Back to Polls in High Desert

Just when they thought they were safe from electioneering, at least for a few months, residents of this high desert city are being barraged with campaign slogans, promises, mailers and handshakes.

On April 9, the citizens of Lancaster will go to the polls for the second time in less than a month. But this time, instead of voting on national, state and county issues, their concerns will be strictly local.

Lancaster, although officially a city since 1977, is about to hold its first mayoral election.

Until now, the position has rotated among City Council members. But two years ago, voters decided that it was time they choose the mayor for this burgeoning city, where the population more than doubled from 1980 to 1990 to just under 100,000.

The change won’t much alter the framework of city government. One of the council positions will simply be converted to that of elected mayor.

The mayor will, as before, have only one vote on City Council issues and he or she will get the same salary as a council member, about $640 a month. The mayor will have no veto power.

But the fact that it will be an elected position for a full, two-year term makes the title especially desirable.

“I would like to be the first elected mayor of this city,” said candidate Frank Roberts, now coming to the end of a term on the council. “That would be a distinction.”

Three other candidates are also vying for the honor.

In the only other race on the April 9 ballot, there are eight candidates for a four-year City Council seat. In political experience, they fall into three categories, reflecting the history of the city itself.

Some are longtime residents of the Antelope Valley who remember when Lancaster was a dusty desert outpost known only for aviation (Edwards Air Force Base is nearby), fringe politics and the fact that Judy Garland lived there briefly as a girl.

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Others got involved in civic activities and local politics during the boom years of the 1980s, when Lancaster grew rapidly, only to suffer a crippling blow when recession cut deeply into the real estate market.

Finally, there are the candidates who, in the pioneer spirit Lancaster still prides itself on, decided that they would run even though they had never before held an elected position.

Lancaster is still a small enough city that many residents have at least a passing acquaintance with at least one of these candidates. But to see them all at once, they had to attend a candidates’ forum.

“We keep in mind,” said Father Bill Caffrey, a Catholic priest who delivered the invocation at the Lancaster Chamber of Commerce forum, “the poor, the hungry, the sick. . . . “

It was the last time any of these three groups were mentioned during the event.

The candidates and approximately 150 residents attending the luncheon forum seemed mostly interested in the three overriding issues of the campaign: jobs, crime and a continuing battle between established city figures and the upstarts who believe the establishment has too much power.

The four candidates for mayor answered questions posed by Chamber of Commerce officials and then from the crowd.

Arnie Rodio, one of the deans of Lancaster politics, stressed economic issues. “If you want jobs, you’ve got to go down to get them,” he said. He didn’t have to explain to this crowd where “down” was--it’s the Los Angeles area in general and the San Fernando Valley in particular.

The Antelope Valley has long worked, with limited success, to convince businesses to relocate in the high desert. Rodio, 67, a retired plumbing contractor, believes that a mayor can best represent the city in these continuing endeavors.

But Rodio, who portrays himself as the most politically experienced of the candidates, found out the hard way that not every business is a desirable target.

After eight years on the council, he lost the 1994 election largely because he voted to use financial incentives to lure a large pet supply store to Lancaster. This angered local pet store owners who felt they now had a big, new competitor partly subsidized by the city.

The issue called into question Rodio’s and other council members’ priorities.

Roberts, 64, seemed the most at ease of all the candidates in talking to the crowd, perhaps because he spent years as a college teacher and is now dean of applied academics at Antelope Valley College. He describes himself as a “team player,” and during his term on the council he has mostly voted with the majority.

He strongly supported an incentive program that pays industries about $2,000 a job to relocate in the Antelope Valley.

“We don’t just get jobs out of this,” he said in an interview. “By bringing industries up here, we cut down on all the commuting people have to do, and that makes for cleaner air.”

There have been no formal opinion polls, so it’s not easy to tell who is leading in this race, but Roberts is certainly winning the money derby. At the beginning of March, his campaign disclosed it had raised $6,807--nearly three times more than any other mayoral candidate.

The candidate who sees himself as Roberts’ chief rival is Michael Singer, 43, a captain in the county Fire Department. A current City Council member, he has repeatedly spoken out against what he considers “back-room” deal-making and other city officials he believes are too friendly with established business interests.

“If Frank Roberts ran for mayor, I knew he’d get elected if I didn’t run,” Singer said in an interview.

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In what is surely one of the most curious of campaign slogans, Singer expressed his feeling that the council had to take a more forthright position by saying, “We need leadership, not sheep-ship.”

Finally, there is Keith Giles, 33, who has never before run for any elected office except his church board (he won). But he decided he didn’t much like the views of any of the declared candidates: “So, I jumped in myself.”

He doesn’t speak out on many issues, declaring his main concern is to make city government more “user friendly” and welcoming for citizens who wish to get involved.

Of the eight candidates for the open City Council seat, five have never before run for that office. But one of the rookies, James Jeffra, seemed to hit a highly responsive chord with the forum audience.

Jeffra, 50, a deputy sheriff currently on disability leave because of an on-duty automobile accident, is an unabashedly one-issue candidate. “My primary focus is going to be to reduce crime in this town,” he said at the forum.

Even when asked what he would do for business, he answered, “The very first thing we need to do is reduce the crime.”

Later in an interview, he said, “I firmly believe when you make a place safer to live, you’ll have the pick of industries coming to you.”

The crime rate in Lancaster is not much out of step with other Southern California cities. But its residents don’t have to think back too far to remember when theirs was a smaller, slower-paced locale where many homes and cars went unlocked.

Now there is gang activity, and the area is known as a leading center of illegal methamphetamine manufacture and use.

In that atmosphere, the passionately single-minded Jeffra has picked up an endorsement from a local Republican group.

Another candidate with strong anti-crime credentials is Els Groves, who was on the City Council from 1986 to 1990, when he declined to run again to spend more time with his family. “But I just felt frustrated sitting there doing nothing,” said Groves, a retired California Highway Patrol captain.

Neither Jeffra, Groves nor any of the candidates mentioned one type of crime that a much-publicized study showed to be unusually high in this suburban community--child abuse.

The only candidate to raise the subject in an interview was Art Nash, a NASA manager whose key campaign theme was to improve the image of Lancaster’s city government.

Several of the candidates said, when asked about the matter, that the rate might simply reflect better reporting of child abuse in the area. Singer confirms that the issue has not garnered much attention in local political circles.

“This is a problem that is hidden away behind closed doors,” Singer said. “The victims of this crime don’t vote.”

Trying for a comeback is George Lee Root, who was ousted along with Rodio in 1994 over the pet store issue, running under the slogan: “Root for Lancaster.”

He will not again harm local businesses, he vowed. “The public did send us a message,” he said. “I heard it.”

Root sees himself as an advocate for retired people, like himself, who live in mobile homes in Lancaster.

Also running are two first-time candidates--Frank Astourian and Joseph Villanueva--voicing opposition to what they called “the power brokers” of the town. Another first-timer is Jacob Flaming, who says he wants Lancaster to become “an all-American city.” He was unsure what organization bestows that honor or if it is still being given out.

Probably the most unorthodox, and surely the angriest of City Council candidates, is David Korczyk, a civil engineer who is not only in the running to be a leader of the city, but is also suing it.

Korczyk was fired from his full-time city job in 1994. He says this is because he told city officials it was unwise and perhaps even unsafe to build a baseball stadium on a designated lot in the northern part of the city because of the threat of sinkholes.

The stadium is now under construction on the site he warned against. Korczyk’s suit, for emotional distress over the firing, is pending.

With the forum over, the candidates made their way through the crowd for a last bit of glad-handing. At least they could be assured that many in this crowd of city and business leaders were likely to vote in next Tuesday’s contest.

But there are indications the rest of Lancaster is not as aware.

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Last week, several candidates reported their wooden campaign signs along local highways had mysteriously disappeared. Sheriff’s deputies and candidates suspected dirty tricks. But then the signs were suddenly discovered stacked up in a backyard.

Deputies said they probably wouldn’t arrest the sign pilferers because they had a reasonable excuse: They took them for firewood because they thought the election was over.