Fire Aftermath Engulfs Laguna Beach’s Mayor : Politics: Foes demand resignation of Lida Lenney and her council allies, but loyalists admire her personal touch.

Chauffeured by police, Mayor Lida Lenney was like a general in loose slacks and a linen jacket as she rode slowly through the burned landscape that resembled a war zone.

At the end of a road, Lenney stepped from the car and walked to the edge of a creek bed, peering across the ravine to where her 2-year-old grandson’s home, toys and clothing lay in ashes.

The mayor stood for a long moment, her face a mask of muffled anguish. But she said little, simply brushed away the few tears that slipped from beneath her dark glasses. And then she went back to work.

“My city was burning,” Lenney said, thinking back to that awful day, Oct. 27. “It’s a terrible thing to think of it as my city, but my city was burning.”

Despite the emotional pain, Lenney emerged as one of the lucky ones in the devastating fire that torched 366 homes and caused more than $400 million in damage. After all, her house was left standing. But in other ways, she has been scathed and scarred by the disaster.

She is a small city mayor suddenly thrust into the swirl of a crisis and an aftermath of recrimination.

Even as firefighters snuffed out the last embers, a faction of citizens demanded that Lenney and two other City Council members resign for having stubbornly opposed construction of a 3 million-gallon reservoir that fire officials believe would have helped battle the blaze. One man, upset his home was destroyed, physically shoved Lenney.

Then, this week, county supervisors blistered Lenney for urging that burned hillsides of the Laguna Coast Wilderness Park be allowed to grow back naturally and not immediately reseeded. One supervisor called it an “extremist position” that would leave the barren park vulnerable to flood damage.

The dissatisfaction with Lenney, and the liberal council majority she represents, runs deeper than hard feelings over a reservoir. Opponents say they have pushed a “nonsensical agenda” for years, neglecting the nuts-and-bolts business of running a city while straining the budget by fighting unwinnable legal wars, often involving environmental or land-use issues.

“She’ll let her emotions guide her rather than logic,” said Darren Esslinger, a leader of the political opposition. “Laguna needs to get back to the basics of providing the city’s basic infrastructure needs, which she has woefully neglected.”

Bob Mosier, president of the Laguna Beach Taxpayers’ Assn., echoed that sentiment with a dour indictment: “I don’t think (Lenney) has many strengths.”

Yet the mayor has remained unflappable and poised under the strain.

Last Tuesday night, before a largely hostile audience, she stuck to her guns and was the lone vote against a new effort to push for the reservoir, which she has opposed on environmental grounds.

“This is a very hard time to be mayor,” she said later. “I said to myself, ‘I’m going to have to start walking around with a target in front of me.’ ”

However, the mayor does enjoy unyielding support from loyalists who appreciate her kindness and personal touch.

As Lenney sipped coffee at a cafe the other day, a woman walked over to the table, extending a hand.

“I want you to know you have so much of my admiration and you’ve served this town so well,” she said. “Every time I see you, my heart goes out to you.”

Still, the harshness of political life after the fire has taken a toll, said George Lenney, who married Lida in 1984, two years before she was first elected to the council.

“It’s very hard on her,” he said. “She gets a lot of nourishment from people in the community who realize she’s doing her very best . . . but, yeah, it hurts.”

None of this, however, has kept Lenney from her job. From the day after the fire and through the mudslides that followed, she has worked steadily on official and unofficial city duties, touring fire-ravaged neighborhoods, presiding over emotionally charged council meetings and taking pains to see that fire victims receive help.

Her style is personal.

One day, after a woman, her daughter and grandchild were forced from their home by flood waters, Lenney visited the family and stood amid the chaos of the mud-caked house, hugging the grandmother.

Such compassion has won Lenney solid supporters who have rallied to her defense, describing her as brave and hard-working, somebody who would sacrifice herself for a worthy cause.

“We call her Leader Lenney,” said Linda Rushing, a board member of the Laguna Canyon Conservancy, which Lenney founded in 1987. “I would say, if it weren’t for her, there would be 3,200 houses (developed) in the canyon.”

Robert F. Gentry, Lenney’s closest ally on the council, said she has won the respect of elected officials throughout the state. “I find that very telling. When your peers respect you, that says a great deal.”

Gentry said the gaping disparity of opinion about his colleague may result partly from “a perception of style.”

Smartly dressed, smoothly coiffed and driving a new red Mercedes-Benz, Lenney does not look like someone who would stage a weeklong protest at the home of Donald Bren, head of the Irvine Co. But that’s just what she did in 1989, trying to persuade the county’s largest landowner to shelve plans to build a housing development in Laguna Canyon.

In fact, Lenney is a seasoned veteran of political wars. And even now, although she admits the fire represents one of the low points in her life, Lenney gives no hint she will buckle.

Picking at a bran muffin at the chic Cafe Zinc in Laguna Beach, Lenney said she has not yet decided whether to run for reelection.

“I am a political animal,” she said, shrugging slightly, as if there were nothing to be done about it. “It would be hard to give it up.”

Looking back on a lifetime that led her to the mayor’s seat, Lenney recounted incidents that shaped her public life. And it doesn’t take long to sift out the values that motivate her: a protective instinct toward the environment and an itch for social justice.

Even her two most vivid memories illustrate those themes.

There was that “frightening and inspiring” day in 1968 when she stood with an all-African American congregation singing “We Shall Overcome” in Selma, Ala. “Outside,” she said, “there were National Guard and police dogs lunging at ropes.”

Another vivid memory occurred 21 years later, on Nov. 11, 1989, when 7,500 marchers converged on Laguna Canyon in an anti-development demonstration planned by Lenney’s conservancy. Shortly afterward, the city and the Irvine Co. struck an agreement that enabled the city to buy the land for open space.

“I think I have an inner core that allows me to do what I think is right even when it’s hard and, sometimes, even when it’s unpopular,” Lenney said.

Born Lida Pennacchini in Linden, N.J., Lenney cut her political teeth early during dinner time arguments over apartheid with her father, who was born in South Africa and favored the separation of races.

By the time she arrived at Trenton State Teachers College in New Jersey, Lenney was eager for leadership, eyeing a seat on the college executive board. The dean of women advised her to give it up.

“She said there’s no point in you running . . . because there is a man running and there’s no way you’ll get elected,” Lenney remembered. Lenney ran anyway, and lost.

The next year she was elected president of the college executive board.

Lenney’s teaching career spanned 30 years, the last 15 with the Laguna Beach Unified School District, where in 1978 she served as president of the teachers union.

In 1988, just two years into her stint on the council, Lenney took a wild political gamble and sought the Democratic nomination for the 40th Congressional District seat, taking on Christopher Cox, a political natural with the conservative credentials to claim Orange County.

“She’s the kind of person who operates from the gut and her heart,” said City Clerk Verna Rollinger, a friend for 20 years and an early supporter in the congressional race.

With virtually no chance of victory, Lenney threw herself into the maelstrom, attacking the Republicans on their environmental stands and saying the male-dominated Congress was out of touch with the country’s women.

“I knew she wasn’t going to win,” Gentry said, “but I admired her commitment to the principles she brought to that race. . . .”

Unquestionably an optimist by nature, Lenney emerged from the political defeat “bruised, sober and realistic,” George Lenney said. “She hyped herself up to believe she could win that race for Congress, which was an incredible long shot. I think it hurt her quite a lot.”

If Lenney’s supporters admire her willingness to fight even the losing battles, her opponents do not.

They say her energies are misplaced and that her emphasis on preserving open space and righting social inequities has not served this city of 24,000 people.

Eager to preserve the city’s village ambience, opponents say the council majority and its appointed Design Review Board have infringed upon property rights and wasted taxpayer money by tempting landowners to sue the city.

Some wonder aloud how the city will raise the $33 million to buy the final slice of Irvine Co. land, a payment due in June, 1995.

“She doesn’t have Laguna’s big picture in mind,” Esslinger said. “She has good intentions. I just don’t think she sees the ramifications of the decisions she makes.”

The stress of the fire, and a continuing round of verbal assaults, has taken its toll on Lenney. But recently, she spent a day doing the two things that are most likely to restore her: she wrote in her journal and played with her grandson.

“What really makes me happy, what gives me joy, is to be with my grandson,” she said.

And if political groups are opposing her, individuals continue to offer support.

“Hang in there, kid,” said a man who approached the mayor in front of City Hall. “You’re doing great.”

Whether such sentiments will propel Lenney into another council campaign next year is still unknown. Next month, she will slip briefly from the spotlight when the rotating position of mayor falls to another council member.

Lenney made it clear she will not be rushed, or shoved, into making a premature decision about whether to run again next November.

“In politics, things continue to change,” she said. “A lot of political decisions are made in the moment. And I’ve got a year to go before that moment comes.”

Laguna’s Movers and Shakers

Lida Lenney

Position: Laguna Beach mayor

Born: March 20, 1933, in Linden, N.J.

Family: Married, two children

Education: Master’s degree in social ecology from UC Irvine, 1984; bachelor’s degree in education from Trenton State Teachers College, N.J., 1955; teaching certificate from St. Andrews University, Dundee, Scotland, 1954.

Background: First elected to the City Council in 1986; teacher at Thurston Middle and Top of the World elementary schools in Laguna Beach, 1972-87; administrator and head teacher, Sullivan Elementary, Mission Viejo, 1971-72; educational testing service field coordinator, Lee County, Ala., 1968-69; English teacher, Takoma Park Jr. High, Takoma Park, Md., 1960-62; teacher, English as a second language, Foreign Language Institute UNKRA Project, Seoul, Korea, 1956.

Reservoir issue: Lenney has opposed the reservoir next to Alta Laguna Park. She has called for more information on how the city water system performed in the fire before making any final decision on the reservoir.

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Robert F. Gentry

Position: Laguna Beach councilman

Born: Nov. 1, 1938, in Boston

Family: In a domestic partnership

Occupation: UC Irvine associate dean of students

Education: Master’s degree in educational administration from Indiana University, 1962; bachelor’s degree in psychology and sociology from Hanover College in Hanover, Ind., 1960.

Background: First elected to the City Council in 1982, serving three terms as mayor; led city negotiations with the Irvine Co. to buy Laguna Laurel property; chairman of League of California Cities Environmental Quality Committee, 1992 to present; member of steering committee for the National League of Cities Energy Environment and Natural Resources Committee; also involved with Governor’s Advisory Committee on Offshore Oil Leasing, the city’s AIDS Education Task Force, and executive committee of the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

Reservoir issue: Gentry, who lost his home in the fire, has opposed the reservoir on the city-owned open space parcel in the past, but recently crafted a compromise agreement that would allow the Laguna Beach County Water District project to proceed. The district board of directors has yet to consider the compromise, but some water officials predicted it would be rejected.

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Ann Christoph

Position: Laguna Beach mayor pro tem

Born: June 20, 1945, in Appleton, Wis.

Family: Single

Occupation: Landscape architect

Education: Master’s degree in landscape architecture from University of Michigan, 1971; bachelor’s degree in art from Arizona State University, 1967.

Background: First elected to the council in 1990; served as planning commissioner in 1990; served as board member and secretary of South Laguna Specific Plan Board of Review 1983-89; member of South Laguna Specific Plan Advisory Committee, 1979-83; served as board member of South Laguna Civic Assn.; was chairwoman of the Laguna Beach Unified School District Master Facilities Planning Committee, 1973-80; served as board member Friends of the Hortense Miller Garden, 1985-88.

Reservoir issue: Christoph has abstained on reservoir votes because of potential conflict of interest related to past contract with city to design Alta Laguna Park. The proposed reservoir site was designated as open space as part of the agreement to build the park. She is awaiting a binding ruling from the state Fair Political Practices Commission on the issue.

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Johanna S. Felder

Position: President of Village Laguna, a community group formed 22 years ago to stop the development of high-rise hotels and condominiums at the city’s Main Beach.

Born: June 20, 1943, in New York

Family: Married, two children

Occupation: Retired nurse

Education: Registered nursing degree from Pilgrim State School of Nursing, New York, 1964.

Background: Has served as Village Laguna president, 1990-present; has served as a member of board of directors for the Laguna Greenbelt Inc.; served as a member of Collector’s Council of the Laguna Beach Art Museum, Curator’s Circle Newport Harbor Art Museum, docent for Newport Harbor Art Museum, and Adopt the Brick Committee of the Laguna Beach Chamber of Commerce; also has been involved in the Laguna Canyon Conservancy, Citizens Against the Toll Roads, Sierra Club and The Greenbelt Alliance.

Reservoir issue: Village Laguna, with about 400 members, has supported a reservoir at the alternative Top of the World site identified in a water district environmental impact report. Has opposed reservoir at the proposed knoll site because it contains various bureaucratic obstacles that would hold up the project and because the land is environmentally sensitive.

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Kenneth C. Frank

Position: Laguna Beach city manager

Born: April, 7 1944, in San Francisco

Family: Divorced, two children

Education: Master’s degree in public administration from UC Berkeley, 1971; bachelor’s degree in political science and economics from San Francisco State University, 1966.

Background: Became city manager in 1979; was assistant to the city manager in Berkeley for four years till 1979; worked for five years for the League of California Cities.

Reservoir issue: Frank, whose Mystic Hills home was destroyed in the firestorm, has not taken a public position on the reservoir.

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Kathleen Blackburn

Position: Laguna Beach councilwoman

Born: July, 22, 1943, in Los Angeles

Family: Married, one child

Occupation: Controller of sunglass company

Education: Bachelor’s degree in physiological psychology at UC Berkeley, 1964; Regents fellow at UCLA graduate school in physiological psychology.

Background: First elected to the City Council in 1992; served as planning commissioner, 1988-92; was member of the South Laguna Specific Plan Board of Review, 1984-88; served on Laguna Beach Unified School District Parent Teacher Assn.; also involved in Laguna Beach Volleyball Assn., Ebell Club of Laguna Beach, National Charity League, and Three Arch Bay Assn.

Reservoir issue: Blackburn has been supportive the reservoir.

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Wayne L. Peterson

Position: Laguna Beach councilman

Born: Sept. 27, 1939, in Omaha, Neb.

Family: Single

Occupation: Property manager

Education: Master’s degree in business from California State University, Long Beach, 1968; bachelor’s degree in finance from California State University, Long Beach, 1965.

Background: First elected to the City Council in 1992; served as planning commissioner, 1985-91; served on Design Review Board, 1983-85; was secretary of Log Cabin Club of Orange County.

Reservoir issue: Peterson has been a longtime advocate of the water reservoir.

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Robert R. Mosier

Position: President of the Laguna Beach Taxpayers Assn., formed in 1947.

Born: Sept. 9, 1924, in San Francisco.

Family: Married, four children.

Occupation: Semi-retired businessman; retired engineer.

Education: Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from UCLA, 1950.

Background: Has served as a board member North Laguna Community Assn. and United Laguna; served as chairman of city Parking and Traffic Circulation Committee, 1988-92; was involved in a number of city committees involving such issues as water use, traffic and Laguna Canyon Road improvements.

Reservoir issue: The taxpayers group, with about 800 paid members, has long supported the reservoir proposal. It believes city should let the water district proceed with the project in whatever way water officials believe is the best for public health and safety.

Note: Photos of Blackburn, Felder and Frank were not available

Sources: individuals listed

Researched by ANA CEKOLA / Los Angeles Times