Barbara Yaroslavsky Assailed for Missing Forums

Barbara Yaroslavsky, a top candidate for the 5th District City Council seat, has missed 10 scheduled candidates’ forums in the last month, prompting accusations from her challengers Wednesday that she is trying to win the election on her money and name recognition alone.

“I think she is showing total disdain for the public,” said candidate and former school board member Roberta Weintraub, who says she has attended all the events.

“She is expecting her money to buy her the election and I don’t approve of that.”

Yaroslavsky, a first-time candidate, is considered a front-runner because she has surpassed the others in fund raising with more than $307,000 and has name recognition that her husband, Zev, developed over the 19 years he held the post before being elected to the County Board of Supervisors.

Weintraub complains that by skipping the forums, Yaroslavsky is depriving voters of the opportunity to question her about her positions.

Candidates Jeff Brain, a Sherman Oaks businessman, and Mike Feuer, the former head of a legal services clinic, also questioned Yaroslavsky’s absence at candidate debates.

For her part, Yaroslavsky’s campaign rejects charges that she is running a “stealth campaign,” saying that she has simply missed the forums because of scheduling conflicts with other political events. For example, she missed a forum Tuesday by a women’s action group in Downtown Los Angeles to meet voters at a supermarket in West Los Angeles, said Yaroslavsky’s campaign manager, Laurie Saffian.

“This is not a strategy,” she said. “These are legitimate conflicts with meetings we’ve had previously scheduled.”

Saffian added that Yaroslavsky attended many of the forums in February and plans to attend a few more before the April 11 primary.

“She likes to go to them,” she said. “But Barbara is out meeting people, she is walking door-to-door, she is talking to voters on the phone.”

Some of her challengers and critics say they suspect that Yaroslavsky has stopped attending the forums because she realizes that public speaking is not her strong suit and that she is better off reaching voters through campaign literature.

On Tuesday, a tenants rights organization that issued a report card to the candidates based on their answers on a questionnaire gave Yaroslavsky a C because of her “weak and vague answers to her questionnaire,” said Larry Gross, executive director of the Coalition for Economic Survival.

Feuer got an A, Weintraub got a B+, and Brain got an F, mostly because he opposed expanding and strengthening the city’s rent control ordinance.