Weintraub Made Name on School Board, Now Ready to Graduate

ROBERTA REDUX: Former Los Angeles school board member Roberta Weintraub is seeking a new political incarnation, this time as the successor to Los Angeles City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who is expected to easily win election to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors seat now held by Ed Edelman.

“Nobody should believe this will be a cakewalk, but I’ve got good name identification and I intend to win,” said Weintraub, 58, as she assessed her prospects in a 5th City Council District election that is likely to produce a slew of ambitious aspirants.

Weintraub, who resigned last June from the Valley-based school board seat she had held since 1979, has already pumped $10,000 of her own money into her campaign coffers and several years ago switched political parties. After years as a Republican, she became a Democrat.

Some wonder if Weintraub--best known for leading the fight to dismantle the Los Angeles school system’s desegregation plan and whose political base has been in the San Fernando Valley--can pull votes on the liberal Westside. Sixty percent of Yaroslavsky’s district is on the south side of Mulholland Drive, while the rest is in the Valley and includes Sherman Oaks and Van Nuys.

But Weintraub says she’s got a track record that easily transcends her origins as a foe of court-ordered desegregation. She points to her role in establishing contraceptive-dispensing health clinics at high school campuses; setting up day-care centers for student mothers at schools in the east San Fernando Valley, and working to build a dozen magnet school programs that seek to offer an exciting curriculum to a multicultural student body.

Yet some even wonder if Weintraub’s Valley base is all that secure.

Weintraub raised hackles when she supported a 1992 school board reapportionment plan that stripped the Valley of one of its two all-Valley seats. Former ally Bobbi Fiedler, the founder of Busstop, accused Weintraub of selling out the community.

But since leaving the board, Weintraub has tried to stay in touch with the Valley’s pulse by supporting the breakup of the school district.

Nor has she been resting since she left the board a year ago. Currently, she serves as a Mayor Richard Riordan appointee to the city’s Library Commission, co-directs Students Run LA, a group that trains youngsters to participate in the Los Angeles Marathon, and is an appointee to the Board of Governors of the California Bar Assn.

If Weintraub were to win a seat on the City Council, it would amount to a reunion of sorts. Two other former Weintraub colleagues on the school board--Jackie Goldberg and Rita Walters--now sit on the council.

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ROSENTHAL REPRIEVE: State Sen. Herschel Rosenthal (D-Los Angeles), now trying out for the job as successor to state Sen. David Roberti (D-Van Nuys), has so far failed to arouse the same ugly controversy that made Roberti’s tenure as a Valley lawmaker harrowing.

In many ways, this quiet state of affairs in the 20th Senate District is surprising.

The 75-year-old Rosenthal, who represented the Westside for two decades, shares much of the baggage that got Roberti in trouble. Like Roberti, Rosenthal is not from the Valley, he’s a liberal and he has backed gun control.

But Rosenthal has not encountered the same hostile Valley electorate that greeted Roberti when he began shifting his political base from Hollywood to Van Nuys in 1992.

It must have something to do with the fact that Roberti, as the author of a 1989 assault-weapons ban, was the state’s most visible symbol of gun control and thus the hated target of 2nd Amendment activists.

Despite disavowals, the energy and animosity directed at Roberti came from gun activists. Although he voted for the gun measure, Rosenthal was not a notable figure in the debate.

“We don’t have a sense that the gun activists are lying in wait for us,” said Lynette Stevens, who is on leave as Rosenthal’s chief of staff to manage his latest political venture. “But we’re not saying it won’t happen.”

Jerry Seedborg, Rosenthal’s political consultant, added that Rosenthal, unlike Roberti, also benefits from not being a total stranger to the Valley. In fact, Rosenthal’s current 22nd Senate District, due to the vagaries of reapportionment, includes 40,000 constituents residing south of Ventura Boulevard who also live in the 20th District.

Additionally, the April, 1992, and April, 1994, races were special elections in which Roberti found himself running against a throng of Republican and Democratic foes, all clamoring for his head. Such elections encourage ganging up against the incumbent.

Rosenthal, by contrast, faces one foe in the June 7 Democratic primary who is having trouble rustling up even $1,000 in campaign contributions. When the senator dispenses with his fellow Democrat, he will face one GOP foe in the Nov. 8 election.

Meanwhile, the Republican primary has proved to be a quiet affair peopled with personalities who tried unsuccessfully in 1992 and again this year to defeat Roberti. Running here are Dolores White, a real estate broker, Randy Linkmeyer, a gun store owner, Larry Martz, a maintenance contractor, and until recently Al Dib, a retired green grocer and perennial candidate.

Dib bowed out of the race and endorsed Linkmeyer. Businessman David Honda, who had trouble getting enough signatures to qualify for the ballot, is out of the race.

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DEJA VU?City Hall is still trying to fathom what’s going on in Los Angeles City Councilman Marvin Braude’s office. In recent days, Braude has learned that he’s losing two longtime aides, Cindy Miscikowski, his chief deputy and principal planning aide, and Rosalind Wayman, the head of his Valley office.

Miscikowski’s departure has provided the grist for some weighty political conjecture. Much discussed is the question of whether Miscikowski, the wife of lobbyist-attorney and real estate heir Doug Ring, will run against Braude, much as Laura Chick did against Joy Picus.

Los Angeles City Councilwoman Chick, it will be recalled, worked several years for Picus, resigned to go back into private life, in 1992 resurfaced as a critic of Picus and in 1993 challenged her former boss in a hotly contested election. Picus cried foul throughout the campaign, likening Chick to a trusted employee who steals trade secrets and then sets up a competing business. Despite it all, Chick won.

For the record, Miscikowski says she has no plans to run for Braude’s seat whether he’s in it or not and that she’s headed for the job of executive director of the Hebrew Union College’s Skirball Cultural Center. The center, which includes a museum featuring the works of Jewish-American artists, is scheduled to open next year in the Sepulveda Pass. (It’s the facility that’s being built on the west side of the San Diego Freeway near the top of the pass.)

“I think not,” Miscikowski said when asked this week if she’d run for City Council. “It’s really time for a change--a time to see if there’s life outside City Hall.”

Still, Miscikowski, a Brentwood resident like Braude, has long been considered a prime candidate for the seat Braude has held since 1965, and many observers find it hard to believe she will not seek election someday.

Meanwhile, Glenn Barr, Braude’s press deputy, said recently that Braude has not foreclosed the possibility of running again in 1997. Others wonder, however, if the 73-year-old anti-smoking crusader, who has had Miscikowski virtually running his council office for years, will want to hang on to the seat if he must attend more closely to the affairs of office.