ELECTIONS / THOUSAND OAKS COUNCIL : Loh Charms Many in Conejo Valley While Attracting a Few Enemies

Thousand Oaks resident Alton Emerson helped himself to a thick barbecue beef sandwich fresh off the Elks Club’s still-smoking grill and turned around to find himself face-to-face with City Council candidate Trudi Loh.

Dressed casually in jeans and a suede jacket, Loh had come to the club’s bimonthly Saturday afternoon fund-raiser looking for two things: dinner for her family and votes.

Emerson juggled his sandwich to shake her hand.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he said. “I’ve got a question for you.”

While Loh listened attentively, Emerson spelled out his greatest concern for the fiscal future of Thousand Oaks. The city is close to build-out, hardly receives any property taxes from the state and relies heavily on sales tax revenue, he said.

“So where are we going?” he concluded. “What are we going to do?”

Loh barely paused for a breath, firing off a five-minute response outlining her plans to use city staff members to attract more businesses such as Amgen to the area, to make the city more business-friendly and to turn the citizens’ business task force into a permanent commission. Emerson nodded along earnestly as she presented her ideas.

By the time she had finished, his vote was won.

“I like her very much,” Emerson said, balancing the sandwich as he got into his car.

With her combination of poise, intelligence and clear, careful answers, Loh has managed to charm many in Thousand Oaks. Her advisory committee--essentially a list of those who have endorsed her--is peppered with names of well-known Conejo Valley players: three former mayors (Lee Laxdal, Larry Horner and Frances Prince), activist Michael Hagopian, businessman Larry Janss, public safety advocate Otto Stoll and former Planning Commissioner Irv Wasserman.

Horner said he chose to endorse Loh after watching her at a candidates’ forum in North Ranch in April.

“That night, after I saw how she fielded questions and presented herself, solidified my opinion of her,” Horner said. “She has a demeanor about her and a presence that I had not seen in any of the other candidates or the candidates in the prior election.”

The 38-year-old attorney has also attracted a few enemies along the way, most noticeably the pro-business group Citizens to Save Our City. Members of that group targeted Loh early as the candidate most likely to present a challenge to Mike Markey, the Compton homicide detective the group supports.

After a confidential memo outlining the group’s plans to “do the bad guy politicking and allow Markey to run a positive campaign” was leaked to Mayor Jaime Zukowski and forwarded to newspaper reporters, Markey disavowed the group’s support.

A few weeks later, Loh said she had been receiving harassing calls at her home. One of the calls was traced to James Lee Henson, a member of Citizens to Save Our City.

Loh notified police, who indicated in a report that there was “significant physical evidence” supporting Loh’s claim. Henson admits to calling Loh twice, but said he was not trying to harass her. He has dropped out of the pro-business group.

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Throughout the incident, Loh stayed calm. But she was angry.

“I don’t countenance people doing things like that,” she said, her generally soft voice acquiring an edge. “I don’t believe in putting up with that for one second.”

That same no-nonsense air was evident earlier this week when Loh showed up in small claims court in Simi Valley to defend herself against charges that she had backed out of paying $3,000 in wages to a former campaign worker.

Court Commissioner David Long submitted a judgment in Loh’s favor, but did not dismiss the possibility that Loh’s campaign consultant could still be liable for the worker’s wages.

By nature, Loh said, she is tough. She grew up in Pomona, a city she describes as completely different from the affluent Thousand Oaks neighborhood in which she now lives. Her high school was closed several times because of race riots and an armed guard stood by the door every day, she said.

“I didn’t grow up in a Thousand Oaks by any stretch of the imagination,” she said.

Her father was a blue-collar worker. At one time he owned an auto body repair shop, though for most of Loh’s childhood her father repaired machines in factories around Los Angeles.

“My image of my dad was him coming home tired,” Loh said.

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Loh said she grew up with the conviction that she would go to college and have a successful career in law.

“I always had the feeling of looking toward financial responsibility for myself,” Loh said. “I always assumed I would be paying the bills, which I did.”

After graduating from Cal State Fullerton with a degree in political science, Loh went on to receive a law degree from the University of Southern California.

Her first job as an attorney was with Zobrist, Garrett & Garner--now defunct--in Downtown Los Angeles, handling business law. Bob Shulman, one of the attorneys who helped train her at the Downtown firm, remembers her as a “great young attorney.”

“She was self-possessed and assured, with good reason to be,” Shulman said. “You could sense that she was going to mature into a very strong leader. It was pretty obvious she had the goods.”

Loh left that firm after 18 months, working in business law at various firms in the San Fernando Valley. She moved to Thousand Oaks in 1982 after she met cardiologist Irving Loh, whom she married in 1983. She worked for a six-month stint in the Thousand Oaks city attorney’s office.

Ready to start a family, she stopped working full time in 1987, though she occasionally took cases.

“It was a tough decision,” she said. “You step off that track and you don’t go back really. It’s a one-way street.”

Her husband already had a son and daughter from a previous marriage. Together the couple have two daughters, now 5 and 7 years old. Every now and again she reflects on the trade-off between a life of negotiating in board rooms and a life of shuttling her daughters from her North Ranch estate to ballet class and back.

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“No regrets really,” Loh said. “Whenever I have regrets I just look at my kids.”

She has kept busy, volunteering as a coach for the Thousand Oaks High School mock trial team and as a member of several local groups, including the Thousand Oaks Crime Prevention Task Force, Library Restoration Committee, Assn. of American University Women and the local chapter of the National Women’s Political Caucus.

From appearances, she still seems the young urban professional she once was, showing up at candidates’ forums in elegant suits with briefcase in hand and a cellular phone within easy reach.

And the confidence she developed at an early age has not diminished. Last fall she ran a scrappy--some called it dirty--campaign against Frank Schillo, challenging the 10-year veteran of Thousand Oaks politics. Loh, a registered Democrat, lost to Schillo, but by less than 3%, a surprisingly narrow margin in a relatively conservative district.

With $44,000 of her own money, she kept pace with Schillo’s expensive campaign, each candidate spending more than $140,000.

In the special election campaign, she has raised $23,000--only $500 from her personal bank account.

She made enough of a name for herself in that race that when it became evident a special election was in the offing for Thousand Oaks, Loh’s phone started ringing.

“People had to call me up and say, ‘Would you run?’ because I was flat-out tired from the supervisor’s race,” Loh said. “It really had never entered my mind.”

It had also never entered her mind that she would become the target of so much enmity, particularly from Citizens to Save Our City, who have criticized her on everything from her wealth to the fact that her husband worked with the Clinton Administration on health-care reform.

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The pro-business group has said Loh would fall in line with the slow-growth forces on the council, namely Mayor Jaime Zukowski and Councilwoman Elois Zeanah.

Loh said the supervisorial race, where she was running against a member of the Thousand Oaks old guard, had much to do with creating the sense that she was in the same political camp as Zukowski and Zeanah, which she says is not true.

Her strong pro-environmental stance and endorsements from the Sierra Club and Save Open Space in that campaign may have been factors, she said. But those endorsements--the Sierra Club has also endorsed her in the council race--do not mean she is a radical “tree-hugger,” she said.

“What distinguishes me from environmental activists is that I am a pragmatist in my soul,” Loh said. “I want to do what is doable, what is practical. That is the moderating factor. I consider myself a defender of the quality of life here.”

Loh questions whether her gender has something to do with the animosity directed at her.

“Maybe some of them have an anaphylactic [allergic] reaction to me just because I am a woman and a professional woman,” she added.

Brian Coller, one of the founder’s of Citizens to Save Our City, dismissed that idea.

“Far from it,” he said. “That’s the last reason I would not be for her. I believe any qualified person should be able to run.”

Nevertheless, Loh said a negative image of professional women does seem to color some voters’ perceptions of her.

“You have to have a certain degree of self-confidence not to get pushed around,” she added. “Just because you have self-confidence and faith in your abilities doesn’t mean you don’t have an open mind. It doesn’t mean I don’t listen to people.”