THOUSAND OAKS : Loh Calls for ‘Clean Campaign Pledge’

Responding to a pro-business group’s attack strategy during the spring campaign, Thousand Oaks City Council candidate Trudi Loh has called for other candidates to join her in signing a “clean campaign pledge.”

Loh said she decided to write a “good guy agreement” after reading of a Citizens to Save Our City plan to allow Compton homicide detective Mike Markey to run a positive campaign while the group did the “bad guy politicking.”

“As we cast about for ways to improve the moral climate in our community, I plan to take the high road and I hope I have company,” Loh told the City Council Tuesday night.

She said she will ask other candidates--and Citizens to Save Our City--to sign the agreement. The group’s president, Brian Collier, has said that he will target Loh for negative campaigning during the race.

“It was particularly drafted for them,” Loh said Wednesday. “I hope that they decide that they made a serious error in judgment.”

Collier said he does not take the call for clean campaigning seriously.

“I’m laughing about it,” he said. “I just think it’s funny for somebody who threw out a lot of negative campaigning in the last campaign to be calling for a clean campaign. But hey, if candidates want to sign it, doesn’t bother me.”

Markey said he had not yet been asked to sign the agreement, although he already signed a fair-campaign pledge, part of the paperwork the city clerk has all candidates sign.

“I’m not going to say no, but I’d want to sit there and read it and absorb it,” Markey said. “We ran a clean campaign last time. I think this should be more of an issue for her than for anybody else.”