Anti-Roberti Group Gains in Recall Bid

Anti-gun control activists and others said Wednesday that they have collected enough voter signatures to hold a recall election against state Senate leader David A. Roberti (D-Van Nuys) this spring, when he will have less than eight months left in office.

A spokesman for the Constitutional Rights Federation, a Mission Hills-based gun owners group, said anti-Roberti activists gathered more than 45,000 voter signatures, more than twice the number needed to stage a recall in late March or April.

A successful recall would be a major political embarrassment for Roberti. The powerful Senate president pro tem, who must leave that post in November because of term limits, plans to run for state treasurer this year, and his prospects could be badly damaged if voters in his home district toss him out of the Senate amid a statewide campaign.

Gun owners remain angry at Roberti for co-sponsoring a 1989 ban on military-style semiautomatic assault weapons and his current efforts to limit the number of bullets that can be held in rifle and pistol magazines.

Gun activists mounted a nationwide grass-roots campaign to defeat Roberti in his bid for the Van Nuys-based 20th state Senate District seat in a 1992 special election. They mailed more than 400,000 leaflets to voters attacking him on a variety of issues.

Despite massive campaign spending, Roberti barely defeated a novice GOP candidate, Carol Rowen of Tarzana. A Roberti aide later said the gun owners’ flyers had a “significant impact” on the race.

For the recall election to be held, anti-Roberti activists must submit 20,670 valid voter signatures by today. A spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County voter registrar said Wednesday that more than 10,000 signatures have already been certified as valid. The county by law has until Feb. 5 to certify all the signatures.

A Roberti spokesman lashed out at recall proponents, labeling them “radical gunners” willing to waste taxpayer dollars to wreak political revenge on Roberti.

“This is much bigger than David Roberti,” Steven Glazer said. “This is a battle about whether or not the state has the right to provide reasonable limits on guns.”

Recall proponents are “willing to take thousands and thousands of dollars away from law enforcement to make their case” against Roberti, Glazer said.

A spokeswoman for the registrar’s office said she did not know how much a recall election would cost.

Dolores White, a Reseda real estate agent and a sponsor of the recall effort, said anti-Roberti forces are a coalition of groups that include more than just gun owners. The coalition’s members include crime victims, environmentalists and former Roberti supporters who have turned against him, she said.

But White acknowledged that most groups in the coalition represent gun owners.

Manuel Fernandez, chairman of the Constitutional Rights Federation, which represents gun owners in the San Fernando Valley, said the recall is, indeed, intended as pay-back for Roberti’s gun control efforts.

“The whole purpose of the recall of Roberti is retribution for the passage of the semiautomatic rifle ban,” said Fernandez, who helped spearhead the 1992 campaign against Roberti.

Fernandez, a law firm researcher from Mission Hills, is a former leader of another anti-Roberti group, Californians Against Corruption, which participated in the 1992 campaign and is part of the recall coalition.

According to a 1993 letter obtained by The Times, CAC last year asked the National Rifle Assn. to help bankroll the recall campaign, saying that dumping Roberti from office would intimidate politicians around the nation who favor gun control.

“We have to engage the enemy, to work the enemy, to get in so close we can smell ‘em,” said the Feb. 5 letter, signed by CAC advisory board member Richard L. Carone.

“Roberti is the most vulnerable, high-visibility target in California, and we need a major victory here. With Clinton in power, the nation needs one, too.”

But George McNeill, who heads NRA lobbying efforts in statehouses around the country, said the NRA has declined to give money to the recall group.

“If Californians want to recall Roberti, that’s up to California voters at the time. . . . If it’s not successful, he won’t be able to serve again anyway,” McNeill said.

Under state recall rules, Roberti must win a majority of the votes cast to retain his office. Other candidates can qualify for the same ballot and, if Roberti is recalled, the top vote-getter would be elected to serve out the balance of his term.

Glazer said the senator would survive any recall, saying Roberti plans to “fight like hell” and has at least $250,000 in campaign funds to protect himself.

But in an internal CAC memo, also obtained by The Times, gun activists outlined how the mathematics of a recall election could work against Roberti.

The memo said Roberti received only 43% of the vote in the 1992 special election, with the other 57% divided among four candidates. With no opponents to split the anti-Roberti vote in a recall election, the senator might not be able to muster the 50%-plus-one majority he needs to survive.

“We like the rules of that game! We can elect a state senator with well under 50% of the vote,” the memo said.

White, the recall sponsor, unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination in the 1992 20th District election and said she will be a candidate to succeed Roberti if he is recalled.

Her fellow recall sponsors include three others who lost to Roberti in that election. But one of them, former Libertarian state party chairman John Vernon, has since died.