School Board Candidate Displayed the Write Stuff

Memo from Barry Brucker to local political aspirants: Don’t get mad. Get even.

Two months ago, Brucker was turned away for an appointment to an empty seat on the Beverly Hills school board. Last week, he campaigned as a write-in candidate against two incumbents. He not only won, he slaughtered them.

In the first write-in victory in a Los Angeles County election in 15 years, Brucker, a 40-year-old businessman who did not declare his candidacy until a month before election day, finally got his seat on his hometown school board with 1,558 votes.

His tally was about twice the number of votes either of his incumbent opponents received.

Elected with him was Century City attorney Gerald E. Lunn Jr., who won the second open board seat with 1,104 votes.

The two men handily ousted trustees Lillian L. Raffel and AJ Willmer, whose tallies were 838 and 764, respectively. Dr. Tricia Roth received 401 votes and Edward E. Rice had 221.

The election, locals said, hinged on discontent among some parents with the pace of long-awaited school repairs.

But Brucker’s victory had another component--30 days worth of pavement-pounding, midnight-oil-burning, lawn-sign-planting effort.

Brucker said he and his supporters had wanted a voice on the board since September, when trustee Jo Ann Koplin resigned. When the board selected Alissa Roston instead, Brucker got together with another unsuccessful applicant, Allison Okyle, and discussed how best to regroup.

The two joked about running a joint write-in campaign, then started to take the joke seriously. Eventually, they said, they decided to put Brucker up for office with Okyle as his campaign manager and Beverly Hills City Councilman Tom Levyn as co-chairman.

By the time their plan got underway, there were only 30 days left until election day.

“You can understand how daunting a task it is for someone to say, ‘I want to run against an incumbent. No. 2, I’m going to do it as a write-in. And No. 3, I’m going to do it in four weeks,’ ” Levyn said.

Campaign meetings went until midnight every night for a month. Brucker and Okyle walked door-to-door marathons in the precincts, covering virtually every street in the “flats” of Beverly Hills, they said.

As time dwindled, the pace became almost frenzied. “I found myself running between houses,” Brucker said. “You wanted to touch everybody.”

By election day, Brucker had published a mailer with the names of 1,000 people who had endorsed him, including two of the current school trustees.

Another mailer included free pencils emblazoned with the words, “The Write Choice,” and a full-page ad in a local paper showed how to write in the candidate’s name.

On the issue front, the key point of contention was the rate at which the district’s five schools were being repaired, despite a $77-million bond issue approved for that purpose in 1993.

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At Beverly Vista Elementary, where Brucker had gone to school as a child, students had been attending class in portable bungalows since the Northridge earthquake nearly four years ago.

Incumbents said the voters who were unhappy misunderstood the strings attached to the bond issue, overestimating the speed with which the repair money could be raised and spent.

Ousted trustee Willmer said that the 1993 measure stipulated that the money would be raised in a series of bonds issued over 10 years, so the taxes for the average household would never exceed $100 annually to repay the bonds. “The fact is, we don’t have the money,” Willmer said.

But Brucker turned the concern to his advantage, Willmer said.

“Every piece of his campaign literature accused the incumbent board members of having $77 million and being incompetent in our inability to spend it,” he complained.

Those complaints have not ended with the election. Several of the losing candidates have publicly accused Brucker of, among other things, spending more on signs and mailers than their voluntary campaign limit of $33,700 per candidate allowed.

Brucker acknowledges that his write-in victory was novel--according to the county registrar-recorder, the last successful write-in campaign was in 1982, when Assembly candidate Bruce Young appeared on the ballot as a Democrat and waged a simultaneous write-in campaign as a Republican.

However, Brucker denies that overspending was his key to success.

“It [the campaign] wasn’t so much ‘Barry Brucker, rah, rah,’ ” said Brucker. “It was more about we have to do something about our schools.”