Mud Flies in Orange Race

The mailers once depicted her peering from behind a pile of lumber and accepting hefty donations from sinister developers.

Now Carolyn Cavecche, a conservative running for the Orange City Council in an officially nonpartisan election, is painted as a “liberal activist” in cahoots with like-minded operatives out to destroy the GOP.

So is she a tree-hugger or a builder’s pawn?

Whatever sticks.

Such is the state of politics in Orange. Cavecche is facing Scott Steiner in a special election Tuesday to fill a seat left vacant after Councilman Mark Murphy was elected mayor in November. The two candidates, who campaigned in last fall’s general election but failed to win enough votes to gain a council seat outright, have nearly identical conservative platforms and say mostly the same things on the stump.

But voters would never know that from the stinging mailers each candidate is sending out.

Steiner, a deputy district attorney, warns that if Cavecche wins, the council will be controlled by Shirley Grindle, a slow-growth advocate and campaign finance watchdog.

Cavecche says that Steiner is a front man for supporters of a commercial airport at El Toro.

It appeared for a while that the airport would be the dividing issue, with Steiner in support and Cavecche against. Whoever is elected could tip the scales on a council that’s divided 2-2 on an El Toro airport.

But that dividing line has blurred.

Steiner is distancing himself from the Airport Working Group, a Newport Beach-based organization that supports an El Toro airport--even though the group spent $54,016 on mailers backing him and two other Orange candidates in November’s general election.

Steiner now says he opposes any plan that would bring flights over Orange.

Never mind that his father, a former county supervisor, kicked $15,000 into the Airport Working Group’s mail campaign last time around. That campaign included the fliers implying Cavecche was beholden to developers.

“We knew nothing about that independent expenditure,” said Frank Caterinicchio, a Steiner campaign advisor. “If we had, we would have put a stop to it.

“Scott was never on record in support of an airport,” he said.

So is Steiner opposed to an El Toro airport? “I didn’t say that,” Caterinicchio said.

Cavecche, who says she is against the county’s plan for El Toro without exception, accuses Steiner of hedging because he is indebted to the Airport Working Group. She describes him as a product of the “political establishment” who moved back into town less than a year ago to advance his political career.

Cavecche wants Steiner’s boss, Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas, to investigate allegations that Steiner used his office computer to compile lists of contributors and e-mail another prosecutor about campaign strategies. “I guess if you live in a politician’s family, you can do whatever you want,” she said. Steiner says the charges are frivolous.

His campaign charges that Cavecche, a library commissioner and stay-at-home mother, is a puppet of local activist Grindle. It sent out a mailing accusing Cavecche of joining with Grindle to wage “campaigns of personal destruction against Republican leaders.”

“It is time people learned that liberal activist Shirley Grindle is trying to control the Orange City Council,” Caterinicchio said.

Grindle, an advisory member of the preservationist East Orange Neighborhood Committee, did endorse Cavecche last fall, but she is sitting out this race. “Why are they sending a hit piece out on me when I am not running for office?” she asked.

The latest mailing accuses Grindle and Cavecche of teaming up to file a lawsuit against Steiner in an effort to block him from listing his endorsers on the campaign ballot. Grindle said she had nothing to do with that legal action and is considering filing a libel suit against the mailing’s authors.

Yet, despite the nasty political back and forth, there has been little disagreement over one of the biggest concerns of voters: the planned development of East Orange, a 7,000-acre swath of unincorporated land ripe for development and slated to be annexed by the city.

“We have been mouthing a lot of the same stuff on that,” Cavecche said. “We’re both saying what needs to be said.”

That would be general statements about Orange needing a lot more open space. They speak in broad terms about considering every new development in East Orange carefully.

What voters won’t hear from either are ultimatums to the Irvine Co., the corporate landowner of all of East Orange. Nor are they pushing for any radical environmental measures.

“Orange is paved over,” said Fred Smoller, chairman of the political science department at Chapman University. “It is a real fight now to get every piece of land we can get for a park.”

But Orange, he noted, is a conservative city where voters panic at any proposal that might raise taxes.

“I don’t see any candidate saying ‘no development,’ ” he said. “That’s Santa Monica, not here.”