Outsiders Face Tough Task in Bid for Board

Gordana Swanson and Douglas Drummond see Los Angeles County government as broken and want a chance to help fix it.

From their vantage point as outsiders, the nation’s largest county government needs one thing more than anything else: reform. So they are waging an underfinanced, uphill fight to bring a new face to the Board of Supervisors.

In candidate forums and occasional mailers to some of the voters in the sprawling 4th Supervisorial District, Swanson and Drummond have a tough task.

They want to offer ideas on how to change a county government that faces severe financial troubles and huge demands for law enforcement, health care and social services. But those issues have taken a back seat in their campaigns.

Their primary purpose in Tuesday’s election is to stop retiring Supervisor Deane Dana from handing the office he has held for the last 16 years to his longtime chief of staff, Donald Knabe. If Knabe gets more than 50% of the vote, he wins the office and avoids a runoff with the second-place finisher in November.

For Swanson, a former Rolling Hills mayor, this race is in many respects a rerun of her long-shot campaign against Dana four years ago. In the 1992 contest, she forced the supervisor into a hard-fought runoff.

Last time, Knabe was Dana’s campaign manager in the fall election. This time, Knabe is the candidate to beat. As the election draws near, Swanson is lashing Knabe as a symbol of what’s wrong with county government.

Drummond, a retired police commander and vice mayor of Long Beach, is new to county campaigns. He is mounting a grass-roots effort, using a folksy eight-page newspaper that combines attacks on Dana and Knabe with his own approach to changing county government.

The three candidates have one thing in common: All are Republicans. And Knabe, in a mailer this week that slashes at Swanson and Drummond, brands himself as the best Republican in the race.

Altogether, there are six candidates on the ballot in the crescent-shaped district that runs from Marina del Rey, through the South Bay beach cities, across the Palos Verdes Peninsula and Long Beach and follows the 605 freeway to Whittier and then east toward Diamond Bar.

Engineer Joel Lubin, a Downey Democrat, and Torrance businessman Norm Amjadi are mounting spirited efforts that also stress the need for reform, but they lack the resources to reach voters. A sixth candidate, former Deputy County Assessor Richard Markowski is on the ballot, but is not campaigning.

The race has taken on an increasingly negative tone.

Swanson and Drummond believe Dana should not hand over one of the state’s most powerful elective offices to his top aide. “It is inappropriate to pass the baton to a staff member,” Drummond said. “It should be open for all.”

Swanson says voters should not elect Knabe because Dana has endorsed him. “You’ve got to earn it,” she said. “I think he has done an abominable job.”

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The campaign between Swanson and Knabe is particularly personal, a byproduct of her differences with Dana over the years.

Swanson was appointed to the Southern California Rapid Transit District board in 1980 by then-Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, who had lost a tough campaign to Dana.

Once Dana took office, he removed Swanson from the RTD board. She later regained her seat and became president of the transit district. Dana then played a role in the formation of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which replaced the RTD in 1993.

When she ran against Dana, Swanson criticized the supervisor for voting to increase salaries and pensions and costly practices that have since been abandoned, including catered lunches and bulletproof limousines.

She tied Dana to then-County Chief Administrative Officer Richard Dixon, whose controversial $6-million remodeling of his Hall of Administration office suite generated news stories.

Forced into a runoff, Dana turned against Dixon and forced his resignation.

Dana fired his longtime friend and campaign consultant, Ronald Smith, and Knabe took a leave of absence to run Dana’s campaign. Knabe and Dana’s new campaign consultant, Harvey Englander, then portrayed Dana as a reformer in one of the costliest supervisorial campaigns in the county’s history.

Englander is now Knabe’s campaign consultant, and Smith is working for Swanson. Swanson says she now wants to “finish the work I started in 1992.”

On the campaign trail, Swanson promises to make a 20% cut in the salaries of top county bureaucrats earning more than $100,000. She points to Knabe’s pay as Dana’s chief deputy, which rose nearly 47%, from $70,491 to $103,455 in the last seven years, as a sign of what’s wrong with the county.

Swanson and Drummond are critical of what they see as wasteful spending. Both oppose plans for a $4.4-million nature center and library in Deane Dana Friendship Regional Park on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Drummond, who has studied the county’s troubled budget, argues that services can be delivered far more efficiently.

After 29 years as a street officer, jailer, detective and commander in the Long Beach Police Department, Drummond has a unique perspective on public safety. He would restructure the Sheriff’s Department, creating two distinct divisions to patrol communities and to oversee the county’s vast jail system.

Swanson wants the Sheriff’s Department to be audited. She said the department appears to be top-heavy with administrators who are paid “outrageous salaries.”

Drummond and Swanson, like Knabe, promise to work hard to save jobs and bring jobs to the economically distressed county. Swanson has suggested that the county begin a marketing campaign to attract new business.

All three support efforts to move the county’s health care system from an emphasis on expensive hospital treatment to a focus on community clinics.

Swanson would like to see more attention on public health problems and less on bureaucrats telling health care professionals how to do their jobs. Drummond wants to see Los Angeles County follow the lead of Orange and San Diego counties in contracting with private hospitals for services.

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But there are differences among the three over campaign reform and term limits.

Knabe has raised more than $1.4 million, most of it from labor unions representing county employees, developers, lobbyists and companies that do business with the county.

With $150,000 in loans from her husband and contributions from women’s groups and other contributors, Swanson has raised more than $240,000.

So has Drummond, who contributed $15,000 in cash and loans to his campaign and raised the rest from his position as a two-term councilman in Long Beach.

Swanson favors a $1,000 limit on contributions in county races, while Drummond supports a $2,500 limit. Knabe has said he will study the issue. Swanson and Drummond favor a two-term limit for supervisors. Knabe said he would consider a three-term limit.

Knabe’s two main challengers bring widely different backgrounds to the campaign.

Swanson, 60, was born in Yugoslavia, spent part of her childhood under guard in Italy and immigrated to the United States after high school. She said the experience of growing up under fascism and communism had a lasting impact and she is still “tremendously in awe of living in a democracy.”

Drummond, 58, was born in Los Angeles, grew up in a housing project in Long Beach, served in the Army and went to work for the Police Department.

He said his experience on the streets of Long Beach taught him first-hand the problems of crime and poverty. But his record on the Long Beach City Council was marked by a unanimous censure in 1993 after he made remarks about gays and AIDS that were deeply offensive to many in the community. Drummond apologized, voted for his own censure, and said the incident was “very, very embarrassing and I regret it.”