusual punishment.”

Though he holds out little hope for an upset, Urbach half-jokingly says that his campaign has “vested my right to complain” about politics.

“If you vote, you earn the right to complain,” Urbach said. “This is the next progression. I’m going to vote, complain and try to make a change.”

Democrat Ken Lanzer, Libertarian Mark Hunt and Shirley Marcoux of the Peace and Freedom Party are unopposed in their respective primaries in the 74th District, in which Republicans hold an overwhelming 53%-31% voter registration edge.

In Peace’s 79th District Democratic primary, candidate James Wilburn has made minority representation a major issue, posing the question, albeit delicately, of whether the heavily minority district could be better represented by a white incumbent or a black challenger.

“The issue isn’t that he’s white--I’ve never gotten in front of a group and said, ‘Vote for me because I’m black,’ ” said Wilburn, a 34-year-old security consultant who moved to San Diego in the early 1980s after having served as a city councilman--the youngest ever elected--in Wellston, Mo.

“The only thing my black skin does is level the playing field. . . . The point is that people of color are able to represent this district. We don’t need him.”

Peace, who argues that the 79th District’s population breakdown is similar to that in his old district, responds by saying that “roots have more to do with community” than race or ethnicity.

“I was born and raised in San Diego,” the 39-year-old Peace said. “When I was elected to the Legislature in 1982, Wilburn was in Missouri.”

Telling voters that they have “a chance to make history” by electing San Diego County’s first black state legislator, Wilburn also has tried to capitalize on Peace’s ready admission that he might seek higher office before his term expires if state Sen. Wadie Deddeh (D-Bonita) is elected to Congress this year.

Peace, though, believes that his candor about his political future has defused any resentment and prefers to focus in his standard stump speech on a legislative record that he immodestly describes as “one of the very best in Sacramento.” Among other things, he has worked doggedly to obtain funding to clean up Mexican sewage and toxic spills that flow into the United States.

The most heavily Democratic state legislative district in San Diego, the 79th, which stretches from East San Diego, through National City and Chula Vista, to the Mexican border, is slanted toward the Democrats by a 56%-31% margin among registered voters. Republican Raul Silva-Martinez, Libertarian James Train and Peace and Freedom candidate Edwardo Prud-Home are uncontested in their respective primaries.

Although the presence of incumbents helped to draw opposition in the 74th and 79th districts, the absence of one has made the 66th District race one of the most crowded on next week’s ballot.

Seven Republicans hope to transform the North County-Riverside County district’s overwhelming GOP registration edge into a two-year Assembly term: retired airline pilot Fred Clayton, businessmen Ted Cook and Ray Haynes, lawyer Michelle Lusin, retired fire marshal James McMullen, Temecula City Councilman Ron Parks and health-care administrator Pete Vanderhaak.

Despite the district’s 53%-34% Republican advantage, three Democrats--manufacturing supervisor David Hendrick, building inspector Patsy Hockersmith and insurance consultant Larry Murphy--are seeking their party’s nomination. Libertarian Bill Reed and Peace and Freedom Party member Anne Wood also are on the ballot.