Carpetbagger Issue Moves Into Several Area Races : Politics: Redistricting creates opportunities for candidates who are willing to relocate. It also resurrects a potent campaign weapon.

With more than a hint of mockery, Congressman Elton Gallegly says he doesn’t know what to make of Daphne Becker, his most aggressive Republican challenger in the June primary.

“When she’s in Camarillo, she says she’s from Camarillo. When she’s in Carpinteria, she says she’s a Carpinterian. When she’s in Ojai, she says she’s from Ojai. Everywhere she’s gone she tells someone she’s from somewhere else.”

Gallegly, a longtime Simi Valley resident, is prepared to fire similar barbs at Anita Perez Ferguson, a potential Democratic opponent who is staying with a friend until she completes the purchase of a residence in Oxnard. Until recently, she lived in Santa Barbara.

“My roots might just be a little deeper than hers,” Gallegly said.

And Assemblywoman Cathie Wright (R-Simi Valley) calls her most experienced opponent, Marian W. La Follette, “a political opportunist” for moving to Thousand Oaks from her Corona del Mar home so she can compete in an open state Senate seat.

“She’s coming all the way from Orange County,” Wright said. “I think people have to question whether her heart is really in this district.”

New political boundaries fashioned by this year’s redistricting have opened a multitude of opportunities for candidates who are willing to pull up stakes and move into new districts.

But it has also opened candidates to the accusation of being a carpetbagger, a term coined by hostile Southerners to describe unwanted Northerners who descended upon the South to make their fortunes after the Civil War.

Gallegly, 48, a Republican running for a fourth congressional term, is well aware of the potency of the allegation. In 1986, he won his first congressional race partly by painting his heavily favored opponent, Tony Hope, as a carpetbagger who returned to California from the nation’s capital to run for office.

Now, two of Gallegly’s potential rivals have recently moved.

Unlike candidates running for state and local office, individuals vying for a congressional seat do not have to live within the boundaries of the political district. But to be sure, the lack of a legal residency requirement does not stop campaign accusations of being a political outsider.

For his part, Gallegly says he is not going to sling mud at either of his Republican opponents before the June 2 primary or, if he wins, at his Democratic rival in the fall general election.

But with Gallegly emphasizing his longtime connection to the community, voters cannot escape the carpetbagger implication.

“I will try to point out that I have deep roots in Ventura County,” Gallegly, the former Simi Valley mayor, said last week. “I lived here 25 years. That will be one of my strongest tools.”

An examination of the voter registration affidavits signed by Gallegly’s opponents provide a glimpse into whether the carpetbagger label will stick.

To vote, individuals must complete and sign--under penalty of perjury--a voter registration card that is filed with the registrar of voters. An important piece of information on the card is the individual’s permanent residence.

Under California law, residence means “domicile”--that is, the “place in which his or her habitation is fixed, wherein the person has the intention of remaining, and to which, whenever he or she is absent, the person has the intention of returning.”

“The whole thing hinges on intention,” said Melissa Warren, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state. “It’s very complex. It gets pretty strange.”

So strange that in 1985 a state court ruled that homeless people who called the grassy patch around Santa Barbara’s landmark fig tree their home could use the turf as their domicile for purposes of voting. The California Court of Appeal affirmed the decision.

Even Gallegly, who moved to Simi Valley from Los Angeles at the age of 22, ran afoul of the voter registration law.

Between 1975 and 1979, the year that he was elected to the Simi Valley City Council, Gallegly was registered to vote in Simi Valley. But instead of using his home address as required by law, he used his city business address on his voter registration card.

In 1979, after receiving a complaint, Ventura County Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury checked on Gallegly and 28 other individuals who had done the same thing. Bradbury then dropped the matter, declaring that Gallegly and the others filed their declarations in ignorance of the law and without any intent to gain personal benefit.

“We just used the business address as a convenience,” Gallegly said, recalling the incident.

Bradbury is a staunch Gallegly supporter in the current congressional race.

Becker, 50, a businesswoman, is one of two Republicans challenging Gallegly in the June primary in the 23rd Congressional District that encompasses Carpinteria and all of Ventura County except Thousand Oaks

Becker has resided in the new congressional district for 20 years. But until recently, she lived in Carpinteria, one corner of the district, according to voter records.

Her recent move has prompted Gallegly to question whether she has relocated to the heart of the congressional district for political advantage.

Becker, who owns a property management and construction firm based in Camarillo, sniffs at Gallegly’s inference of being a political outsider.

“I have a choice of 85 properties I could live in in Ventura County,” Becker said.

Earlier this year, Becker said she separated from her husband and departed from the Carpinteria house where she lived for six years. Now, she said, she lives with her son in a residence that she owns in Ojai.

The other Republican seeking to unseat Gallegly is Dr. Robert A. Shakman, 48, of Ventura. He has lived in his current residence for 16 years.

In the Democratic congressional primary, Anita Perez Ferguson, 43, an education consultant, is running against Kevin Sweeney, 33, an environmentalist.

When the new congressional district’s lines separated heavily Latino Oxnard from Perez Ferguson’s home in Santa Barbara, she decided to relocate to Ventura County. She moved temporarily into the Oxnard townhouse of Mary L. Barreto, a family counselor and political supporter.

“I wanted to get residence in the district,” Perez Ferguson said. “I really felt it was important to be in there and be part of things happening there on a daily basis.”

On Jan. 13, Perez Ferguson signed a voter registration card declaring that Barreto’s residence was her permanent address, according to county voter records. Since then, she has invoked her new registration to vote in an Oxnard school bond election.

Barreto’s townhouse “is the place I’ve been living,” Perez Ferguson confirmed.

Perez Ferguson’s residence in Santa Barbara, which she and her husband have owned since 1977, was listed as her former address.

Although Perez Ferguson lists Barreto’s townhouse as her new permanent domicile, it’s actually a temporary address because she is purchasing a residence in Oxnard.

But both Perez Ferguson and Barreto defend the voter affidavit that the Barreto townhouse is also Perez Ferguson’s residence.

“She stays with me during the week,” Barreto said. “She likes it down here. There’s a different ambience. When somebody eats, sleeps and has campaign and social meetings (at Barreto’s townhouse), I would say that constitutes where you live.”

Perez Ferguson said that on weekends she tries to get back to Santa Barbara, where her husband lives and works. “It is not where I live anymore,” she said, but added that she and her husband have no intention of selling it.

Displaying some impatience at the questions, Perez Ferguson said she preferred to move on to another subject.

“There are so many other issues of major importance,” she said. “This is kind of a silly thing, a kind of non-issue.”

Sweeney, a Ventura resident for more than three years, listed a Ventura apartment as his residence with the registrar, a place where he said he has hung his hat since February. Before that, he said, he lived in another apartment in Ventura.

“I don’t own property anywhere,” he said.

Sweeney said he viewed living in the new congressional district as important because of the “visceral contact” that a candidate needs to have with area residents.

“This is where I shop, this is where I go on bike rides,” he said. “If you say you’re part of this community and you’re not, you’re misleading the voters.”

Earlier this year, former Assemblywoman Marian W. La Follette, 65, moved from her $1.3-million residence in Corona Del Mar to Thousand Oaks to compete for an open seat representing the new 19th State Senate District.

The new district, left vacant by the retirement of Sen. Ed Davis (R-Santa Clarita), stretches from Northridge in the San Fernando Valley to Ventura County, encompassing the cities of Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks, Moorpark, Oxnard, Camarillo, Fillmore and Port Hueneme.

La Follette has been criticized by political opponents for moving to a rented condominium in Thousand Oaks only weeks before the cutoff date for filing candidacy papers.

“I think anyone who wants to run for office should run from where they live,” said Assemblywoman Cathie Wright, 62, La Follette’s most combative opponent.

Fillmore City Councilman Roger Campbell, the other Republican candidate in the state Senate race, agrees that it is important for candidates to live among their potential constituents. “I’ve lived here all my life,” Campbell said. “I think it’s really difficult, if you haven’t been a resident of the district, to really know what the issues are.”

La Follette defends her recent move. She said she lived in Northridge, a city in the district, until about 16 months ago when she retired from the Assembly and moved to be closer to a Newport Beach hospital where her late husband, John, was receiving chemotherapy for cancer. He died in December, 1990. She sold her Northridge residence when it was damaged in a fire.

Furthermore, she said, she has represented portions of the district during her 10 years in the Assembly, including a large area of the San Fernando Valley throughout the 1980s, and the Conejo Valley in the early 1980s. She also owned a bookstore in Thousand Oaks from 1979 to 1981.

“I don’t think the carpetbagger issue is a very honest issue in this campaign,” La Follette said.

Asked why she moved to Ventura County to run for the state Senate, La Follette said she has considered doing so for years.

“It’s not a new idea,” she said. “It didn’t just come out of the blue. For years when I was in the Assembly, I would jokingly say, ‘When Ed Davis retires I will run for his seat.’ ”

Although she cannot claim roots as deep in Ventura County as her two opponents’, La Follette said she knows the issues in the area as well as Wright or Campbell.

“The problems people are facing in Ventura are no different from the problems people are facing in the San Fernando Valley,” she said. “Everybody is concerned equally about jobs.”