LOCAL ELECTIONS LA PUENTE CITY COUNCIL : Perennial Incumbents, Apathy Reign

Ask Mayor Max E. Ragland how long he’s been on the La Puente City Council, and he has to pause to do some simple arithmetic with a paper and pencil.

“Twenty-four years,” he says with some surprise.

And how many times have his fellow councilmen elected him mayor? “I don’t know. It’s funny, I haven’t kept track of that,” he says. “I’ve been mayor, I think, five times. . . . I’ve also been vice-mayor several times, but I don’t know how many.”

Ragland, 70, can be forgiven his confusion. After all, he and the two other incumbents running for reelection Tuesday have been on the council for a combined total of 60 years. Among Los Angeles County’s 86 municipalities, the La Puente City Council may be the most experienced and deeply entrenched.

Every other year, with rare exceptions, La Puente voters have elected the same group of men to office. No outside challenger has unseated a councilman in 22 years.

First elected in 1958, Ragland is running for his seventh four-year term on the five-member council. Francis (Frank) Palacio, 62, also is seeking his seventh term. Louis Guzman, 70, is going for a fourth term.

Another councilman, Charles Storing, 62, has served on the body since 1960. One of the challengers in this year’s election hadn’t even been born when Ragland, Palacio and Storing first took office.

La Puente’s experience is not uncommon among the smaller cities in Los Angeles County. In most April elections, incumbents win about 70% of the contests, records indicate. Each year a handful of the 40 or so cities holding April elections have them canceled because of a lack of challengers.

Even in this company, however, La Puente stands out. This year’s “campaign” has not included a single candidate forum or rally. Council members and challengers agree that community response to the election can be summarized in one word: apathy.

If next month’s election follows patterns of the past, about 10% of the registered voters in this city of 33,000 will cast ballots. In previous elections, candidates have been elected with as few as 600 votes.

“There’s a small group of people who vote all the time and that group votes in the same people,” said Louis Perez, 52, a two-time loser in the council race. In his first two campaigns, Perez lost by 93 and 257 votes.

To get an edge this time, Perez is registering new voters. “Everybody says that it’s time for a change, for some new blood,” said Perez. “Well, if you want some new blood, you need to get some new voters.”

Guzman said he, too, is “disturbed” by the low voter turnout. In the past campaigns, he said, “When we’ve had candidate forums, more candidates would show up than voters.”

For the perpetually elected councilmen, the twice-monthly council meetings long ago became routine.

To date, Councilman Palacio has attended about 550 meetings. Collectively, the current council has more than 2,000 meetings under its belt. Palacio, Ragland and Storing have each voted on an estimated 4,000 agenda items.

With consensus being the rule, the vast majority of those items have ended with 5-0 votes.

“We stopped fighting a long time ago,” Palacio said of the council. “Why should we make a lot of noise and get our city in the paper?”

Supporters of the long-serving councilmen say they have been consistently reelected because they are doing a good job of running the city. As proof, they point to the city’s $16.7 million cash reserve.

Rather than allow the city’s savings to grow, the five challengers say some of La Puente’s surplus money should be spent on badly needed social reform. They say much has changed in La Puente since Ragland was first elected to the council in 1958.

Back then, walnut and orange groves surrounded the 3.5-square-mile city. The nearby Pomona Freeway was only a dotted line on an urban planner’s map and the phrase “drive-by shooting” had yet to enter the local vocabulary. Downtown La Puente was a small, but thriving commercial center, with families patronizing the Star Theater, a movie house complete with a “crying room” for infants.

The Star Theater now shows X-rated films. Last week, the marquee promised patrons an “Interlude of Lust.” Since the halcyon days of the 1950s, gang- and drug-related crime have tarnished La Puente’s image as a quiet bedroom community--crack dealers can be seen operating openly just a mile down Main Street from City Hall.

“Something has to be done, these issues need to be addressed,” said candidate Manuel Garcia, 52, a member of the city Planning Commission who is taking a second shot at a council seat. “I don’t think the council is doing anything about it.”

The main shopping district along Hacienda Boulevard has suffered a series of major blows in the past year. First, the Gemco department store closed--sales and property taxes from the store were the city’s largest source of revenue. A Jeep and a Ford car dealership also have left the city, moving to greener pastures in the neighboring City of Industry.

La Puente has fallen on tough times, the three incumbents concede. Guzman said La Puente, like other suburban cities, is finding it difficult to fight the drug epidemic.

“We’ll chase (the drug dealers) from here, and then they’ll go someplace else,” Guzman said. “It’s like the Medfly problem. It won’t go away.”

Despite the city’s economic and social problems, the challengers face an uphill battle. Not since 1968 has an incumbent lost his seat to an outside challenger. New council members have only been elected when councilmen have retired or died.

The newest member of the council, Joe Alderete, was elected in 1986 when four-term councilman Allen T. Lefever retired. Mayor Ragland left the council in 1974 for a seat on the Planning Commission, but was reappointed in 1983 when three-term councilman Allen J. Martin died.

The last outsider to defeat a city councilman was former state Sen. Joseph B. Montoya, who was recently convicted in a corruption scandal. And even Montoya didn’t win his council seat on the first ballot. Montoya finished the 1968 election in a tie with Councilman Storing.

Palacio recalled that the two candidates refused to pay for a recount to break the tie. State regulations stipulated that the race should then be decided by a coin toss.

“They didn’t like that idea very much,” Palacio remembered. So the councilmen decided to recount the ballots themselves. For 13 hours they sat in the council chambers tallying the votes by hand.

In the end, four ballots were invalidated. Montoya was elected by a single vote, launching the 28-year-old social worker on his political career. Five years later, when Montoya was elected to the state Assembly, Storing was reelected to the council to fill the vacancy.

Besides Garcia and Perez, other challengers in this year’s election include Garrett Terrones, a 22-year-old department store cashier, and Edward Chavez, a substitute teacher. Sally Holguin-Fallon, who lists her occupation as “educator,” is attempting to become the first woman elected to the council.

Garcia believes it is only a matter of time before one of the incumbents loses an election. “These people haven’t been challenged, really. Now people that are running are working hard at it, walking the precincts, doing mailers and having fund-raisers.”

Palacio, a veteran politician with 40 years of public service, admitted that he has done little campaigning for this election. “I can’t,” he said, “because my bones are getting older.”

The white-haired councilman said he admires the persistence of his opponents.

“They’re all over the place campaigning. More power to them,” Palacio said. “But once I put my name on the ballot, they’ll have to fight me for a seat.

“If I lose, no problem,” he continued. “Don’t get me wrong, I want to win. But I’ve already had my glory.”