ELECTIONS / L.A. COUNCIL : Chick, Magana Take Lead in Fund Raising

Los Angeles City Council candidate Laura Chick has tapped a variety of business interests to raise $81,000 in her race to represent the southwestern San Fernando Valley, maintaining her fund-raising lead over incumbent Joy Picus, according to campaign finance reports filed Thursday.

Meanwhile, Latino business leaders played an important role in putting Sylmar attorney Ray Magana far ahead of the six other candidates vying to fill the District 7 council seat in the northeast San Fernando Valley being vacated by Councilman Ernani Bernardi. The 81-year-old Bernardi is stepping aside to run for mayor.

Magana had raised a total of $51,200 Thursday and filed for $28,500 in public financing for his campaign in the District 7 race. Under the city’s ethics law, public financing is available to candidates who meet certain conditions.

Campaign finance reports filed Thursday show Chick, a former aide to Picus, has raised $81,000 from private contributors and obtained another $23,500 in matching funds from the city treasury.

Picus, seeking her fifth term representing District 3, has gotten $69,000 in donations and filed a claim for $24,200 in matching funds.

As of late Thursday, the only other District 3 candidate to have filed a campaign statement was homeowner activist Robert Gross, a former Picus ally, who has raised $7,100--some $3,400 of which he contributed himself.

Two-thirds of Gross’ contributors are from Woodland Hills, where Gross has been a leader in the fight to reduce commercial development around the Warner Center area.

District 3 candidates who had not filed finance reports with the city Ethics Commission by the deadline late Thursday were businessmen Charles Nixon and Mort Diamond and police sergeant Dennis Zine. However, mailed reports meet the deadline if they were postmarked Thursday.

The report Chick filed Thursday shows donations come from a wide range of business and real estate executives and attorneys. Political newcomers normally have difficulty raising money from such sources when running against incumbents.

But Chick has accused Picus of creating a hostile environment for business in the West Valley. She is the wife of Robert Chick, a former city airport commissioner and chief executive of Lawyers Mutual Insurance Co., which specializes in writing malpractice insurance for attorneys.

“Business is supporting me because they are very tired of having a council member who doesn’t get it: If we don’t have a thriving economy, we don’t have jobs and don’t have a healthy tax base to pay city services,” Chick said.

Picus’ campaign statement also shows her raising money from developers, including Norman and Irving Feintech, who have an interest in the huge Porter Ranch development project, and from GLM Associates and Kaku Associates, two consulting firms involved in the Warner Center Specific Plan--GLM as a representative of property owners, Kaku as the plan’s private traffic engineer.

In District 7, Magana’s strong financial showing gives him about $14,000 more than Lyle Hall, a fire captain who had been considered the front-runner. If Magana succeeds in obtaining the public funds he says he has qualified for, he will have double the money raised by most other candidates, including Hall.

Magana’s success in fund raising puts a new face on the race to represent the district, which was created in order to give a greater voice to Latinos in the northeast Valley, but whose voter rolls are dominated by mostly conservative Anglos.

Magana, however, is fairly conservative and Hall is a liberal, said Jaime Regalado, a professor of political science at Cal State L.A. and director of the Edmund G. Brown Institute of Public Affairs. And that, Regalado said, might make the attorney an attractive candidate to conservative Anglos as well as to conservative and moderate Latinos.

“He is closer to business,” which explains his ease in fund raising, Regalado said, “but I think there is also some feeling that he might be a more suitable candidate if a Latino candidate is going to make it into the runoff.”

Hall, a fire captain who came in second to Bernardi in the race for the council seat four years ago, has raised $36,829 since last July. Of that, Hall’s supporters contributed only $14,329 in cash this quarter, on top of $2,000 last quarter, with the remaining funds coming from loans.

Hall blamed his slow start on the tough fund-raising climate that has affected all of the candidates. It is proving harder to raise the roughly $200,000 most analysts say it takes to run a well-financed campaign, Hall said, in part because of the slow economy and in part because this campaign is different from the one four years ago.

“Last time it was a race against an incumbent, and it was an opportunity for people to contribute not only for me, but for those who wanted to contribute against him,” Hall said. “This time, it’s an open race.”

Anne Finn, widow of former Councilman Howard Finn, has the second largest campaign treasury at $39,495, of which $25,000 was a loan.

Leroy Chase, director of the Boys & and Girls Club of the San Fernando Valley, has raised $31,260 to date, including about $10,000 in loans and $6,100 of his own money.

Richard Alarcon, mayor Tom Bradley’s aide for the San Fernando Valley, has raised $25,943 since the campaign began last summer. This quarter he raised $14,068.

Al Dib, a conservative Republican, has raised $23,575 to date, virtually all of it during the past reporting period. Among Dib’s contributors were Watson Land Co. of Carson, a development company that gave $500, and RJR Nabisco Inc., which also gave $500.

Henry Villafana, a schoolteacher, said he is not accepting contributions.