Business Group Trades Potshots With Officials : Elections: The Chamber of Commerce will enter the local political arena after losing $50,000 annual contract. It is considering working to defeat incumbent council members.

Chambers of Commerce and their city halls are often the closest of allies, but in Duarte the local chamber is acting as if World War III is about to break out.

“The atomic clock is about one minute to 12, and we’re in total warfare,” said Gordon Dill, executive vice president of the city’s Chamber of Commerce.

Six months after the City Council voted to bail out of its $50,000-a-year contract with the chamber, the chamber’s board of directors has devised a counterattack.

The group is changing its bylaws so that it can join a minority of chambers statewide that have formed political action committees and endorsed city council candidates. The board has yet to decide whether to challenge Mayor John C. Van Doren and council members Margaret Finlay and James Kirchner, who are up for reelection in November.

On another front, the attorneys for the chamber and the city fired off heated letters.

Chamber attorney Michael Donnelly warned the city to stop discouraging business owners from joining the group and trying to “disrupt the day-to-day operations of the chamber.”

Duarte’s attorney vehemently denied that the city has tried to paralyze the chamber.

“Your loose allegations of ‘city employee misconduct’ (and) ‘attempting to break the back of the chamber’ are simply false,” Duarte City Atty. E. Clarke Moseley wrote back.

The allegations are so false, Moseley wrote, “that it is difficult to dignify your letter with a response saying they’re false.”

Dill and other chamber officials say their allegations are tough to prove because business owners are too afraid of losing the city’s business to speak out. Dill offered two business owners as examples of those who have been pressured by city officials.

When contacted by The Times, one owner, who spoke on condition of anonymity, denied that city officials had threatened him. The other owner did not return phone calls.

Chamber officials have held a grudge against the city since December. That’s when the council voted to take advantage of a 60-day escape clause and back out of its the five-year contract it had with the chamber for business promotional services.

At the time, council members argued that the chamber was no longer effective because its board of directors had been stymied by months of infighting and resignations that often were blamed on Dill.

Dill alleges that city officials are trying to undermine the chamber because they want complete control of services for the business community and because council members have grown tired of funding a chamber that sometimes criticizes them for poor judgment.

Though they would hardly characterize their relationship with the chamber as cordial, several council members said that calling their conflict with the chamber “warfare” is simply Dill’s hyperbole. They say the chamber continues to offer some valuable services to the community.

But those services are drying up. Without city funding, the chamber is struggling, Dill said, although he insists that the organization will survive. Membership is at an all-time high of about 270, but several programs have been cut, including the group’s “Eggs and Issues” networking breakfasts. Additionally, a secretary--Dill’s wife--was laid off, and the chamber’s eight-hour business day was scaled back to 9 a.m. to noon.

Meanwhile, a group of chamber officials who resigned in a huff last year because of disagreements with Dill are working to establish the fledgling Duarte Business Assn. That group already has more than 100 members, according to Gini Loop, the group’s president and a former chamber president who resigned last year.

“I want to work with a group that doesn’t have an ax to grind (with City Hall),” Loop said.

The chamber-City Hall spat has left some city officials and business leaders in surrounding communities shaking their heads in disbelief, if not amusement, that such a bitter relationship could drag on for so long.

“I’ve heard from nearby cities that we have become somewhat of a laughingstock of the San Gabriel Valley,” Duarte Councilman Kirchner said.

Next door, the executive director of the Azusa Chamber of Commerce, Vera Mendoza, said: “I think it’s sad what’s happening in Duarte because it’s defeating the purpose of the chamber. We’ve had differences of opinion with our city but never that serious a problem.”