Issues May Be Scarce, but Passion and Politics Aren’t : Mayor’s Clout--and His Cash--Are on the Line in School Races

It’s been the loudest and most costly election season ever for the Los Angeles Board of Education, a supercharged assault on the status quo led by Mayor Richard Riordan and $2 million he raised from the city’s business interests.

Launching a barrage of mailings, radio and television ads and phone calls to promote his slate of three challengers and one incumbent, the mayor made himself, in many ways, the focus of the election, as those he targeted accused him of trying to seize power for his wealthy friends.

Meanwhile, a less partisan committee of business and education leaders conducted a parallel campaign with a mass mailing that sought to rouse voters with a call for a radical change in the way the school district is run.

The campaigning has built to a crescendo this weekend as hundreds of volunteers go door to door and work phone banks to make last-minute pitches before Tuesday’s balloting.

But how much difference will all the fanfare make in the historically low-interest board races that have been decided in recent years by the campaign contributions and voting power of district employee unions?

Veteran political consultants were reluctant to predict a sizable increase over the usual 12% to 15% turnout, except in the two districts that also have competitive races for the City Council.

“I’d say if at the high end . . . you get 20%, somebody has done a great job,” said Jim Hayes, president of Political Data Inc., which tracks voting patterns.

“I haven’t seen the kind of effort that would be needed to build turnout,” said Parke Skelton, who is advising two candidates in the race.

Fueled by Riordan’s committee, the Coalition for Kids, spending on behalf of the three challengers and one incumbent on his slate topped $1.5 million by the end of the week.

Meanwhile, the mayor continued to accumulate funds, reporting late contributions of $198,000, lifting his total to just a few dollars below the $2 million he had said he would raise for the four board races. It was unclear whether he intended to spend it all by Tuesday, or retain some for possible future campaigns.

The unprecedented influx of cash fueled new rounds of mailings timed to reach homes over the weekend as well as continued television and radio commercials.

On top of all the partisan firepower, an unusual civic effort to boost voter participation in the school board races concluded with daily cable television broadcasts of a forum taped Wednesday night at UCLA with all but one of the 10 candidates attending.

Because of the large size of the districts, which have about 230,000 registered voters, mailings and precinct walking have focused on winning the loyalty of voters who have a strong habit of going to the polls.

If anything, scattered attendance at all four forums sponsored by a committee of prominent business and education leaders suggested that the electorate has not caught election fever.

The Committee on Effective School Governance promoted the forums--one each featuring the candidates in every race--by mailing more than 100,000 invitations.

Yet the largest crowd was about 150, and most of the audience at each forum consisted of partisans who came to support their candidates.

Here is a district-by-district rundown:

District 1

Incumbent Barbara Boudreaux continued her attack on Riordan’s intervention--he is backing challenger Genethia Hayes--as an “evil effort” to gain control of the school district’s $6.6-billion budget for the benefit of corporate leaders.

After sitting out several public forums on the grounds that they were linked to “Riordan and his buddies,” Boudreaux changed course Friday by attending a debate arranged by the Committee for Effective School Governance.

The event erupted in shouts as her followers held up pictures of Riordan and $20 bills, saying, “Where’s the money?”

“I’ve proven myself to be a person of integrity,” Hayes, who had a huge spending edge, responded later. “I’ve stuck to the issues and never attacked Barbara Boudreaux personally.”

The mayor’s campaign committee reported spending $262,000 on behalf of Hayes through Wednesday and launched a radio advertisement scheduled to air on so-called “black radio programs” throughout the last week of the campaign.

Hayes, 54, and Boudreaux, 65, have deep roots in the district that runs from South-Central Los Angeles to the Crenshaw and Baldwin Hills neighborhoods.

With a boost from the hot race for the City Council’s 10th District, some political observers predict that 35% of the district’s registered voters will turn out.

The other two candidates in the race, Austin Dragon and Moses Calhoun, reported no campaign contributions and are not expected to be major factors.

District 3

Two-term board member Jeff Horton was being outspent more than 3 to 1 by challenger Caprice Young, a former assistant deputy to Riordan who was receiving more of his help than any other candidate on the slate.

During the week, spending on her campaign topped $665,000, with more than $600,000 of it coming from the mayor.

Young’s campaign spokesman, Jason Greenwald, said the push over the weekend would include many dozens of volunteers concluding an effort expected to have reached at least 60,000 voters in the district stretching from Silver Lake to North Hollywood.

Fighting off any sense of gloom over the unequal spending, Horton mounted a similar walking and phone drive and held steady with an optimistic message.

“I’m feeling like we have a shot at this,” said Horton consultant Skelton. “It feels to me like they’re acting like they’re a little scared about the race.”

Throughout the campaign, Horton, 51, has said that reforms he has written or supported are already showing results in the form of rising test scores and falling dropout rates and that steady leadership is needed to complete new initiatives such as ending social promotion.

Young said the pace of reforms charted by the current board is too slow to meet the challenge of test scores that show two-thirds of the district reading below grade level.

District 5

School board member David Tokofsky, the one incumbent supported by the mayor, was launching a campaign on Spanish-language radio to reach voters in the heavily Latino district stretching from Lincoln Heights to San Fernando.

Tokofsky, 39, said he expected to have more than 400 volunteers out over the weekend, including many teachers who have strongly supported him in this and his previous election, and a soccer league.

Raising more than $200,000 on his own, Tokofsky has received the least help from Riordan. But the mayor pumped more than $22,000 into the campaign during the week on top of $44,000 earlier, which brought Tokofsky’s total to more than twice the resources of challenger Yolie Flores Aguilar.

In the week’s forums, Aguilar, 36, attacked Tokofsky as a puppet of the teachers union, which strongly supported him, and for selling out to Riordan.

In a last-minute mailer sporting the colors of the Mexican flag, Tokofsky promotes himself as the watchdog who has been the board’s most persistent critic of a “tired bureaucracy that doesn’t want to look in the mirror.”

Voter turnout could be high because District 5 includes the 7th and 14th City Council districts, which both have competitive races.

District 7

In the district that stretches from Watts to San Pedro, incumbent George Kiriyama stunned the audience during his Thursday night forum by walking out after seizing the microphone to give a 15-minute speech.

Late in the campaign, Kiriyama has had a drop-off in campaign contributions while support from Riordan continues to roll in for challenger Mike Lansing.

Kiriyama, 67, who was relying on support from the 40,000-member United Teachers-Los Angeles, portrays Lansing as beholden to Riordan, whose support for him topped $565,000 through April 7.

Lansing, 42, who runs a Boys and Girls Club in San Pedro, has characterized Kiriyama as a “do nothing” on a board that has a reputation for divisiveness and micromanaging Supt. Ruben Zacarias.

Meanwhile, the race has been bedeviled by ballot mix-ups. An undetermined number of incorrect sample ballots were distributed by the Los Angeles city clerk’s office in at least four Torrance precincts, city election officials said.

Correct sample ballots were mailed a week ago to every registered voter in those precincts, along with an explanation of the error, said Joseph Giles, assistant chief for the election division.

Separately, an undetermined number of absentee ballot applications for the June runoff were mailed to voters, Giles said. The correct sample ballots have now been mailed, he added.