THE 5th DISTRICT RACE FOR SUPERVISOR : Antonovich Vs. Ward : Fight for 5th District Comes Down to Battle for Votes in the Valley

The battle for the 5th District supervisorial seat--and for control of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors--has come down to quiet San Fernando residential streets where incumbent Mike Antonovich and challenger Baxter Ward are fighting for the support of some of the hardest-to-figure voters in the state.

Ward, who has publicly campaigned as a non-politician and spurned contributions of more than $250, has nevertheless put together a group of seasoned campaigners from labor unions and environmental groups who have targeted 200 precincts, most of them in the Valley, for a get-out-the-vote drive featuring visits to homes and solicitations from phone banks.

“Our canvassing is showing a shift from undecided to Ward,” said Don May of the League of Conservation Voters, which has joined the Sierra Club and some county unions, including the big Local 660 of the Service Employees International Union, in the effort. May helped run the same sort of campaign last year in the victory of Ruth Galanter, a growth-control advocate, for a Los Angeles City Council seat.

Antonovich, meanwhile, is sending out 300,000 mailed messages today to selected voters in the San Fernando Valley reminding them that former television news anchor Ward was a politician and served eight years on the Board of Supervisors before Antonovich defeated him in 1980. “People remember Baxter as a TV journalist but don’t remember him on the board,” said Antonovich campaign consultant Alan Hoffenblum. “So we are trying to remind them of his eight years on the board.”

The targets of this effort are selected precincts of the San Fernando Valley, the vast center of a supervisorial district that reaches from the Las Virgenes-Malibu section of the Santa Monica Mountains, across the Valley, over the San Gabriel Mountains to Pasadena and Alhambra.

The outcome will determine the shape of county government for the next four years. The five-member board is now controlled by three conservatives, Antonovich, Pete Schabarum and Deane Dana. While Ward is not as liberal as the two other incumbents, Kenneth Hahn and Ed Edelman, he lined up with the liberals on some welfare and health care votes during his terms and was more friendly to the unions than the conservatives.

In addition, Ward, who has campaigned strongly as an advocate of development controls, is expected to clamp down on residential and commercial subdivision growth in the district, which contains most of the county’s undeveloped land. That expectation has won him support from environmentalist groups and from homeowner associations in the Santa Monica Mountains and the Santa Clarita Valley, the heart of slow-growth sentiment.

In the arithmetic of the election, Ward appears to have those areas locked up. Antonovich ran especially poorly there in the primary, where he fell short of getting 50% of the vote against Ward and eight other challengers. Antonovich, on the other hand, appears strong in his hometown of Glendale, and the Pasadena area, where his Republican Party ties are appreciated and where the GOP is hoping for a big party vote for Vice President George Bush.

Center of Conflict

That leaves the valley as the center of the conflict.

Antonovich is concentrating on the west and central valley neighborhoods of Republicans and ticket-switching Democrats.

One such area is around Cal State Northridge, where there are many Republicans, and Democrats appear to be of the Reagan Democrat variety, having supported the President in the last two elections.

“It hasn’t been a pleasant race between the two of them,” Michael Crawley, a consulting firm owner, said of the Antonovich-Ward encounter. “They seem to be throwing ill-directed pot-shots at one another instead of dealing with meaningful issues.”

Crawley favors growth and he is leaning toward Antonovich. He is one of the people Antonovich hopes to lock up with mailers and television commercials this week.

D. Gordon Meighan is a Republican who once was appointed to the state Board of Guide Dogs for the Blind by then-Gov. Reagan. But his memories of Ward are strong and, as feared by Antonovich consultant Hoffenblum, they are of the days when Ward was a muckraking TV anchor. “There are many reasons I am voting for Ward but the main reason was back in 1968, when he was a reporter, he assisted a 16-year-old girl, the daughter of friend, who needed an artificial kidney.”

The several miles around the Northridge campus contain a mixture of Republicans and conservative Democrats. It is a good example of an Antonovich target area.

It is predominantly white with many affluent neighborhoods filled with upwardly mobile young families and affluent older professionals. Republicans tend to outnumber Democrats west of the campus, with Democrats holding power in neighborhoods to the east.

But despite a 57%-40% registration edge in the nearby district of Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sepulveda), Reagan beat Mondale 57% to 41% in 1984.

That was an illustration of why the Valley is difficult for political analysts to figure. For these are the so-called Reagan Democrats, who cross back and forth between parties. For example, Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) beat challenger Ed Zschau 53% to 44% there in 1986, while Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley lost to Gov. George Deukmejian 54% to 43%.

In addition to today’s mailing, Antonovich sent one out Tuesday and may make a third mail drop later in the week to such areas.

The message is, “So He Wants His Job Back,” Hoffenblum said. The mailings will emphasize themes Antonovich is also using in his speeches and his debates with Ward: The challenger engaged in “witch-hunt” investigations of innocent county employees while supervisor; supported land development despite his slow-growth stance now, and opposed tax-cutting Proposition 13 in 1978.

Remains Confident

As far his his solidly Republican, affluent base, Antonovich remains confident.

Anne Peplow, a legal secretary, interviewed at her Cape Cod house in Glendale, said, “I haven’t been paying much attention to what they have been saying, probably because I was going to vote for Antonovich.”

In the same Glendale block as Antonovich’s house, John and Georgia Platis were divided. Mrs. Platis, a Republican, will vote for Antonovich while Platis, a Democrat, supports Ward. But he added that after going to hear neighbor Antonovich debate Ward, he concluded that the supervisor “is a much more sympathetic character in person.”

The Ward effort in the San Fernando Valley is concentrating on precincts in North Hollywood, Reseda and Encino.

Tevel Laxer, political director for Local 660 of the Service Employes International Union, said the campaigners selected precincts where Antonovich’s nine challengers beat him in the primary, but where there was a comparatively low turnout.

He said his troops are concentrating on “voters less likely to vote,” visiting their homes and telephoning them in an effort to build the Ward vote on Election Day.

Ward’s campaign is allied with more affluent and experienced campaigns. Laxer said the Ward group is working with environmentalists backing Gov. Michael Dukakis for President, Democratic Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy for U.S. senator and for Proposition O, the anti-oil drilling measure on the Los Angeles city ballot.

In addition, he said, Campaign 88, the Democratic state get-out-the-vote effort, and Coalition 88, another liberal group, are helping the Ward campaign.

And, he said, homeowner groups in the Santa Monica Mountains and the northern county, where many county employees live, are staging similar get-out-the-vote efforts. Two county employee fund-raisers in the Lancaster area brought in $5,000 to the Ward campaign, he said.

There in the north county, an afternoon of visiting voters made clear the potential strength of Ward.

While in the San Fernando Valley and in Glendale, Pasadena and San Marino, interest in the presidential race was greater than in the supervisorial contest, those interviewed in the subdivisions of Canyon Country were keenly aware of board decisions and their impact on residents’ lives.

The area is Republican, and the Democrats who live there are also of the Reagan stripe. Reagan beat Mondale in some of those precincts eight to one in 1984.

But a look at the population shows why the residents are so interested in the nuts and bolts of local government. Most are young families. A total of 67% of the population is under the age of 35. Most are education-oriented, 80% having high school and some college educations. Most are married. And while there appears to be plenty of disposable income in the area, most of the people work in either well-paid blue-collar or white-collar jobs rather than being at the top of the economic ladder.

‘Lesser of Two Evils’

Lois McGovern is still undecided. “I’m not really comfortable with Baxter Ward,” she said. “He’s not anything spectacular. But from what I hear about Mike Antonovich, he was bought by special interests and it is time we changed.” She indicated that she is leaning toward Ward as “the lesser of two evils.”

But she was clear about what troubled her. “The local school, which was designed for 600, now has 800,” she said. “There are temporary buildings on the campus. They are overcrowded. And every week the traffic gets worse. The facilities are not keeping up with the development.”

Material for this article was contributed by Times researcher Cecilia Rasmussen, The Times Marketing Research Department and the Rose Institute of Claremont McKenna College.