ELECTIONS / THOUSAND OAKS COUNCIL : At Final Candidates’ Forum, Signs of Stress and Flashes of Friendship

In the final candidates’ forum before the June 6 special election, the six people running for the vacant Thousand Oaks City Council seat were starting to show signs of wear.

At Wednesday night’s televised event at the Civic Arts Plaza, mobile carwash owner Lance Winslow sipped from a glass of a bright-green sports drink, saying water wouldn’t quite quench a thirst that came from too much talking on the campaign trail.

Engineer and real estate broker John Ellis delivered one-word answers whenever he could. And Compton homicide detective Mike Markey went so far as to agree with archrival attorney Trudi Loh on future uses for Broome Ranch.

When an audience member asked Ramaul Rush, a juvenile court dependency counselor in the San Fernando Valley, if he thought that making Thousand Oaks Boulevard more pedestrian-friendly is a good idea, Rush threw up his hands at what he seemed to think was a simplistic question with an obvious answer.

“Sure it is,” Rush said. “I don’t have a problem with that.”

The rest of the candidates laughed, then began a round of applause for Rush that quickly spread to the audience.

Sitting shoulder to shoulder at a cramped table in the seventh forum of the campaign season, the six would-be council members were almost . . . chummy .

In less than two weeks, Thousand Oaks voters will go to the polls to pick a fifth City Council member to fill the seat vacated by Frank Schillo, who was elected to the Ventura County Board of Supervisors last fall.

The six candidates gave one-minute answers to now-familiar questions about development, business, open space, public safety and what to do about the old City Hall on West Hillcrest Drive.

“Get rid of it,” Ellis said. “That’s what we should have done six years ago. I have never been able to understand why the City Council has set and allowed that property to fall apart from top to bottom. Even now when they are supposed to have security, that place is a haven for vandals.”

The question of how to boost sales-tax revenue came up several times during the evening, and the answers ranged from Winslow’s suggestion to dispense with restrictive city ordinances that he says hamper small business to Markey’s idea of recycling tax dollars by requiring city government to shop locally for supplies. Loh took a cautious approach, warning that too much retail might not be good for the city.

“We can’t be blindsided by chasing after sales tax,” Loh said. “There are only a finite number of sales-tax dollars to be had out there.”

While the questions that were written by members of the League of Women Voters dealt generally with the issues, audience queries were far more pointed toward individual candidates and occasionally took jabs at them.

“It’s been coming and here it is,” moderator Nancy Grasmehr told Markey. “What is Citizens to Save Our City?”

At the outset of the campaign, members of the pro-business group said they planned to support Markey’s candidacy while using “bad-guy politicking” to hurt his opponents. Even though Markey has publicly disavowed any ties to the group, the association lingers.

“I have no idea who is involved and what they do,” Markey said Wednesday.

For office-supplies salesman Ekbal Quidwai, who appears at almost every council meeting to speak on a variety of issues but most often rails against the construction of the $64-million Civic Arts Plaza, an audience question about how he likes being thought of as a gadfly was particularly cutting.

“Whew,” Quidwai said. “I am getting all the good questions tonight.”

The forum will be aired again on Thousand Oaks’ cable TV station Friday at 5 and 9 p.m. and Saturday at 6 and 10 p.m.