12 Elections, 1 Common Woe: Money

Twelve very different Los Angeles County cities will hold elections Tuesday for public officials faced with the same essential problem: money.

From urban city to desert municipality, the common issue is how to get more and spend less while grappling with daunting funding losses from the state’s financial quagmire.

Long Beach, California’s fifth-largest city, has a problem to match its size: a three-year, $105-million shortfall, which dwarfs an array of other issues.

Expansion around Long Beach Airport, a financial cloud over the iconic Queen Mary and a police probe into the nonprofit fundraising foundation for the city’s signature grand prix car race all pale compared with money woes.

If the nine council members don’t heed their consultant’s warning to stop spending windfall money on fixed expenses and start severely cutting costs -- they didn’t with the last budget -- they risk a municipal bankruptcy.

Such a debacle would distract attention from other concerns in the city of 461,000, such as worries about police and fire staffing, airport-area growth and a charged debate over a proposed liquefied natural gas plant in the shared Long Beach-Los Angeles shipping basin that promises greater efficiency but has raised questions about health and security risks.

The Long Beach Area Chamber of Commerce endorsed incumbents Laura Richardson, Dennis Carroll, Rob Webb and Dan Baker.

The Long Beach Press-Telegram called for their ouster, citing the ever-growing deficit under their stewardship. Incumbents said the city staff misled them about the risks of a huge 2002 pension hike that the council unanimously gave city employees -- who are reliable voters. But the editorial deemed the hike an obvious and “dangerous risk” and said “taxpayers lost.”

Challenging Carroll is Patrick O’Donnell. Running against Webb are Kennedy Collins, Rae M. Gabelich and Terry G. Jensen. Vying for Richardson’s council seat are Regina Chaney, Lewis Lester and Dee Andrews. Baker has no opponents on the ballot but faces declared write-in candidate M.L. “Sonny” Bozeman.

Off the Long Beach coast, voters in the Catalina Island city of Avalon will choose two council members and a mayor. But perhaps more significant are two ballot measures that would raise the hotel bed tax and redirect business license fees from the chamber of commerce to the city. The income would help replace about $400,000 that acting City Manager Pete Woolson has said the city will lose in state funding.

In the city of Lancaster in the Antelope Valley, meanwhile, fighting crime is the dominant theme in Tuesday’s elections. A fast-growing region known for affordable housing, the Antelope Valley saw a record 43 homicides in 2003, as many as half gang-related, and law-enforcement officials are worried that cheap rent and home prices are luring gang members from the core to the northernmost edge of the county.

Public safety, then, has been a focus of local candidates, although one has been convicted of stalking and the son of another candidate was charged in two stabbings.

Four-term incumbent Mayor Frank Roberts, who faces three challengers, is playing up twin efforts that occurred on his watch: drug sweeps and the demolition of derelict buildings that can attract crime.

One of the challengers, tax preparer Gene Gaynor, says a good way to battle crime is a greater emphasis on Neighborhood Watch programs and community policing.

Mayoral candidate Tom Delaney has a tough-on-crime stance and remains on the ballot but says he stopped campaigning after his son, Sean, was charged in February with attempted murder in the stabbing of two men.

Mayoral hopeful David “Ab” Abber has criticized the city leadership for failing to hire new deputies. Abber was convicted of felony stalking in October 2001, according to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.

Whether to hire new deputies is the city’s sole ballot question. Measure 04-A, which requires a two-thirds vote to pass, would fund 10 new sheriff’s deputies with a $25-per-parcel property tax. Observers say it pits residents’ desire for safe neighborhoods against their strong anti-tax sentiment.

Managing growth is the major issue in Santa Clarita, where the vice chairman of the local Sierra Club group, Henry Schultz, is taking on two City Council incumbents, Cameron Smyth and Bob Kellar. Schultz, a research scientist, says city leaders are beholden to big developers.

Schultz has promised to fight overdevelopment, including the planned 20,885-home Newhall Ranch subdivision to be built outside the city limits. The county has approved the overall Newhall Ranch plan, but more detailed parts of the project must still be approved later.

Contests for local offices will also take place Tuesday in Arcadia, Sierra Madre, Walnut, Culver City, El Segundo, Lawndale and Whittier.

Walnut voters will consider a proposed $25-per-parcel property tax for the city library, which is partly funded by Los Angeles County’s financially strapped library system.

Measure L would raise about $210,000, which could prevent cuts next year, when the county library system faces a projected $9-million budget shortfall.

Eleven cities in the county rejected similar ballot measures in March, county library spokeswoman Nancy Mahr said.

Bradbury and Vernon canceled their City Council elections because in both communities, only one candidate entered for each open seat.

Bob Stern, president of the Los Angeles-based Center for Governmental Studies, said such scenarios are increasingly common statewide, especially in small cities.

He attributes the trend to voter apathy, a lack of local political coverage in the media and the money cities save by not running elections, which in 900-person Bradbury would have cost up to $10,000, said City Clerk Claudia Saldana.

In Malibu, where one officeholder wryly observed that civic debate is a battle between “no growth” and “painfully slow growth,” Tuesday’s election is a symbolic referendum on the City Council’s recent attempt to manage development pressure.

In November, the council supported Measure M, a proposal it said would help the city slow development, acquire open land near its Civic Center and bring a wastewater treatment plant.

But opponents persuaded voters that the complicated proposal would have actually encouraged development.

On the ballot for three open council seats are two incumbents -- Jeff Jennings and Ken Kearsley -- and four challengers, Walter F. Keller, John Mazza, Pamela C. Ulich and Jay Liebig. William Winokur’s name appears on the ballot, although he dropped out of the race, the city clerk’s office said.

The wisdom of backing Measure M has remained hotly disputed. Challenger Keller called it “a vicious thing negotiated by amateurs.”

Incumbent Jennings defended the measure. “It’s been re-characterized as this pro-growth initiative, which in fact it never was,” he said. “It would have reduced commercial build-out and supplied us with parks.

“But that’s politics.”