Alarcon and Finn to Run for Council : Politics: Mayor Bradley’s Valley liaison and an ex-councilman’s widow will campaign for the District 7 seat.

Quickening the east San Fernando Valley’s political tempo, Richard Alarcon, Mayor Tom Bradley’s Valley liaison, and Anne Finn, 77-year-old widow of former Councilman Howard Finn, have declared that they intend to raise money to run for retiring Councilman Ernani Bernardi’s seat.

The pair join five others who had earlier filed similar declarations for the District 7 seat. They include Lyle Hall, a fire captain who forced Bernardi into a hotly contested runoff election in 1989 but fell short of ousting the veteran lawmaker.

The 80-year-old Bernardi, recovering Friday in Kaiser Permanente hospital in Panorama City from surgery to remove a cancerous growth from his colon, has said repeatedly that he does not intend to seek reelection when his current term expires next year.

Alarcon filed the required papers for the City Council seat Thursday, and Finn filed Friday.

Alarcon, 38, the mayor’s Valley liaison since June, 1990, becomes the second and best-known Latino to enter the race to replace Bernardi. Last September, Bernardi field deputy Raymond J. Magana filed the official papers required to raise money for the race.

For several years, Bernardi’s district has been viewed as the most likely to elect the Valley’s first Latino council member.

The City Council redistricting plan adopted last summer, based on 1990 U.S. Census Bureau data, carved out a District 7 with a 70% Latino population. However, only 31% of the district’s registered voters are Latino.

In an interview Friday, Alarcon said he would campaign on a pledge to make the “socioeconomic development” of District 7 his top priority.

“Any successful candidate has to address the issue of jobs and economic development,” Alarcon said. “But while there’s a need for a very aggressive economic development agenda for this community, it can’t be accomplished at the expense of the neighborhoods. There has to be a coordinated effort.”

As the mayor’s top Valley aide and a member of the board of directors of numerous community organizations, Alarcon is widely known in the Valley. Alarcon has served on the board of the Valley Interfaith Council and has been chairman of a project to increase United Way’s involvement with Latinos in the East Valley.

In 1986, Alarcon was among a group of young activists from the Valley pressing for a council redistricting plan favorable to Latinos.

More recently, Alarcon briefly belonged to a Latino coalition that backed a redistricting plan for the Los Angeles school board that was subsequently adopted. One of the plan’s controversial features is that it creates a new Latino-dominated school board seat that runs from East Los Angeles to Sylmar.

Several groups, including blacks in the East Valley who live in District 7 and the 31st District PTSA, are now seeking to place a measure on the June ballot to scrap the adopted school plan and replace it with another.

Alarcon confirmed Friday that Al Avila, a former aide to Councilman Richard Alatorre and a longtime Sylmar resident, would help run his council campaign.

Avila, now a private government relations consultant, has been seen for years as a possible candidate for Bernardi’s seat.

However, Avila said, “I’m not running myself. I’m going to support Richard.”

Alarcon also disclosed that Corrine Sanchez, executive director of El Proyecto del Barrio, a nonprofit job training agency based in Pacoima, has agreed to be his campaign treasurer.

Meanwhile, Finn announced Friday that she is a prospective candidate for the Bernardi seat.

“I feel for people out there,” Finn said. “They need somebody who’s caring. If elected, they’d have somebody like themselves representing them--just an ordinary citizen.”

Finn said she decided to run after learning that two-thirds of Bernardi’s district is the same as the district her husband represented.

“When Howard died it was so traumatic, and then when they took away his district it was like a wound that wouldn’t heal,” Finn said. “Running is like instant therapy. I feel like I’m going to take care of some unfinished business.”

Soon after Howard Finn died in office in 1986, the council divided his district into two, one represented by Bernardi and the other by Councilman Joel Wachs.

“I’d only want to serve one term--that’d be enough for me to say goodby,” Finn said.

In addition to Hall and Magana, others who have filed declarations of intent to raise money for the District 7 race are LeRoy Chase Jr., head of the Boys & Girls Club of the San Fernando Valley; Albert Dib, who ran for Bernardi’s seat in 1989, and Sharon Humphrey-Peterson.