CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS : Dana Appears Unbeatable as He Seeks 3rd Term on Board of Supervisors

Los Angeles County Supervisor Deane Dana recalls the evening in late 1979 when, after 27 years as a telephone company manager, he first considered a break with obscurity.

A veteran behind-the-scenes Republican worker, Dana hosted a cocktail party to urge state Sen. Robert Beverly to run against Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, a liberal Democrat.

Instead, Beverly suggested that Dana enter the race himself.

“I was truly shocked,” said Dana, 61. “I’d never seen myself that way. It took some getting used to.”

Flush With Cash

Today--nearly eight years after he emerged from a pack of nine challengers, then raised $575,000 to upset former Congresswoman Burke--Dana is so entrenched and flush with cash that he has drawn only two little-known opponents in running for a third term on the county’s powerful Board of Supervisors. He is expected to win easily June 7.

Dana, the most moderate member of the board’s conservative majority, is challenged by Marina del Rey computer consultant Jeffrey H. Drobman, 39, and Al Stillwell, a 51-year-old retired small businessman from Long Beach.

“Everybody I know hates the guy and feels disenfranchised by him,” said Drobman, whose monthly rent at the marina soared after Dana and conservative colleagues Pete Schabarum and Mike Antonovich allowed rent control to expire in 1985.

“Somebody had to run so we can express this feeling,” Drobman said.

Stillwell, a devout Catholic recently rebuked by the Los Angeles Archdiocese for including photos of himself with Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II in campaign literature, said he is running because Dana is lax on pornography.

Both opponents charge that Dana, his $1.15-million campaign treasury bolstered by large real estate and construction industry contributions, has sided consistently with pro-growth interests, while ignoring a regional movement toward limits on construction.

The challengers concede, however, that they have done little to take their message to the 1.6 million residents of the 4th District, which stretches along the coast from Long Beach to Malibu.

Neither opponent will spend more than $1,000 on his campaign, they said, while Dana spent about $250,000 through March 17 and plans a second round of signs and mailers before the June 7 election.

Dana said polls show him winning at least 60% of the vote. He leads, he said, in every community in his district except Malibu, where his pro-growth positions have fueled a new drive for cityhood.

“I have a good relationship in all these areas because they know what I have done,” said Dana, who dismisses his backing of “balanced growth” as an issue, since construction is occurring mostly outside his district.

“The point is that the people that live here today are having children, and those children are going to want to live in Southern California,” Dana said.

The supervisor said he is running for another four-year term on a record of increased county efficiency.

In 1980, “I thought all the dollars were being spent on the inner city and nothing was going to the outlying areas,” said Dana, a 24-year resident of Palos Verdes Estates.

“But when I got (in office), I found it wasn’t being spent anywhere properly,” he said.

Soon after taking control, the board conservatives began to hire private companies to perform traditional government services and to cut several thousand employees from the county’s work force of 78,000.

The board, again following the conservatives’ lead, last year placed 1,600 county managers on a merit plan in which salary increases are based solely on performance.

Dana also takes credit for new courthouses, parks, senior citizen centers and homeless shelters throughout his 60-mile-long district. He has helped steer the county’s first two new trolley lines--one already under construction--to his district and is lobbying for another two, he said.

The supervisor, an engineering school graduate, is not usually seen as a particularly strong or charismatic leader. Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), a frequent Dana critic, said: “Any honest person would agree that Dana has gone far on limited abilities.”

But Dana is often described as an amiable, well-informed and energetic administrator, who is blessed with a capable staff.

Many local officials, including prominent Democrats, acknowledge that Dana has paid close attention to their needs.

Santa Monica’s liberal Mayor James Conn said, “We’ve gotten our share of county money.”

Ernie Kell, Long Beach’s Democratic mayor, noted the health, housing, homeless and AIDS assistance Dana has brought to his city.

‘Growth Issues’

Torrance Councilman Mark Wirth, a Democratic Assembly candidate, said that, “Although I have some disagreement with him on growth issues, I think he probably has served Torrance pretty well.”

Santa Monica sued the county for increased homeless services two years ago. But Dana now “makes sure a portion of that money comes to us,” Conn said.

“I’m a Democrat and I don’t endorse Republicans,” Conn said. “But at some point, I think we all get very pragmatic about this. We’re going to work together, and that’s the way it is.”

Dana contends that 90% of the council members in his district’s 22 cities support him, even though most are Democrats. The 4th District votes conservatively, but registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 378,000 to 285,000.

“You can’t get engaged in partisan political struggles,” he said.

Pragmatism, not ideology, may be Dana’s hallmark--at least during his second term.

Dana voted in virtual lockstep with Antonovich and Schabarum for his first three years. He admitted that he was learning how to be a supervisor and nearly always followed Schabarum’s lead.

The board majority’s personnel and budget cuts, especially in health services, brought howls of protest and strong union backing for Dana’s opponent in the 1984 election, former Assessor Alexander Pope, whom Dana outspent 2 to 1 and easily defeated.

Even before his 1984 reelection, however, Dana had begun on occasion to vote apart from Antonovich and Schabarum.

He may be without a strong opponent this year, Democratic leaders say, not only because of a $1-million treasury but because of an increasingly pragmatic and moderate voting record.

He has mended fences with labor, backed away from explosive issues that could have rallied district voters against him and sometimes even taken the lead on social issues.

When 1,000 Malibu residents caravaned downtown to protest a Dana-backed regional sewer proposal last October, he ended the emotional meeting by recommending new studies of alternatives. He now says a regional sewer may not be built.

In 1987 when Schabarum pressed for a study on the use of three mountain canyons in Dana’s district near Brentwood as a municipal landfill, Dana cast the deciding vote against the study.

Previously, Dana had backed Schabarum’s effort to force the city of Los Angeles, in which the canyons also lie, to accept its share of garbage by dumping it in the canyons.

Dana has also earned points for moderation from some environmentalists by working with the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy to expand its park system. He has signed the sample ballot in favor of Proposition 70 on the June ballot, a $776-million parks bond measure that includes $30 million for the conservancy, even though longtime friend and ally Gov. George Deukmejian has urged its defeat.

In addition, a year ago, before the 750,000-member county Federation of Labor could line up behind another candidate, the supervisor, joined by his wife, Doris, told a San Pedro dinner crowd of longshoremen and marine unionists that he would always listen to their views.

Not long after that, Federation of Labor boss Bill Robertson told reporters that Dana had become “a relatively good supervisor.” Robertson said recently that he sees Dana as “a decent guy who wants to act in a moderate fashion.”

Joe Wetzler, chairman of a 30,000-member coalition of county AFL-CIO employees, said the supervisor has spearheaded a drive that will end with the opening of the first child-care center for county employees this fall.

“We were very concerned he would be ultraconservative, but he’s not been all that bad, believe me,” Wetzler said.

Aware of organized labor’s position, county Democratic leaders months ago shifted their focus to trying to beat Antonovich, who is also running for reelection in June, said Jim Clarke, the party’s county chairman.

Efforts this year to recruit Long Beach Auditor Robert Fronke or former Rancho Palos Verdes Mayor Jacki Bacharach to run against Dana came too late and without a promise of strong financial support, both said.

“Deane is sort of undefined,” Bacharach said. “He doesn’t have a lot of strong positions one way or another. So you would have to define him, and say what’s wrong with that.”

In a large and diverse district, such a campaign would be enormously expensive, she said.

Nonetheless, Bacharach and Los Angeles Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, whose district overlays part of Dana’s, said the supervisor should have been vulnerable this year because of the strength of the slow-growth movement on the crowded Westside.

Dana supported the proposed 900-acre, 20,000-resident Playa Vista development near Marina del Rey, backs continued construction at the marina and favors more growth in Malibu, Galanter noted.

But Pope, who struggled for contributions in 1984, said Dana’s early fund-raising stifled opposition.

“It puts the challenger in a Catch-22 situation,” Pope said. “If you don’t have the money, it’s hard to raise the money, because you’re perceived to be starting way back and not a serious candidate.”