Youthful Candidates Enter Race for Santa Clarita Council Seats

Michael Egan and Mark Clark have unabashed dreams of earning City Council seats in April that they hope would soon lead to far loftier political posts, including governor or even president.

To reach such heights, however, the pair probably will have to go to college. Or in Egan’s case, at least finish high school.

Egan, 18, and Clark, 23, are part of an unprecedented youth movement in Santa Clarita electoral politics, which in the city’s 10-year history has largely been dominated by middle-aged and senior residents. Cameron Smyth, son of retiring Councilman Clyde Smyth, also is running for the council--though he is all of 26.

And the youth movement may gain a fourth member. Ryan Krell, an 18-year-old student at College of the Canyons, has picked up election paperwork at City Hall.

Until those papers are filed, his candidacy will not be official and he has not publicly divulged any campaign plans. But City Clerk Sharon Dawson said Krell credited a College of the Canyons instructor with inspiring him to run as an effort to get young voters to the polls.

The rules require only that each candidate be of voting age when the filing period closes Jan. 16. Egan turned 18 this month.

Since Monday’s opening of the filing period, eight residents have obtained paperwork.

Two other announced candidates for the three council seats being contested in April are Kent Carlson, a machinist for the city of Los Angeles, and Marsha McLean, an environmental activist who led the successful fight to block a landfill in Elsmere Canyon.

Councilman Carl Boyer III announced that he will not seek another term. A member of the panel since the city’s inception in 1987, Boyer joins Smyth on the sidelines for the spring race. The other incumbent whose seat is up, Jo Anne Darcy, has said that she will decide in early January whether to seek reelection.

The three young candidates could combine their years on Earth and still be in the ballpark of the age of some council members. Some skeptics predict that voters will be turned off by their inexperience. To the unfledged hopefuls, however, their age broadens their appeal in a city where 40% of the population is younger than 22 and the hottest grass-roots political topic of late involves not economic or land use issues but whether to build a park for skateboarders.

“People in politics always say that we are the future of America, but they don’t seem to want to help us,” Clark said during a break from his job in the Andrews Electronics warehouse in Valencia.

“Twenty-three to me is the best place to start.”

Egan, a senior at Valencia High School, waxed Roosevelt-esque on his candidacy: “Who better to relate to youth but youth itself?”

Smyth prefers to play Greg Brady to his rivals’ Bobby and Peter. As a UC Davis graduate in rhetoric and communication, he speaks in polished phrases, recalling “the onion fields up and down McBean Parkway” of his Santa Clarita childhood and the “hills I used to play on that are now homes.”

As deputy chief of staff to state Sen. William “Pete” Knight (R-Palmdale), Smyth points out that he is the only announced candidate with full-time government experience. He has developed a detailed campaign platform aimed at promoting small-business prosperity and moderate land development.

Longtime residents say he is a chip off the elder Smyth, who hewed to a centrist philosophy on the council.

“I’d like to think my age has nothing to do with my qualifications,” Smyth said.

Egan and Clark say the same.

“If you look at my past, you will see that I am just as much if not more experienced than anyone else running,” Egan said. “I’ve been wanting to do this since I was 12.”

In addition to taking classes at Valencia High and College of the Canyons, Egan has served on several community panels and as a juror in Teen Court, a Sheriff’s Department program in which minor juvenile offenses are judged by teenagers.

Egan says that if elected he would increase youth participation in government by forming committees with young members. As the son of a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy, he also would push for increasing the size of the sheriff’s detachment that serves as the city’s police force.

Clark spent five years as an airman stationed at Vandenberg Air Force Base. After his discharge in July, he returned to Valencia to begin work as a warehouse parts puller.

“My getting elected would show young people that they have a chance to get involved,” he said.

Clark said his military experience convinced him of the importance of keeping Santa Clarita’s streets safe. “We’re the fourth-safest city [with a population of more than 100,000] according to the FBI, but I’d like to be the first,” he said. He also believes that several schools need to be built, especially middle and high schools.

The three candidacies buck the conventional wisdom that young people have grown increasingly disenchanted with the political process since the voting age was lowered to 18 in 1970, with the notable exception of the 1992 presidential election.

The Washington-based Center for Policy Alternatives and the youth magazine Who Cares polled 18- to 24-year-olds in 1996 and found that only 9% had worked for a political candidate or party. And 61% agreed with the statement: “Politicians and political leaders have failed my generation.”

But ministering to that disaffection shouldn’t mean tossing untested youths the keys to power and asking them to have it back by curfew, said Santa Clarita Councilwoman Jill Klajic.

“It’s sort of a novelty,” she said. “I think they know it’s a novelty. They don’t understand the graveness of the duty. It is very easy for them to be infatuated with the attention and the power, and it takes maturity to handle that.”

With a laugh, she added: “I have a 26-year-old son and he’s been married and has had a job and done a lot of things for a lot of years, but when it comes to running city government, he wouldn’t have a clue.”

Evelyn Hughes Maslac, an executive at the Los Angeles County Children’s Planning Commission, is not so skeptical.

Given the Santa Clarita Valley’s steady expansion--its projected 2010 population of 270,000 would roughly quadruple the 1970 figure--those young voices are just clearing their throats, she said.

“They are a tremendous resource that usually goes untapped,” Maslac said. “It’s time for the next generation to step up.”