GEORGIA MERCER

Believing their values were only as meaningful as their actions in the community, a group of socially conscious Los Angeles residents started a synagogue in the west San Fernando Valley some years back.

One of the congregation’s founding members and its first president was Tarzana resident Georgia Mercer.

The thinking that motivated Mercer to found the synagogue carries through to her secular life and explains her evolution from community volunteer to her current occupation: full-time City Council candidate. Mercer is running to represent the 11th District, an affluent Valley-Westside area bifurcated by the Santa Monica Mountains.

Mercer’s style is characterized by a disposition so sunny that people who have known her for decades swear they have never seen her fall apart--or even be out of sorts.

“And you won’t, either,” Mercer said proudly.

Not surprisingly, Mercer’s downside is not easily unearthed.

The most damning criticism, coming from Woodland Hills homeowner activist Gordon Murley, was that Mercer stage-managed community meetings for her former boss, Mayor Richard Riordan, to such an extent that community participation was squelched.

Yet Mercer very much views herself as a creature of the community, a contrast she draws between herself and her chief opponent, Cindy Miscikowski, a longtime aide to retiring Councilman Marvin Braude.

“I see City Hall from the community’s perspective,” Mercer said. “I don’t see the community from the perspective of City Hall.”

Among her accomplishments, Mercer, 55, co-founded the Juvenile Justice Connection for troubled youth and ran the gang diversion program Project Heavy. She worked on a committee that lobbied for the state’s first car smog devices and served on the city’s Human Relations Commission.

A paid job as public affairs director for Planned Parenthood of Los Angeles grew out of Mercer’s involvement in women’s groups, dating from the ‘70s. All of the key women’s groups have endorsed her.

After a stint as Riordan’s staff liaison to the West Valley, women’s groups and the Jewish community, Mercer is seeking to parlay her good works into a spot at the horseshoe-shaped council table. She sees her bid as the logical next step in her evolution.

“Georgia has done it all,” said Marcia Herman, co-founder of the Women’s Political Committee. “She has been preparing for this her whole adult life.”

Mercer’s rabbi, Steven Jacobs of Temple Kol Tikvah, said she has stood in the trenches with him for years.

“Any issue that has affected this city, Georgia was right there,” Jacobs said. “She does not equivocate.”

Busing was perhaps the most controversial issue in which Mercer was involved. Bucking popular opinion on her home turf in the Valley, Mercer worked on a citizens advisory committee charged with creating a school district busing plan. The group’s goal was to forestall a less palatable court-ordered proposal.

When a busing plan came to pass and other families fled to private schools, Mercer and her husband, David, let their only child be transported across town during the sixth and seventh grades.

Steven Mercer, now 29, remembers the family discussions well. “[My mother] said to me and my father, ‘These are the values I’m interested in here--equal education for people. . . . This is important.’ . . . They asked me if I could do it. I said, ‘Yes.’ ”

Police Commission President Raymond C. Fisher, a Mercer supporter, served with her on the school busing committee in the late ‘70s. “It took a lot of courage, particularly if you were from the Valley,” said Fisher, a Sherman Oaks resident.

Fisher predicted that Mercer, if elected, would be a consensus builder who would bring savvy, good judgment and “great integrity” to the council.

Her husband of 35 years, who owns a vitamin company in Calabasas, predicted that Georgia would be a great lawmaker and still maintain her perfect record of making the bed before leaving home.

“David Mercer never feels neglected,” he said.

Son Steven remembers a letter written early in the campaign that, while grammatically correct and cleanly typed, was not quite up to his mother’s standards. Steven, a full-time campaign worker, urged sending it anyway. His mother thought otherwise.

“It just says something about the way you do things,” she said.

Mercer’s bulging larder at home also makes a statement. Friends and family say the Mercer pantry is like a minimarket, while Mercer calls it a response to her working-class background without culinary frills or spare treats.

“We never run out of things if we can help it,” Mercer laughed. “And the neighbors know where to come to borrow.”

The daughter of a Russian immigrant whose poor English rendered him uncommunicative, Mercer said her mother did the family’s talking and managed its business dealings. Georgia, the couple’s only girl, held her own among three hulking brothers.

Mercer said her strength and disposition come from her mother, while her work ethic was learned from her father, a welder. She was raised in Upstate New York and met her husband at Roanoke College in Virginia. They married and moved to Los Angeles, where Mercer earned her degree and became a Los Angeles grade-school teacher.

Steven was adopted soon thereafter. Underscoring the social-involvement streak in his mom’s personality, Steven’s earliest memory of her community work was at the agency that brought him to his parents.