TUESDAY ELECTION PREVIEW : CITY COUNCIL : Voters to Reelect or Retire Bernardi

Los Angeles City Council dean Ernani Bernardi was thrown into the toughest campaign battle of his political career April 11 when city Fire Capt. Lyle Hall forced him into a runoff election.

Of the eight council members up for reelection this year, only Bernardi failed to gain a majority vote in the primary. On Tuesday, his fate will be decided by voters in the 7th Council District, which stretches across the east San Fernando Valley.

During the last eight weeks, the two candidates have staged dozens of news conferences to announce endorsements and have sent out numerous flyers attacking each others’ flaws and touting their own fortes. One brochure, reflecting a common charge by Hall’s campaign that Bernardi, 77, lacks the stamina for the job, said Lakers’ basketball center “Kareem Abdul-Jabbar knows when to retire. Why doesn’t Ernie Bernardi?”

8 Public Forums

They have appeared together at eight public forums, which have occasionally turned contentious. At one held in the northeast Valley community of Mission Hills, Bernardi’s wife, Lucille, became so irritated by tough questions and charges from Hall supporters that she snapped an obscenity from her seat in the audience.

If voter turnout is very low, as expected, the election result could turn on which side has the best get-out-the-vote effort.

“In a race like this, low turnout doesn’t matter,” said Harvey Englander, Hall’s campaign manager. “We just hope our voters turn out and theirs don’t.”

Allan Hoffenblum, Bernardi’s campaign consultant, said the higher the turnout, the better the incumbent will fare because “if it’s extra low, the only ones who turn out are those who are upset.”

Bernardi blames his struggles this year on a change over which he had little control: a 1986 redrawing of council district boundaries that stripped away much of his traditional white, blue-collar Van Nuys support and supplanted it with the poorer, heavily Latino areas of Sylmar, Pacoima and Arleta. He has been a Valley councilman for 28 years.

However, Hall, 49, says he got Bernardi into a runoff because the councilman has become increasingly unresponsive to the community’s needs and ineffective at fulfilling them. Hall frequently clashed with Bernardi when Hall lobbied the City Council as president of the city firefighters’ union from 1976 to 1984.

Hall says, “It’s time for a change.” Bernardi says Hall is a “Johnny-come-lately.”

A poll conducted for Hall shortly after the primary showed the two neck-and-neck, with Bernardi only one percentage point ahead. Because the poll had a margin of error of four points in either direction, the one-point lead was statistically meaningless. Bernardi’s pollsters, in a survey taken a week later, said they found the incumbent had an 18-point lead.

According to the most recently available campaign finance reports, Hall had raised $131,400 since the primary, nearly twice the $71,000 Bernardi raised during the same period. A third of Hall’s donations came from union sources and individual firefighters. But as of May 20, Hall had spent $45,000 more than he has raised and he had loaned the campaign $15,000 of his own money. Bernardi, on the other hand, still has more than $13,500 left for the final days of the campaign.

Money often plays a large role in deciding modern-day political races, but this is not the first time Bernardi has been financially outgunned.

In 1981, Bernardi was at the top of a “hit list” of candidates targeted for defeat by city police and firefighters because he was leading a ballot drive to limit their pensions, which a year later passed by a wide margin. Bernardi’s 1981 opponent, Paul Goldener, raised a third more than the incumbent, but Bernardi won with 76% of the vote.

The 7th District race has been largely a battle of personalities, primarily because the candidates agree on many of the issues relevant to Valley voters.

Reputation for Feistiness

The one issue on which they took opposite sides--locating the Nancy Reagan center for drug rehabilitation in Lake View Terrace--became moot May 26 when the former First Lady killed the project by withdrawing her support because of community opposition. Hall approved the Lake View Terrace site while Bernardi joined with center neighbors in opposing its location in a residential area.

After virtually ignoring his seven primary opponents, Bernardi has cemented his longtime reputation for feistiness during the runoff campaign, frequently shouting and shaking his fist during public appearances. Throughout his years on the council, Bernardi has carved out a niche as an iconoclastic budget watchdog, often angering his council colleagues with his “no” votes on spending proposals.

Hall has largely retained a calm demeanor during campaign public appearances, reserving his most biting criticisms for mailers and press releases.

Bernardi has garnered the support from most of the district’s minority group leaders while Hall signed up several statewide Democratic politicians, including former Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., now state Democratic Party chairman.

Perhaps the most typical exchange of the campaign began at a May 3 forum in a Pacoima church when Bernardi accused Hall of crippling the city’s ability to hire more police officers by backing a lawsuit that demands more generous police and firefighter pensions.

Referring to Hall and the other union activists who backed the successful suit, Bernardi yelled, “I challenge Mr. Hall to get his goons to call that lawsuit off.”

After the forum, Hall said he was not offended by the comment. But the next day Hall called a news conference with city union leaders to criticize Bernardi’s insensitivity and demand an apology, which Bernardi refused to offer.

Weeks later the comment was bannered across a Hall mailer: “Ernie Bernardi calls union members ‘goons.’ ”

(San Fernando Edition) DEMOCRAT HALL A FISCAL CONSERVATIVE?

Democrat Lyle Hall is featured in a mailer sent to Republicans that calls Ernani Bernardi a liberal Democrat and portrays Hall as a fiscal conservative in the “Reagan tradition.” Page 4, Part II

RELATED STORIES: Page 1, Part II