CINDY MISCIKOWSKI

When the thrice-weekly governing sessions at City Hall disintegrate into pettiness, as they often do, an exasperated Councilwoman Ruth Galanter wonders what it would be like if her friend Cindy Miscikowski were on the City Council.

In Galanter’s musings, the collegial, even-tempered Miscikowski would bring the discussion back to the issues, while refraining from the temptation to get down there and mud wrestle with the others.

Miscikowski, 48, would very much like to join Galanter and company at City Hall. She has dreamed of doing so for most of her 22 years as a planning aide and chief of staff to retiring Councilman Marvin Braude.

The ultimate City Hall lifer, Miscikowski’s depth of experience is both blessing and burden in her campaign.

While it has brought her enviable support, monetary and otherwise, from the downtown crowd and popularity with many leaders of the homeowner community who have worked with her, “insider” is not an endearing word with voters these days.

Miscikowski is not helped by her marriage to land-use attorney Doug Ring, an influential city and county lobbyist who successfully challenged the city’s ethics disclosure law in the late ‘80s as unconstitutional.

Hoping to defuse the issue, Ring quit paid lobbying more than a year ago, though he still takes on pro bono clients needing help navigating the city bureaucracy.

Ring’s late father and uncle were major real estate developers in the ‘50s and ‘60s. The family business has substantial real estate holdings and is a major leaseholder in Marina del Rey.

“I married well,” shrugs Miscikowski.

Her handlers have taken an aggressive stance that delving into the issue is pure and simple sexism in that it suggests Miscikowski would be unduly influenced by her husband.

Both Ring and Miscikowski say they disagree on many things and debate them hotly.

For her part, Miscikowski displays her City Hall experience to full advantage at public events, using her encyclopedic knowledge of the district to present herself as a knowledgeable ally, not a member of some distant City Hall cabal.

At campaign forums, Miscikowski personalizes her answers by referring to a problem she’s handled in the community--or even down the block from her questioner.

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As she walks precincts, Miscikowski reports constituents may not recognize her at first, then suddenly recall how she helped them in some long-ago battle over a stop sign, a pothole, a tree.

“She seems to know why every tree is where it is,” Galanter said.

How does a staffer distinguish herself from the boss she has long served?

On issues, she doesn’t and on style, there’s no confusing Miscikowski with her famously cantankerous mentor, Braude.

“Cindy’s best and worst quality is that she’s Mary Tyler Moore,” said husband Ring, who describes himself as somewhat more temperamental than his wife.

Using praise from Braude and Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, Miscikowski is appealing to voters in this environmentally sensitive Valley-Westside district by reminding them of her key role in the passage of ballot measures banning oil drilling off the coast and limiting development.

“She’s someone who has made more difference than anyone in City Hall,” Yaroslavsky said in his endorsement of Miscikowski.

Attorney Roger Diamond, a moving force behind the “No on Oil” proposition, recalls that Miscikowski was an integral part of a team effort in the campaign, although he has not endorsed her, preferring that Braude run again.

Illustrating that many community leaders have positive ties to both Miscikowski and her chief opponent, Georgia Mercer, Diamond’s wife, Fran, also an environmental activist, has endorsed Mercer, with whom she has long been associated in women’s groups.

Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn. President Richard Close is illustrative of homeowner-leaders who back Miscikowski. Close said he and others appealed for naught to more than one council member--including Braude--for help in curbing traffic and development on Ventura Boulevard.

Nothing came of it until an appeal to Miscikowski, who was instrumental in getting everyone together and hammering out a Ventura Boulevard Specific Plan to address the problems, Close said.

Miscikowski frequently tells voters she is running for City Council “because I like to solve problems and I’m good at it.”

She is less clear about her vision for the district and the city, or how she sees her role changing if she is the decision-maker, not the chief of staff.

“I don’t know,” she said.

A military brat, who wanted to be a nun, Miscikowski moved around a lot as a child, settling down for high school in Washington, D.C. She started college at Ohio State on a science scholarship and transferred to UCLA as a chemistry major.

“I wanted to be the first woman astronaut,” she said.

But it was the ‘60s and Miscikowski got caught up in politics, especially the campaign of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and switched her major to political science.

She met Braude while working in his unsuccessful campaign for county supervisor and joined his city staff working in the district office. A bit of a planning wonk, Miscikowski earned a certificate in city planning while working for Braude.

To round out her resume before running for office, Miscikowski left the city in 1993 and went to work for the Skirball Museum briefly before resigning to campaign fulltime.

During her years at City Hall, Miscikowski was nearly all work and no play.

Council aide and confidant Renee Weitzer ate lunch with Miscikowski almost every day. The topic of conversation as often as not, both women say, was how Cindy could meet a nice man.

The problem, Weitzer said, was that Cindy worked all the time, didn’t plan or attend many social outings and was two people--the consummate pro at work, but too reserved and serious to be a social butterfly.

“She was just not outgoing,” Weitzer said.

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Non-materialistic and undomesticated, Miscikowski neither cooked, cleaned nor paid much heed to fashion, Weitzer said. She picked out the first two non-objectionable couches she saw that could be delivered right away and called that decorating.

Then Miscikowski and Ring took note of each other in a Tracy-Hepburn kind of way, after squaring off in a debate on the city’s slow growth ballot measure in the mid-’80s.

Miscikowski said Ring proposed by offering her a choice of two gifts: one, a nun doll and the other a book on weddings.

She chose the later.

The success of the marriage, like Miscikowski’s long run with Braude, is testimony to her ability to get along with people, Ring said.

“If she can get along with me and Marvin Braude, she can get along with anyone,” Ring said.