Furutani to Run for Harbor-Area Council Seat : Elections: The Los Angeles school board member is the second well-known challenger to longtime incumbent Joan Milke Flores.

Presenting a potentially tough challenge to a longtime incumbent’s hopes for reelection, Los Angeles school board member Warren Furutani formally announced Thursday that he will run for the Harbor-area Los Angeles City Council seat held by Joan Milke Flores.

Furutani becomes the fourth announced challenger to Flores, and the second with broad name identification. Janice K. Hahn, daughter of former county Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, previously announced that she would challenge Flores’ bid for a fourth, four-year term in the council’s 15th District, which stretches from Watts to San Pedro.

At a City Hall press conference, Furutani said he would challenge Flores in part because her recent unsuccessful campaigns for California secretary of state and Congress show that she is no longer interested in local office.

Furutani also said he was a candidate because the city and the 15th District need new initiatives to increase employment, decrease crime and restore hope. “It’s time for a change,” Furutani said.

The 45-year-old school board member, first elected in 1987, is well-known in the Harbor area; he was born in San Pedro and raised in Gardena. He lives in Harbor Gateway.

Claiming that the city has treated the distant and gritty 15th District as a stepchild, Furutani said last spring’s riots exposed the degree of street-level frustration and anger in Los Angeles with the status quo.

Since the riots, Furutani said, people in other parts of the state and country have asked him, “ ‘Warren, has Los Angeles gotten back to normal?’ And I tell them, ‘Normal is what caused this in the first place.’

“It is becoming normal in Los Angeles that every time you get off the freeway . . . that there is a man, a woman, of any number of different races, standing there with those same cardboard signs asking for help,” Furutani said.

“It is becoming normal in this city every weekend to do a body count (from murders) like we once did years ago during the Vietnam War.

“It is becoming normal for people to be living in fear . . . and not to have the pride in Los Angeles that we once had,” he said.

Furutani pledged to work to correct these and other problems in the 15th District with an agenda that includes expansion of enterprise zones and creation of districtwide advisory councils to work with the council office to resolve area issues.

“No longer will part of our community be used as a junkyard. No longer is part of it gonna be used . . . to just run trucks from the Port (of Los Angeles) to downtown,” he said.