Campaign Ending on Sour Note for Voters

Kathleen Hoskanian sat at an outdoor cafe at the Grove shopping center Sunday morning and sighed as she collected her thoughts about Tuesday’s election for mayor of Los Angeles.

“It’s too bad we don’t have more of a choice,” she said, lamenting that the two contenders have devoted the last weeks of the campaign to attacks on each other. “You don’t know who to believe anymore.”

Whether incumbent James K. Hahn or challenger Antonio Villaraigosa becomes the next mayor depends, in large part, on what swing voters, such as Hoskanian, do when they go to the polls.

On Sunday, The Times interviewed voters in the two most hotly contested areas -- the San Fernando Valley and South Los Angeles -- as well as at the Grove, an upscale mall that is a frequent campaign stop.

With turnout expected to be low Tuesday, the candidates are trying to reach every voter in these areas. Precinct walkers descend on their homes. Campaigns mailers flood their mailboxes. Their phones trill with calls urging them to vote for one or the other.

Hahn visited five black churches in South Los Angeles on Sunday, Villaraigosa went to seven, and then both drove up to the San Fernando Valley. Over the weekend, both also dropped by the Grove or the adjacent Farmers Market in the Mid-City area.

But despite the attention, some voters in these areas expressed disappointment Sunday that the campaign is ending without an inspiring discussion of how to heal the city’s ills: traffic, crime and failing public schools.

Many complained that the candidates have relentlessly torn into each other, leaving voters to choose, as Hoskanian said, “between the lesser of two evils.”

The Hancock Park resident, who works for American Airlines, ticked off a list of issues she thinks the next mayor needs to confront, including gangs and after-school programs.

She is leaning toward Villaraigosa, she said, “not because of anything he said” but because former presidential candidate John F. Kerry endorsed him.

In southwestern Los Angeles, meanwhile, the city’s landscape has been transformed by the heated campaign battle. Dozens of campaign signs crowd the median on Manchester Avenue, overshadowing the daisies.

The political drama is not readily apparent on the wide residential side streets that run between Manchester and Century Boulevard. These are neighborhoods that once were Hahn strongholds. But resentment over how Hahn pushed out Bernard C. Parks, who is black, as police chief means this middle-class African American area is up for grabs.

In the park by St. Andrews Recreation Center, 11 men clustered around a game of dominos. When asked about the election, a dismissive, contemptuous series of shouts went up, all directed at the incumbent. None said that he planned to vote for Hahn.

Monica Moore, a 59-year-old nurse, said she has been inundated by mail. A man from the Villaraigosa campaign stopped by Saturday, she said, polite enough and with a simple plea to vote for the challenger.

But like many voters here, Moore’s most important issue is one that the mayor has little power over: education. She has grandchildren in the public schools, and said she is disturbed by the large class sizes. She is still trying to figure out who will get her vote.

Trouble in the schools weighs heavily on voters here, and many of them said Sunday that they hold incumbent Hahn accountable, rightly or wrongly.

David James said a few weeks after his son Kevin started his freshman year at Washington Preparatory, a high school in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the youth was held up at gunpoint at a bus station near the campus. James moved his son to an L.A. Unified charter school, and said he’s thinking about voting for the challenger.

“Mayor Hahn, you know, he’s not doing what he’s promised as far as taking care of the schools,” said James, 59. “That’s the only issue I have.”

Alvin Taylor, 59, a city parks worker, offered a host of complaints about life under Hahn.

He is concerned about the scandals he’s read about, that the Hahn administration is under investigation for how it awarded contracts. And he is dismayed by the Los Angeles Police Department’s treatment of young people in parks.

“I don’t think [Villaraigosa] is going to be any better,” he said. “We just need a new head up there every once in a while.”

But residents such as Don Holyfield believe that Hahn deserves another term. He is concerned about what he sees as the LAPD’s problem with police brutality, but he considers Hahn “a man of his word” who needs a few more years to leave a lasting legacy. “Problems are not solved overnight,” the 50-year-old contractor said. With Villaraigosa, he added, “We don’t know what he’s going to do.”

Stacey Brannon, 37, who works for SBC Communications, supported Hahn in 2001, and is voting for him again this year.

The first time, she said, “I voted for him because of the Hahn legacy” -- a reference to Hahn’s father, the late county Supervisor Kenneth Hahn. “The second time around, I feel like he’s the lesser of two evils.”

Brannon’s report card for the Hahn administration is mixed. She likes the way the city comes out quickly with paint buckets when she calls about fresh graffiti. But she doesn’t feel any safer than four years ago, is dismayed by the high cost of housing and doesn’t like the way Hahn handled the ouster of Chief Parks. Overall, she said, the quality of life in Los Angeles “has stayed the same basically. I don’t think there’s a big project he’s done that I can think of.”

Pelton Rogers, 86, proudly placed a blue Hahn for Mayor sign in his yard on 84th Street. A retired carpenter, he struck up a friendship with Hahn’s father years ago. Hahn, he said, has been “a pretty good mayor for everybody.”

More than 20 miles away in the southern San Fernando Valley near Sepulveda Dam, voters said they had been bombarded with phone calls and mailers. Many said the tone of the campaign had turned them off.

“I don’t think it’s been very positive,” said Erik Anderson, who was walking his poodle and watching a softball game at the Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area, where the sun-splashed diamonds were busy with Sunday leagues.

The Van Nuys bond trader said he has received phone calls from the Hahn campaign in which callers seemed “so surprised” when he told them he would vote for the mayor.

Since then, however, Anderson, 30, said he has changed his mind. “We might as well try someone new,” he said, adding that the Hahn administration has done a particularly poor job maintaining streets. “The roads are embarrassing.”

Although education seemed to be the top concern of South L.A. voters, in the Valley, snarled and potholed roads appeared to top the wish list that voters have for the next mayor. At a Barnes & Noble on Ventura Boulevard, Harlene Oren, a retiree from Encino, said traffic in her neighborhood is “horrible.” She said she had voted by mail, but would not reveal whom she voted for.

Mike Benjamin, 42, of Sherman Oaks agrees that City Hall needs to do a lot more to ease traffic in the Valley. But he also wants the city to spruce up ball fields such as the ones at Sepulveda Dam. “Some of these fields are just so run down,” said Benjamin, an office manager who was waiting for his softball game to start. He complained about the lack of trees, working water fountains and comfortable stands.

Still, Benjamin said he is backing Hahn because he believes the city places too much emphasis on bilingualism, including in employment. And he said he worries that Villaraigosa would advocate for more, at the expense of keeping “English as a first language.”

But David Velarde, 40, who also was taking in a game, said Hahn has had his chance. “It didn’t seem like he did anything,” he said. Velarde, who works for a plumbing contractor, added that the city should help expand Neighborhood Watch programs and install more security cameras on street corners.

“I don’t know if anybody can make a difference, but Villaraigosa seems like more of a people person,” he said.

Meanwhile, back at the Grove, Jim Hillin and his wife, Kim Little, who live in Cheviot Hills, said their votes could cancel each other out, but both were united in their irritation at a campaign they said has done little to inspire.

“It’s confusing to know what any kind of truth is about these people,” said Hillin, adding that he is favoring “whoever is not Hahn.”

Little was no less disaffected with the campaign, although she was leaning toward Hahn. “I just don’t believe what the other guy is saying.”

Hillin said he had difficulty having confidence in either of them. “The mayor should be a visionary,” he said. “All I’ve heard from both is: ‘My esteemed opponent is ... a cheat.’ ”

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Times staff writer Paul Pringle contributed to this report.