ELECTIONS / L.A. CITY COUNCIL : Picus Opponents Say City Business Climate Is Ailing : Politics: Challengers for 3rd District seat say incumbent has an anti-business attitude. She says her relations with industry groups are friendly.

With Southern California’s economy stuck in neutral, Los Angeles City Councilwoman Joy Picus faces political challengers who say her hostility to business has cost the city in jobs and business flight.

If their strategy succeeds, it might bring a major twist to Los Angeles’ civic dialogue, where the rhetoric of slow-growth and neighborhood protection has often overshadowed complaints that City Hall taxes, building limits and red tape stifle business initiative.

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard Joy talk about business without calling it greedy or developers without saying they are whiny and selfish,” said candidate Laura Newman Chick of Tarzana. “She has been very unfriendly to business.”

Chick, a former aide to the four-term incumbent, indicts Picus for too often bowing to homeowner extremism at the expense of legitimate business interests. More balance is needed, she says. “I’m very much in the middle,” she said.

Also challenging the west San Fernando Valley incumbent’s record on business is candidate Dennis Zine of West Hills, a Los Angeles Police Department sergeant and former spokesman for Deputy Chief Mark A. Kroeker, head of the Valley Bureau. All told, five challengers are maneuvering to stop Picus’ bid for a fifth term.

“The anti-growth attitude is dissipating” in the West Valley, Jeanne Nemo said. Nemo, a Republican, ran against Picus in 1989, getting 15% of the vote in a race in which the incumbent vowed to stop any commercial development on the 21.5-acre Warner Ridge site.

Meanwhile, Picus denies she has stunted opportunities for business in the 3rd District, pointing at the praise she got from developers for her work in helping produce a “consensus” plan to develop Warner Center. Picus called the plan a “model for a job-friendly community that cares about its neighbors.”

Moreover, Picus’ political advisers say voters are leery of candidates whose support for business and development may conflict with homeowner concerns.

Now Nemo is supporting Chick, a registered Democrat who was Picus’ chief field deputy from 1988 to 1991.

Walt Mosher, president of Precision Dynamics Inc., a Pacoima firm, and president-elect of the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn., also believes Picus’ ouster would improve the city’s business climate.

Mosher is endorsing both Chick and Zine in the April 20 primary. “I’m hoping one of them gets into the playoffs because the city of L.A. is sick,” said Mosher, referring to a potential June runoff. “Zine and Chick are sympathetic to all concerns, including those of business. I would not classify them just as business candidates. But they are sensitive.”

“There’s no question that Joy’s not an unconditional business group supporter and that she probably argues more vocally for homeowners than others do,” said Benjamin Reznik, current VICA president and prominent land-use attorney.

But taken on the whole, Picus is fair, said Reznik, citing her opposition to a recent proposal to add a 7.5% surcharge to the city’s business tax.

“She understood that a new tax would break the back of small businesses,” he said. Despite her opposition, the tax was adopted.

Chick has enjoyed some success at the campaign cash register as she has positioned herself as a candidate friendly to business.

For example, attorney George Mihlsten is listed as a member of Chick’s campaign finance committee and Dan Garcia, a senior vice president at Warner Bros. and former president of the city Planning Commission, held a fund-raiser for her at his Mt. Washington home.

Mihlsten, a member of City Hall’s lobbying elite who counts among his clients JMB/Urban Development Co. and Voit Co., one of the largest property owners in Warner Center, says he has not yet played an active role in Chick’s campaign. He lauds Chick as a “solid candidate.”

“I read Mihlsten’s involvement as saying something about Chick’s ‘win-ability,’ ” said Paul Clarke, corporate political consultant. “Heavy-hitters don’t like to support losers.”

Another Chick fund-raiser is David W. Fleming, a prominent attorney and 1991 recipient of the Fernando Award for his community service work. Fleming, a Studio City resident, recently donated $1 million to Valley Presbyterian Hospital.

Richard Paley, a real estate broker and two-time president of the Reseda Chamber of Commerce, also has joined the Chick ranks. “Business has not been Joy Picus’ top priority,” said Paley, who is holding a fund-raiser for the candidate this month.

Her business support has also produced a financial windfall.

Chick, the wife of Robert Chick, an insurance company executive and former Airport Commission member, reported raising $50,000 for her campaign by Jan. 4. Picus did not reach that same mark until six weeks later.

Picus won reelection in 1989 with 52% of the vote after outspending all her competitors combined. The second and third place finishers, Peter Ireland and Nemo, spent only $63,000 while Picus spent $263,000.

In 1989, precincts around the Warner Ridge project were Picus strongholds.

But in the upcoming April election, Picus’ Warner Ridge flank may be weakened by challenger Robert Gross, ex-president of the Woodland Hills Homeowners Organization. A former Picus ally in the fight to block the Warner Ridge project, Gross, the candidate, now partly blames the incumbent for the homeowners’ defeat, saying she was ineffectual.

Still, Picus’ challengers face a strong head wind trying to unseat a 16-year incumbent.

A poll of 400 likely voters taken by the Picus campaign in late February found that the incumbent got 47% of their votes, Zine 7%, Gross 6% and Chick 4%.

Receiving 2% each were Morton S. Diamond, a self-described small business advocate, and Charles Dana Nixon III, a Woodland Hills businessman.

Thirty-two percent of those surveyed were undecided, said John Fairbanks, Picus’ pollster. The margin of error was 5%.

Meanwhile, Picus campaign strategist Bill Carrick, referring to Chick, contends that the West Valley electorate wants a council member who is not “too close to developers.”

Recent city history provides examples of council members, including Peggy Stevenson and Pat Russell, who were unseated in large measure because they were successfully portrayed as puppets of special business interests.

Current business opposition to Picus is sour grapes, coming from developer interests that have not gotten their way with projects in her district, Reznik said.

Picus herself is perplexed by the charge that she is anti-business.

“I recognize the importance of business and I’ve always been ready to listen to business leaders,” she said, ticking off a long list of regular liaisons she has with chambers of commerce and industry groups.

If land-use plans for the Reseda and Warner Center business districts have seemed to move with glacial slowness, the inertia comes from the city’s bureaucracy, Picus said.

“I also was recently honored by the Warner Center Business Assn. for my dedication,” Picus said. “The plaque said: ‘For her dedication and support of our community in so many ways.’ If that’s not friendly to business, I don’t know what is!”

But others see Picus’ record differently and point to the Warner Ridge controversy, one of the city’s most prolonged and bitter government-business squabbles. In that matter, Picus testified that she opposed the large commercial project, in part, to placate Woodland Hills homeowners for her 1989 reelection.

But Picus and the city lost their fight with the developers after a costly lawsuit, and the project’s groundbreaking nears.

Last year, Picus antagonized chamber of commerce supporters by dismissing warnings that businesses would leave the Valley unless City Hall eased its reulations on them. “She said they were bluffing,” said one business representative.

Chick has charged that Picus has stymied business development in the West Valley by failing to press for swift approval of both a plan to permit doubling development in Warner Center and a new blueprint for managing growth in the aging Reseda business district.

Yet, only last week, the council’s Planning and Land Use Management Committee recommended approval of the Warner Center Specific Plan, while developers praised Picus for working with them in the past year to complete the plan.

However, that praise was tempered. The representative of one Warner Center property owner called the eight-year process of drafting the specific plan “Kafkaesque.” Another termed it “extremely painful.”

Zine also is staking out a claim as the pro-business, pro-economic development candidate.

In his inaugural campaign appearances, Zine has said he decided to run against Picus because of his frustrations about business flight and over-taxation in the city.

Zine’s campaign manager, Rick Taylor, also has taken potshots at Chick on the business issue. “We want to encourage economic development by small businesses in the community--like those along Sherman Way,” Taylor said. “We’re not going to be putting high-rise office buildings on every corner and that’s why the big developers and their downtown lobbyists are not pouring money into our campaign.”