COVER STORY : MAYOR: 13 Candidates Vie to Lead Long Beach : A Baker’s Dozen Vie for an Ounce of Power : Candidates for Long Beach Mayor Make Their Pitch for a Job That Lacks Clout

The man who occupies the mayor’s chair must feel that he’s wearing a straitjacket at times.

As the leader of California’s fifth largest city, Mayor Ernie Kell is faced with the ills common to a major urban center: A record homicide rate, a looming budget deficit, neighborhood blight, potholes--all these headaches, and more, land on his desk.

But if Long Beach residents expect Kell to lead the ship of state through angry shoals, he must do so without oars. He has no vote on the nine-member City

Council. Most of his vetoes can be overridden with a simple majority. In short, it’s a job that carries little official power.

Yet Kell and 12 other candidates are vying for the mayor’s job. The challengers are an eclectic lot, including two City Council members, a real estate magnate, a former city college president, a Marxist, a former minister and a 20-year-old college student.

With so many candidates running, it is unlikely any will garner the necessary majority--50% plus one vote--required to win the April 12 primary. In that case, the two top vote-getters would meet in a June 7 runoff.

Most candidates brush aside the question of mayoral powerlessness, saying they will overcome this obstacle to beef up the police force, cut red tape and bring national recognition to Long Beach. In forums across the city, challengers have railed against Kell for failing to create a vision for Long Beach. These critics charge that for six years, Kell has governed this port city as a sleepy seaside town. And they say his few initiatives have been restricted to downtown and the wealthier Eastside.

Kell says critics overlook his tireless lobbying efforts in Sacramento and Washington on behalf of the city, and he wonders if his opponents are simply grandstanding.

“Leadership is not standing on a soapbox, taking credit for everything you do,” said Kell, who earns $84,057 as mayor. “I’ll match my personal success with anybody.”

The mayor’s race comes at a time when Long Beach is in transition--its bustling harbor, gleaming downtown skyscrapers and struggling shopping corridors are all on the cusp of change.

Once a predominantly white suburb of Los Angeles, a bastion of Navy and defense industry employees, only a shadow of Long Beach’s former image remains. The naval hospital on the city’s Eastside has closed, and the Navy base continues to scale back its operations. Defense plants, once the bulwark of a solid middle class, have laid off thousands, throwing the city’s economy into a tailspin. Immigration has created cultural enclaves within the city, a cacophony of new languages and values.

As Long Beach sheds its Iowa-by-the-Sea image, most candidates say the mayor must be an ambassador to business, create more jobs, fill this port city’s newly expanded Convention Center, its sleek downtown hotels, theaters and boutiques. And the mayor needs to be a diplomat to unite disparate neighborhoods. In this climate of rapid change, several candidates see an opportunity to reshape the skyline, to leave their own sprawling signatures on Long Beach.

“It’s like someone is giving you a huge canvas, like 20-feet-by-200, and you can do anything with it,” said Ray Grabinski, who is giving up his City Council seat after two terms to run for mayor. “You can leave one dot on it or create a major landscape.”

Whether the mayor will actually be given the paint and brushes to leave a mark has been a matter of some contention.

Six years ago, Long Beach voters elevated the job from a ceremonial post rotated among council members every two years to a full-time elected position. A citizen’s task force that recommended the changes wanted to give the mayor veto powers that would have required a two-thirds council vote to override. But the council watered down the measure that voters ultimately approved, requiring a simple majority to deny most vetoes.

Today, the mayor can propose ordinances and policy changes, but cannot vote on them. The city manager draws up the annual budget, although the mayor presents it to the council with his own recommendations. On budget issues, the mayor has a stronger veto, requiring a vote of two-thirds of the council members to override. Kell has used his veto twice--to block a package of budget increases and to force a proposed downtown apartment complex to reduce its number of units. The council voted to override Kell’s veto on the budget issue, but he prevailed on the development dispute.

The mayor also makes appointments to the city commissions that oversee multimillion-dollar projects in redevelopment, planning and the harbor. But the mayor doesn’t exert any real authority over those agencies, the commissioners say, and his appointments must be approved by the City Council.

In a bid to expand the mayor’s clout, Kell recently supported a proposed ballot measure to give the mayor a council vote. But council members--including mayoral candidates Grabinski and Vice Mayor Jeffrey A. Kellogg--rejected the plan, saying it could tie up city business with 5-5 deadlocks.

Kellogg said he prefers that the mayor be given stronger veto powers. A vote of two-thirds of the council members should be required to override all vetoes, he said. Grabinski favors a mayoral vote on the council, but only if the number of council seats is changed to ensure an odd number of voting members.

Kell has vowed to lead a grass-roots initiative to put such a measure on the ballot in the future. “The system needs to be changed,” Kell said. “There’s no way the mayor can operate (effectively) without legislative power.”

But the mayor has the potential to wield influence beyond the authority that is defined in the City Charter, Kell’s challengers say. The job can be used as a bully pulpit to attract new business and bring prestige to a city that for decades has lived in the shadow of Los Angeles. Most challengers insist that Long Beach needs a brand-name mayor--such as a Tom Bradley--who will work to make Long Beach a nationally recognized urban center.

“I don’t think Ernie Kell has been an effective spokesman outside the city limits,” said Paul Schmidt, a political science professor at Cal State Long Beach and an adviser to mayoral candidate Frank Colonna. “Long Beach is not a (real) presence in Sacramento or Washington.”

Kell, political insiders say, remains part of the old Long Beach--a city that survived on revenues from a booming oil industry and was proud of its self-sufficiency. Now that state lawmakers have begun slashing funds to cities to help balance the state budget, Long Beach can no longer afford to be independent or aloof.

“This city will never be what it was,” said candidate Beverly O’Neill, retired Long Beach City College president. “I think people look at us as provincial, but we’re becoming international.”

Opponents complain that Kell doesn’t even attend national mayoral conferences. Kell says they are a waste of time and taxpayer money. Critics contend he doesn’t bother to attend meetings of the city’s most powerful commissions. Kell says he doesn’t want to grandstand, and he is more effective behind the scenes. For example, he says his quiet lobbying trips to the nation’s Capitol have helped save the Navy shipyard from closing.

Rep. Steve Horn (R-Long Beach) said Kell and other city officials have worked to keep the shipyard off the Pentagon’s closure list. Horn, who is not endorsing a mayoral candidate, said Kell has led several delegations to lobby Navy brass in Washington.

Kell, 65, will admit he’s more comfortable in back rooms, behind the scenes. He learned politics as a boy growing up in North Dakota, where he saw his paternal grandfather (a Republican) defeat his maternal grandfather (a Democrat) for a seat in the state House of Representatives. After moving to Long Beach in 1953, he waged six successful campaigns for council and mayor, building a strong support base. He believes that support will carry him into office again.

He recites a list of achievements during his tenure: The $111-million Convention Center expansion; two new police substations, and expansion of the police force. At his urging, a curfew on teen-agers was revived in January, which he predicts will reduce crime dramatically. The City Council is considering a Kell proposal to fine parents whose children violate the curfew. Kell prefers to talk about what he and most of his challengers agree are the key issues in this campaign: crime and jobs. He said he wants to continue adding officers and reservists to the police force. He also says he will continue to push ahead with plans to convert the site of the closed Naval hospital on the Eastside into a huge discount shopping center and develop the city’s waterfront into a major tourist attraction, projects that he estimates would create thousands of jobs.

At neighborhood forums across the city, most of the candidates--squeezed shoulder to shoulder in metal folding chairs----begin and end their two-minute messages with a promise to hire more police.

Kellogg and O’Neill pledge to put 100 and 150 more officers on the streets, respectively. Both agree the new salaries could be paid for by privatizing some city services, such as the city’s janitorial services or the police helicopter unit.

Colonna favors tripling the number of volunteer reserve officers. He also wants to move the downtown police headquarters into the city’s center--a plot of city-owned land virtually surrounded by Signal Hill--and introduce mobile substations into the most crime-ridden neighborhoods.

Grabinski puts his emphasis on funding more gang intervention and youth recreation programs, but also advocates an increase in the police force.

Perennial candidate Thomas (Ski) Demski, a Santa Claus look-alike, would pay for additional officers by selling the Queen Mary, which he describes as a costly albatross around the city’s neck.

Not everyone agrees that more police are the answer to crime, however.

“History has proven you only make problems worse with more oppression,” said candidate Lee Chauser, a Marxist and high school English teacher. “It’s like throwing gasoline on a fire.”

G. Juan Johnson, an Amtrak employee, favors more counseling for the homeless and impoverished residents who might commit crimes.

Chauser and others stress jobs as one answer to reducing crime. El Nora Willingham, a self-employed motivational specialist, would create marketing councils to welcome new business; 20-year-old “youth candidate” Terry J. Stidom, a Long Beach City College student, would lower business permit fees.

Don Westerland, who headed the city’s Redevelopment Agency board for 6 1/2 years, criticizes Kell and City Hall for stifling new business. He would reduce the number of permits required for business.

“Most government people don’t have a ghost of an idea of what the business person needs,” said Westerland, a former minister who runs Family Service of Long Beach, a counseling agency. “I’m talking about changing the culture at City Hall.”

Dan Rosenberg, a retired teacher and longtime council critic, wants to eliminate several city commissions to free up funds for city services.

While the candidates seem passionate about these issues as they campaign at chicken-dinner fund-raisers and walk door to door, some political insiders complain that most are trudging a well-worn path.

“Not one candidate has come up with a new or fresh approach to government,” said Jeff Adler, a veteran of several Long Beach campaigns--including Kell’s two previous mayoral bids. “I don’t think you’ve heard one big idea. Everyone wants to be safe.”

Although the candidates are scrambling to put their names before the voters--often repeating the same stump speeches at forums night after night--they reveal little about their personal histories and motivations.

Take Ronnie Barnes. An ordained deacon in a small church and a legal investigator who runs his business from home, he has eight children to support. Yet he plans to spend $5,000 to $10,000 of his own money to convince voters that God intends him to be the next mayor.

“I am proclaiming victory now,” Barnes said. “I can do that because I am obedient to my creator.”

Grabinski grew up on the rough side of the tracks. Born on Chicago’s South Side, he lived in East Los Angeles, Compton and North Long Beach, along the way acquiring a tattoo that graces the middle finger of his right hand--a crude bluish dot to show others he was protected by buddies.

In Long Beach, Grabinski said, he found opportunities waiting. He opened three restaurants and won a seat on the City Council after playing a key role in a neighborhood group’s fight to block a refinery in the Wrigley district.

Beverly O’Neill grew up in another working-class neighborhood in central Long Beach. Her mother worked in a laundry. O’Neill helped out by working at the local J.C. Penney.

She enrolled at Long Beach City College and, four decades later, became the school’s president. After retiring last June, friends convinced O’Neill she could repeat her success in the role of mayor.

For Colonna, leadership is an old dream. In high school he says he was the “short, fat kid in horn-rimmed glasses and a buzz cut.” But even then, when girls danced with him only out of sympathy, he says, he had this future mapped out: a successful business, a family, and then, when the time was right, he would step forward to lead. The role model of his dreams is apparent in the large, framed photograph of John F. Kennedy hanging in his campaign office.

Kellogg, a six-year member of the council and vice president of a commercial real estate brokerage firm, is the youngest in a family of success stories. One brother is a U.S. Army general stationed in Europe, another played football for the Denver Broncos and a sister is a psychologist.

For his part, Kell bristles at the mention of someone new moving into his 14th floor City Hall office that overlooks a downtown skyline he helped shape. He dismisses claims that he is vulnerable to anti-incumbent sentiment or wealthy challengers. Four years ago, he beat five other hopefuls in the primary, then slipped past Councilman Tom Clark by 670 votes to win reelection.

The resilient mayor, who has sat on the council nearly 20 years, says he needs another term to finish his work on the Naval hospital project and other redevelopment plans beyond downtown.

“I’m the one who started the job, I should be the one to finish,” Kell said of the Convention Center expansion and other projects initiated during his tenure. “There’s something to be said for experience.”

Kell says it’s easy for challengers to point their fingers at a sitting mayor, but questions whether they have offered innovative ideas to address crime, joblessness and other key issues.

Attempting to throw the criticism of him back at his challengers, Kell asks: “Where the heck is their vision?”

Candidates for Long Beach Mayor * Ronnie Barnes

Age: 49

Occupation: Legal investigator.

Comment: “I want to create a strong mayor form of government instead of being controlled by the city manager.”

* Lee Chauser

Age: 48

Occupation: English teacher, Fairfax High School, Los Angeles.

Comment: “I want to be mayor so I can help the underdogs, the disadvantaged, the people who are not represented by the City Council or the mayor.”

* Frank Colonna

Age: 50

Occupation: Owner, real estate brokerage firm.

Comment: “I want a Long Beach that people can feel good about again, a city of cohesive neighborhoods working together to make Long Beach prosperous.”

* Thomas (Ski) Demski

Age: 64

Occupation: Owner, bumper sticker business.

Comment: “This city has been run like a downtown clique for 15 years and I would like to break it up.”

* Ray Grabinski

Age: 50

Occupation: City councilman; 4-H development coordinator, UC Cooperative Extension Program.

Comment: “Serving as mayor would be an opportunity to repay the city for all the opportunities I’ve had.”

* G. Juan Johnson

Age: 40

Occupation: Amtrak employee.

Comment: “I have faith that I can hold the council and the city manager more accountable to bring more truth and services to the citizens of Long Beach.”

* Ernie Kell

Age: 65

Occupation: Long Beach mayor.

Comment: “I think I have the experience, expertise and the proven leadership to accomplish the continued rebuilding of Long Beach, including neighborhoods and business.”

* Jeffrey A. Kellogg

Age: 40

Occupation: Vice mayor; vice

president, T.F. Merrick Co., commercial and industrial real estate broker.

Comment: “I am the one candidate on record in support of downsizing government so we can solve real problems like violent crime without raising taxes.”

* Beverly O’Neill

Age: 63

Occupation: Retired president, Long Beach City College.

Comment: “I want to put an end to the bickering and ineffectiveness at City Hall, to restore confidence and pride in city government.”

* Dan Rosenberg

Age: 65

Occupation: Retired teacher/scientist.

Comment: “I want to be mayor because I believe I have the political experience, skills and the will to help stop the death of democratic processes in Long Beach.”

* Terry J. Stidom

Age: 20

Occupation: Temporary office worker, Long Beach City College student.

Comment: “I want to show everyone, especially the youth, that a young person can do the best job of uniting this community.”

* Don Westerland

Age: 58

Occupation: Executive director, Family Service of Long Beach, a nonprofit counseling agency.

Comment: “I am dedicated to celebrating our diversity, bringing a dynamic consensus and tapping the reservoir of Long Beach’s rich and varied citizenry.”

* El Nora Willingham

Age: 48

Occupation: Self-employed motivational specialist.

Comment: “I’ve turned my life around--I was a high school dropout, welfare recipient and teen parent. Now, I’m ready to help turn around the quality of life in Long Beach.”