Anti-Zeanah Mailers Heighten Recall Fight

Accusing her of everything from missing too many meetings to needlessly costing the city millions of dollars in legal fees, the group working to oust Councilwoman Elois Zeanah struck over the weekend with its first mailer of the fall campaign to recall Zeanah in the November election.

Meanwhile, the rival group working to defend Zeanah distributed a mailer of its own over the weekend, asking voters for money and denouncing the recall as a plot by developers to silence a vocal opponent.

The dueling literature represented the opening salvo in what is sure to be a long and vicious recall election campaign, with each side accusing the other of spinning the truth or lying outright to persuade Thousand Oaks voters.

“It was so mean-spirited that I put it aside,” Zeanah said, describing her initial reaction to the mailer by Yes! Remove Elois Zeanah. “It’s obviously a hate campaign. They’re trying to defame me, and to me, it’s an issue of whether voters want to believe the bad guys or not.”

Peter J. Turpel, spokesman for Yes! Remove Elois Zeanah, said the group’s mailer is the first of many advertisements utilizing various media that the group has planned for upcoming weeks.

Turpel defended the numerous accusations in the latest mailer--the group’s first since gathering enough signatures to place a Zeanah recall measure on the ballot--saying each is based on facts.

“There is nothing, as opposed to their mailer, that is trumped up,” Turpel said. “It’s all in the public record and we’ve been saying this for seven to eight months. She can’t stop the wave of truth spreading through the city right now.” Titled “Why Elois Zeanah should be removed from the City Council now,” the mailer rattles off a list of nine misdeeds the group claims Zeanah has committed in office.

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For instance, the slick-stock mailer accuses her of missing too many meetings, and refusing to carry her share of the council workload by serving on committees and attending community functions.

It also accuses her of putting the public’s health and safety at risk by failing to vote for improvements to the Hill Canyon Wastewater Treatment Plant until recently. The delay, the mailer claimed, will cost the city an extra $11.2 million.

Zeanah said the mailer was full of inaccuracies and falsehoods. For example, she said she has never refused to serve on city committees. The problem, she said, is that Mayor Judy Lazar and former mayors have been biased against her and refuse to appoint her to the positions.

She also said she has never put the public’s health at risk, arguing that the sewer issue could have been resolved if city officials had not borrowed money from the city’s sewer accounts to help build the Civic Arts Plaza.

Councilwoman Linda Parks, who is heading up the Committee Against the Recall of Elois Zeanah, or CARE, said at best, the mailer distorted facts. At worst, she said, it slandered Zeanah with what she saw as blatant untruths.

“I saw it as what I expected--a very slick mailer full of lies,” Parks said. “It’s the first of many, I’m sure. They will bombard this city with lies and hate.

“Some of those, we have no idea what they were talking about,” she added. “Some others, we see where they put a spin on the truth.”

By contrast, the CARE mailer, which only went out to about one-third of the city’s registered voters, sought not so much to outline Zeanah’s records as to argue why a recall was unnecessary. It pointed out that whether voters agree or disagree with Zeanah’s political stances, a recall serves little purpose because she is up for reelection in November 1998.

The mailer also claimed the recall was unfair, because Zeanah had committed no malfeasance while in office and had remained true to her promises to voters. A recall, it argued, should not be used to “punish people with whom you disagree.”

Both mailers broke a recently enacted city law requiring all recall literature to state the names of the group’s top two contributors of $2,000 or more.

For example, City Clerk Nancy Dillon said the CARE committee received a $5,000 donation from Yvon Chouinard, owner of Ventura-based Patagonia Inc., and that was not mentioned on the mailers. Parks said Monday that the contribution, which she declined to discuss, came in after the mailers were printed.

The Yes! Remove Elois Zeanah mailer also violated a state elections law requiring recall committees to state on their literature the names of any contributors who had donated more than 80% of the group’s money. Jill Lederer, a Domino’s Pizza franchise owner, had provided more than $145,000 of the $175,000 the group had spent as of its last campaign finance report this summer.

“What it basically comes down to is, if an individual contributes more than 80% of that committee’s money, that individual’s name must be on all literature,” said Gary Huckaby, a spokesman for the state Fair Political Practices Commission in Sacramento.

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Like all violations of the state Political Reform Act, such offenses are punishable by up to $5,000 in fines. Warnings, however, are usually issued, Huckaby said.

Regarding the violation of the city law, both groups will be warned, but no other action will be taken, Dillon said, because there is no indication they purposely sought to deceive voters.

If a majority of voters decide to recall Zeanah on Nov. 4, they will select her replacement from a field of three candidates: engineer David Seagal, homemaker and student Roni Fenzke, and Cal Lutheran University Vice President Dennis Gillette.

“I hope the public is braced for the biggest mudslinging storm in our city’s history,” Zeanah said. “It’s coming. This is just the beginning.”