In Council Race, Tough Part Is Finding Audience

The Woodland Hills meeting room was stuffy, the candidates tense and weary. The season finale of “ER” was on soon, and as one man noted, he intended to be home in time to see it.

Such is the competition for voters’ attention facing Georgia Mercer and Cindy Miscikowski as they seek to win a seat on the City Council in the June 3 runoff election.

Is anyone out there listening? Or did voters already decide in the primary who they want in City Hall to replace retiring Councilman Marvin Braude?

That scenario would favor Tarzana resident Mercer, a former aide to Mayor Richard Riordan.

With her 900-vote plurality in the primary, former underdog Mercer has momentum on her side.

Mercer also has an ongoing issue she is using to portray Miscikowski as a City Hall insider--the gated Brentwood community in which Miscikowski lives.

Mercer contends that the gates were approved by the City Council after a plea from then-council aide Miscikowski.

The continuing attack on the gates meshes with Mercer’s self-definition as an outsider seeking to change City Hall.

“Cindy says her 22 years in City Hall are her biggest asset,” Mercer said. “I see it as her biggest liability.”

But saying she got a wake-up call in the primary, Miscikowski is fighting back with attacks of her own, starting with a challenge of whether Mercer can properly claim to be an outsider after working for the mayor and heading a city commission during the Tom Bradley years.

Miscikowski, who like Mercer is a Democrat, is also mounting a vigorous campaign to woo GOP voters in the nonpartisan contest, using endorsements from Supervisors Don Knabe and Mike Antonovich.

“I’m the candidate who has the experience to get things done,” Miscikowski says.

But will any of Miscikowski’s attacks on Mercer develop into critical mass in the short time she has left to woo voters?

Or will the pitiful turnout expected June 3 make the outcome depend more upon who gets their voters to the polls than on any attack ad that their respective consultants can conceive. In case this does occur, both sides have strong field operations toiling to get out the vote.

At the recent campaign forum hosted by several Valley homeowner groups, the first question, posed by moderator Jill Stewart, a columnist for the weekly New Times, was about the the gates.

The gate issue also drew a sharp exchange on a cable television debate taped last week.

Miscikowski said at the forum that the gates are an example of a neighborhood being empowered to get what it needed from City Hall. She maintains that the gates were a done deal long before she and her husband, land-use attorney Doug Ring, moved into the Brentwood neighborhood in 1989.

But Mercer said Ring, then a city lobbyist, began acting as the volunteer attorney for the couple’s homeowner association in 1989 and the gates were not approved until mid-1995.

“The issue is one of using insider influence [in] getting something for yourself that no one else has gotten,” Mercer said.

City documents confirm that Ring became involved in 1989 and that the City Council did not approve the precedent-setting gates until six years later.

Several city departments initially opposed the gates, then later reversed themselves, according to documents in the public file.

Residents of the neighborhood north of Sunset Boulevard and west of the San Diego Freeway sought to wall off their streets to outsiders to prevent drivers from heading to the as-yet-unopened Getty Museum. To keep residents from fighting the museum, the Getty agreed to pay for the gates in the mid-1980s. That agreement, however, was not binding on the City Council, which was not a party to the deal.

While some newly built communities have received permission from the city to be private, Brentwood Circle was the first established neighborhood to be designated a private community that can be entered only by invitation.

Political analyst Sherry Bebitch Jeffe said the gate issue underscored a prevalent voter perception about government.

“It is symbolic in the minds of many people of the insider’s ability to get things done, while the average Joe cannot,” Jeffe said.

Miscikowski herself increased the gates’ impact as an issue by not answering the charges in campaign literature during the primary, letting her opponent define her.

“It’s a real risk for Miscikowski that she did not take the chance to define herself positively,” Jeffe said.

What Miscikowski said to reporters and in campaign forums about the gates is now being used by Mercer to keep up the pressure.

For one thing, Miscikowski said during the primary that she was “philosophically” opposed to the gates, but acceded to the wishes of her neighbors.

But a videotape of the City Council hearing in 1995 shows Miscikowski not as a reluctant participant, but as an advocate for the gates.

Giving her address in the affected neighborhood and saying she was speaking as a private citizen, Miscikowski, a popular and respected figure at City Hall, was the leadoff and principal witness.

Several council members expressed reservations over the gates as a step toward a further balkanized city. They also called the gate issue premature because the Getty Museum traffic had not yet materialized. Yet several months later, in 1996, the gates were approved and installed.

Miscikowski said in an interview there is nothing inconsistent about her statements and denied she was the principal witness at the gate hearing. She said her neighbors asked her to speak for them and she agreed.

Miscikowski acknowledged the flap over the gates hurt her in the primary because she did not respond fully to the questions raised.

But when people learn she did not live in the neighborhood when the agreement between the neighbors and the Getty Museum was struck, the subject fades from the radar screen, Miscikowski said.

“The gates are not an issue,” Miscikowski said. “They’re a way of trying to avoid the issues.”

So far, Miscikowski has attacked Mercer for attacking her in the primary.

“I didn’t mention Georgia in my earlier pieces,” Miscikowski said. “She put out, not only distortions, but outright lies. We’ve got to be more aggressive.”

She has responded to the suggestion that she is somehow remote or hiding behind gates by sending voters a Rolodex card with her home phone number and inviting them to call.

Consultant Rick Taylor said Miscikowski has returned 100 calls so far.

Another issue the Miscikowski team hopes to develop stems from a remark they say Mercer made to an apartment owners’ association that homeowner groups wield too much power at City Hall.

Delving into Mercer’s resume, Taylor said eight years ago Mercer worked for a development firm that is now a registered lobbyist, an association he hopes will show Mercer is not the outsider she says she is.

“Georgia Mercer panders to the audience she’s in front of,” Taylor said.

Mercer consultant Larry Levine said the attempt to link Mercer to a developer firm represents “desperation time.”

“You want to talk about the pot and the kettle,” Levine said. “You have Cindy Miscikowski who has 115 contributions from lobbyists representing 347 clients in City Hall going back eight years to attack Georgia Mercer for a part-time job she had for a firm that was not a lobbyist at the time.”