‘92 SAN GABRIEL VALLEY ELECTIONS : Candidates Backed by Water Companies Capture Seats : Politics: A coalition of five firms spent $80,000 to $90,000 to oust unsympathetic incumbents in four district races.

With the broadest and most politically diverse field of candidates ever to run for three regional water district boards, voters soundly rejected incumbency Tuesday, while also apparently responding to an aggressive campaign by water companies.

Five of the eight incumbents decisively lost their bid for reelection. Two others retained their posts by slim margins.

In four of the races, a coalition of five water companies spent an estimated $80,000 to $90,000 to erase the gains made by environmentalists in elections over the past four years.

Never before in the San Gabriel Valley has such a concentrated financial effort been mounted for the water boards, which in past years labored in political obscurity.

The payoff for the water companies was the defeat of three incumbents considered unsympathetic to their interests: Burton Jones of South Pasadena and Royall Brown of West Covina, both members of the Upper San Gabriel Valley Water District, and Robert V. Armstrong of Pomona in the Three Valleys Municipal Water District.

In the fourth case, H. William Robinson, a 41-year-old West Covina representative on the Upper District, squeaked by the water companies’ candidate in a field of a six. Robinson had 26.7% of the vote, compared with 26.2% for Robert Nordstrom, a 70-year-old retired insurance company executive who had support from the water companies’ coalition.

“There was a well-organized, well-financed campaign against each one of us,” said Jones, once considered a friend of the water companies and a stalwart among local water politicians. For the first time in 22 years, he faced opposition.

“The whole thing is just so completely different and so very political now,” said Jones, 73, a former South Pasadena mayor. “In the old days, we said you just do your job and shut up. It’s not like you’re running for governor. And we all accepted that.”

The political landscape of water boards, however, has radically shifted in the past four years in the San Gabriel Valley as the boards cope with increased pressure to address issues of underground water contamination, drought-related water shortages and rising water rates.

An unprecedented 35 candidates--including two school board members, a present Glendora councilwoman, a former Glendora mayor, two city attorneys, a former chairman of the state Republican Party and two Sierra Club leaders--competed for the nine posts.

The water company coalition, formed in August as a political action committee called Consumers For Clean Water, targeted three seats up for reelection on the five-member Upper District board and one on the seven-member Three Valleys, which had four contested seats.

The privately run water companies are Southern California Water Co. of San Dimas, Suburban Water Systems of La Puente, Cadway Inc. of Whittier, San Gabriel Valley Water Co. of El Monte and California-American Water Co. of Chula Vista.

One of the candidates to benefit from the coalition was Andrew A. Krueger, who is the general manager of California-American’s San Marino office.

Krueger, 56, of Pomona, won a three-way race in Three Valleys with 42% of the vote, unseating 68-year-old Armstrong, who placed second with 33%. Krueger said the water companies needed to form a political action committee as a way to combat rising water rates.

Those rates have been going up, he said, not just because of the drought but because of unwise judgments and expenditures being made by the current water boards.

Anaheim political consultant Michael Lewis, who was deputy aide to Pete Schabarum during his tenure as a Los Angeles County supervisor, assisted the companies in organizing the coalition.

His clients, he said, “are in it for the long haul and realize they are going to have to be more aggressive about ensuring a stable supply of water.”

The companies, he said, believe the Upper District in the past two years has taken the wrong turn by letting its attention wander from its principal mission: to arrange for the importing water from outside the region to supplement the local ground water supplies. As an example, the Upper District has spent money on a reforestation project in the Angeles National Forest.

The full-scale entrance of the water companies onto the political scene, Hacienda Heights environmentalist Wil Baca said, “just means the races will be even more competitive two years from now.”

And the next time, he said, environmentalists will make the water company campaign contributions an issue.

In its campaign, the coalition sent out similar mailers to constituents of two water districts in addition to contributing directly to its chosen candidates.

In the Upper District, Frank Forbes said the water company coalition contributed a majority of the $8,000 he spent to defeat Jones and South Pasadena attorney David Czamanske, one of two candidates endorsed in the region by the Sierra Club.

Forbes said he sees himself as not owing anything to water companies. “I am independent enough to not be bothered by that,” said Forbes, 68, a semi-retired civil engineer from Arcadia who worked for 22 years as the public works director in San Gabriel.

In the other Upper District race, Royall Brown--elected as a reformer and environmentalist four years ago--said he was defeated partly because one of his two opponents, Kenneth Manning of Hacienda Heights, received campaign help from the water company coalition. “Once I discovered that big money was involved,” Brown said, “I knew it was way out of my ballpark.”

Brown estimated that he spent in the vicinity of $3,000. Financial records filed with the county indicated that Manning, a 40-year-old builder, had received $8,159 from Consumers for Clean Water as of Oct. 17.

But Brown also said Manning, who has served for 13 years on the Hacienda-La Puente Unified School District Board, had good name recognition among voters. “That’s fairly hard to overcome,” he said.

Running in a field of five in Three Valleys, Henry S. Barbosa, a Rowland Heights resident who serves as city attorney for Azusa, Bell Gardens, Lynwood and Montebello, cited name recognition as one of the reasons he defeated incumbent Willard Netzley, a La Puente attorney.

Barbosa, 44, is part of a political family in Irwindale where his mother was the city clerk, his father served on the council and his brother is a current council member.

But more than that, Barbosa said, his campaign emphasized more efficiency on the board, which has been criticized for long-winded meetings and spending excessively. “I’m against too many meetings, too much travel and, of course, too much fighting,” said Barbosa, who estimated he spent about $4,000.

In one Three Valleys race where the incumbent did not seek reelection, Walnut environmentalist Maxine Leichter, 47, attributed her easy win to the fact that “we not only had a clear message but we delivered it.” Endorsed by the Sierra Club, she won 52% of the vote. “The ‘women’s vote’ also helped me,” she said.

Her message, she said, was that she “would work for the community to keep rates down . . . by using the least-cost alternative supplies of water. That means conservation, reclamation and conservation pricing.”

The only Three Valleys incumbent to win was Bruce Milne, 40, of San Dimas. A regional manager for a water treatment systems company, he got 21% of the vote in a field of seven.

One incumbent who lost, Robert Keiser, has served on the San Gabriel Valley Municipal Water District for 10 years. Keiser, a 69-year-old Alhambra resident who is president of the board, said he has no clue why he was defeated by opponent, John S. Leung, an Alhambra civil engineer who until now was unknown in water politics circles and gave little appearance of waging a campaign.

Leung could not be reached for comment.

Keiser’s board colleague, 50-year-old Joseph Reichenberger, who easily won reelection, said he believes voters didn’t “really understand the time and dedication given to the district by Bob.”