Car Chase Latest Chapter in Westside Political Rivalry

An aide to Los Angeles City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky led the husband of a campaign challenger on a lively car chase Thursday--an election year escapade in a bitter Westside political rivalry.

The incident, which has sparked charges of political spying and grandstanding, is the most recent flap in a six-year feud between Yaroslavsky and Laura Lake, an environmental activist making her second bid to unseat him.

James Lake, the challenger’s husband, said he surprised Ginny Kruger, Yaroslavsky’s veteran planning deputy, as she drove by the Lakes’ house on Kinnard Avenue in Westwood at 9:10 a.m. Thursday. Kruger was driving her city car.

“I felt like she was spying on us,” said Lake, a UCLA professor of molecular biology. He said he pursued Kruger in his car for about a mile, honking and waving at her because he was so upset.

The Lakes said they recently moved out of the Kinnard Avenue house--just outside the 5th Council District--into a Westwood Village apartment so Laura Lake could legally challenge Yaroslavsky in the April 20 election.

The Lake camp suspects that Kruger was trying to prove Lake was still living in the Kinnard house--trying “to catch Laura coming out for the paper in her jammies,” as one aide put it.

“Nonsense,” Yaroslavsky said. “It’s either a tempest in a teapot or a desperate attempt to try to make something out of nothing. . . . To suggest that Ginny Kruger was doing anything other than her job is absurd.”

Kruger maintains that she drove by the house unintentionally; she said she was in the neighborhood to drop off a document about a proposal to expand the Fox Studios complex in nearby Century City. The Fox controversy, like so many involving development in District 5, has found Lake and Yaroslavsky at odds.

Kruger said she saw James Lake make a U-turn to follow her in his car. “He was trying to catch up with me,” she said. “I thought it was kind of odd that he was following me.”

Yaroslavsky maintained that “we are not interested in where Laura Lake lives.” But in an interview Friday, he nevertheless produced copies of her voter registration form showing her recent change in address.

Candidate Lake, meanwhile, insists she was the victim.

“There’s no excuse for snooping on people like this and doing it at public expense,” she said. “It’s wrong.”