Hard Work Pays Off for Lam in City Race

After six years in politics, Westminster Councilman Tony Lam doesn’t take winning for granted.

That’s why his campaign for a third term on the City Council included putting 30,000 absentee ballot applications in English and Vietnamese along with his political mailers into Pennysaver shopping pamphlets mailed to Westminster households before the Nov. 3 election.

The effort paid off Friday when county voting officials announced the final election results. Lam, who trailed candidate Kermit Marsh by 67 ballots on the morning after the election, won by 497 votes.

This year saw two other Vietnamese candidates on the ballot in Westminster--Chuyen Nguyen was beaten by incumbent Frank Fry Jr. in the mayor’s race, and Duoc Tan Nguyen failed to get into office, coming in sixth in the council race. Lam spent $62,000 on the race, more than the other 12 council and mayoral candidates combined.

Lam said he won despite negative campaign mailers directed toward him, including a flier from Fry urging voters to reject “Tony ‘Little Saigon’ Lam.”

“I never resort to negative campaigning,” Lam said from his Vien Dong restaurant near Westminster’s Little Saigon business center. “The perception was made that the Vietnamese were trying to take over the city.”

But Lam said he’ll take his third oath of office next month with no ill feelings from the election.

“I will make a strong positive statement once I take office that the election is behind us and we should work together,” he said.

Close finishes aren’t unusual for Lam, 62, who won his first ballot for a two-year term in 1992 with a few dozen votes to spare. His victory made him the first Vietnamese government official elected in the United States.

In 1994, he handily beat a recall attempt by residents angry that the city had lost a $700,000 judgment in a lawsuit filed by firefighters who lost their jobs. Five months later, he prevailed with a 500-vote margin to win his first four-year term.

Lam, a Republican, said he ran this year amid a population that increasingly has swung Democratic as younger generations register to vote. Many younger Vietnamese Americans view the Republican Party as “too rigid and one-sided,” he said.

Lam said he is interested in one day running for an Assembly or state Senate seat but hasn’t been seriously considered by the local GOP establishment. But he said he won’t change parties to run for office, even if new legislative districts are carved out of central Orange County during Democratic-controlled reapportionment in 2001.

“I’m a loyal Republican,” he said. “But minorities are still on the bottom of the list when [candidates] are eyed by the hierarchy.”

By any measure, Lam’s rise in politics--and to prominence in his adopted country--is impressive.

He immigrated to the United States in 1975, part of a wave of refugees that came to Camp Pendleton through Operation Frequent Wind, which relocated 50,000 people from South Vietnam as Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese. Lam arrived with his wife and six children, who shared a Quonset hut with two other families for three months before moving north to Westminster.

To support his young family, he pumped gas, stocked groceries and sold life insurance. In 1983, he opened Vien Dong near Little Saigon, the business district that serves as the seat of the county’s Vietnamese community.

Since his first election win in 1992, Lam has cemented support within the Vietnamese and senior populations and within mobile-home communities. The campaign decided to send absentee ballots throughout the city because many ethnic and older residents prefer to vote that way, said Jeffrey Brody, assistant professor of communications at Cal State Fullerton, who served as a Lam campaign advisor.

During the campaign, Lam chose not to respond to accusations that he favored Little Saigon over other areas of the city or that he was responsible for the city’s deteriorating streets and roads.

He also was blamed when the city’s 30-year-old water storage tank ruptured on Sept. 21, sending 5 million gallons of water smashing through a fire station and adjacent neighborhood. But Lam had voted several years ago to consider selling the city’s water system to a private company as a way of paying for expensive upgrades. The water system ultimately remained with the city.

“This was a tough race, but I run for office because I feel it’s a way to pay back this country for everything it has done for me and my family,” Lam said. “My [campaign slogan] was to create unity through diversity. We need to build community pride.”