Mining Discontent, Striking Electoral Gold : Victors May Be Held Accountable for Promises to the Valley

For years, from a political standpoint, San Fernando Valley residents have viewed themselves as the folks standing on the wrong end of the proverbial thumbed nose. Valley residents, for example, make up more than one-third of the population of Los Angeles, but have less than one-fifth of the membership of the city’s appointed commissions, and no representatives at all on the four major bodies: police, fire, water and power and public works.

Los Angeles has one of the nation’s lowest police-to-citizen ratios among major cities--2.2 officers per 1,000 residents. Valley residents were so put out by the fact that their police-to-citizen ratio is smaller by half that they unfortunately helped kill a modest property tax increase for more officers--in part based on the belief that few would be assigned to the Valley. Last year, one of the two only all-Valley seats on the Board of Education was also lost.

Those who campaigned on this burgeoning disaffection did extremely well or better than anyone expected in the Valley on Election Day. And an incumbent labeled as an ineffective defender of Valley interests--3rd District Councilwoman Joy Picus--was drubbed.

Mayor-elect Richard Riordan, who campaigned heavily on the promise to better represent the Valley, won 71% of its vote. Opponent Michael Woo, heir-apparent to the old coalition of Mayor Tom Bradley, gained 29%.

Related facts also show that the Valley is no longer an archly conservative and monolithic white enclave.

Riordan, for example, won the Valley battle for those who had backed the mayoral campaigns of moderate City Councilman Joel Wachs and Assemblyman Richard Katz, gaining 65% and 53% of their supporters, respectively.

The mayoral balloting in two Pacoima precincts in the Valley’s 7th District illustrate the same point. Low-income Latinos make up more than 92% of the population in both. The apparent winner of the City Council race in that district, Richard Alarcon, won more than 70% of the vote in those precincts. But Riordan also made a respectable showing against Woo there, pulling in more than 42%.

Alarcon sensed the direction of the Valley’s political winds as well as anyone. The man who served as Bradley’s chief City Hall liaison to the San Fernando Valley campaigned on the fact that his district--you guessed it--had been ignored by City Hall.

Whether his slim 164-vote margin against former Fire Capt. Lyle Hall holds up or not (some remaining absentee ballots have not been counted), an important point has been made. The race was also a sign of the growing political power of Latinos in the 7th District and in the east San Fernando Valley as a whole. Alarcon was out-endorsed and out-funded, relying on a phalanx of young volunteers who had never before worked on campaigns.

In the southwest Valley, the same wave of discontent swamped longtime City Council incumbent Picus in the 3rd District. Following Picus’ often futile attempts to champion Valley interests, Laura Chick, Picus’ former field deputy, won 145 of the district’s 163 precincts.

Picus opposed term limits for City Hall’s elected officials, hardly a shrewd move for a four-time incumbent in this political climate. Chick also seized on Picus’ bungled effort to block the controversial Warner Ridge office-complex development. The developers were able to move forward on their project virtually on their own terms.

Tuesday’s winners succeeded, in large part, by touting themselves as candidates who would better represent a part of the city that has been misunderstood and taken for granted. Because of the discontent they so successfully quarried, however, they are now likely to be held more accountable for those promises than any of their predecessors.