Hopefuls Spurn Big-City Politics

Across the San Fernando Valley and in Hollywood, 122 candidates for city councils that do not--and may never--exist have been thrust onto the front lines of the secession movement.

They and their supporters, as well as others who are unaffiliated with the candidates but support the breakup of Los Angeles, see the scores of grass-roots, underfunded campaigns and volunteer networks as the vanguard of cityhood efforts that seek to remake the map of Southern California.

Jerry Hays, a Valley council candidate and painting contractor, recently put it this way to a roomful of fellow Valley residents: “If everybody in this room would call everybody they know, and they would all agree to call everybody they know, we could not lose.”

In training sessions sponsored by secession backers, first-time candidates are learning how to speak to the media (take a simple mantra and keep repeating it), how to gain votes (knock on doors and meet your neighbors) and how to sell secession (memorize key facts about how a new city would be run).

“They’re sort of a manifestation of an idea and of a dream,” Richard Katz, co-chairman of the San Fernando Valley Independence Committee, said of the candidates. “The dream is of a smaller, more representative city, and if [someone] walks to your door as a potential candidate, it makes it real. It puts flesh and bones on the [campaign] mail you get.”

And although the Valley cityhood campaign plans to organize volunteers to talk to residents about secession, organizers also hope to piggyback on the candidates’ efforts and increase the number of “yes” votes as friends, neighbors and followers turn out to support each individual.

To that end, campaign Director Gerry Gunster has urged the 104 candidates for mayor and council to avoid bashing their opponents and concentrate instead on pushing cityhood.

“What I do when I go out is I talk about Valley independence,” said candidate Jay Rosenzweig, a private detective who is using his wife’s law office as his campaign headquarters.

Although he is raising a modest amount of money and hopes to put on a campaign, Rosenzweig said he is not worried about his opponents.

“If cityhood wins and I don’t get the seat, I’ll still feel like I’ve accomplished something,” he said.

In Hollywood, 18 people are running for council of a proposed new city, according to the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder’s list as of Friday afternoon. The top five vote-getters would be elected and choose a mayor from among themselves.

Paul Ramsey, an architect who is among the Hollywood candidates, said his running mates appear more interested in securing cityhood than in their own political success.

“Most of us aren’t campaigning against one another. We’re working for Hollywood,” Ramsey said, adding that his primary goal is to get out the message that Hollywood would improve as its own city. Several candidates are conducting political coffees together, said Ramsey, president of the Hollywood Knolls Community Club.

Secession measures for the Valley and Hollywood will appear on the Nov. 5 ballot. A majority of votes from the proposed city and Los Angeles as a whole are needed for each measure to succeed.

Reliance on a phalanx of citizen-candidates embodies a romantic notion of democracy and could work in a small-town setting, said Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. But it does not take into account the realities of big-city politics, where it takes big money to reach enough voters to ensure a victory, he said.

“Symbolically, I favor their approach,” Guerra said. “But in reality, it hasn’t worked in a big American city in 40 years. And there’s no reason to believe that it would work this November.”

Part of the problem, Guerra and others said, is that Valley candidates will campaign mostly in the Valley, where cityhood already has support. The more pressing need is to win votes in other parts of Los Angeles, they say.

Valley secession backers have said they hope to win a large enough majority in the Valley to overcome a mild loss from the rest of the city. Early polls, however, show secession trailing overall, in part because it is failing badly in Hollywood.

Moreover, the Valley candidates are being advised by a central campaign committee whose out-of-town political strategists are unfamiliar with Southern California requirements. For instance, most shopping centers require a week’s notice and an application before volunteers can hand out literature. As a result, the campaign’s first foray into the community was put off a week, as organizers gathered and filled out applications.

In addition, the candidates’ early outreach to the media has been awkward, critics said. During a training session, for instance, secession backers asked reporters to leave the room and then warned candidates to think twice before granting interviews.

“It’s decidedly unnatural political advice,” said Arnold Steinberg, a Republican political strategist who has served as an advisor to the secession movement. “It’s not the way people run for office.”

Most of the candidates operate businesses or hold jobs and cannot do much campaigning during the day. Sometimes, religious obligations get in the way.

Candidate Carlos Ferreyra, a leader of the cityhood movement, said he did not expect to begin campaigning in earnest until after the Jewish High Holidays in mid-September.

Still, candidates are beginning to venture out, holding campaign coffees and walking precincts.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to run for office without raising hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Rosenzweig said. “That’s why I’m doing this. This is a race for the underdog.”

Susan Deas, 33, a city council candidate from Northridge, works from an office in her mother’s house, where Deas grew up and still lives.

The yard is filled with containers of debris from the 1994 Northridge earthquake. The Deas family is still embroiled in a battle over the insurance settlement from the quake and must save the detritus for upcoming court hearings.

Deas said she hopes to raise at least $1,000 for her campaign. She has won the support of older neighborhood activists who have known her since she was a little girl, she said.

She plans to walk precincts, participate in debates and set up a Web page. But, like others who are running, Deas is uncomfortable trying to raise large amounts of money. That would make her like the big-city politicians many secessionists are trying to defeat, she said.

Candidate Jose E. San Miguel, 60, originally from the state of Tamaulipas, Mexico, set out recently to find support at Hansen Dam. He put up a table and covered it with photographs: of himself running in marathons, of the run-down sections of the park that he is working to improve and of running clubs and school athletic classes he has sponsored.

San Miguel, who has lived in Pacoima for 30 years, has the support of neighborhood council members as well as fellow runners and families from Pacoima who use the park.

He has promised to put bathrooms near the dam, where hundreds of people come daily to run, walk and ride horses. San Miguel also said he would donate his council salary to the new city.

“He’s got a big heart, and he tries to do the right thing in the community,” said Heidi Paul, who serves on the board of the Foothill Trails District Neighborhood Council.

San Miguel personifies much of what secession backers had hoped they would find in candidates: community leaders with a vision for their area. But he does not aggressively push secession itself.

“It is their decision,” he said of the voters. “I cannot tell them what to believe.”

That’s also true of Scott Svonkin, a legislative aide who is running for Valley council in the Studio City/Sherman Oaks area. Svonkin said he has raised more than $80,000 and hired political consultant Rick Taylor to run his campaign.

But Svonkin said he does not intend to use his money and time to push for secession above his own candidacy.

“I want the voters in Studio City and Sherman Oaks to get to know Scott Svonkin,” he said, “to get to know my record of public service and my business accomplishments and get to know my wife and my daughter.”

Although he outpaces most Valley candidates in terms of fund-raising, Svonkin has been forced to economize. He leased space on three billboards--none in his district--to promote his candidacy.

“The billboards on Ventura Boulevard are so expensive, I wasn’t able to get them,” he said.

Most of the candidates would be new to elected office, but Paula Boland, who is running in the Northridge council district, has been there before. Boland is a former state assemblywoman who, during her time in the Legislature, helped make the secession vote possible.

But she too is keeping her campaign modest, fielding phone calls from the kitchen of the house where she has lived since it was new in 1968. Boland has become an unpaid advisor of sorts for other candidates, offering tips on precinct walking and fund-raisers.

“I’ve given them real simple advice,” she said. “The first thing you do is get on the phone and raise money. You walk precincts. Campaign events are OK, but ... then you have to get back on the phone and raise more money.

“You never know how much you’re going to need,” said Boland, who held a fund-raiser over the weekend. “You have to raise enough to win.”

Although Boland is one of secession’s longest-running supporters and an ardent advocate, she will not necessarily be out of office if it fails. Boland also is running for City Council in Los Angeles.