The March 5 elections came and went in Redondo Beach, and with them the hubbub surrounding Measure A – the protests, the highly charged public meetings, the threats of litigation, and the round-the-clock phone calls to voters.
The issue that has divided Redondo for a decade – the future of its waterfront, and particularly the AES power plant – had been at least temporarily laid to rest with the defeat of Measure A, which proposed outlawing power generation at the site.
But anyone in Redondo Beach thought who it was a time for a break from the campaign-period tit-for-tat was mistaken.
As the May 14 run-off election approaches, the political din is growing louder.
The run-off comprises four separate races: the mayoral battle has been narrowed down to Steve Aspel and Matt Kilroy; the final contenders in District 1 are Jim Light and Jeff Ginsburg; and vying for the District 4 seat are Jan Jeffreys and Stephen Sammarco. Voters will also elect Chris Cagle, Dawn Esser, or Steve Diels as city treasurer, after the surprise resignation of longtime incumbent Ernie O’Dell.
The election comes at a potential turning point in Redondo Beach history. What will occur with the power plant is still up in the air – state regulatory agencies could still halt its re-powering, and at least some portion of the property is likely to be converted to public use. The rest of the waterfront is in flux, with major redevelopment on the table.
Four of the nine elected positions in the city will be filled in this election. Who wins will determine the direction Redondo takes.
Against this backdrop, defamatory letters are flooding the inboxes of local editors. Mass emails containing allegations of cronyism and political bullying are circulating.
Allegations of electioneering have emerged. One former candidate, Kim Fine, filed a writ of mandate to remove her endorsement from Light’s ballot statement. Another former candidate, 18-year-old political wunderkind Julian Stern, filed a police report alleging Sammarco systemically removed his campaign signs. Sammarco denies any wrongdoing.
The political atmosphere in Redondo Beach is fraught.
“This is politics at its lowest,” said mayoral candidate Steve Aspel, who currently represents District 2 on the City Council. “This kind of stuff that’s going on right now is reserved for third world politics, not for Redondo Beach. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Running off
Pat Aust, a longtime city council member, former mayoral candidate, and 44-year city employee, said political infighting is just a sign that it’s crunch time.
Candidates have been campaigning heavily for six months now, and they – and their supporters – are tired. They just want it to be over. They just want to win.
“We’re not seeing the best of any of the candidates, I believe,” Aust said. “We’re in survival mode now, so it’s like when you back ‘em into the trenches they’re gonna have to fight, and fighting isn’t pretty. Everybody gets dirty in a fight.
“I mean, early on, we were fighting because we thought there were differences between us. But now we’re just fighting.”
Aust has watched Redondo Beach undergo many an election cycle and believes the tension and the mudslinging are just byproducts of an inherently flawed runoff system.
“This is the thing I have against not winning with a plurality. Will winning with a majority give us the best person or the longest fight?” he asked. “What’s the system that will take the longest amount of time and cost the most money and give us almost the same outcome? Oh, that’s right, this one.
“We’re the only city around that does this. It’s like we haven’t come into the 21st century. Everyone else around us went with plurality, where a candidate gets the most votes and then it’s over.”
Not so in Redondo Beach, whose charter was long ago modeled on the L.A. City Charter and mandates a majority vote, he said.
Mayoral candidate Matt Kilroy, who currently represents District 5 on the council, said this year has been a political “overload” for local voters.
“We started into this campaign period so quickly after the November [national] elections, voters could barely come up for air,” he said. “In a perfect world, candidates would lay out their resumes, credentials, and vision and voters would vote on that… In a perfect world you’d like the election to be about issues that matter and you’d like it to take less than six months.”
It seems this is a less-than-perfect world.
Dianne Prado, who was eliminated from the District 1 race in March, has been disheartened by some of the political shenanigans she believes are transpiring behind the scenes.
“The more you get into politics the dirtier it gets… It’s why people don’t like politics,” she said. “It’s why people don’t like politicians. I believe things need to change. I think it’s important for the people to be involved in politics, to question what’s going on, because that’s the only way things will change.”
Candidate Jeff Ginsburg, who is running his first-ever local political campaign, called the election season “an interesting learning experience.”
While his hopes of a bright future aren’t dashed, he’s learning that politics aren’t always pretty.
“I don’t like this kind of politics; I like to be positive. I’m learning my lesson that it’s not always going to go that way,” he said.
Aspel, who has been accused of bullying and intimidation in recent weeks, called the present political atmosphere “despicable.” Prado used the same word when she made those accusations against him.
Bullying for the pulpit
The allegations stem from one incident in particular, which began as a run-of-the-mill paperwork issue but snowballed instead into a public nightmare, tapping into longstanding tensions exacerbated by vitriolic debate over Measure A.
Back in early March, Measure A – a ballot initiative intended to re-zone a section of Harbor Drive property such that it could no longer be used for power generation – was up for a vote. Light and councilmember Bill Brand – who was re-elected with a clear majority in March – co-authored the measure and led a vocal campaign in support of it. There were others, including mayoral candidates Aspel and Kilroy, who opposed the initiative because they believed it would invite a lawsuit from the property owner, global energy company AES. Ultimately, the voters rejected the measure, but only by a narrow margin – 51 to 48.9 percent.
Then, on March 30, Kim Fine – who ran for the District 1 seat in March but didn’t make it to the run-off – signed a writ of mandate instructing the city to remove her name from Jim Light’s official ballot statement.
Light wrote in his statement that both Fine and Prado endorsed him. Fine was surprised.
“I have not endorsed Mr. Light. Therefore, his candidate statement is materially false and misleading,” her writ of mandate reads.
In her writ, she alleged she was harassed by some people who were upset that she had endorsed Light. “As a result of Mr. Light’s false statement, I have received harassing notes left on my door as well as angry comments from neighbors which have ridiculed me for ‘endorsing’ Mr. Light. Mr. Light’s candidate statement has placed me in a false light and has caused discord in my life.”
Fine later said the whole thing stemmed from a misunderstanding.
“I spoke to Jeff and Jim after the March 5 election and said I wanted to be supportive of their campaigns,” she said. “I wanted to be able to work with whoever was elected, but I didn’t want to publicly endorse anybody because each seems to have a specific following and I don’t know my place in the community and don’t want to isolate anybody or close any lines of communication.”
She was startled to find her name on Light’s list of endorsements on his website and in his ballot statement, so she called Light, who said he had misunderstood her pledge of support.
“What I didn’t know at the time was that she had a differentiation between the word ‘endorse’ and the word ‘support.’ I’d never heard of that; in fact, if you look up the definition of ‘endorse’ it says ‘publicly support’,” Light said.
“I called Jim to tell him I’d be looking into filing a writ to have my name removed,” Fine said. “He was very kind and said he had misunderstood; he didn’t mean any malice.”
Together Light and Fine contacted City Clerk Eleanor Manzano, who confirmed she was not able to amend the ballot without a writ, as the filing period for candidate statements had closed.
At the Stanley Mosk Courthouse in downtown L.A. where she filed the paperwork, Fine bumped into Prado, a civil rights lawyer who works there.
Prado said Fine was visibly distraught. Following her dialogue with Fine, Prado was uneasy. It appeared to her that Fine had been bullied into filing the writ.
All year Prado has been outspoken about changing the political landscape; now she felt it was serendipitous that she’d run into Fine and felt she had to say something about that encounter. So Prado wrote a letter to local editors and posted it to her website; shortly thereafter NoPowerPlant.com then sent a mass email containing the full text of the letter.
It went viral. Anyone with any interest in Redondo politics received multiple copies of it.
In the letter, Prado discloses that she does support Light but says her motivation for speaking up is not to garner votes for him but to shine a light on the truth.
“It was clear that she [Fine] was being intimidated into doing this, and it was also pretty clear that she didn’t even understand what she was ultimately signing,” Prado wrote.
She alleged Aspel threatened Fine, telling her “it would be a shame if she would have to move from Redondo for something like this.”
“I was shocked by this news, shocked by the distress Fine was in, and told her that she needed to speak out and tell others about this,” Prado wrote.
“She replied that she was told she could not say anything about this until the election was over. My heart ached for Fine and also for the state of the local politics of Redondo Beach.
“This bullying by Steve Aspel is despicable and the residents of Redondo need to know that this is evidently the character of the current mayoral candidate.”
Aspel dismisses Prado’s letter – and the accusations that have been slung at him in the days since it published – as “ludicrous.”
“I can’t believe how low these people are stooping,” he said. “Kim Fine is a really nice person that got stuck in the middle of a firestorm. I would never threaten or bully her. I have never, ever said a bad word about Kim Fine or to her.”
He said Fine called him to seek advice about filing a writ, and he told her it was an important matter because her endorsement could have unintended implications.
“She had a lot of votes in District 1 so she’s a popular person down here. If she said she endorsed either Jim or Jeff that could mean a lot of votes and there are people who read those ballot statements and nothing else,” Aspel said.
“But I didn’t even know what a writ was before all this happened. I don’t know where all these accusations are coming from.”
Aspel said Fine told him the $500 filing fee was steeper than she could afford, so he suggested Ginsburg cover the cost – as the removal of the endorsement would be good for his campaign.
Ginsburg agreed and paid the fee on Fine’s behalf. Light accused Ginsburg of electioneering, but Ginsburg defends that check as a legitimate campaign expense. He said he made an inquiry to the California Fair Political Practices Commission just in case, and got the green light.
“Legally I’m fine, and I think ethically I’m fine here,” Ginsburg said. “If the roles were reversed and I were Jim Light I would’ve done all the work that poor Kim Fine had to do and I would’ve paid the fees myself because I caused the problem in the first place.
“The person who did wrong here is the person who submitted the wrong statement, if you remove all the smokescreens. Had the ballot statement been correct in the first place, none of this would have been necessary at all.”
So why does it all matter?
Light thinks Aspel is trying to ensure he loses. Aspel thinks Light is trying to oust him from the race so Kilroy – who has since the election gained the support NoPowerPlant.com – becomes mayor.
“Aspel told Kim he does not want me on the city council,” Light said.
“I know what their motivation is,” Aspel said. “They want their candidate to win but why they would stoop so low as to print all these lies, I have no idea. They’ve turned the mayor’s race into something that it shouldn’t be.”
In mayoral battle
Kilroy has also been dragged into the fray. He said Aspel’s supporters have turned on him with particular vigor since this controversy erupted.
“His supporters started throwing bombs back saying I sold my soul to the NoPowerPlant people… People are twisting information to fit their own needs and purposes,” he said. “And I’m just not going to go down that road.”
On April 25, NoPowerPlant.com sent a mass e-mail confirming its support for Kilroy, who after the March election agreed to push for a resolution opposing the power plant. Many local political observers were surprised, as Kilroy had formerly been a vocal opponent of Measure A. Some labeled him a flip-flopper.
Kilroy insists his position has never faltered.
He opposed Measure A because he felt it was poorly drafted, but said he never supported the idea of preserving a power plant on the Redondo Beach waterfront.
“I wrote a resolution [opposing the power plant] before Measure A was even on the ballot. I took a stance before and I haven’t changed my position,” he said.
“I want their votes [in the NoPowerPlant.com camp], of course I want their votes. But it’s rather ridiculous for someone to sit there and claim that, number one, I flip-flopped and, number two, I’m somehow now totally in their control. Somebody said I was pandering to special-interest groups… I find it hard to understand how 49 percent of voters is a special-interest group.”
Aspel accepts this as part of the politicking process.
“There are forces out there that don’t want me as mayor; they want Matt [Kilroy] because he’s part of the NoPowerPlant.com team now,” Aspel said. “Matt was 1,500 votes behind and I think he thought the only way he could set himself apart or catch up to my votes was to make friends with the NoPowerPlant people and hopefully he’d get all of those votes. And he may, but that’s his business.”
Kilroy said he has no intention of using the Fine incident to point fingers at his political rival.
“I knew about it all a week before Dianne Prado’s letter came out,” he said. “If I had any intent to use it to my benefit, I would’ve done it before Dianne Prado did, so I have no interest in talking negatively about Steve or anything he may or may not have done. It’s just not fair.”
Why the backlash?
Fine said she was shocked by the backlash from the community following the circulation of Prado’s letter.
“It really did blow me away,” Fine said. “I just didn’t think it would turn out this way. May 15, they’re not going to remember me or care. If this is my 15 minutes of fame I’m really sad…I love the community and how close I am to my neighbors and I wanted to bring the community together and something like this feels like it’s tearing the community apart, and that kills me.”
Ginsburg said he feels for Fine, who got caught in the crossfire of a political battle.
“She took the burden of all of this on her own shoulders and did what she felt was the right thing to do and she’s suffered the most for it. This is something that she didn’t cause,” he said.
And Prado believes her letter, and the resulting reactions from members of the community, speaks volumes about the state of local politics in Redondo Beach.
“Everyone, stop for a moment and take a step back and think about the bigger picture and let’s talk about it and think about it and try to hash it out. I think it just cuts the surface of really what’s wrong with politics,” she said.
“I don’t think people want to think there’s something wrong with the government. I just thought it was really sad and disheartening to hear something like this can happen at the local level, and I know people will choose not to believe me but I have nothing to gain from this. If anything, I have more to lose. For me, it was important for this to come out so people wouldn’t be blind to it. Even if they don’t believe me, maybe they’ll start to question.”
Whatever one believes, the campaign’s rancor speaks to a rift within the city that has been growing for more than a decade. Light, Brand, and Esser have all been highly critical of the city’s handling of waterfront development. Building a Better Redondo (BBR) and NoPowerPlant.com have been engaged in hand-to-hand political combat, fighting both successfully and unsuccessfully through lawsuits and ballot measures that have already changed Redondo’s political landscape. The vast majority of elected officials in Redondo, and particularly Aspel, Aust, and Diels, have likewise engaged in political warfare to stave off the activist groups’ efforts.
“This is also about BBR,” Aust said of this election. “This isn’t just BBR, this is the third iteration of BBR and they’re using the same tactics. It’s kind of like, we lost one fight [the defeat of Measure A in March]; let’s make a crusade out of something different.”
Aspel, who faced Light as an opponent the first time he ran for council, believes BBR uses divisiveness as a political strategy.
“Eight years ago I ran against Jim Light and there was a lot of drama and venom from his side and I chose not to even acknowledge it and I did my own thing then, too,” he said. “I think it’s just the way they do business.”
He believes the “real bullies” are those spreading lies about him on the internet, in particular the outspoken groups that passionately supported Measure A.
“This is not my fight and I don’t know why they got me involved,” he said. “They took this and ran with it and put it all over blogs and social media that I am a bully and I will unequivocally deny that. I consider Kim my friend.
“The really strict ‘Yes on Measure A’ people…this is their new fight. They’re going to try to take out any opposition they have and there’s no negotiation with them. They want total annihilation. They are the bullies… Jim Light has been a bully for the 10 years I’ve known him and will continue to be. Jim Light put Kim in this position; I did not.”
Light was incredulous at this allegation.
“I don’t remember any controversy in that first election,” he said. “I hardly knew Aspel back then, so there was no malice. There were the normal mailers and stuff like that, but no tension. What’s transpired since then, there’s been tension, but he called us ‘more toxic than the cancer in his rectum’ years ago – I think the animosity has been more on his side toward me than anything else.
“And now, I have nothing to do with NoPowerPlant.com – that’s a different group of ladies and I haven’t been interfacing with them. All they did was publish what Dianne Prado put out. She’s not part of BBR or NoPowerPlant.com. She’s an attorney who decided to run for city council and I think she’s appalled by what she’s finding in our local politics and she felt like, because Kim wasn’t going to come out and tell people what happened, it was her civic duty to do so.”
A turning point
Redondo Beach is at a crossroads.
The city is preparing to completely revamp its waterfront, a major economic driver, in a $200 million bid with El Segundo development firm CenterCal. The fate of the Harbor Drive power plant hangs in limbo as the California Energy Commission considers its application to upgrade to a newer model. In the meantime, the City of Redondo Beach has elected to become an “intervenor” in the decision-making process, saddling it with the responsibility (and $200,000 expense) of participating in the Sacramento-based commission’s deliberations.
It’s a pivotal moment in Redondo Beach history, and the council members elected this month will make key decisions determining the city’s future.
They just have to get there first.
“I’m just ready for this all to be over, and for us to get on with the city’s business,” Aspel said. “I’m tired. We’re all tired.”
