It’s a Big Valley in the Race for Mayor

Two years after the question of whether to stay in Los Angeles or bolt roiled the San Fernando Valley, residents there face another decision: whether to side with the man who led the fight against secession or embrace one of four major challengers, two of them with deep roots north of Mulholland Drive.

Snobs and comedians from “the other side of the hill” poke fun at the Valley as the capital of the pornography industry, urban sprawl and strip malls, and as the area that spawned the idiot-speak of “Valley Girls.” The secession ballot, they note with a smirk, included a proposal to call a new Valley city Camelot.

But those who live and work in the Valley say it represents the core of middle-class Los Angeles; it’s home to people who are serious about their politics and will play a decisive role in the next election.

“It’s going to be a key battleground area in the mayor’s race,” said Councilwoman Wendy Greuel, who lives in Van Nuys. “It’s a high-voter-turnout area with politically active people. If someone doesn’t actively campaign there, they do it at their peril, because the voters there want attention.”

That includes people such as Stanley Gardner, a retired aerospace engineer from Reseda -- 23 miles from City Hall -- who voted for Valley secession.

Gardner doesn’t think much of the city’s leaders. He said with disdain that his pockmarked street has not been resurfaced in half a century, the entire time he has lived there.

“Everything is downtown. They need to do a better job downtown getting the services to us out here,” said Gardner, 84, as he and some friends sat around talking one recent day at the Valley Ranch Barbeque Restaurant.

Asked about those running for mayor of Los Angeles, the former Lockheed employee grunted dismissively.

“I don’t know if I can vote for any of them,” he said, adding of Mayor James K. Hahn: “He hasn’t done anything for us.”

The five major candidates are battling the sentiment represented by Gardner leading up to the March 8 balloting. If no one receives a majority of the vote, a runoff will be held in May.

Hahn, who led the campaign against Valley cityhood, acknowledges that his stand has cost him support in an area of the city that played a crucial role in electing him four years ago. Overall, secession won in the Valley by 4,000 votes out of 245,000 cast, but it lost on a 2-1 vote citywide

“I’m certainly campaigning all over Los Angeles, but with emphasis in the San Fernando Valley, because I know the whole buildup to secession was born out of a frustration that folks in the Valley felt that city government had not paid enough attention to them,” Hahn recently told a group of business leaders in Van Nuys.

Hahn is not alone in paying special attention to the Valley. Three of his four best-funded challengers -- state Sen. Richard Alarcon, Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa and former Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg -- have opened campaign offices in the Valley, establishing a beachhead in the vast northern suburb. The fourth, Bernard C. Parks, has a phone bank operating in the Valley.

The presence of Alarcon and Hertzberg in the race underscores another difficulty for Hahn: In 2001 he faced one serious candidate from the Valley but this time he faces two.

Alarcon and Hertzberg both have represented large parts of the Valley as elected officials from their respective bases in Sun Valley and Sherman Oaks.

A Times Poll this month found that likely voters in the Valley had yet to coalesce around one candidate. In the poll, 21% supported Hertzberg, 18% backed Hahn, 15% supported Villaraigosa, 10% favored Parks and 5% backed Alarcon.

Councilman Greig Smith of Granada Hills, who supports Hahn, says the Valley is crucial to the mayor’s staying in office.

“The San Fernando Valley is going to be the Ohio of this election,” Smith predicted, referring to the state that pushed President Bush over the top in November.

The reason for the Valley’s prominence in city elections is sheer numbers. Its 1.4 million residents represent 36.8% of the city’s population -- 42% of the electorate citywide in the last mayoral election.

In 1993, Republican Richard Riordan won election as mayor after getting 70% of the Valley’s vote. In the rest of the city, former Councilman Mike Woo beat Riordan by a 52% to 48% margin, but the Valley landslide gave Riordan 54% of the vote citywide.

Riordan went on to win reelection in 1997, when 74% of the Valley voters cast ballots for him.

“The Valley was an essential element of winning citywide then, and it is more so now,” said Arnold Steinberg, a political consultant who advised Riordan on the Valley.

Steinberg said Riordan in the 1990s, and Hahn in 2001, appealed to Valley voters who tended to be more conservative than their counterparts elsewhere in the city. Hahn won 55% of the Valley vote in 2001, slightly higher than his margin of victory citywide.

Indeed, though Republicans make up 20.4% of registered voters citywide, they represent 27.6% of voters in the five council districts wholly in the Valley.

Citywide, Democrats make up 56% of the city’s voters, but they constitute fewer than half of those registered to vote in the Valley.

But Jim Hayes, whose Glendale company Political Data Inc. provided demographic data on the Valley to the campaigns of Hahn, Hertzberg, Villaraigosa and Alarcon, says the Valley is no longer the predominantly white enclave that it was in past decades.

The last U.S. census found that 42.5% of the Valley population was Hispanic, with 41.3% white, 9.2% Asian American and 4.5% African American. Two of the five council seats wholly in the Valley are now represented by Latinos: Council President Alex Padilla and Councilman Tony Cardenas.

“It’s just not as homogenous as it once was,” said Allan Hoffenblum, a political consultant not involved in any of the mayoral campaigns.

The demographics could affect the election results: Alarcon and Villaraigosa are expected to split the Latino vote in the Valley and Hertzberg and Hahn are expected to share most of the remaining Valley vote, experts say.

Although Alarcon and Hertzberg live in the Valley, they do not have a lock on the area’s vote.

In fact, Valley candidates have failed to make the runoff in recent elections. Despite a strong Valley turnout, former Councilman Joel Wachs, who lived in Studio City at the time, placed fourth in the 2001 election and third in the 1993 election, just ahead of former Valley-based Assemblyman Richard Katz.

“We haven’t had a history of Valley candidates being able to use their Valley base to win the mayor’s race,” Steinberg said.

Former Rep. Bobbi Fiedler of North Hills said part of the problem is that political stances popular in the Valley can alienate people in other areas of the city -- and vice versa.

Fiedler, who opposed secession and is supporting Hahn, said Hertzberg’s plan to break up the school district is an example of a proposal that may appeal in the Valley but turn off voters elsewhere.

“That may not be as big an issue for people outside the Valley,” Fiedler said.

A Republican, Fiedler is one of the few Valley politicians to win a citywide vote; She won an at-large seat on the Los Angeles school board in 1977. She won by leading a conservative cause, the anti-busing movement.

Fiedler believes Hahn has improved services to the Valley since secession and predicts that will determine the mayoral outcome more than lingering bitterness over the cityhood election.

Others strongly disagree.

David Fleming, chairman of the Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley and a key secession backer, said voter anger over Hahn’s aggressive campaign against Valley cityhood still simmers. Fleming backed Hahn for mayor in 2001, but this year is supporting Hertzberg.

“He declared war on the Valley and expects his constituents to forget that,” Fleming said.

The Times Poll this month found Hahn’s opposition to secession is playing a role in his erosion of support. Twenty-one percent of likely Valley voters said Hahn’s position on secession would make them less likely to vote for him, though the majority said it would play no role.

Among Valley voters who voted for secession, just 14% said they would vote for Hahn; 29% said they would vote for Hertzberg. Hahn’s weaker position is evident in endorsements from the Valley’s elected leaders. Four years ago, Hahn was backed by five of the seven council members who represent the Valley, including Padilla, a Sylmar resident who was on the stage holding Hahn’s arm high in a victory salute on election night in 2001.

This time, Hahn has support from only three of the Valley’s seven council members. Padilla, Cardenas and Greuel have not endorsed in the race -- Padilla and Cardenas backed Hahn four years ago -- and Councilman Jack Weiss has endorsed Villaraigosa.

Padilla has had some notable public disputes with Hahn in recent months, including opposition to a sales tax pushed by Hahn to hire more police. The council last week killed a proposal to put the sales-tax issue on the May ballot.

Hahn said he hoped Valley residents would be impressed by improved services and the number of residents he has placed on city commissions.

“I hope that they will judge my record and see what we’ve been able to do,” Hahn said. “I hope they will see the difference in the openness of neighborhood city halls, that they see we’ve doubled the number of street miles being resurfaced.”

But criticism of Hahn was rampant one recent night at a mayoral debate held by the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn. Hahn skipped the debate.

The group’s chairman, attorney Richard Close, backed Hahn four years ago but this year is supporting Hertzberg. Close was chairman of Valley VOTE, the secession group, and thought Hahn has not delivered on promises to improve services.

But others at the forum were less concerned with the 2-year-old dispute over secession than what the next mayor would do for the Valley.

In questions to candidates and interviews afterward, resident after resident said the issues of greatest concern in the Valley were crime and traffic.

Hahn could benefit from statistics showing that violent crime was down 15.5% in the Valley last year compared with the previous year, and property crime had declined 9.5%.

But all four of his major challengers say the Valley remains under-policed, and residents at the Sherman Oaks forum said traffic was getting worse.

“Traffic is the most serious problem. We have gridlock,” said Carl Weferling, a Sherman Oaks resident.

“We waste a lot of time stuck in traffic on the freeways,” agreed Jocelyn Korchak of Sherman Oaks. She said all of the challengers who attended the debate said the right things, but she remained skeptical.

“They sound very good, very intelligent,” she said after listening to candidates run through lists of promises for the Valley. “The only problem is, I want to know where is the money for all of this?”