Court of Appeal Will Review D’Agostino Bid : Campaign: Candidate was disqualified from council race due to lack of petition signatures. Election officials will be asked to explain decision.

The state Court of Appeal on Wednesday kept a sliver of hope alive for Deputy Dist. Atty. Lea Purwin D’Agostino in her almost-dead attempt to run for the Los Angeles City Council seat representing the southeastern San Fernando Valley.

The court agreed Wednesday to review a lower court decision upholding election officials who disqualified D’Agostino from the 5th District ballot in the April 11 election, on the grounds that she failed to submit the required 500 valid signatures on her nominating petitions.

She appealed that decision last week to Superior Court Judge Robert O’Brien, who sided with election officials.

But at the behest of D’Agostino, who has accused election officials of being “hyper-technical” in rejecting dozens of signatures on her petitions, the state Court of Appeal agreed Wednesday to review O’Brien’s decision.

Under the ruling, election officials must appear before the court on March 15 to explain why D’Agostino was disqualified.

D’Agostino said she was “cautiously optimistic” about the ruling. Her attorney, Ronald Turovsky, said he was “very encouraged about it.”

She wants to join four other candidates in the race for the seat representing the 5th District, which stretches from Sherman Oaks and Studio City in the southeastern San Fernando Valley over the mountains into the Westside.

Kristin Heffron, chief of the city’s elections division, said she had not seen the ruling, but that the city has already printed 148,500 ballots for the April elections, ballots that do not include D’Agostino’s name.

Heffron said that if the Court of Appeal forces her to include D’Agostino’s name, all those ballots would have to be destroyed and new ones printed. She said she could not estimate the cost.

The candidates who have qualified for the ballot are Jeff Brain, a Sherman Oaks businessman; Mike Feuer, the former head of a legal clinic; Roberta Weintraub, a former school board member from the Valley, and Barbara Yaroslavsky, a Westside activist and wife of Zev Yaroslavsky, the councilman who represented the district for 19 years before resigning in December after he was elected to a seat on the Board of Supervisors.

The primary election is April 11 and the general election is June 6.