Bogaard Leading in Early Voting for Mayor of Pasadena

Former Pasadena Mayor Bill Bogaard appeared Tuesday night to be headed for a runoff against either incumbent Chris Holden or Councilwoman Ann-Marie Villicana as absentee votes were being counted in the city’s first mayoral election in 88 years.

With 6,369 absentee ballots tabulated and another 1,000 or so yet to be counted, Bogaard was in the lead with 44% of the vote.

Holden and Villicana each had about 24%, with seven other candidates sharing the remaining 8%.

Political experts said absentee ballots typically amount to about half the total. Tabulation of approximately 7,000 to 8,000 ballots cast in voting booths was underway late Tuesday.

The experts said absentee ballots usually reflect a more conservative part of the electorate than those cast in voting booths.

Holden, whose main support is in the city’s predominantly black neighborhoods, was expected to gain ground as the vote was counted.

Nonetheless, Bogaard sounded confident of eventual victory, even if he fails to get the majority needed to avoid an April runoff.

“We will be able to celebrate tonight,” he said.

Incumbent City Council members Paul Little in District 2 and Joyce Streator in District 1 led as absentee ballots were being counted.

In District 6, Steve Madison was leading with 53% of the vote, and in District 4, the race seemed to be headed for a runoff between Steve Haderlein and June Takenouchi.

Two Pasadena Unified School Board incumbents, George Van Alstine and Jackie Jacobs, appeared headed for reelection. The district includes Altadena and Sierra Madre as well as Pasadena.

Tuesday’s mayoral election stemmed from the voters’ decision in November to replace the city’s ceremonial mayor--chosen from members of the City Council--with a mayor chosen by the electorate in Los Angeles County’s sixth-largest city. The campaign for an elected mayor resulted in unusual levels of campaign spending for a part-time office. At least two of the three front-runners may have spent more than 10 times the mayor’s $18,000 salary.

A total of nearly $500,000 was raised by the candidates, most of it by Holden, Bogaard and Villicana, causing concerns about what some critics call the “Los Angelization” of Pasadena. Among the top contenders, in fact, only Councilman William Paparian’s fund-raising was moderate--his campaign war chest totaled about $30,000.

The major candidates tossed aside the city’s long-held tradition of door-to-door politics, each spending money on a deluge of campaign mailers. The Holden campaign led the way, sending out everything from a 60-page autobiography to potholders from his mother.

“This is more like a congressional race. The election has become a function of money,” said R. Michael Alvarez, an associate professor of political science at Caltech.

Holden, 38, a commercial real estate agent, is the architect of the city’s charter reform that created the elected mayor. After 10 years on the council representing an impoverished northwest neighborhood, he hoped to emerge from the shadow of his father, Los Angeles City Councilman Nate Holden.

Chris Holden, a soft-spoken former college basketball player, engineered the ouster of the longtime city manager last year and pushed through a living wage for employees that won him organized labor’s support.

Bogaard, 60, a councilman and mayor during the 1980s, promised to return civility to City Hall. The law professor and former corporate lawyer is a champion of preserving Pasadena’s neighborhoods.

At 32, Villicana, an attorney and real estate broker, is the first and only Latina elected to office in the city. A straight-talking Republican and business booster, she compares City Hall to an automated teller machine because so many legal settlements have been paid to former employees.

Throughout the campaign, the issues of education, public safety and development dominated the debate.

Holden and Villicana promised to help the city’s troubled classrooms by adding after-school reading programs.

Villicana proposed 65 more police officers and two more substations. Holden and Bogaard said the city does not have the money needed for expanding the Police Department. Besides, they said, crime is down.

Bogaard said the city has ignored or minimized neighborhood concerns about a proposed South Lake Avenue retail and movie theater development. A compromise with angry neighbors, he said, would have avoided the lawsuit that has delayed construction.

Holden said he drafted a recent settlement that calls for no movie theater, but Villicana says the compromise was a disaster that ruined a good project.

She and Bogaard have also criticized the city’s subsidization of private development.

Other candidates on the ballot were Roy Begley, Lance Charles, Jackline Matosian, Van-Martin Rowe, Guido Meindl and Eleta Fellows.

The city will get least two new faces on the council because Villicana and Paparian vacated their seats to run for mayor.