Four Districts OK $370 Million in School Bonds

One day after voters delivered a series of contrasting messages in nearly 100 local elections across Los Angeles County, campaign officials for several victorious school bond measures credited their victories to an early start, careful planning and cadres of energetic volunteers.

Voters in four school districts approved more than $370 million worth of bond measures Tuesday to repair aging schools or build new campuses. Voters in four other school districts turned down bond measures totaling $252 million.

Mixed results also carried through in votes about municipal taxing measures and fire protection services and in individual election races.

Incumbents carried the day in many races, including a Bonita school district race in which the reelected incumbent had announced his withdrawal from the race weeks earlier; Robert Olander II said Wednesday that he has not yet decided whether to serve another term.

In the Whittier Union High School District, however, all three incumbents were drummed out of office.

Voters also turned out at least one officeholder in several other contests, including two City Council members in Diamond Bar, one of whom, Gary Werner, helped found the city eight years ago. Two school board members also lost their seats in the Bassett Unified School District, where voters also rejected a $19-million bond measure.

On an election day in which voter turnout averaged 15%, county officials were unusually slow in tabulating the ballots, prolonging the moment of truth in scores of contests. For local elections, the county uses fewer vehicles and no helicopters, making ballot delivery slower than when it counts ballots in statewide and national elections.

The fates of the eight school bond measures--which all needed two-thirds approval for passage--provided the biggest contrasts, and some surprises, in Tuesday’s balloting.

“I am so thrilled to be a part of a community that values education and cares about its kids,” said Connie Webb, superintendent of the Eastside Union School District in the Antelope Valley, on the morning after voters authorized $15.5 million in bonds to build two schools and to remodel a campus built in 1950.

“By March or April, we hope to be swinging those hammers,” Webb said.

In El Segundo Unified, where voters approved a $24-million measure to refurbish the district’s campuses, interim Supt. Bill Watkins was equally enthusiastic.

“We’re really excited. The whole community really came together for the kids on this one,” Watkins said. The victory came four months after voters narrowly rejected an identical measure in June.

A $93.1-million bond measure also passed handily in Las Virgenes Unified, situated between the San Fernando Valley and the Ventura County line. In Pasadena Unified, voters approved a $240-million bond measure, the largest amount sought by any district Tuesday.

The Pasadena school district, which includes Altadena and Sierra Madre, surprised many observers when it overcame some vocal opposition and won approval from almost 74% of voters in a district where 30% of school age youngsters attend private or parochial schools.

“It sends a clear message about how much this community cares about its children. This is a tremendous investment,” school board President Lisa Fowler said Wednesday.

Fowler attributed the measure’s victory--the first since 1963 in Pasadena--to growing public awareness of schools’ needs and a desire to continue to reduce class sizes, a goal that requires additional space.

Las Virgenes and Pasadena hired political consultant Larry Tramutola, whose Oakland-based Tramutola Co. has managed 59 school bond campaigns in California over the last three years and has helped put 55, including these two, over the top.

Tramutola said both districts began planning their bond campaigns well over a year ago, developing a sound accounting of the needs for each school and formulating detailed plans for financing them. Then hundreds of volunteers made sure that the needs were communicated to voters.

“It takes a lot of work and a lot of volunteers who have got to be able to convince voters that [the bond measure] makes sense,” Tramutola said, noting that in every district, it is the voters without children in the public schools who must be convinced.

Still, he said, Pasadena’s resounding win was a bit of a surprise, even to him.

“If you had asked me a year ago if Pasadena would have passed a bond measure, I might have said no, but a lot of people there worked very long and hard, and it paid off,” he said.

In contrast, there was no joy in the Torrance Unified School District, where bond backers had also been hoping to turn a June defeat for an $80.5-million bond measure into a victory this time around. They came closer this time--62.6% of voters said yes compared with 58% last spring--but still fell short of the 66.7% required to pass local bond measures.

Alan W. Gafford, the coordinator of the “K for Kids” campaign, spent a gloomy Wednesday second-guessing the efforts of the last few weeks.

“We should have gotten the location of every [school] parent in Torrance and called them,” Gafford said. “We got 2,100 more votes than the first time around but that doesn’t equate to the number of parents out there.”

Torrance Supt. Arnold Plank, who walked precincts on weekends to get out the vote, was certainly discouraged but not ready to give up.

He and the school board may try again with another bond measure. Plank said there was no way there was enough money in the district’s $110-million budget to pay for the projects earmarked in the bond campaign.

Bond proponents seemed to take no comfort from the fact that all four losing measures garnered more than the 50%-plus-one needed for approval in most other kinds of elections.

“I thought it would be close,” said Lawndale School District Supt. Joe Condon, whose board had sought $31 million. “We really made a sincere effort. I thought we’d come closer than we did,” he added of the measure that garnered nearly 59% of the vote.

And at Mt. San Antonio Community College District, which lost a $122-million bond measure, officials were struggling to find other ways to pay for eight new construction projects to accommodate the school’s 39,000 students in the east San Gabriel Valley.

In munipal ballot measure voting, Hawthorne residents turned down one tax measure while approving another; in Azusa , voters approved two measures while roundly defeating three others. And in Agoura Hills, both tax questions on the ballot--one for libraries, another a business charge--went down to defeat.

Proposals to merge city fire departments with the county met contrasting fates in Lynwood and Montebello.

Lynwood residents voted nearly 2 to 1 to transfer the city’s Fire Department into the Los Angeles County Fire Protection District--the third city this year to approve the switch.

Local firefighters backed the merger, saying it would save money for the cash-strapped city. Officials were skeptical of benefits but the City Council took no position on the measure.

A similar measure in Montebello failed by a wide margin--61% to 39%--after a bruising campaign that pitted firefighters against local leaders vigorously opposing the shift.

Voters in Alhambra and West Covina face similar ballot measures next month.

In the Whittier Union High School District, incumbents suffered from fallout over their controversial ousting of a school superintendent over allegations that he violated the state education code for soliciting campaign funds for board members in the 1995 election.

*

Times staff writer Ken Ellingwood and correspondents Deborah Belgum, Kevin O’Leary and Richard Winton contributed to this story.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

School Bond Measures

Voters in Los Angeles County approved four local school bond measures in Tuesday’s balloting but rejected four others. The measures, aimed at financing modernization of buildings orconstruction of new facilites, each requirered two-thirds approval.

Approved

*--*

District Amount in millions % of Votes Eastside Union $15.5 71.5 El Segundo Unified $24 76.9 Las Virgenes Unified $93.1 79.3 Pasadena Unified $240 73.7 Total approved $372.6

*--*

Rejected *--*

District Amount in millions % of Votes Bassett Unified $19 52.5 Lawndale $31 58.9 Mt. San Antonio Community College $122 56.3 Torrance Unified $80.5 62.6 Total rejected $252.5

*--*

Source: County registrar-recorder