Candidates Get Territorial in Battle for GOP Nomination : Election: Republican primary campaign in 24th Congressional District focuses on personal matters such as residence and business credentials.

Forget health care reform and gun control, Bosnia and nuclear proliferation. What’s caused the most fur to fly in the race for the Republican nomination in the 24th Congressional District has been more personal.

Who is the native son? Who is the seasoned businessman? Debate over these topics has turned candidates from polite to testy.

“I am the only candidate here who has actually run a business,” Richard Sybert, an attorney, former Cabinet-level aide to Gov. Pete Wilson and the candidate with the fattest portfolio of GOP endorsements, said at a recent forum. “The others have been either employees of large organizations or consultants. . . . I meet a payroll.”

But Emery Shane, a commercial real estate broker from Agoura, has denounced Sybert as a “prima donna” without real business experience while boasting that he is himself “the candidate who has lived here the longest.”

The day before, another candidate, Mark Boos Benhard, also of Agoura and sole proprietor of a public relations firm, stepped up attacks on Sybert as a carpetbagger when he displayed a deed showing that Sybert does not own the Calabasas house in which he lives. “It’s part of a pattern of inconsistency by Sybert,” Benhard said.

One anonymous prankster sent voters a slice of rug with a note accusing Sybert of being a carpetbagger. “I guess it’s been reduced to this,” Sybert said with a sigh recently.

The winner of this fractious GOP primary will run in November against U. S. Rep. Anthony C. Beilenson (D-Woodland Hills), the resilient nine-term incumbent who faces only nominal opposition in the Democratic primary from Scott Gaulke, a follower of political extremist Lyndon LaRouche.

Slamming the curriculum vitae and personal credentials of one’s political foes is as all-American as baseball, especially when policy debates are boring or the candidates are largely indistinguishable, according to veteran campaign consultants.

Nor are such discussions without merit.

“I think all of that is important,” said Sal Bianco, a member of the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn.’s government affairs committee. “We need to know, for example, if the candidates are familiar with the district they want to represent.”

So what are the facts?

Accused of being a carpetbagger, Sybert, in fact, is a new resident of the 24th District. Voter registration records show that Sybert moved his registration to the Valley from Pasadena in October, 1993.

Records also show that Sybert owns homes in Pasadena, Sacramento and Washington, D. C., but not the house in which he resides in Calabasas.

Sybert, who has loaned his campaign $430,000--or more than 85% of its assets--said he intends to buy a house in the district when it is opportune. “If he gets elected, he’ll buy,” Benhard quipped recently.

Sybert downplays the carpetbagger charge. “The problems of Pasadena and Westwood (where Sybert lived in the mid-1980s before taking a job with the Wilson Administration) are not significantly different from those of the Valley,” he said. “What’s really important is not where you’ve been but where you are going. And I intend to make this my home.”

Sybert has also claimed to be the GOP primary’s only current Los Angeles resident. “The other candidates have . . . fled to Ventura County--they don’t face the problems we face here anymore. . . . I am truly one of you,” Sybert, a native of Whittier, recently told a Los Angeles audience.

Among the other Republicans running, Robert Hammer, Shane and Benhard live in Ventura County, as does businessman Sang Korman. (Korman, though an officially declared candidate, has not campaigned.)

Sybert, who has a master’s in business administration in public finance from UCLA, has also had his credentials as a businessman challenged. He became president of Lanard Design, a Santa Barbara toy design company with eight employees, only last November. Previously he was general counsel to Lanard’s parent company.

But others say Sybert’s business experience is thin. “It looks to me like Sybert’s political consultants told him he needed business experience on his resume so he got a job with that toy company,” Shane charged in an interview.

“I certainly do manage the firm,” Sybert said recently. Asked how he could preside over such an enterprise in Santa Barbara while running for Congress from the Los Angeles area, Sybert said: “With some difficulty. It’s one of the reasons why I look tired all the time. I’m often working at night on the business.”

Hammer has in turn been attacked by Sybert for voting infrequently in local elections.

Although Hammer moved from Minnesota to Newbury Park in 1985, he was not registered to vote at his new residence until nearly two years later and has voted in only four of the last eight elections, according to records.

Business and travel account for that record, Hammer said. Sybert said Hammer could have voted by absentee ballot.

So far, no one has challenged Hammer’s business credentials. Hammer currently bills himself as a self-employed investment banker. Before setting up his own firm, Hammer was a senior vice president for First Interstate Bancard in Simi Valley, the credit card arm of First Interstate Bancorp.

Hammer has repeatedly touted his experience putting First Interstate’s credit card business back on its feet in the late 1980s as an example of the kind of creativity and resourcefulness that he says proves he could reinvent a badly run federal government. “I was brought in as a member of senior management of that organization to turn that company around,” he said.

Two of his former bosses have high praise for Hammer’s performance at First Interstate.

Benhard, 29, is a native of Los Angeles. Except for a stint in Washington, D. C., as an aide to former Orange County Rep. William E. Dannemeyer, Benhard has lived in the San Fernando and Conejo valleys.

Benhard, who has been endorsed by the California Republican Assembly, a right-wing organization within the party, characterizes himself as a small businessman.

But he acknowledges that he runs his company, MBB Communications Services, a public relations firm he established in 1992, out of a room in his home. Asked about his clients, Benhard said that he had only a few.

“I’ve called myself a struggling small businessman,” Benhard said in an interview. “I don’t think I’ve ever said I was successful.”

From February, 1991, to September, 1992, Benhard was the $40,000-a-year director of communications for the Los Angeles Visitors and Convention Bureau, a nonprofit organization that is 60% funded with receipts from the city’s hotel tax.

At a recent forum, Benhard boasted of his involvement in protecting Los Angeles’ image as a tourist destination after the 1992 riots.

Benhard was laid off his job at the bureau when his two-person unit was eliminated as a cost-cutting measure. “It was the most expendable division,” said bureau Vice President Michael Collins, who nevertheless praised Benhard’s work.

Shane has staked out a claim as the most native of the candidates, saying he has spent 35 of his 36 years in the district, and stressed his own business credentials.

“I have been one of the few people who have run a business with several hundred employees,” said Shane, who is a currently a real estate broker.

He claimed that he developed several small shopping complexes in partnership with his family and once managed a string of fast-food outlets in South-Central Los Angeles that later went bankrupt.

“I lost money on it,” Shane said of the experience.

In yet another venture, Shane said he and a partner, Mannie Jayasinghe, made money buying three fast-food restaurants in South-Central Los Angeles and “building them up and selling them” to Korean investors.