Ex-Foes Alarcon and Katz Have Vivid Memories of Chad

All this talk about hanging chads--those fickle flakes of paper befuddling Florida’s presidential vote counters--is old news to a certain state senator from Sylmar.

Richard Alarcon, who was elected after a bitter Democratic primary that he won by a mere 29 votes, has been chatting about chads all week, ever since he realized that Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush’s knockdown fight for Florida’s 25 electoral votes may hinge upon those tiny squares of paper voters poke out of punch-card ballots to indicate their chosen candidate.

“He started talking to me last night about chads, and I was like, ‘Who in the heck is Chad?’ ” said Mikki Bako Sorensen, Alarcon’s chief of staff.

Chads are more than an arcane bit of electoral trivia to Alarcon. For five long days in the summer of 1998, he waited while a squad of county workers recounted, by hand, some of the 113,000 ballots cast in his nail-biter of an election against former Assemblyman Richard Katz. Each man dispatched teams of 10 to monitor the recount, which Katz requested and paid for, spending about $40,000.

The vote tally shifted ever so slightly because human eyes caught a few votes that the ballot-counting machines had missed. As in Florida, the problem was that in rare instances a chad defied the voter’s poke and remained clinging to a ballot by a corner or two or even three, preventing tallying machines from properly recording the vote.

“Every day I was getting different results,” Alarcon recalled. One day, his lead narrowed to seven votes. At another point, it widened to 45. “I was literally hanging by those little chads.”

Eventually, Katz called off the recount. He, too, recalled the awesome power of the chad this week, remembering the feeling of helplessness as his political fate dangled before him.

“It’s nuts,” Katz said. “You sit there and you run through all these scenarios in your mind as to why you think you’re going to win. You’re waiting as people hold these ballots up to the light to see if you get a vote or not. The thing I came away with is a reminder of how sloppy this process can be.”

In California, chads hanging by a single corner count as votes, said Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Conny McCormack. Chads attached by more than one corner are disqualified, but the standards in Florida are looser. No state law there spells out how election officials should divine a voter’s choice if a ballot is only partially punched.

“There’s no perfect voting system, and these chads sometimes don’t dislodge,” McCormack said. “But I’m afraid now people have this impression that they never dislodge, when in fact probably 99.9% of the time they do.”

Both Alarcon and Katz, loyal Democrats to the core, support Gore and say that the presidential vote should be recounted by hand in at least a few Democratic-leaning Florida counties. But the sour aftertaste of their own state Senate race--which Katz contested in court--still lingers.

Asked by a reporter to pose for a photograph with his old rival Alarcon, Katz immediately said no. He called back a moment later to say that he would reconsider--”if Bush and Gore do it first.”

LAST CALL: With San Fernando Valley lawmakers Tony Cardenas (D-Sylmar) and Bob Hertzberg (D-Sherman Oaks) easily winning reelection to their last term in the Assembly last week, the question on the minds of some political junkies is: What will they do in two years when they are forced out by term limits?

Cardenas said he is seriously thinking about a run for Congress, adding that he is confident that redistricting will create a new open seat in the area for the 2002 election.

“I haven’t made a final decision, but I’m definitely exploring that,” Cardenas said, just days after he was reelected to a last term with 76% of the vote.

Cardenas once considered a run for Los Angeles City Council but said last week his greater interest is in Washington.

“One of the things that interests me about the federal government is making laws for the entire nation, instead of just dealing with local issues such as providing street lights,” Cardenas said.

The assemblyman believes his work as chairman of the Assembly Budget Committee will prepare him well for a move to Washington. He has already broached the subject with the area’s current congressman, Rep. Howard Berman (D-Mission Hills), assuring the veteran that he would only run if a new, open seat is created.

“I’ve made it very clear to him that I am interested in Congress but that Howard would be a colleague, not someone I would challenge,” Cardenas said.

The assemblyman predicted California would pick up at least one and possibly two congressional seats after the new census is complete, and, as a member of the Assembly Elections Committee, he is in a good position to see that any addition of districts provides new opportunities in the Valley.

Cardenas said he and others are wondering what Hertzberg will do.

Hertzberg is focusing on the speakership and has not begun to plan beyond, according to an aide. Earlier this year, he abandoned thoughts of running for city attorney in 2001 so he could instead become Assembly speaker.

NOHO SUNSET: There doesn’t appear to be much future in getting elected to a project area committee advising the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency.

In July, the City Council voted to disband a committee elected to oversee creation of the city’s largest redevelopment project in the northeast San Fernando Valley after the group became mired in acrimonious debate, capped by a fistfight at its last meeting.

This week, the CRA sent notices to the 25 members of the project area committee overseeing redevelopment in North Hollywood, advising them that their authority on the panel has expired.

“It’s an outrage,” said Victor Viereck, chairman of the panel. “They don’t want oversight. They want a rubber stamp.”

Elected by the residents and property owners in North Hollywood, the committee has been dominated by redevelopment agency critics for years.

The panel has angered City Hall by questioning many redevelopment proposals and filing complaints with authorities about what members felt was misconduct by the city.

Lillian Burkenheim, the agency’s project manager in North Hollywood, said an ordinance approved by the City Council three years ago that extended the redevelopment project included a sunset clause for the project area committee.

The City Council will now have the option of creating another advisory committee, Burkenheim said.

“They [council members] want to be inclusive,” Burkenheim said. The new appointed committee, as opposed to the elected project area committee, will have more flexibility to discuss issues as they arise in meetings, Burkenheim said.

Despite the city action, Viereck said he will talk to other members of the panel about continuing to meet as an unsanctioned project area committee, so that the voice of dissent is not silenced.

After all, he noted, a project area committee officially disbanded 11 years ago in Hollywood is still holding meetings.