‘Clean Sweep’ Slate Strategy Sways Some, Irks Others

From the city that brought you Tuesday Night City Council Fights and a half-million dollar recall battle comes a new development: the formal, organized City Council slate.

Council contenders Laura Lee Custodio, Dan Del Campo and Wayne Possehl boast a group name (the clean sweep team), a logo (a cartoonish broom) and a common set of issues (reining in growth, promoting mom-and-pop businesses and scrutinizing city spending).

The candidates print yard signs together, send out mailers and news releases en masse and even wear matching yellow T-shirts.

Depending on who’s talking, the development represents either a healthy sign of Thousand Oaks’ burgeoning political savvy or the inevitable denouement of a nasty discourse. Spending money on group signs and literature is alternately viewed as a clever way to reduce expenses or a crafty ploy to skirt the city’s newly enacted campaign finance reform law.

From a political point of view, the slate strategy is a risky one that carries the possibility of a big win or a whopping defeat, said Alan Heslop, a political science professor at Claremont McKenna College who directs the Rose Institute of State and Local Government.

“I don’t think you can generalize about it too much, but so long as you know who you’re jumping into bed with in your joint candidacy, slates make a lot of sense because they do produce an economy in campaign costs,” Heslop said.

“It does tend to be an all-or-nothing strategy,” he added. “It’s highly doubtful these three people are equally well-known and comparable as candidates. If it turns out the slate goes down, the best candidate of the three will go down with it, whereas he or she standing alone might have been elected.”

More often than not, slates are a common, passing phase for mid- to large-sized cities struggling through a difficult issue--often growth and development. When the issue is resolved, slates tend to disintegrate, he said. A few rare slates linger, becoming part of a city’s mainstream, as is the case in Berkeley.

Candidate Possehl said crafting a slate--or a team, as he prefers to call it--helps voters clear a cluttered field of 13 people vying for the council.

If people want to tap three like-minded folks who disdain the ideas of the incumbents, they need look no further. Others sneer that the group is a “hate slate” because of its anti-incumbent fervor.

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“See, we’re stealing from the enemy,” Possehl said, referring to incumbents Andy Fox and Judy Lazar, as well as Park District Director Dennis Gillette, a presumed front-runner.

“The pro-growthers have always run just as many candidates as there are available seats, maybe one more. That way, all their support can be focused exactly where it’s needed. Unfortunately, the slow-growth people have never been that disciplined. . . . Now we have a package and people know exactly where we stand.”

Others fear what the slate development augurs.

“It’s a bad sign for the city,” said Fred G. Kimball, a Thousand Oaks resident and political consultant who is not involved in local races. “Our city is being broken up into two sides, two halves based on development politics. I don’t think it’s good for the city.”

A curious path brought Thousand Oaks to this crossroads.

Slates and political parties have long been a mainstay of state and national politics, but local races in California are deemed nonpartisan by the Election Code.

While it’s common in Ventura County for candidates to purchase a spot on a Republican slate mailer or fill out a questionnaire and wind up on a slate for the teachers union or the Christian Coalition, City Council candidates rarely clump together and run as a group.

“Only in Thousand Oaks do they come up with stuff like this,” said county elections chief Bruce Bradley. “It’s pretty fractious out there.”

Under the stewardship of Councilwoman Elois Zeanah, the doyenne of Thousand Oaks’ anti-growth movement, the city has seen at least the kernel of a slate for the past three municipal elections.

Ventura has also flirted with slate politics, but never in such an organized fashion as is now occurring on the other side of the county. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, slow-growth and pro-business slates, backed by environmental and business groups, scrabbled for control of the Ventura City Council.

The slate’s first incarnation in Thousand Oaks came in 1994, when Zeanah endorsed retired filmmaker M. Ali Issari and city Operations Manager David Hare as her running mates. At the time Zeanah was criticized for breaking an unspoken council members’ agreement not to endorse candidates. When the votes were tallied, only Zeanah managed to snare a council seat.

Two years later, Planning Commissioner Linda Parks and political newcomer Del Campo teamed up and crafted joint signs and mailers. Parks was the top vote-getter and Del Campo came close to unseating Councilman Mike Markey.

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The appearance that Zeanah is orchestrating the slates turns off some voters--such as homeowners association activist Cathy Schutz.

“For me, it’s very distasteful,” she said. “Slates remind me of political bosses running the city. I think you need to give people more credit than that. . . . They can make their own choices; they don’t need to be told these three people are banding together.”

Parks said the genesis of slates has been an organic one.

“I think this came about because people are fed up with the council and its incumbents,” Parks said. “I do believe there’s a feeling in town of ‘Throw the bums out.’ ”

The slate “is a very straightforward, logical, intelligent way to look at the whole picture,” she added. “It’s a strategy. We’re suggesting a strategy to people that maybe some people don’t want suggested. They want to choose from door number one, two and three.”

Some residents are also bothered by the way the slate raises and spends money in light of the recent passage of a local law that limits individual campaign contributions to $250.

The slate’s fund-raising certainly adheres to the letter of the law and none of the three candidates has raised nearly as much money as the incumbents. But Parks and Zeanah, and Zeanah’s husband, all have given the maximum donation to all three clean sweepers.

By running all three names on signs together, the candidates can triple the number of signs and mailers they could otherwise afford.

Campaign finance reform committee co-chairman Jim Bruno said slates are “antithetical and anathema” to everything the panel worked for.

“The slate feels covert to me,” Bruno said. “It’s like everything we tried to achieve has been subverted.”

Del Campo disagreed, pointing out that the incumbents and Gillette share many donors, but simply have chosen to run separate campaigns.

“Each of us pays a third for everything,” he said. “What difference does it make if you pay a third of the price for a piece of cardboard or if you cut the cardboard into three pieces? It would be ludicrous to say we’re circumventing anything.”

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Many of Thousand Oaks’ old guard political leaders are put off by the notion of people running together rather than on their individual merits.

“The way slates are run, it’s almost a quasi-violation of the [open-meeting] Brown Act even before they make it to the council,” groused former Mayor Alex Fiore, who sat on the council for 30 years. “The slate people already agree or disagree on the issues before they’re even in front of them. Maybe only one of them would come to the meetings and the other two could just submit proxies. Or maybe they’d all just mail in their votes.”

Clean sweep team backer Mitch Rheingold, a financial advisor who also sat on the campaign finance committee, believes the value of the slate is in the eye of the beholder.

“If you’re on the opposite side of the growth issue, you don’t like the slate,” he said. “If you support their issues, then you like it. For me, the slate helps crystallize attention on the issues--mostly growth--better.”

In giving themselves a name and collective identity, Possehl believes his group is just calling a fact a fact.

“In my analysis, this city has been run by a power clique ever since its founding,” he said. “I look at Fox, Lazar and Gillette as a slate when you look where the money’s from. . . . You could cast this election as a battle of the slates if you wanted to.”