As the end of the decade approaches, Keith Higginbotham spends the next month exploring five of the top things to expect in Long Beach in 2010 (click here for Part One). Today, Keith previews the five upcoming races for open seats on the Long Beach City Council – coming to a ballot box near you next April.
With Jack O’ Lanterns long gone, the bones of Thanksgiving turkeys working their way to the landfills and Christmas lights rising to the eaves of houses everywhere, your intrepid writer has been tasked to explore a somewhat different season – one just around the corner.
It is one not muted in the colors of fall leaves, or replete in November cornucopias, or even the red, white and black of Santa Claus. No, this is a season that comes but once every four years for most residents of our fair city, one besmirched in the color of donation checks and front-lawn placards. A season where the joyous carols of Christmas are replaced instead by the insipid sound of hyperbole and rhetoric. Where the smell of holiday food is replaced with the scent of political blood.
It is Campaign Season – something in reality less like the holidays and more akin to Rabbit Season or Moose Season, except in this case, the rabbits and moose in question typically shoot at each other or at their own feet.
On April 13, 2010, the city will return to the polls and for the residents of Districts 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9, this will offer a chance to select a new City Councilmember (in addition to the other citywide races).
So, headlong fearless reader, if you wish to be annoyed, irritated, offended and in some cases validated. I can promise that if you finish through to the end of this missive, you will likely experience at least one of these feelings.
This is due to the fact that everything you are about to read is pure and total speculation. It is the opinion of your intrepid writer and based on nothing more than simple hunches, prognostication, and maybe even a simple flip of the coin.
On one side of the field we have the five incumbents, each of which is trying to win re-election. And yet, even this is not the simple affair that most elections might appear to be. In the case of the council races only two of the five incumbents, Gary DeLong in the 3rd District and Gerrie Schipske in the 5th, will campaign without some form of asterisk next to their name.
In the 1st District, incumbent Robert Garcia is campaigning to hold a seat he has occupied for less than nine months since winning a special election in April.
The two remaining incumbents, Tonia Reyes-Uranga in the 7th District and Val Lerch in the 9th, might not even be considered technically as incumbents, since both are termed out come election day and both face running as write-in candidates to win a third term. Ah, the magic and legacy of Mayor O’Neill.
Each of these incumbents has indicated they will be running, though keep in mind that any candidate, incumbent or otherwise, has until Jan. 15, 2010 to file the necessary paperwork to run.
In the 1st District, Garcia’s only stated opponent at this time is Jana Shields, president of the Wilmore City Heritage Association and president of the Friends’ House at Drake Park. In the April special election that sent Garcia to the council dais with 40.7-percent of the vote, Shields pulled in just 3.7 percent of the vote out of a field of seven candidates. Though it is unlikely that the upcoming election will have the embarrassingly low turnout that the special election did – Garcia won with only 1,077 votes – Shields would still have to dramatically improve her position to tackle Garcia. Add to this that Garcia has remained relatively untainted by the city budget debacle – mainly because he wasn’t there when the pot began to boil over – and he has also stayed clear of some of the other more recent council controversies, your writer believes that it is highly likely that the 1st District voters will send Garcia back for a full term.
In the 3rd District, arguably the most conservative of the city council districts, incumbent Gary DeLong currently faces a sole opponent in the shape of attorney Tom Marchese, vice president of the University Park Estates Neighborhood Association and a board member for the Los Cerritos Wetlands Land Trust. Given that Marchese has been a very vocal critic of the controversial wetlands swap deal and DeLong at times seemed the most vocal council proponent of the deal, the race could come down to a one-issue contest. However, history shows that one-issue races typically favor the incumbent, and given DeLong’s conservative bona fides and the conservative demographics of the district, Marchese is not likely to gain enough traction to defeat DeLong. Also working in DeLong’s favor might be a splitting of the anti-DeLong vote among any other candidate that enters the race. While Marchese is the only candidate to file preliminary election paperwork with the City Clerk to date, another potential candidate is former Redevelopment Agency board member Terry Jensen, a fiscal conservative that has also been a vocal critic of the landswap and campaigned heavily against the Mayor’s defeated Measure I parcel tax last summer. It is also worth mentioning that DeLong won his 2006 run-off election with 67.7-percent of the vote, stomping his sole opponent by a margin of more than 35 percentage points. Even in the five-candidate field of the 2006 general election, DeLong pulled in over 20 percent more of the vote than his nearest challenger.
In the 5th District, incumbent Gerrie Schipske looks to face off against Mike Hedges, president and CEO of Pacific Striping in Signal Hill. Although Schipske won a squeaker of an election in the 2006 run-off to join the council – narrowly defeating write-in candidate Jackie Kell by about 1.5 percentage points, or 170 votes – Schipske was a virtual unknown in 2006 running against a very popular, but termed-out Kell. This time around, Schipske has the cache, including a reputation as one of the most engaging members of the council and a track record highlighted by aggressive action on environmental issues. Given the record that Schipske has built during her first term, the reputation she has built among her constituents, and a solid portfolio of endorsements, it seems unlikely that a relative unknown to local politics could unseat her.
The 7th District race, where termed-out and write-in incumbent Tonia Reyes-Uranga looks to face off against at least three opponents, may turn out to be one of the closest. Reyes-Uranga has spent two terms on the council building a solid rapport with her constituents, perhaps a more solid constituent support base than any other councilmember. In her second term election win in 2006, she handily defeated her lone opponent by a margin of 16 percentage points.
This time around, as in the past, she also boasts a very deep endorsement portfolio, especially among labor groups. Given her reputation as an aggressive fighter for issues in her district, the possibility of her winning on a write-in ballot is certainly within the realms of possibility. In addition, her opponents, long-time Wrigley area community activist Jill Hill, assistant City Auditor James Johnson, and Academy Award-winning community activist Jack Smith, could wind up splitting those anti-Reyes-Uranga voters in the 7th District into irrelevant smaller slices of the pie. The big question will be how aggressive of a campaign Reyes-Uranga can run and how effectively she can get out the vote of her supporters.
The 9th District is also looking to shape up to be a tight race. Termed-out write-in incumbent Val Lerch is set to face off against three candidates. However, unlike Reyes-Uranga, Lerch does not appear to have the same cache with his constituents. Lerch is set to face off this time against his 2006 opponent Steve Neal, whom Lerch defeated by just under 5 percentage points. However, Neal, the Director of the AFL-CIO Community Service Department at the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, is not alone in the contest against Lerch this time – former Lerch staffer and financial consultant Dan Pressburg and airline employee and therapist Brad Shore have each filed to take a run at the 9th District seat. With three challengers diluting the non-Lerch voting pool, it may be possible that this race is headed to a run-off. It remains to be seen if, like Reyes-Uranga must also accomplish, Lerch can mobilize his supporters to pick up their pencils come election day. Lerch does have at least one powerful endorsement, though. Former Long Beach Mayor Beverly O’Neill, who garnered national headlines for winning a third term with a highly effective write-in campaign, has already endorsed Lerch for his run.
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