West Valley Seen as Key for Board Recall

During his last run for the Los Angeles Unified School District board, Mark Slavkin pined for a campaign that would generate widespread interest among voters, who typically turn out in excruciatingly low numbers for school board races.

Now, Slavkin’s wish may come true, but, following the outline of a common fable, it may not be quite what he had in mind.

A recall drive has been launched against the school board president as retribution for his support of Los Angeles Unified’s legal challenge to Proposition 187, the anti-illegal immigrant measure approved by 59% of the state’s voters in November.

If the sponsors get the recall on the ballot in the L-shaped district stretching from Chatsworth to Westchester, the effort threatens to draw out the very voters who usually ignore school board races: people without children.

Whether this is the first clap of rolling-thunder political upsets like those that followed the passage of property tax-freezing Proposition 13, or merely a last publicity gasp from the forces behind Proposition 187, remains to be seen.

But for Dave Doerr, it has a familiar and unsettling sound.

Doerr served as a suburban Sacramento school board member in 1978 and was the only one of five board members who voted not to join a suit against Proposition 13. He also was the only one not targeted for recall by furious citizens.

“The people became unglued,” Doerr said. “It just went like wildfire. Overnight, they collected the signatures and recalled the four other members of my board. I was left as the sole survivor.”

Slavkin prefers to point out the differences between then and now, namely that Proposition 13 was a pocketbook issue--people mad about rising taxes voting to lower them, then lashing out at elected officials who disagreed--while Proposition 187 was an attempt to stem illegal immigration and the school board has merely challenged its constitutionality.

“I don’t know how much more indirect you can get in your focus than to attack the problem of illegal immigration by attempting to recall a school board member,” Slavkin said during an interview last week. “It seems like a grand diversion.”

But the leaders of the recall drive prefer to dwell on the similarities, saying the bottom line is the same: The use of taxpayer money to oppose a measure overwhelmingly approved by taxpayers, and the arrogance of power.

“The idea that they would use our public monies to fight something that was clearly the will of the people is quite outlandish, particularly because it was clear private parties were already pursuing legal challenges to 187,” said Janice Bierley, a former science teacher in Granada Hills and Hollywood, and director of the recall committee of the Voice of Citizens Together, a San Fernando Valley organization.

To get the recall measure on the ballot, the group has to gather nearly 53,000 signatures in the next three months. They are aiming for the June primary, but city elections officials say it would more likely require a special election. A simple majority of the turnout would push Slavkin from office.

The key for recall proponents, political consultants said, will be to focus their efforts on the West Valley, where support for Proposition 187 was high and where lies 40% of Slavkin’s district. The other 60% is on the Westside, where the immigration measure lost.

Overall, a Times evaluation showed the measure carried the entire district by the narrowest of margins--51% to 49%.

Many political pundits believe a single unknown will determine which way the recall will go: the ability to tap into and sustain voter anger, which they say will be essential both for gathering petition signatures and for raising up to $250,000 needed to finance the drive.

“If they strike while the iron is hot, they may have a receptive audience,” said Arnold Steinberg, a Valley-based political strategist who has worked on many Republican campaigns.

Slavkin’s greatest strengths, consultants agreed, is that he is a good campaigner with a reputation for being in touch with his constituents. A main weakness is that he is not well-known in the West Valley because that area was added to his district less than two years ago through reapportionment.

Some say that if voter anger is the determining factor, Slavkin may be in serious trouble.

At the two recall organizing meetings held in the San Fernando Valley, emotions ran high, with cheers and jeers breaking out in equal measure among a crowd numbering in the hundreds.

And Voice of Citizens Together founder Glenn Spencer tapped into their frustration. “This city has been invaded,” Spencer told the crowd gathered in a Sherman Oaks elementary school auditorium last week.

He blasted the Board of Education as “anti-American” for its stand on 187 and some of its members’ pre-election vows not to comply with provisions to report children suspected of being here illegally. “You are to be colonized. . . . That’s the philosophy of these Board of Education members,” he said.

The race to qualify the recall election began Friday, with city approval of the recall petitions’ language. Though they don’t have much time, supporters remind skeptics that they are part of the group that qualified Proposition 187 for the November ballot.

Slavkin is taking the drive quite seriously too. Already he has begun interviewing political consultants and sending out letters seeking contributions from perennial supporters. And he worries that the battle is distracting him from the business of running the nation’s second largest school district.

The political consultant who ran Slavkin’s two successful campaigns for school board advised that acting slowly could be fatal.

“If they actually start to begin the process, he should be out there in the streets . . . with his troops, getting his message across,” said consultant Rick Taylor. “While they’re out there getting signatures, they’re framing the issue in people’s minds . . . and you don’t want to let them frame the issue.”

Los Angeles’ last successful recall was also of a sitting Board of Education president, Howard Miller, ousted in 1979 by a 57% majority, angry over his support of busing. Miller lost by more than 4 to 1 in the West Valley.

It did not help matters that Miller also denounced Proposition 13 on television, radio and in print--and wound up debating one of the initiative’s popular authors, Howard Jarvis.

Miller “managed to stoke the fire of people against him--not only the people who were against him on busing but people who were against him on Prop. 13,” recalls Northridge political consultant Paul Clarke, one of the leaders of the recall-Miller movement.

But the similarities between Miller and Slavkin--the recall drives following unpopular stands on a statewide ballot measure and the activism of West Valley residents--end there. It is the differences between the two--particularly in political backing and logistics--that observers say could form insurmountable advantages for Slavkin.

“It strikes me as a different time and a different issue,” said Miller, who has returned to practicing law in Los Angeles.

Under old election rules, Miller was elected citywide, so his opponents had a larger territory from which to garner petition signatures and support.

But Slavkin was elected in a smaller district. The size and the typically low turnout--fewer than one-third of registered voters cast ballots in the 1993 school board election--means that the influence of groups such as the teachers union and homeowner organizations is magnified.

The union has vowed to back Slavkin in the recall drive. United Teachers Los Angeles helped Slavkin beat an incumbent in his first election in 1989, then abandoned him in 1993 after he joined the board majority in voting to cut teacher pay by 10%. But Slavkin later helped restore 8% of that cut, winning back union support.

“I think there are a number of items where we have a lot of similarities with Mark,” said UTLA President Helen Bernstein. “And this is not about Mark Slavkin personally, this is: Do you go out and punish people for carrying out their constitutional duties?”

Likewise, parent-teacher associations are expected to back Slavkin. Harriet Sculley, president of the 31st District Parent Teacher Student Assn., which covers the Valley, said parents there now accept Slavkin as their representative, despite his political beginnings on the Westside.

“Mark has been very available to the community. It seems like at least once a month I hear of him having a meeting at a school, having a community meeting,” Sculley said.

Some Valley homeowner associations and other neighborhood groups, on the other hand, probably will line up against Slavkin.

Richard Close, who was an attorney for the recall-Miller campaign and is president of the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn., believes the issue will appeal to those upset about the sorry state of the schools, regardless of their position on 187.

“What I’m hearing in the community is very simple: ‘When they can’t keep the schools clean, when they don’t have enough money for paint, why are they spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on legal fees to overturn what the voters approved?’ ”

But if the recall effort results in a special election, the school district would have to foot that bill, as well.

Bierley, the recall director, sees no hypocrisy there. “At least it’s the people deciding how they want the money to be spent,” she said. “At least we would stop them and stop their misuse of funds.”

Close believes that some Valley homeowners long active in civic affairs and political organizing will turn out to help the recall movement, even if they live outside Slavkin’s district. They would be ineligible to sign petitions and vote for a recall, but could provide money and important grass-roots support.

Outside the Valley, that kind of support is unlikely to materialize, said Bill Christopher, coordinator of PLAN/LA, a citywide consortium of neighborhood groups.

“Here you are trying to recall a white male activist, who is a liberal, with strong ties to the Jewish community in West L.A.,” Christopher said. “In places (other than the Valley), I don’t know that it will translate into manpower and phone banks and precinct walkers.”

* MIGRANT POLICY: Mexico enforces strict immigration laws. A8