Activist Armies March in Vote Battle : Council Elections to Test Interest Groups’ Sway Over Voters

As evening shadows fall across the well-preserved, Tudor-style homes of Eucalyptus Avenue, Marilyn Gottschall knocks on one more door.

This time, instead of introducing herself as “your neighbor down the street,” she greets Ida Huitt, an elderly friend, who invites her inside.

“I can’t stay,” Gottschall says. “I’m canvassing this district for Ray Grabinski. He’s running for City Council.”

Grabinski has already come calling, Huitt says, and she admires his “pleasing personality.” But she’s had second thoughts about voting for him, she says.

She recalls the comments of a friend who had worked with Grabinski’s opponent, Councilwoman Eunice Sato, when Sato was a PTA president. Sato had been hard to work for, Huitt says, but “she got things done.”

For Gottschall, the task is to eliminate the second thoughts of her neighbors before the April 8 primary election. And to reinforce the community-activist image that Grabinski has been cultivating for nearly a year during an aggressive door-to-door campaign.

Group Involvement

She and hundreds of other volunteers working for Grabinski and for candidates in three other City Council races are representatives of community, political and labor organizations that in recent years have become increasingly involved in municipal politics--and whose influence will be tested on election day.

Gottschall belongs to the highly visible, 580-member Long Beach Area Citizens Involved, which has virtually staked its reputation on defeating Sato, or at least making her run hard for the first time in her 11-year political career.

“I think the only power that’s recognized in the city of Long Beach is vote-getting power. . . . We do see the Grabinski campaign as a litmus test for us,” said Sid Solomon, president of Citizens Involved, a liberal community group that attends all City Council meetings and takes positions on nearly every important local issue.

“We’re concentrating on the 7th District. We’re working very, very hard for Grabinski,” said Solomon, whose group broke tradition in endorsing Grabinski nearly a year before the election.

Citizens Involved, which distributes 4,000 copies of its own newspaper every six weeks and produces an interview program on local cable television, has helped raise about $4,000 from its members for Grabinski, Solomon said. Dozens of its members will walk for the candidate or work phones over the next 12 days, he said.

Indeed, the 7th District would seem to be a clear test not only of the group’s ability to influence an election, but also the importance to candidates of gaining the benediction of an array of local special-interest groups.

Sato, who says she has never courted special-interest or neighborhood groups, has the endorsement of only one, the Long Beach Fire Fighters Assn. The political action committee of the Downtown Long Beach Associates, a group of downtown business owners, has contributed $1,140 to her campaign but has not formally endorsed her.

Joining Citizens Involved in support of Grabinski are the 625-member Police Officers Assn., the 2,000-member Teachers Assn. of Long Beach, the 2,200-member City Employees Assn., the large gay community’s Lambda Democratic Club and the 26-union Greater Long Beach Labor Coalition, which claims more than 120,000 members. Those organizations and eight others that make up the Council of Long Beach Organizations also collectively endorsed Grabinski. Other Council of Organizations members include the Chicano Political Caucus, the Council of Seniors of Greater Long Beach, the Democratic Women’s Study Club, the Gray Panthers, the Long Beach Area Fair Budget Coalition, the Long Beach Democratic Club, the League of Latin American Citizens and the Long Beach chapter of the National Organization for Women.

Top officials of several of those groups said they will be working to defeat Sato. For example, Walter Miller, general manager of the City Employees Assn., said about 50 of his union’s members will campaign in District 7 on weekends.

Grabinski’s strongest support, however, has come from a California Heights group he helped found six years ago when fighting construction of an oil refinery in that neighborhood. Over the years, he has been spokesman for the California Heights Action Group on several issues at City Hall, and now the group provides him with a 35-member campaign staff, he said. Individual members have also contributed nearly $3,000 to his campaign, Grabinski said.

“I’m trying to sell the kinds of things we’ve been a part of,” said Grabinski, a delicatessen owner in Bixby Knolls. “I was spokesman and the one that received all the publicity. But this campaign is more or less an extension of CHAG.

“Before we had CHAG, there was a feeling that we weren’t at all represented down at City Hall,” he said. “And when we first started out it was punch and kick and scratch down there with the city planning staff. Now it’s changed 180 degrees.”

Sato insisted that most of the groups supporting Grabinski are special interests looking out only for themselves.

“I cannot represent these special-interest groups,” Sato said. “My concern has always been the great masses of people who have no special interest and expect to have a good community in which to live.”

She derides Citizens Involved as “a small, loud group” with little or no power. And, she says, the efforts of the City Employees Assn. and the other groups won’t come to much.

‘Always Against Me’

“They’ve always been against me, so what’s new?” said Sato, a former schoolteacher. “They don’t know who they are opposing. They don’t know my strength. My strength is my solid record of 10 years on the City Council and 25 years in this city. When I work (for constituents) every day for 10 years, that’s solid.”

Sato, however, has been pleased to walk the 7th District two days a week for the last month accompanied by a Long Beach fireman, whose union is the only major one in town to endorse her.

“I’m very proud to have a fireman walking with me,” but it’s impossible to tell if the firefighters’ presence yields any votes, she said.

The Long Beach Fire Fighters Assn., which withheld its support in District 7 in 1982, backed Sato this time “because we’ve been able to deal with her a lot better during the past few years,” said Harold Omel, union president.

Omel said the firefighters had declined to support Sato in the last election because the city’s other two major employee unions, the police officers and city employees associations, had opposed her. Those two unions see her as a staunch supporter of city management.

Sato has requested help from only one or two firefighters at a time, Omel said, but more will be provided to work phones as election day nears, he said.

Though getting little support from special-interest groups, Sato has received campaign contributions from Mayor Ernie Kell and from several large corporations, including McDonnell Douglas Corp., Hughes Aircraft Co., Jet America Airlines and Wrather Port Properties Ltd. She has raised more than $24,000 compared to about $15,000 for Grabinski.

Voters Impressed

Candidates say endorsements of special-interest and neighborhood groups impress voters and help raise campaign funds, though contributions from the groups themselves often are no more than $1,000 to $1,500 per election.

More valuable are the volunteers each group can provide. Especially valuable are the firefighters, who come with a good-guy reputation, candidates say.

Omel said he can have 70 firefighters on the stump on a weekend day. Miller said the City Employees Assn. is much more active than in previous campaigns and will provide 100 workers this time. And Solomon insisted that 400 Citizens Involved members worked for Councilman Wallace Edgerton in 1984, when he won with nearly three-fourths of the vote.

The impact of special-interest groups has indisputably increased since 1976, when voters narrowly approved a measure that required election of City Council members from nine districts instead of citywide.

With district elections, groups such as the firefighters were able to concentrate on a smaller area and see the effect, Omel said. And groups like the Downtown Long Beach Associates have seen their campaign contributions go further, said its president, Vito Romans.

‘Exercising Their Muscle’

“Now the power base has been diffused, and more groups are exercising their muscle,” Kell said.

While the Sato-Grabinski race is the most clear cut in terms of special-interest support, unions and community groups are also being heard in the 1st District.

There, in the city’s diverse downtown area, Evan Anderson Braude has the support of the Labor Coalition, Joy Melton has the endorsement of the firefighters and police unions, and Jenny Oropeza is getting help from several groups for which she has worked. The Downtown Long Beach Associates, which traditionally has distributed several thousand dollars to candidates, has made contributions but will not endorse until after the primary, Romans said.

Melton said she values the endorsements she has received, but added: “I think we establish our own volunteer base from within our own community. I don’t know how effective these organizations are in bringing out the vote.”

But Oropeza, co-chairman of the unsuccessful 1984 initiative effort to elect school board members by district rather than citywide, figures that at least 25% of her current workers come from that campaign.

“I’ve been an active part of them,” she said. “It’s like having one of your own run, and that’s compelling to people. . . . There is a new awakening among community groups about the impact these groups can have.”

Most major community and labor groups have also endorsed in the 3rd District, with the firefighters and police backing Councilwoman Jan Hall and several other organizations favoring James Serles.

In the 9th District, the firefighters, police officers, the Long Beach Board of Realtors and the Labor Coalition are backing Warren Harwood. Opponent Ralph Howe has the Lambda Democratic Club support and the endorsement of the Mobile Homeowners Assn. of Villa Park.

During this campaign, there have been examples of special-interest groups demanding, and getting, the attention of City Council candidates.

On March 9, a new coalition of seven historical preservationist groups, with a total of 4,000 members, hosted a forum where about 15 candidates said they would try to save the city’s landmark buildings. As a result, the city’s strict earthquake ordinance, which would require the costly rehabilitation or demolition of numerous pre-1934 apartment buildings before 1992, has become a top campaign issue in District 1.

“This is definitely part of a larger movement (toward more community involvement) and it’s very exciting,” said Luanne Pryor, president of the Beach Area Concerned Citizens, one of the forum’s sponsors.

Recently, Pryor’s group joined others in getting the council to agree to fund a bicycle path along Ocean Boulevard. Some of the group’s members were also part of a grass-roots citizens committee that took its plan to restructure city government to the City Council early this year. The issue is now being studied by a council-appointed committee, has been a campaign issue, and could be on the ballot this fall.

Another group, the 450-member local chapter of the National Organization for Women, has endorsed in council races for the first time. NOW has about 25 to 30 people walking or working phones three to four hours a week for Oropeza and James Serles in District 3, said President Marie Garside.

The Teachers Assn. of Long Beach is also getting back into City Council politics after many years of inactivity. Though heavily involved in labor negotiations until recently, the teachers union will be working for Oropeza, Serles and Grabinski, all of whom support developers’ fees to pay for new schools and the district election of school board members, said Shirley Guy, executive director.

Guy, also a top official in the Council of Long Beach Organizations and the Labor Coalition, said, “Right now I think there’s a lot of optimism that there can be significant changes on that council.”