Water Board Victors Are Accused of Buying Win

SANTA CLARITA —  The three directors of the Newhall County Water District, ousted by challengers in Tuesday’s election, accuse the victors of buying the election and contend that the winners will be developers’ puppets.

Incumbent David Rapoport repeated his complaint that the winners--Val Thomas, Barbara Dore and Tom Campbell--had spent about $34,000 in campaign expenses among them as of Oct. 18, according to county data. The incumbents spent a combined $6,000, reports say.

Rapoport and incumbents Lynne Plambeck and Edwin Dunn maintained that their opponents’ budgets, nearly double the limit set in accordance with the state campaign finance measure Proposition 208, meant moneyed developers were trying to buy seats on the board.

The massive Newhall Ranch development proposed by the Newhall Land & Farming Co. would not be in the area covered by the district, the smallest of Santa Clarita’s three major water retailers, which serves only 10% of Santa Clarita Valley residents.

But the incumbents insisted that Newhall Land, the valley’s largest landowner, was seeking to secure water for Newhall Ranch and eventually dissolve the Newhall district into a valleywide monopoly--which a company spokeswoman and the victors strongly deny.

Dunn and Plambeck were unreachable Wednesday, though Plambeck said Monday that if she could not be contacted after a loss, her reaction would be simply: “They just bought an election.”

“The public’s saying, ‘We don’t care if the Mafia is running this district, just give us decent water,’ ” Rapoport said.

Campbell took 21.4% of the vote, Dore 17.4%, and Thomas 17.3%. Plambeck, Dunn and Rapoport finished with 14.9%, 14.6% and 14.4%.

“Their whole campaign was manufactured,” Rapoport said. “Did they want to debate the issues? No. If you really believe that the water is poor and the district is being run into the ground, wouldn’t you want to get in front of a camera or get up onstage and prove it? They didn’t want to. Their whole purpose was to run a negative campaign.”

Thomas, a local Realtor, acknowledged that residents of the district, which includes most of Newhall and slivers of Castaic and Pinetree, will be expecting the new board members to deliver on their promises of lower rates and better water when they take office Dec. 5.

“We do have some specific plans, but some of what we do will depend on the other members of the water family,” she said, referring to other wholesale and retail agencies as well as state suppliers.

The challengers attacked the water quality and fiscal management of the district, saying the incumbents had led it into the red and still have not paid off a $3-million loan for repairs after the 1994 Northridge earthquake. District Auditor Karin Russell said $2.4 million of the loan remains unpaid, but produced overall figures that show the district is operating on budget.

As Santa Clarita nears its 10th anniversary as a city, development is booming and new developments need water. Such is the case statewide, where races for even the tiniest boards have turned into slugfests, according to the Assn. of California Water Agencies.

Often, the association says, candidates intend to use water boards as steppingstones to greater political office, as did former President Ronald Reagan. He helped form the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District in 1958 and three years later won his first elected office: a seat on the board of the Topanga-Las Virgenes Resource Conservation District, which deals with water, soil and tree issues.

The Newhall victors expressed relief at the end of the unusually bitter campaign.

“Voters were able to stay aware of the real issues and were not swayed by campaign rhetoric,” said Campbell, an engineer with the Los Angeles-based Metropolitan Water District. “I’m not a politician. I don’t enjoy the campaign part of it all. I’m a water professional. . . . Hopefully, we can remove the politics from the board because it really doesn’t have a place.”

* ELECTION RESULTS: B12-B14