Corina Alarcon Ends Campaign for City Council

In a surprising change of heart, Corina Alarcon withdrew Monday as a candidate for the 7th District City Council seat vacated when her husband, Richard Alarcon, won election last month to the state Senate.

Corina Alarcon cited the demands of her business, family and a newly reinvigorated domestic violence shelter she helped found as factors in the decision not to run. Observers said her exit throws the race to represent the northeast San Fernando Valley wide open.

“All of these things in my life will take away my time from running an effective campaign,” she said. “I would reconsider running for office in the future, but right now, the time is not right.”

Alarcon said she decided over the Christmas holidays to end her campaign even after securing endorsements from Mayor Richard Riordan and her husband, which many people thought made her the front-runner in an expected field of 10 or more candidates in the April primary.

“My wife would have won this race as far as I’m concerned,” Richard Alarcon said.

The senator said he and his wife will endorse someone else--probably former San Fernando Mayor Raul Godinez II, Assembly aide Alex Padilla or community-services organization head Corinne Sanchez.

“Obviously, I support my wife’s decision,” Alarcon said. “I expect to be weighing in to this election very heavily.”

Padilla, Godinez and others said they would pursue Alarcon’s support. Corina Alarcon’s withdrawal “makes the race a little more interesting,” Godinez said.

Added Padilla: “It’s still going to be a very tough race.”

Corina Alarcon said her decision not to run was based on three factors, including a city ethics-law requirement that she sell her insurance business to hold a council seat. (Council members are not permitted to earn a business income while serving.) That process was going to take longer than the three months left before the April election, she said.

In addition, she cited family demands involving her husband’s move to Sacramento to serve in the state Senate.

“It is difficult having a husband transition to the Senate,” she said. “We would have had two candidates in the family.”

Finally, she cited the increasing demands put on her time by the charity Women Advancing the Valley through Education, which she founded with her husband. The group operates a domestic violence shelter in the northeast Valley.

Corina Alarcon is president of the WAVE board of directors.

The shelter has a capacity for 38 families, but has only been able to serve 16 because of a lack of staff. “We don’t have enough operational funds,” she said.

That changed last week when the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded a $749,000 grant to WAVE, which the Alarcons said will allow the group to hire eight more staffers and operate the shelter at capacity.

“I really want to focus all of my attention on maximizing services at the shelter,” Alarcon said.

The Alarcons denied the campaign was canceled out of concern about a possible controversy involving Richard Alarcon’s lobbying for WAVE.

Alarcon acknowledged Monday that he lobbied for the federal grant for WAVE with the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, a city-county agency that ranked WAVE 32nd on a list of 100 projects sent to HUD for consideration. Sixty-two received funding.

“I had met with some of the folks over there to express my support for the project,” Alarcon said, adding: “My wife doesn’t get any money for [her position with WAVE]. She’s a volunteer. There is no conflict.”

Bob Stern of the Center for Governmental Studies, a nonpartisan, campaign-reform organization based in Los Angeles, said Corina Alarcon could benefit politically if the charity she heads receives government assistance arranged by her husband. Her candidacy had touted her WAVE presidency as one of her major accomplishments.

“There’s clearly not a legal conflict,” Stern said. “Certainly, to say you’ve headed a successful charity on your resume is better than to say you headed a charity that closed.”

Corina Alarcon said WAVE could have survived even without the new grant. The charity had received federal funds with the help of the city in the past to buy and renovate an apartment building used as a shelter.

A source close to the Alarcons said Corina Alarcon did not have strong feelings about running for City Council to begin with, and only did so at the strong urging of her husband, who wanted to keep a hold on his old council seat.

Richard Alarcon denied he put any pressure on his wife, saying they decided on her candidacy after Assemblyman Tony Cardenas (D-Sylmar), a close ally, decided not to run for the council seat.

“She did have some reservations,” Richard Alarcon said. “Frankly, we were thinking Cardenas was going to run.”