Paparian Broadens His Perspective : Politics: The city councilman directs his scrutiny toward county government as he starts his supervisorial campaign.

As his six colleagues attended a three-day League of California Cities convention in San Francisco last month, City Councilman William Paparian stayed home and minded his store--a one-man law office on North Marengo Avenue.

It wasn’t that the second-term councilman couldn’t pry himself away. It was just that he didn’t approve of council members traveling at public expense. “Frivolous freeloading,” the councilman calls such city-financed junkets.

Paparian, an independent, sometimes abrasive force on the council for the past 4 1/2 years, now directs his scrutiny at the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. He announced Tuesday that he would challenge Supervisor Mike Antonovich in next June’s election.

“The public is fed up with these pampered supervisors gorging themselves at the expense of the burdened taxpayers, especially at a time when crucial public services are being curtailed or cut out altogether,” Paparian said, citing incumbent supervisors’ limousines and redecorated offices.

Antonovich would not comment except to say that he would run on his record.

Paparian’s message sounded familiar to his fellow council members, from whom he drew little immediate support at the regular Tuesday council meeting.

Vice Mayor Rick Cole described Paparian’s candidacy as part of a widespread “harder look” at county government by voters and candidates, but he also withheld his support.

Paparian’s campaign against an entrenched incumbent in a district that extends far beyond the councilman’s Pasadena stomping grounds has to be considered “an uphill battle,” Councilman Chris Holden said.

The vast 5th District, stretching from the San Gabriel Valley to the northern county line, covers almost three-quarters of the county. The 2,854-square-mile district includes large spaces with no voters, such as the San Gabriel Mountains, as well as conservative suburban communities.

Paparian hopes he can team up with recently elected Gloria Molina and a presumably liberal replacement for Kenneth Hahn, who will retire next year, to form a fresh-faced “reformist” majority on the county board.

Paparian, who recently shed glasses and a mustache to give himself an ingenuously bare-faced look, is a moderate Republican.

“There are supervisors running around in bulletproof, chauffeured limousines when there isn’t enough money to pay for basic services,” he said. “They sit behind bulletproof glass. It’s the same kind of siege mentality that’s growing in other governmental agencies. We have to make government open and accessible.”

Since he was elected to the council in March, 1987, Paparian has sought to hone an image as a compassionate but fiscally prudent legislator. He has vehemently supported the shift in emphasis in Pasadena to “human services,” with an array of support programs for the needy and indigent, at the same time he was kvetching about wasteful programs.

But the combination often doesn’t play, critics have said. Last summer, three months after calling for an audit of the fiscally shaky Rose Bowl, Paparian became a driving force behind a vote to raise council members’ salaries to $3,200 a month.

Like others on the council, he abandoned that stand after an outcry from voters.

Paparian sought unsuccessfully to impose term limits on the council--a maximum of two four-year terms on the council with one-year stints as mayor--and then he enraged minority groups by voting to hire City Manager Philip Hawkey over two black candidates.

Paparian has been an eloquent spokesman for the rights of Armenians.

Most recently, he was outspoken in the heated dispute with Sheriff Sherman Block, demanding that alleged “neo-Nazis” and “white supremacists” in the Sheriff’s Department be blocked from providing security during the Rose Parade and the Rose Bowl game.

The City Council on Monday issued a carefully worded apology to the Sheriff’s Department for remarks made by Paparian and other council members.