Some Voters Say Ousted Councilman Herrera Out of Touch

Gloria Stuart thought she had finally found a politician she liked.

He was a hometown boy with a strong personality and he seemed focused on revitalizing Oxnard’s moribund downtown area, where Stuart and her husband have operated BGs Coffee Shop for 25 years.

For the first time in her life, she put a campaign poster up in her frontyard. And when Andres Herrera won office as a city councilman, she saw the victory as a sign of hope that maybe things were changing in Oxnard.

But that was four years ago. This election, Herrera did not get Stuart’s vote.

“When he was elected, I really thought he was going to work with the people of downtown,” said Stuart, sitting in her coffee shop and contemplating the results of this year’s election, which saw Herrera voted out of office.

“He told us two years ago that we would be hearing something. That something was coming to town. And then he backtracked,” Stuart said. “I always thought of him as a personal friend. He used to come around here once or twice a week. He doesn’t come around anymore.”

Stuart’s sentiments are shared by some other Oxnard citizens who once viewed Herrera as one of the rising stars in Oxnard politics--and who tend to see him now as a politician who lost touch with his own community.

Herrera’s supporters, however, say he was a strong leader who simply lost one close election. It does not spell the end of his political career, they say. And they believe he could emerge again as one of the county’s most influential Latino leaders.

“I think you are going to go on to bigger and better things,” said Dollie Wells, an Oxnard civic leader, at his last council meeting last Tuesday.

In his own emotional farewell to the council, Herrera said he was proud of his work for the city and denied that he had lost touch with anybody during his term in office.

“I think in the last four years we have made an important turnaround in how we provide services for our community,” Herrera said.

“At times people have seen me as brash and arrogant,” he added. “But they have confused that with the passion I have for this city. . . . This is the city I was born in . . . and a city that I will not abandon because of a minor setback.”

Herrera, only the third incumbent in the last 30 years to lose a second term in office on the Oxnard council, lost virtually every precinct in the city Nov. 5 except La Colonia, where he grew up, and the Lemonwood area in central Oxnard.

On Tuesday he stepped down from office as newcomer John Zaragoza took his place on the five-member council. Zaragoza joined Mayor Manuel Lopez and incumbents Bedford Pinkard, Tom Holden and Dean Maulhardt. Unlike Herrera, Lopez easily won reelection and Pinkard finished narrowly ahead of Herrera and behind Zaragoza in this year’s vote.

Oxnard residents cited several reasons for Herrera’s political demise.

Some said they felt uncomfortable because of heavy campaign contributions he took from developers. Others said they were angry with his policies while in office, and thought his personal style too abrasive, combative and arrogant. A few said he had lost touch with the Latino community.

“He took on a superior attitude right after being elected,” said Stanley Moorman, a developer who was born and raised in Oxnard. “I supported him the first time around. This time I voted for Zaragoza. I need someone with an attitude that wants to do something about the city’s problems, not someone who will give me attitude.”

Experienced politicians like Mayor Lopez said Herrera’s personal style may have hurt him.

“The second term is usually a slam dunk,” said Lopez, who has been an Oxnard elected official since 1978. “I don’t know if it was inexperience or temperament, but he just reacted to the public in a way that was antagonistic. That was the public’s perception and perception is everything.”

For his part, Herrera said he does not question the election results. But he said the low voter turnout this year--at 65%, the lowest voter turnout in a presidential election since 1920 in Ventura County--hurt him. He said that perhaps his direct manner of dealing with people was interpreted the wrong way.

Now that he is out of office, he plans to focus on his business consulting firm, HAV & Associates, Herrera said. His business has suffered because of the time he dedicated to the council, he added.

But the political urge that began when he was a radical Chicano activist in college has not dissipated, and Herrera vowed that he will not disappear from public sight.

“You are going to see me sooner than you think,” he said.

Born on Feb. 11, 1946, Andres “Andy” Herrera is the oldest of nine children. Tomas and Conception Herrera moved to Oxnard in the early 1940s from Durango, Mexico. Conception dedicated herself to raising the children while Tomas worked in the fields.

Their father instilled in his children--particularly his two eldest sons Andres and Fermin--a sense of ambition and drive, Fermin Herrera said.

Tomas Herrera liked to repeat an old Mexican proverb to Andres and Fermin: “Between myself and the sky, there is only God”--meaning that their talents and abilities were unlimited. No human being was above them--only God was greater.

The brothers wound up going to UCLA at the height of the ‘60s, full of energy and inspired by their father to become active in the civil rights movements.

Working as a team, the brothers helped organize the United Mexican American Students group, registered in the La Raza Unida party and became Brown Berets--a militant Chicano rights group, Fermin recalled.

The political seed had been planted.

After working a few years in Connecticut for a beverage container manufacturer, Herrera came back to Oxnard.

Soon, he was working as an aide for Supervisor John Flynn, but after a few years left Flynn to work with Ventura County Coalition for Redistricting and Reapportionment. Herrera was made chairman of the organization and became involved in a battle to redraw Flynn’s supervisorial district to increase the voting power of Latinos. The Board of Supervisors later agreed to redraw Flynn’s district to include more Latinos.

Then in 1992, Herrera saw an opportunity to enter Oxnard politics.

In a tight nine-person race, which included incumbents Dorothy Maron and Geraldine Furr, Herrera and Pinkard surged ahead. Although Herrera lost to Pinkard by about 200 votes, he won several precincts including La Colonia and the River Ridge golf course homes.

Herrera ran a campaign stressing the importance of community participation and bringing Oxnard out of its economic slump. He also focused on the voting power of Latinos and increasing their political power.

“The stark reality is that a majority of the community is Latino, but they really don’t have a political voice,” Herrera told The Times in 1992. “This year we will see the empowerment of the Latino community and an increase in its political strength.”

Indeed it was to be the beginning of a new era for Oxnard politics.

For the first time in Oxnard’s history, a Latino--Lopez--was elected mayor and Herrera became the fourth Latino in the city’s 90-year history to join the City Council. Joined by Pinkard and later Holden and Maulhardt, this council set out to make historic changes: running the city like a business, luring more businesses to Oxnard, beefing up police and fire protection and cutting the fat from government.

Looking back at the past four years, Herrera said the city has seen an increase in jobs--like the relocation of Haas Automation to Oxnard--more business recruitment and the opening up of retailing giants like Wal-Mart and the auto mall. All of those strengthen the local economy, Herrera said.

But some of those changes included the privatization of the Economic Development Corp. (which is funded 80% by the city), a controversial move to eliminate the city’s Planning Commission and a proposal to consolidate police and fire training. This year, the firefighters union only endorsed Zaragoza among the City Council candidates.

“We felt that both of the incumbent candidates had been unresponsive to the Fire Department,” said Bill Gallaher, head of the firefighters union in Oxnard. “We endorsed Andres in 1992 and since then we have been disappointed in the way he handled firefighter issues. We were really kind of surprised at the lack of choices, usually there are more.”

In addition, about three years ago, without any public discussion, the city’s bureaucracy was realigned. Department heads were replaced with “team leaders” and several city departments were merged.

Herrera was a supporter of those changes. But critics, including Lopez and Zaragoza, say they may have given too much power to the city manager and created a system where no one is held accountable.

In addition to controversial changes in the way the city does business, some former Herrera supporters said the campaign Zaragoza ran against Herrera was effective.

“Towards the end of the campaign there were a lot of questions, like . . . the amount of money he was taking from developers,” said Francisco Dominguez, head of El Concilio del Condado de Ventura, a nonprofit advocacy group.

In contrast to four years ago when Herrera received most of his contributions from individuals, Herrera received nearly 75% of his contributions from businesses this year. With a $53,000 war chest, he raised the largest amount of any city council candidate in the county.

To Vicky Gonzalez, president of the La Colonia Neighborhood Council, the amount of campaign contributions from outside developers made a difference.

“I’m surprised people in La Colonia voted for him,” said Gonzalez, saying she was speaking solely as an individual. “The reason I didn’t vote for him is because he took a lot of money from developers and that disturbed me a lot.”

In the ads, Zaragoza also questioned Herrera’s claim of having a bachelor’s degree from UCLA. The school has no record of Herrera graduating.

Herrera said the ads were a personal attack, not political. He added that he would look into the confusion regarding his degree because he was under the impression that he had graduated.

“Those were nonissues,” Herrera said.

On that point, Herrera has sympathizers. Fulgencio Camberos, owner of the La Paloma restaurant in La Colonia, a hangout for many politicians and city employees, said he was sad to see one Latino attacking another in the campaign.

“I feel bad that he lost,” said Camberos, who said he voted for Zaragoza and Herrera. “It seems to me that among Hispanics, there should not be attacks against one another.”

Beyond the campaign issues, however, were the larger questions about Herrera’s temperament and the feeling by some that he had failed to meet his promise as a Latino leader.

On several occasions, Herrera publicly chastised speakers who appeared before the council.

And, during a community discussion on the Oxnard Mobilehome Lodge in 1994, Herrera loudly scolded farm worker representatives for what he thought was their lack of action.

“Why don’t you get your collective butts together?” he asked. “Why don’t you get off your collective butts and do your job for a change?”

That sort of outburst gained Herrera a reputation of harshness that hurt him, said Steve Buratti, president of the Inter Neighborhood Council Committee of Oxnard.

“He had a smug, arrogant and condescending attitude toward the people who put him there,” said Buratti, emphasizing he was not speaking for his group. “You can’t treat the citizens of the city with disrespect.”

The criticisms of his personal style puzzle Herrera, who said that he does not understand why people would think of him as arrogant or rude.

He never ran for office as a Latino candidate, Herrera added. But he never turned his back on the Latino community, either, he said.

“I know who I am,” he said.

Still, some former supporters of Herrera noted their disappointment over what they saw as his lack of focus on the Latino community.

“For years, we wanted to get a Latino candidate on the council,” said Dominguez of El Concilio. “We thought he would become a spokesman, but that leadership never transpired.”

Dominguez and other advocates like Barbara Macri-Ortiz, an attorney for Channel Counties Legal Services Assn., said poverty, violence and lack of low-income housing still plague many parts of Oxnard.

They wish Herrera had focused more on those problems while in office, Macri-Ortiz said. But she also wishes the entire City Council would make social problems a bigger priority.

It is not fair to pin the blame on Herrera only, she said. And she added that using the term Latino community is complicated because of the differences in class and nationalities that characterize Hispanics.

“It’s such a diverse community,” Macri-Ortiz said. “Who is the Latino community? Is it the professionals, the poor people, the landlords? Affordable housing is an issue that affects people and at this point we have to hold the whole council responsible. It wasn’t just Andres, it was the whole council.”

Regardless of this year’s election results, it would be foolish to discount Herrera from public life, said one supporter. Perhaps, said Karl Lawson of the city’s Housing Authority, people expected more from Herrera than he could deliver.

“It comes down to what people expect and what people can get,” Lawson said. “I think it is a little too early to engrave a tombstone on Andres Herrera’s career. I don’t think we’ve heard the last of Andres Herrera. He is a very talented man and I wouldn’t be surprised if he ran for another office.”