Los Angeles Elections

The recent election of a Sherman Oaks real estate agent as chairman of a citizens panel charged with overseeing a planned overhaul of Ventura Boulevard has been overturned because a provision of the state's open meeting law was violated. Jeff Brain was elected chairman of the 13-member Ventura Boulevard Specific Plan Review Board by a 7-4 vote at the board's July 26 meeting. One board member was absent from the vote and one seat is vacant.

The city's top ethics official on Friday urged rejection of a plan by Councilman Joel Wachs to tighten a key campaign-spending rule--a plan that has provoked sharp sparring between candidates in the mayor's race. Benjamin Bycel, executive director of the Los Angeles Ethics Commission, advised against Wachs' plan, saying it would put poorer candidates at a financial disadvantage.

Saying he is trying to close a loophole in the city's ethics law, Los Angeles City Councilman Joel Wachs proposed Monday that candidates who exceed voter-approved limits on fund raising be barred from using tax money to help underwrite their campaigns. At a news conference in City Hall, Wachs, a declared candidate for mayor, said his proposal would wipe out an obscure exception in the law that "makes a mockery of ethics reform." "You can't have it both ways," Wachs said.

Two of Los Angeles City Councilman Robert Farrell's aides filed a $1-million slander suit Monday against three of Farrell's political opponents who had raised questions about the propriety of his hiring of the aides. The Superior Court suit was filed by Marcela Howell, who managed Farrell's unsuccessful Assembly race in June, and Anthony Thigpenn, who worked for the campaign.

On her first try, Olivia Strozer got the recording, a toneless voice that instructed her to wait: All the 911 operators were busy. Nearby, 2-year-old Brandon Lott lay shot and gasping for breath in his mother's arms, the victim of a Fourth of July drive-by shooting in Los Angeles. Eighteen seconds ticked by in silence and, panic rising, Strozer redialed. Again and again the maddening recording clicked on.

A coalition of public interest and community groups filed an ethics-in-government ballot proposal Wednesday, offering a potential alternative to an ethics reform package under consideration by the Los Angeles City Council. John Phillips, chairman of the political watchdog organization California Common Cause, said the coalition, dubbed the Clean Government Committee, supports the council's June ballot measure.

The Los Angeles City Council on Friday voted to provide $3.2 million to establish a City Ethics Commission and enact other aspects of the Proposition H ballot measure approved in June. Included in the appropriation is $2 million to be used for political campaign matching funds and $650,000 to staff the ethics commission. The council action also set in motion the process for appointing commissioners and for transferring paper work functions from existing city offices to the new ethics office.

The Los Angeles City Council on Friday killed a proposal to establish public financing of political campaigns and passed an ethics-in-government package along with pay raises for council members, the mayor, the city attorney and the controller. The council "tore the guts out of the proposal" by killing public financing, said Councilman Michael Woo, the chairman of the council's Ad Hoc Ethics Committee and one of the authors of the broad reform package.

The campaign committee formed to push for passage of Proposition H--the government ethics measure on next Tuesday's Los Angeles ballot--has raised nearly $100,000 from many of the big real estate, law and business sources that the measure's proponents say should be driven from City Hall.

Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner will not prosecute aides to Mayor Tom Bradley for using city offices and equipment to assist the City Council campaign of Rita Walters, Reiner's office announced Friday. Reiner concluded after a two-month investigation that the help given to Walters, a longtime Bradley ally whom the mayor endorsed in the 9th District council race, would have been made available to her opponents if they had asked, said Roger J. Gunson, head of the Special Investigation Division.