Councilwomen Flores, Picus Forced Into Runoffs : Voting: Walters squeaks by with just over 50% of the vote. Hernandez, Yaroslavsky and Braude easily win reelection.

Two Los Angeles City Council members face June 8 runoffs to hold onto their seats after Tuesday’s municipal primary election, an outcome that marks the toughest campaign season for City Hall incumbents in 16 years.

In the west San Fernando Valley, incumbent Joy Picus languished well below the 50%-plus-one-vote mark needed to avoid a runoff. With most of the votes counted, Picus has little more than one-third of the total and was headed into a June showdown with her former chief field deputy, Laura Chick.

And in a district extending from the Harbor area to Watts, Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores also fell well short of a majority in a seven-candidate race, with almost all the votes counted.

Both council members and their campaign managers had conceded earlier that they expected to be forced into runoffs. Not since 1977 have two council incumbents in the same election been forced into runoffs to save their seats--just a part of the atmosphere of change enveloping City Hall this year.

As early returns came Tuesday night, Flores said: “I’m not nervous at all. I’m expecting a runoff, and certainly I’m expecting to be in it. Our polls show we can beat anyone, so to me it doesn’t matter who else makes it.”

The big surprise in the race was that Flores’ foe will be Rudy Svorinich, a lifelong Harbor-area resident and owner of an industrial paint store in Wilmington.

Svorinich was solidly in second place, while Janice K. Hahn, daughter of former county Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, was running third with most of the vote counted.

“This is just great,” Svorinich said. “We’re looking at these results, and what we see is that two out of three voters are asking for change. That change is going to carry us to victory in June.”

Flores said she was pleased to be up against Svorinich, saying she views him as an easier runoff foe than Hahn. “This is just great for us,” she said. “If I had my druthers, I’d much rather run against Rudy than against Janice Hahn.”

A third council incumbent, Rita Walters, who represents a downtown-to-South Los Angeles district, tallied just over the 50% mark with virtually all the votes counted in her district, thus avoiding another nasty showdown with longtime council aide Bob Gay, whom she beat by just 76 votes two years ago.

Walters declared victory shortly before midnight. “It sounds like a win to me,” she told cheering supporters.

The election of at least two new council members had been guaranteed because of seats vacated by Councilmen Michael Woo and Ernani Bernardi, both of whom were running for mayor.

Three council members preserved a measure of the status quo. Councilmen Mike Hernandez, Zev Yaroslavsky and Marvin Braude all were heavy favorites and won reelection outright.

City Controller Rick Tuttle and City Atty. James K. Hahn (the brother of Janice Hahn) coasted past little-known challengers. Each won reelection to four-year terms by overwhelming margins.

In the Valley’s 7th Council District, Bernardi announced that he would step down this year after 32 years in office and then took a late flyer at the mayoral race--opening the way for an ethnic rainbow of seven candidates.

With 70% of its residents Latinos, the district could elect the council’s third Latino member--and the first ever from the Valley.

But that breakthrough was not assured because Anglos remain the district’s largest voting bloc, accounting for 48% of the registered voters while Latinos number 31%.

The race featured a trio of Latino candidates--mayoral aide Richard Alarcon, former Bernardi aide Raymond Magana and teacher Henry Villafana. All three were vying for support across ethnic lines in hopes of making the race’s expected runoff.

As the vote count proceeded, Fire Capt. Lyle Hall and Alarcon, Mayor Tom Bradley’s top aide in the Valley, pulled away from the rest of the field in what had been the tightest of the city’s races.

Addressing his supporters last night, Alarcon said: “The political reality, at least in the northeast Valley, has been that the Latino community has never had a candidate before that they believed could really represent them. I hope I’m that guy.”

Hall, who was leading the pack of candidates, told his backers that he looks forward “to a spirited campaign. We’re going to deliver services that haven’t been delivered to the Valley in the past.”

The other candidates with strong showings were Magana, LeRoy Chase Jr., an African-American who heads the Boys and Girls Club of the San Fernando Valley; Anne Finn, widow of Councilman Howard Finn, and Al Dib, a former produce wholesaler and the lone Republican in the nonpartisan race.

Realizing that they would need wide appeal in the diverse district, the candidates played down ethnicity and focused on crime and job creation. One of the clearest dividing lines was on support for the proposition to raise property taxes to finance more police; Finn and Alarcon supported it while the others were opposed.

Another City Council vacancy was created in the Hollywood-area 13th District when Woo announced last year that he would run for mayor. The result is the council race with the most candidates--eight--and another possibility of expanded representation for a minority group--in this case, homosexuals.

More than three-fourths of the vote showed former school board member Jackie Goldberg and Tom LaBonge, a longtime aide to City Council President John Ferraro, well ahead of six others.

Goldberg said the returns bore out her prediction that she and LaBonge would meet in a runoff. Such a race would be one of stark contrasts--pitting Goldberg, a liberal activist and former Los Angeles school board member, against LaBonge, who takes pride in basics such as filling potholes and whose political mentor is the conservative Ferraro.

Goldberg, AIDS health care administrator Michael Weinstein and television executive Conrado Terrazas were the first openly homosexual candidates to run for the council. All ran viable campaigns--raising hopes among gay and lesbian activists that at least one will make the anticipated June 8 runoff.

Other candidates included Tom Riley, a onetime aide to former state Assemblyman Mike Roos, and Virginia Johannessen, a businesswoman and neighborhood activist.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the spring was the difficulty that three council incumbents had in distancing themselves from challengers.

U.S. Presidents have been thrown out of office more often than City Council members in the last 16 years. And it has been 30 years since as many as three of the 15 council members have been forced into runoffs in the same election.

But even their own campaign officials worried Tuesday that Picus, Flores and Walters would not exceed the 50% needed to avoid a runoff.

Picus has survived close contests before, to win four terms in her West Valley district. But with five challengers, a runoff loomed, and political observers said from the beginning that Chick was the likely foe.

The looming contest between the two may be a bitter one. Picus has said Chick betrayed her by entering the race. And Chick has said she saw first-hand in the councilwoman’s office that Picus was a knee-jerk voice against business.

Tuesday night, Chick credited her showing to campaigning hard, including a regular regimen of precinct walking.

“I connected with the voters’ anger and frustration,” she said. “I walked seven days a week for two months. I’ve worn out the soles of my Birkenstocks and today I was out shopping for my runoff Birkenstocks.”

Less than a mile away at her campaign headquarters, Picus said she felt betrayed by her former deputy’s candidacy. “It’s like a business in which a trusted employee takes your trade and clients,” Picus said.

Other challengers--including Los Angeles Police Sgt. Dennis Zine and homeowner activist Robert J. Gross--also painted Picus as being a tired, ineffectual and anti-business incumbent.

Picus argued that although she has not always won, she has fought hard for Valley interests--including losing campaigns to create a Valley planning commission and to preserve intact Valley school board districts during last year’s redistricting.

In South Los Angeles’ 9th District, Walters retained the support of many block clubs and other community leaders that helped her to a 76-vote victory two years ago to fill the remaining term of the late Gilbert Lindsay. And in the last days of the campaign for her first full term, she received a boost in the form of an endorsement letter from Mayor Tom Bradley to the district’s voters.

But Walters was hit hard by her two foes--Gay and Donald Lumpkin--as anti-business and slow to learn her job at City Hall.

Gay touted himself as the only candidate born and raised in the 9th District and the one who knows it best because of his years at City Hall. He most recently worked for Councilman Nate Holden, and spent 16 years as an aide to Lindsay.

But Gay’s strategy also opened him up to the criticism that, during his years with Lindsay, he had been part of development policies that many contend kowtowed to downtown interests while ignoring impoverished neighborhoods south of the Santa Monica Freeway.

In the 15th District, Flores had to deal with assertions that she has lost interest in her job, as demonstrated by her failed 1990 run for secretary of state and her loss last November in a race for U.S. Congress.

Two big-name, big-money challengers led the charge against Flores--school board member Warren Furutani and marketing consultant Hahn. Furutani was the only challenger who has won elected office, while Hahn said her experiences with her father and work with a major developer made her familiar with the district’s problems.

But both came under attack as political opportunists with tenuous ties to the district. Foes noted that Furutani and Hahn arrived in it just last fall, having lived, respectively, in Gardena and Long Beach.

Svorinich apparently benefited from those attacks, as well as his deep ties to the Harbor area. Backed by the area’s large Yugoslav-American community, Svorinich collected more donations than Hahn and Furutani.

The three other incumbent council members faced underfunded opposition.

In the 1st District, which skirts to the west and north of downtown, Hernandez faced the most poorly financed field in the city.

Hernandez jumped out to a huge early lead and held it throughout the night.

Reacting jubilantly to the results, Hernandez said: “We ran a campaign based on our record. And it showed if you do your work, you get elected.” He added: “There’s no question in my mind that the agenda for the next four years has to include job creation and the issue of fighting crime.”

In the 5th District, which reaches from Westwood and the Fairfax district to Van Nuys, Yaroslavsky and environmental activist Laura Lake reprised their 1989 showdown. Lake received less than a third of the vote last time and her slow-growth stand may have become a tougher sell because of the city’s economic woes.

In the 11th District, also on the Westside and in the Valley, Marvin Braude faced two political novices, lawyer Daniel Pritikin and restaurateur John B. Handal.