Top Lawyers, Consultants Involved in Mall Fight

The campaign to halt expansion of Buenaventura Mall is being orchestrated by top-notch lawyers and political consultants in San Francisco who helped lure the Raiders back to Oakland, institute the California Lottery and win President Clinton the Democratic nomination.

Campaign finance records show that the San Francisco-based owners of The Esplanade mall in Oxnard have enlisted the political consulting firm of Ambrosino & Muir to help put together literature for the anti-mall initiative facing Ventura voters next month.

Paul Ambrosino and Mike Muir are direct-mail experts who have designed political mailers for campaigns across the nation, including Clinton’s campaign in 1992. Ambrosino hired the professional petition circulators who collected enough signatures to qualify Ventura’s Measure S for the March 26 ballot.

The Esplanade also hired Bagatelos & Fadem, a law firm that specializes in campaign and election law, and wrote the statewide initiative that created the state lottery.

Peter A. Bagatelos said the firm has been providing legal advice to the local anti-mall committee, which calls itself Citizens Against the Sales Tax Giveaway.

The Esplanade has donated $39,700 to the anti-mall group, more than 99% of the group’s campaign contributions. As a major donor to the committee, The Esplanade is required to file a campaign financial report listing its independent expenditures to halt a sales tax-sharing arrangement between the city of Ventura and Buenaventura Mall’s developers.

Last week, the Ventura city clerk’s office sent a letter requesting that The Esplanade file a campaign financial statement with the city.

But the San Francisco corporation only needs to file the financial statement with the secretary of state in Sacramento, and San Francisco and Los Angeles counties because its owners have donated money to campaigns statewide, Bagatelos said.

“My client is not a city major donor and therefore does not have to file in the city of San Buenaventura,” Bagatelos said. “They filed elsewhere with other officials. . . . They are in compliance with the law.”

Aside from the $39,700 to Citizens Against the Sales Tax Giveaway, The Esplanade has contributed $850 to two candidates for county supervisor in Northern California and to opponents of a few statewide ballot measures, according to financial records.

Bagatelos said his law firm has provided legal advice in recent months to members of the anti-mall committee on how to qualify an initiative for the March ballot and how to fill out campaign financial statements.

“It was short-lived,” Bagatelos said of his firm’s involvement. “It’s little drips and drabs here and there, things related to petition practice.”

Ventura officials said the campaign disclosure statements confirmed what they have suspected for months: that the campaign was being choreographed by sophisticated political pros.

“It’s a neighborhood issue, but underlying the neighborhood issue is big dollars,” City Councilman Jim Friedman said. “But with big dollars, you are going to get big players.”

Indeed, the owners of Buenaventura Mall have hired their own political experts to mount a campaign to defend their City Council-approved mall expansion--a $50-million project that would increase the mall’s retail space by 50%.

MCA Buenaventura Associates has paid Los Angeles-based Marathon Communications Inc. more than $10,000 to mastermind the campaign against the measure.

“We were hired to put together a strategy on how to win the election,” said Sheila Gonzaga, vice president of Marathon Communications, which managed the successful 1992 campaign for an initiative to overhaul the Los Angeles Police Department after the riots.

Under the mall expansion deal, MCA Buenaventura Associates has agreed to pay for $12.6-million in street and parking improvements that would be reimbursed with city sales tax dollars over 20 years. It is this arrangement that has been targeted by Measure S.

If the mall expansion goes through as planned, it would also strip The Esplanade mall of its only department stores. Sears and Robinsons-May have agreed to leave Oxnard for the renovated Buenaventura Mall.

Esplanade representatives Kurt and Craig Scheidt have not returned phone calls. Neither has Ambrosino, a respected political consultant.

Ambrosino’s “persuasive mail” and “attack mail” have been used by campaigns across the nation, according to political industry publications.

In 1994, for instance, Ambrosino and Muir helped nine congressional candidates win elections from California to New York. But eight of their other congressional candidates lost, according to an election scorecard produced by The Hotline, an electronic political tip sheet and news service.

Ambrosino began his political career as an assistant to the governor of New Hampshire and went on to become national field director for then-U. S. Sen. Alan Cranston’s ill-fated presidential campaign.

“In 1989, he formed an innovative San Francisco shop with Mike Muir that has carried California’s well-honed direct-mail expertise to all parts of the country,” states an article in the May 1994 edition of Campaigns & Elections. “They served 29 campaigns in 1992, including Bill Clinton’s drive for the [Democratic] nomination.”

The same publication has cited bare-knuckled language in mailers created by Ambrosino & Muir in its column of “Attack Mail: a sample of effective political direct mail.”

Ambrosino and Muir have also worked on a number of local ballot measures, including a million-dollar campaign in Orange County to raise the sales tax to finance highway improvements.

Ambrosino also designed a public opinion survey in 1989 for the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum board to show widespread support for a return of the Raiders football team. The Raiders left Los Angeles for Oakland last year.