Morgan, Long to Target Each Other’s Backers

Camarillo City Councilman Mike Morgan says he will go after Santa Paula voters disappointed by Supervisor Kathy Long’s vote on city expansion as he heads into a November runoff election with Long for the 3rd District seat.

Long says she’ll do the reverse, appealing to Camarillo voters who solidly backed Morgan in Tuesday’s primary.

Across the county, meanwhile, the top two vote-getters in the 1st District race, Steve Bennett and Jim Monahan, each say they will scramble to win supporters of the third-place finisher, businesswoman Rosa Lee Measures, a sizable group who may hold the key to who replaces retiring Supervisor Susan Lacey in November.

But even as they planned campaign strategies for the next eight months, the candidates and others were assessing the message voters gave by voting in surprisingly high numbers against incumbents on the Board of Supervisors.

Long beat Morgan by three percentage points with 48.3% of the vote, but was forced into a runoff because she did not receive a majority of votes in the district covering Camarillo, Newbury Park, Santa Paula, Fillmore and part of Ojai.

Veteran Supervisor John K. Flynn was reelected to his Oxnard-based 5th District--but just barely. Flynn got 52.7% of the vote compared with a strong 35% showing by Oxnard school trustee Francisco Dominguez.

The results point out that voters have taken note of recent headlines about financial problems and bureaucratic spats within county government--and don’t like what they see, said Herbert Gooch, chairman of the political science department at Cal Lutheran University.

“Incumbency still triumphs, but it’s limping,” he said. “Voters are feeling angry about the supervisors--that somehow they botched stuff. The public did get the message that maybe there is something amiss on the Board of Supervisors.”

Flynn’s win gave the 67-year-old former history teacher an unprecedented seventh term. His slight majority Tuesday contrasts with the more than 60% he has polled regularly in the past decade; it was his most competitive race in 20 years.

At one point during a tense night watching his share of votes drop as Dominguez’s rose, “the alarm did go off,” Flynn said. “But any time you get over 50%, you’re doing OK. I’m very proud of voters for judging me on my experience and what I’ve been able to accomplish.”

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With the primary over, candidates moving on to November began setting strategies for broadening their support and raising the dollars necessary to get their message out.

Morgan, who entered the race late, acknowledged that he faces an uphill battle matching the thousands of dollars pouring into Long’s campaign.

Although he raised $20,000 for the primary, he only has $1,300 left, Morgan said. He hopes to raise another $25,000, but estimates that Long--who amassed $88,000 in the primary--will out-raise him by at least three times that.

Morgan, who drew his greatest support from Camarillo voters, said a bigger battle will be to siphon off some of Long’s support in Ojai, Newbury Park, Santa Paula and Fillmore. He hopes to do that in Santa Paula by telling voters he supports their right to decide whether the city should grow and allow construction of high-priced canyon homes, an expansion that Long opposes.

Morgan said he will also court environmentalists in Ojai and Newbury Park, and continue to criticize Long for the county’s recent financial troubles.

Long and Flynn were part of a split board that voted for a merger of mental health and social service departments in 1998, an action that indirectly led to a series of state and federal audits that will cost the county at least $23 million.

Long downplayed warnings by former county executive David L. Baker that the local government’s finances are on shaky ground, Morgan said.

“It’s still mismanagement, and there is no team effort there,” Morgan said. “She’s still developing her own agenda, instead of working together.”

Long countered that she will run an aggressive campaign that emphasizes her experience dealing with regional, rather than city, issues. She also intends to make Camarillo voters aware of her work on the city’s health-care district, a library commission and providing transportation for senior citizens.

“I intend to get out there and show voters what I can do for Camarillo,” Long said. “I intend to win this race in November.”

Just as important, Long said, will be the work she performs as supervisor in coming months. The board has already taken action to stabilize the county’s finances and that work will continue, she said.

“In the next few months, because it is budget season, we will be doing even more,” Long said.

With more campaigning ahead, Long expects to raise a total of $140,000 by the general election--the same amount she raised four years ago when she defeated Morgan by 8 percentage points.

In the 1st District race, Bennett estimated that he will need to raise another $50,000 before November, bringing his total fund-raising for the primary and general contests to about $134,000. Monahan, who raised $60,000 in the primary, said it will take at least another $75,000 in cash and thousands more in donated services to defeat Bennett, who led polling Tuesday with 44.3% of the vote. Monahan came in second with 31.7% for the district that covers Ventura and portions of the Ojai Valley.

Both candidates said they would capture the 23.6% of voters who cast ballots for Measures. Monahan said he and Measures had a handshake agreement that each would endorse the other in the event that one failed to make it to the runoff.

But Wednesday, Measures said she made no such pact. Instead, she said, she agreed only that the two Republican candidates would not attack each other in the primary and would consider backing the other in a runoff.

“I did not make any statement about an endorsement, nor could I commit to join his campaign,” Measures said. “That was his interpretation of what was said. . . . It’s pretty amazing to me that people hear what they want to hear.”

Bennett, meanwhile, believes that many Measures supporters will back him in November even though he is a Democrat supported by environmental groups and unions. Moderate business owners and those who endorsed Measures because of her strong background in cultural arts will move to him because Monahan has not addressed their concerns during his 22 years on the Ventura council, Bennett said.

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“He has a hard-core committed base. That’s how he’s been elected to the council so many times,” Bennett said. “But it doesn’t translate into a majority of the voters in November.”

Flynn’s 5th District race was the toughest he has faced since 1980, when he defeated Port Hueneme Mayor Dorill Wright by 1,650 votes to win his second term.

Flynn said he expected Dominguez to get one-third of the vote. But he said he was most surprised that Arlene H. Fraser, executive director of the Port Hueneme Chamber of Commerce, did so well, polling 11.7%.

Dominguez, executive director of a Latino advocacy group, said he believes that his campaign was hurt by his late entry into the race, a move that hampered his ability to raise money as well as get out and talk to voters.

Nevertheless, he said he was pleased with his showing and believes that it puts him in good position for another run at the seat four years from now.

“I think we put together a very respectable campaign,” Dominguez said. “What this does is give me experience running a county campaign. It makes me a little more seasoned for next time around.”

Flynn has vowed that this will be his last term, setting up a change in leadership in four years in a district redrawn nearly a decade ago to give Latinos a stronger political voice.

Some Latino leaders said Wednesday that Dominguez’s respectable showing will help boost the potential that a Latino will be elected in 2004.

“I think he did extremely well,” said Latino activist Irma Lopez, wife of the Oxnard mayor and a founding member of a group to help train future Latino leaders.

“This loss should not be considered the end of Francisco’s political career,” she said. “If he wants to continue, I think this will only enhance him as a candidate.”

Times staff writers Fred Alvarez and Margaret Talev contributed to this story.