Valley Activist Takes Next Step in Her Bid to Have an Impact

When a group of socially conscious Jewish Angelenos started a synagogue in the West San Fernando Valley some years back, they chose Tarzana resident Georgia Mercer as their congregation’s first president.

The thinking that led Mercer to help found Temple Kol Tikvah helps explain her evolution from community volunteer to full-time City Council candidate. Mercer is running for the open seat in the 11th District, an affluent Valley-Westside area bifurcated by the Santa Monica Mountains.

Her style is characterized by a disposition so sunny that people who have known her for decades swear they have never seen her out of sorts.

“And you won’t either,” Mercer says.

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

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

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Among her accomplishments, Mercer, 55, co-founded the Juvenile Justice Connection for troubled youths and ran the gang-diversion program Project Heavy. She also 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 1970s. After a stint as Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan’s staff liaison to the West Valley, women’s groups and the Jewish community, Mercer is seeking to parlay her array of good works into a spot at the horseshoe-shaped council table. She sees her bid as the logical next step.

“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, says that in the years they have worked together, “any issue that has affected this city, Georgia was right there. 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 in the late ‘70s worked on a citizens’ advisory committee charged with coming up with a Los Angeles school district busing plan. The group’s goal was to forestall a more unpalatable court-ordered proposal.

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And 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 for 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.

“It took a lot of courage, particularly if you were from the Valley,” said Fisher, a Sherman Oaks resident.

Mercer’s father was a Russian immigrant whose poor English rendered him uncommunicative. Her mother did the family talking and business dealings, while her only daughter held her own with three hulking brothers.

Mercer said her strength and disposition come from her mother, while her work ethic was learned from her welder father. She was raised in upstate New York and met her husband, David Mercer, owner of a Calabasas vitamin company, at Roanoke College in Virginia.

The couple moved to Los Angeles, where Mercer earned her degree and became a Los Angeles grade-school teacher.