LOS ANGELES COUNTY ELECTIONS / CITY COUNCIL : Runoffs to Offer Vivid Contrasts to Voters

After the muddle of a primary election season chock-full of candidates, four City Council races have produced runoffs that will present voters with vivid choices about the kind of leadership they want in Los Angeles.

In one of two races for open seats, former school board member Jackie Goldberg takes her liberal ideology and her bid to become the council’s first openly homosexual member into a battle in the Hollywood-Silver Lake area against Tom La Bonge, a career City Hall employee who prefers discussions of public works and park projects to political discourse.

In the second race without an incumbent, Richard Alarcon aims to break through as the council’s third Latino member--and first ever elected from the San Fernando Valley--in a contest against city Fire Capt. Lyle Hall.

In a district that stretches from San Pedro to Watts, meanwhile, Rudy Svorinich, a paint store owner and already a political giant-slayer in Tuesday’s vote, takes on 12-year Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores.

And onetime council aide Laura Chick faces her former boss, Councilwoman Joy Picus, in a nasty grudge match for control of a West Valley district.

While the campaigns for the two open seats promised to be defined by differing philosophies about how to govern, the showdowns featuring the two incumbents were already turning nasty.

“I think we are going to see nuclear war here in Los Angeles in this political season,” said Rich Lichtenstein, a political consultant not involved in any of the contests.

In the 13th District, which reaches from the Bohemian flats of Echo Park to the mean streets of Hollywood, ideology presents enough contrast that the candidates may not have to sling mud.

Goldberg, 48, is a lifelong liberal who cut her political teeth in Berkeley’s Free Speech movement. She teaches school and led the campaign for a program for gay and lesbian students in Los Angeles schools, but is on leave as an aide to county Supervisor Gloria Molina.

La Bonge, 39, is a former high school football coach who has spent almost his entire adult life working for one City Council member or another--most recently for council President John Ferraro. In a typical moment, he proudly tells a story of how he obtained a recycling bin for a constituent who had not received one from the city.

Rick Taylor, a consultant for La Bonge, said, “I think people in the 13th District want someone who will get their streets clean and expand library hours, and not make foreign policy and talk about global issues.”

As Goldberg celebrated Tuesday’s results, which saw her lead a pack of eight candidates with 35% of the vote, she said the most important part of her runoff race would be to bring together diverse groups under her banner.

Goldberg clearly can expect strong support from gay and lesbian leaders, who said Wednesday that they are brimming with enthusiasm to make Goldberg the first openly homosexual member of the council.

“There is nothing more important than having one of us at the table in terms of how people will treat this community,” said Scott Hitt, co-chair of the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, a national fund-raising group. “There is a lot of excitement about this race and I think Jackie will get a lot of help.”

In the Valley’s 7th District, meanwhile, the prospect of new minority representation is alive in the person of Alarcon, an aide to Mayor Tom Bradley.

Arturo Vargas, vice president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said he hoped that Latinos throughout the county will come to Alarcon’s aid in his runoff with Hall, who finished first in Tuesday’s vote.

Alarcon, 39, said his second-place finish opens the door to “a new northeast Valley.” He said many of his campaign workers were Latino youths fed up with street crime and gang activity.

The district’s population is 70% Latino, and more than a fifth of all residents are between the ages of 14 and 24.

But Vargas acknowledged that with Anglos remaining the district’s largest voting group, Alarcon would have to reach for a wider appeal.

“He won’t be able to just get up and say, ‘I’m a Latino, vote for me,’ ” Vargas said. “He is going to have to say, ‘I’m the most qualified, so vote for me.’ ”

Hall, 53, has made a commitment to deal with the district’s bread-and-butter issues, and Alarcon will have to do the same to win, observers said.

Hall also has an edge in political experience--four years ago, he forced the district’s longtime councilman, Ernani Bernardi, into a runoff, only to lose that race. But the close call he gave Bernardi influenced the incumbent not to seek reelection.

In the 15th District that reaches from Watts to San Pedro, political pundits who agreed that Flores was in trouble had been focusing their attention on Janice K. Hahn, daughter of the retired county supervisor, and Warren Furutani, a school board member, as her most serious challengers.

But Svorinich upset those calculations with a strong showing Tuesday. Benefiting from his hometown roots in perhaps the city’s most hometown-oriented community--San Pedro--Svorinich ran just a few percentage points behind Flores.

The challenger is a former president of the Yugoslavian American Club--now called the Dalmatian American Club--in a community that is heavily Slavic. He is a member of the San Pedro Elks Lodge and the Harbor Masonic Lodge No. 332. His father, Rudy Svorinich Sr., is a retired fisherman and longshoreman and a member of the same longshoremen’s union in which Svorinich’s grandfather and great-grandfather were charter members.

The task facing him, political observers agree, is to build on his primary showing and expand his appeal beyond his home community, perhaps by stressing that Flores, a Republican with a reputation for strong constituent service, generally adopts a more conservative viewpoint than many of the districts residents.

Svorinich “is going to have to be smart enough to go out and use his campaign to get Democratic and African-American voters,” said consultant Taylor, who was not involved in the race.

Flores, despite finishing with less than 30% of the vote in the seven-candidate primary, Wednesday called her showing “not bad at all.”

She also predicted that Svorinich would be a less formidable obstacle than Hahn--whom many had expected to finish second Tuesday--in the runoff. “He isn’t known. He doesn’t have a name,” Flores said. “And a lot of people just vote names on the ballot.”

The campaign between Picus and Chick promised to be the nastiest fight of the bunch.

Indeed, on Wednesday morning, a tired-looking Picus promised to make “character” the central issue of her struggle to maintain her seat.

She then accused Chick of spreading lies in a mailer to voters that accused the Picus of “flying around the world” at taxpayers’ expense. In fact, Picus said she has never traveled outside the country on city business.

But political consultant Harvey Englander, who represents Chick, insisted the mailer was accurate because Picus had once flown over Canada on a city trip to Alaska. “That amounts to traveling around the world,” Englander said.

Picus said that she also plans to spotlight the fact that Chick moved into the district belatedly to run for City Council, and that in doing so the challenger is running against her own mentor. “That’s the equivalent of leaving a company and stealing trade secrets,” Picus said. “People won’t go for that sort of thing in this district. It’s a churchgoing district.”

Chick said the betrayal allegations were ridiculous and that her only loyalty is to “the 3rd District and the city of Los Angeles--they were my employers and that’s why I left my job with Joy.”

Of her former boss, Chick said: “All she cared about was playing it safe and getting reelected.”

Times staff writers Jack Cheevers, Greg Krikorian, Lisa Richardson and John Schwada contributed to this story.