Crowded Campaign Heats Up in Race to Replace Alatorre

A serious thing has happened on the way to this municipal election’s candidate forums: Democracy has broken out.

As they face off at least a couple of times a week, the 14 candidates who hope to represent the Eastside’s 14th City Council District are slowly distinguishing themselves from one another. And--in the three weeks remaining before votes are cast to select Richard Alatorre’s successor--this relatively low-key contest is shifting into a higher gear.

Lawn signs are already springing up across the voter-rich neighborhoods of Boyle Heights, El Sereno, Highland Park and Eagle Rock. Glossy brochures and fliers are trickling into mailboxes at an increasing rate.

At candidates’ forums, the hopefuls bring out their supporters--even if that means their elderly parents and other relatives--to cheer, jeer, even lob a question or two.

Rehearsed or spontaneous, one issue repeatedly pops up: carpetbagging.

Two candidates, Victor Griego and Armando Hernandez, moved into the area to run. Another, Luis Cetina, says he made a mistake on his residency date on a city form, but has lived in Highland Park for more than two years.

Audiences at these forums, held at the Regal Biltmore Hotel downtown, Occidental College in Eagle Rock, El Sereno Middle School and many other venues in the 14th District, react with glee whenever the carpetbagging issue comes up. At one debate, Cetina was asked if he could name three high schools in Eagle Rock. He could. Easily.

At another forum, moderated by Alatorre, the husband of candidate Cathy Molina asked each challenger to state how long they had lived in the district. (Griego did not mention that he moved in right before the deadline, but he did say he was born and raised there and owns two homes and a business in the 14th District.)

The forums also have attracted interesting audience members. Alatorre and his wife have attended several. Assemblyman Gil Cedillo (D-Los Angeles) showed up for one. Miguel Contreras, the powerful executive secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, has attended many, but he worries that the candidates need to reach voters in other ways.

“I can see that everyone has the MCI plan: family and friends,” Contreras said. “After a while, though, you run out of family and friends and you need to reach all those people who aren’t connected to anyone.”

Yet the candidates keep showing up at forum after forum. Some have even become quite friendly, squeezed in next to one another as debate hosts scramble to find chairs and name tags for all 14 candidates; one, Yolanda Gonzales is a write-in.

“There are a lot of great candidates up here,” Zeke Quezada said during one forum.

Even Bill Rosendahl, senior vice president of Century Communications, who moderated a 90-minute debate airing this week on Century Cable, said: “I think we could take our current City Council and replace them with you and we’d have a great one.”

But while many campaign strategists say the forums are valuable, they say that winning a wide-open primary takes a solid field operation with volunteers--and the candidates themselves--walking neighborhoods block by block. Successful candidates also need money for advertising, they say.

“You need organization and money,” Contreras said. “That separates the wheat from the chaff.”

Juan Jose Gutierrez, who heads a nonprofit immigration center in Boyle Heights, said the most successful candidate will campaign the old-fashioned way.

But some candidates, including Gutierrez, have also set up Web sites to attract attention and perhaps a few voters. At Nick Pacheco’s Web site, supporters can even make donations online.

In fact, fund-raising in the 14th District is as different as the candidates. Asked during a forum last week to say how much they have raised, Juan Marcos Tirado and Juan Jimenez appeared to have tied at less than $1,000. Griego topped the bunch with $138,000 with Pacheco at $100,000 and Cetina at $68,000. Several appeared somewhere in the middle, with $40,000 to $50,000.

“You need some money to run a viable campaign, but the person who raises the most money is not necessarily the person who will be the top vote-getter in this race,” said Alvin Parra, who ran against Alatorre four years ago and did surprisingly well despite being vastly outspent. “With so many candidates in this race, the top vote-getter will need to be someone with a good voter base in the district [and who] has already established some name recognition.”

To that end, many of the candidates’ schedules have become crammed in recent days with forums followed by fund-raising coffees, dinners and even golf and bowling tournaments. Most, however, rely on the forums as an attempt to reach at least some voters. They talk about housing, education, child care and transportation.

Tirado, who casts himself as a constituent-driven anti-politician with no ideas of his own, became the darling of one forum as the audience chuckled along with his power to the people pronouncements. But he quickly lost the crowd when he said that if he was elected to the council and “Jackie Goldberg got up and talked about her lesbian lifestyle . . . I’m the kind of guy that would tell her to shut up.”

He was roundly booed.

But as Fabian Nunez, political director for the county labor federation, said: “I think overall this is becoming one of the most difficult races to call. Every day it becomes even more difficult.”