‘92 SAN GABRIEL VALLEY ELECTIONS : MUNICIPAL RACES : Pasadena Repeals Growth Management Initiative : Results: Incumbents prevail in Alhambra contests, and a schoolteacher wins a Walnut City Council seat.

After a bitterly contested campaign, voters Tuesday repealed Pasadena’s 3-year-old Growth Management Initiative, which had placed tight annual caps on new housing and commercial development.

The repeal referendum, or Proposition O, passed with 53% of the vote. The vote was the culmination of a complicated yearlong process, involving a lawsuit, an out-of-court settlement, public discussions about planning in Pasadena and the revision of the city’s General Plan.

In other municipal votes, incumbents prevailed in both the City Council and Board of Education races in Alhambra, and a Walnut High School teacher won a seven-candidate race to replace a council member who had died.

Each side in the Pasadena growth issue accused the other of misrepresenting the consequences of passing or rejecting the proposition.

Pasadena Residents In Defense of the Environment (PRIDE), which led the effort to keep the growth restraints in place, said the proponents’ telephone canvassers were wrongly claiming that rejection of the repeal would result in cuts in the city’s police and firefighting budgets.

“It was an absolute lie to get people excited,” PRIDE treasurer Anthony Thompson said.

But Lynn Wessell, the Burbank political consultant who ran the “Yes On Proposition O” campaign, said growth restraints could have an indirect effect on the city budget. “The point was that the whole issue of public safety could be impacted if folks didn’t vote for a better managed-growth program,” Wessell said. Some proponents of the repeal claimed that the growth restraints have stifled business in the city, leading to losses in tax revenue.

At the same time, the proponents charged that PRIDE was appealing to voters’ baser instincts rather than to an idealistic vision of the city.

Mayor Rick Cole, who was the city’s leading voice in favor of the repeal, said PRIDE had refused to recognize the good intentions of the city, focusing its campaign on the City Council’s “untrustworthiness.”

“This is a local example of people choosing to vote for their hopes rather than their fears. They (PRIDE) ran a campaign based solely on the issue of trust, saying that City Hall had not earned the people’s trust,” Cole said Wednesday. “What we asked for was a mandate for what City Hall has done right in the past year.”

The City Council and the city’s financial Establishment had put their weight behind Proposition O after the settlement two years ago of a lawsuit brought by the Pasadena Urban League, the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce and others.

The original Growth Management Initiative, approved by the voters in 1989, set annual limits of 250 new residential units and 250,000 square feet of commercial development. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit claimed that the growth restraints were unconstitutional.

In an out-of-court settlement, the city agreed to involve large numbers of Pasadena residents in a revision of the city’s General Plan, a document that theoretically embodies the city’s vision of itself, setting broad development goals. The agreement also called for bringing the Growth Management Initiative back to the voters.

The revised General Plan was approved by the City Council in September after 11 months of public hearings.

Proponents of repeal say the General Plan will adequately protect the city from overdevelopment by reducing, through zoning modifications, the potential for development by 85% and by restricting most growth to six areas that are now largely non-residential.

As the campaign heated up, at least one council member defected from the pro-repeal side. Councilman William Paparian said publicly last week that, because his constituents in East Pasadena were largely against the measure, he would himself vote against it.

The “Yes On Proposition O” campaign outspent PRIDE by better than 3 to 1, receiving late contributions of $25,000 from the Chamber of Commerce and a developers’ political action committee for $12,500. The campaign raised more than $100,000, while PRIDE made do with about $30,000.

PRIDE chairman Mike Salazar was bitter about the outcome, charging that the telephone canvassers had run a “smear campaign.”

“I think we had a pretty strong showing, given the big lies they told,” said Salazar, who charged that a late poll by Wessell’s organization led to the public safety gambit.

Wessell acknowledged Wednesday that there had been a survey, about six weeks ago, showing anti-Proposition O sentiment leading by a 2-to-1 margin. But he said that the emphasis on public safety, with open appeals from the city’s police and fire chiefs based on the prospect of losses in city revenues, was merely part of the ongoing campaign.

“There was no immediate nexus,” Wessell said. “We didn’t just launch into those campaigns.”

In Alhambra elections, the celebration started early for City Councilman Boyd G. Condie as he and 100 supporters gathered in his home Tuesday night. As the early votes came in, Condie led challenger Llewellyn P. Chin with 63% of the votes counted.

Finishing with 10,742 votes to Chin’s 6,508, Condie won a second four-year term in District 4.

“We had good support throughout the entire community,” Condie said. “I think this was a vote of confidence by the people of Alhambra.”

Condie outspent his opponent, raising $26,000 for his campaign, including several $1,000 gifts from auto dealers and auto repair shops.

In the race for three school board seats, incumbents Stephen R. Perry and J. Parker Williams were returned to second terms on the five-member board and Phyllis J. Rutherford to a third term.

Perry, a police officer and flower shop owner, emerged as the overall leader with 19,579 votes, or 30%. Rutherford, a Los Angeles County educator, captured 18,416 votes, or 28%. Williams was third with 15,764 votes. Theater manager and school booster Vincent Chow was a distant fourth with 11,354 votes, for only 17%.

In Walnut, the seven-candidate council race was easily won by Jack Isett, a teacher at Walnut High School and member of the Planning Commission.

Isett, 51, garnered 2,565 votes, approximately 900 more than his nearest challenger, Ernest (Ernie) Aguilar, who tallied 1,664 votes. Isett will serve out the remaining three years of the term of Councilman Ray T. Watson, who died of a heart attack in June.

Isett, who has lived in Walnut for nearly two decades, credited his victory to strong support from the city’s more established residents. “If you’ve been around for 18 to 20 years, you build a strong base of people who back you,” Isett said.

Although the campaign lacked divisive issues, it was marked by a controversy over the fund-raising efforts of Mei Mei Ho-Hilger, who was bidding to become the first Asian-American to serve on the council.

Ho-Hilger, who finished third with 1,573 votes, was criticized by fellow candidates for building a war chest of more than $20,000, about 10 times the norm for council contests in Walnut.

Isett, who said he spent about $1,600 during his campaign, characterized Ho-Hilger’s fund-raising achievements as “overkill” and said the outcome of the election proved him right.

“It speaks for itself,” he said. “You have to prove to people that you’re qualified.”

Free-lance writers Sheryl Gorchow and Steve Hirano contributed to this article.