Sherman Proposal for Parents Hotline Leaps Hurdle in House

U.S. Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Sherman Oaks) celebrated a legislative victory Thursday when the House of Representatives adopted his amendment to the Child Protection and Sexual Predator Punishment Act.

The legislation would create a national hotline operated by the Department of Justice to provide parents information about convicted sexual predators. It’s modeled after a similar program in this state.

Although the California program has been touted by law enforcement officials like Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren, Sherman’s measure had appeared in trouble because the leadership of the House’s subcommittee on crime, Rep. Bill McCollum (R-Fla.) and Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), wanted more hearings before bringing it to a vote.

With some prodding by Sherman, the amendment passed on a 247-175 vote, after nearly 150 members changed votes at the last minute.

“People voted ‘no’ based upon the names of those who opposed it [McCollum and Conyers] but then they switched to ‘yes’ after they looked at my handouts,” Sherman said.

Getting the amendment through the Senate may be another difficult fight.

Meanwhile, expect Sherman to make the amendment part of his reelection campaign when he faces Republican businessman Randy Hoffman in November.

During his primary race, Hoffman promoted his involvement in Kids Safe, a Granada Hills group that has lobbied for better notification laws and fewer plea bargains for sexual predators.

It was Hoffman’s own group that sponsored Sherman’s amendment.

Sherman brushed aside questions about whether he planned to feature the amendment in his campaign this fall.

“I have no idea what my campaign brochures will say,” he said. “You don’t win legislative victories to win elections, you win elections to win legislative victories.”

Summertime

It’s not as if anybody on the Board of Supervisors had a traumatic time of it during last week’s election. Gloria Molina was unopposed and Zev Yaroslavsky won handily over three minor opponents.

But it’s awfully quiet around the Hall of Administration, with supervisors handling a lot of social engagements and putting out bunches of tame press releases, like one from Mike Antonovich about making a smooth transition to a consolidated court system.

“Everybody around here is just kind of recovering from the election,” said Yaroslavsky spokesman Joel Bellman. “We got a new computer system so we’re trying to learn that.”

Yaroslavsky’s office is equally nonchalant about the upcoming deadline for filing 103,500 signatures needed before the supervisor’s anti-subway ballot measure can be put before the voters next November.

The signatures are due at least a month before the registrar-recorder’s deadline of Aug. 7 for measures intended for the November ballot, because county officials must verify that they are valid.

In addition, because the measure involves the MTA, it must be submitted to the county from the transportation agency, not from a private citizen. So the signatures must be submitted even earlier, in order to pass through red tape at the MTA.

All along, Yaroslavsky’s office has said it will submit “more than enough” signatures by mid-June, but with that time upon us, the supervisor is still not saying exactly when the signatures will be ready, when they will be submitted, or how many have been gathered so far.

Never-Ending Story

During the race for a state Senate seat in the San Fernando Valley, the two Democratic candidates, City Councilman Richard Alarcon and former Assemblyman Richard Katz, promised not to make ethnicity an issue.

It didn’t work out that way.

The polls have been closed for more than a week, but they are still accusing each other of “playing the race card.”

The outcome of the election is still up in the air pending the tally of hundreds of outstanding ballots. Alarcon holds a slim 33-vote lead out of 75,000 cast, with only 350 provisional ballots left to count.

But it is clear from the results so far that Alarcon, who is Latino, has a strong base of support was in the heavily Latino northeast Valley portion of the 20th Senate District.

Katz, who is Jewish, has the strongest support in the heavily Jewish southwest part of the Valley.

Since the hand count began last week, representatives for Katz and Alarcon have camped out at the office of the county’s registrar-recorder.

Both camps had appeared to be working together in a cordial manner to review the tally.

Until Wednesday, when Fred Woocher, an attorney for Alarcon, wrote to Registrar-Recorder Conny McCormack to complain that Katz’s representatives were discriminating against Latinos by challenging most of the ballots filed by persons with Spanish surnames.

“Some observers for the Katz campaign have filed frivolous challenges to the authenticity of signatures on absentee ballots on no basis other than that the person submitting the ballot was Spanish surnamed,” Woocher said in the letter.

McCormack shot back, “At no time has the ethnicity or perceived ethnicity of any voter played any part in our determination of which ballots to include and not to include in the ballot counting process.”

For his part, Katz rejected the accusation outright, calling it “a blatant continuation of the efforts by Alarcon’s supporters before the election to inflame ethnic tensions.”

Katz was referring to a campaign mailer sent to voters earlier in the campaign on Alarcon’s behalf by state Sen. Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles), the head of the Latino caucus. The mailer tried to tie Katz to Gov. Pete Wilson and an incident in Orange County where a Republican Party leader was accused of using poll guards to keep immigrants from voting.

Katz called the mailer an example of “race baiting.”

But he wasn’t the only one to complain. The Jewish Federation of greater Los Angeles and the Anti-Defamation League wrote to Polanco on Wednesday to complain.

“It is obvious from all press reports that certain campaign literature was filled with untruths and was racially divisive in its efforts to pander to a particular community group’s fear,” according to the letter from Jewish Federation Chair Carmen Warschaw and Executive Director Michael Hirschfeld.