Castaneda, Tovar Disqualified in Council Race Over Signatures

Los Angeles City Council candidate Rose Castaneda was eliminated from the race to succeed incumbent Ernani Bernardi after falling just 38 voter signatures short of a city requirement that she turn in 500 voters’ names, election officials said Tuesday.

Another candidate, Pacoima civic activist Irene Tovar, also was knocked off the ballot for the April 20 election, officials said. She was 96 signatures shy.

Kristin Heffron, chief of the city’s election division, said officials invalidated more than 430 of the nearly 900 voter signatures submitted by Castaneda, disqualifying her from the council’s 7th District race.

Castaneda’s campaign manager, Marc Litchman, conceded that “there are . . . problems” with some of her signature petitions but said they are minor. Castaneda will “take every measure possible” to get on the ballot, including possibly filing a lawsuit against the city, he said.

“I’d say on a scale of irregularities of one to 10, this is a one,” said Litchman, who said Castaneda is not suspending her campaign and continued to make fund-raising calls Tuesday.

Tovar could not be reached for comment late Tuesday.

Under the city election code, council contenders must hand in valid signatures of at least 500 voters, plus pay a $300 fee, to be placed on the ballot.

The disqualification of Castaneda and Tovar shrank to nine the number of candidates in the race for Bernardi’s seat, which represents the northeast San Fernando Valley. Bernardi, 81, recently jumped into the race for mayor of Los Angeles.

Castaneda, a top aide to Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City), had been expected to run a strong campaign with her boss’s help. Berman recently lobbied hard for local labor unions to endorse Castaneda, and was expected to give her significant fund-raising aid.

Two leading contenders--Lyle Hall and Richard Alarcon--said that with Castaneda out, they will have a chance to grab endorsements from unions whose backing she had locked up or was pursuing.

Organized labor is a key battleground in the largely blue-collar, Latino council district. Castaneda recently was endorsed by four local chapters of the International Assn. of Machinists, which represent 3,500 Valley-area workers.

Alarcon, Mayor Tom Bradley’s Valley liaison, said several union locals were “torn between supporting me and supporting her.”

“With her out of the race, I expect to garner their support,” he said, declining to name the unions.

Hall’s campaign manager, Bob Stiens, said Hall now has “a chance to go back” to some locals that have not endorsed him and ask for their blessing. Hall, a city fire captain who forced Bernardi into a runoff in 1989, recently was endorsed by the 700,000-member Los Angeles County Labor Federation, AFL-CIO, despite intense lobbying by Castaneda, Alarcon and candidate Raymond J. Magana.

City election officials were still checking signatures from two other 7th District candidates late Tuesday--Jose Galvan and Sandra Hubbard--and said they would not complete them until today.

Heffron said Castaneda submitted 896 voter signatures but election authorities threw out 434 of them. Many of those signatures were invalidated, Heffron said, because they were undated or there was a discrepancy between dates written down by voters and those given by Castaneda signature-gatherers.

“She was insufficient,” Heffron said.

Litchman said that in one case, a Castaneda signature-gatherer dated her 25-name petition before letting voters sign it. He said there were similar problems with other petitions.

“She signed and dated it when she got it. Then she went out and got signatures,” he said. He said all of Castaneda’s signatures were valid and that he had urged elections officials to reverse their disqualification of her.

“We’re confident we’re going to be on the ballot,” he said. “We have more than enough signatures to qualify.”

Some other candidates said that even though signature gathering is a somewhat complicated process, they played by the rules and Castaneda did not.