Ninth in a series
[img]989|left|Denny Zane||no_popup[/img][Editor’s Note: For more than 30 years, Denny Zane, 63-year-old visionary-philosopher-politician-arch activist in Santa Monica, has been in the forefront of shaping and influencing public policy and environment-related projects. This is a first-person account of that journey. Summing up the way he has morphed through a series of (always-linked) career changes, he said: “I got into the habit of making a living by pursuing my personal political priorities.” Now concerned with mass transportation, accent on light rail, his address is movela.com]
Re “Scoring a Major Victory Over LAX”
The second part of the strategy our coalition adopted to win support for regional airports and to defeat Mayor Riordan’s plans to expand LAX and double their annual passenger load was to drag out our campaign past the end of Riordan’s term, 2001.
There was a mayoral contest that had six significant candidates, Jimmy Hahn, Joel Wachs, Kathleen McConnell, Xavier Becerra, Steve Soboroff and Antonio Villaraigosa. So I went to my client, Mike Gordon, the Mayor of El Segundo, and I said:
“We bottled them up in SCAG (Southern California Assn. of Governments), and now we have to bring this puppy home.”
I proposed that we begin a canvassing operation in areas of the city of Los Angeles closest to LAX, primarily Westchester, Playa del Rey and Venice. This canvassing operation would be self-funded because we would ask for donations at the door, just as we had done in Santa Monica with SMRR, the Renters Rights campaign.
Effectively, we moved the SMRR canvas into Westchester for a number of months. We went door-to-door in Westchester, Playa del Rey and Venice, collecting donations. Our message to the voters was, we wanted to get voters signed on pledge cards that they would not support any candidate for mayor unless they opposed Riordan’s expansion of LAX.
We took this pledge to the mayoral candidates, first to Antonio, to Xavier Becerra and Joel Wachs. All of them signed the pledge. Eventually, we got others. The only one who didn’t sign was Steve Soboroff.
Here Was the Strategy
The premise of this was we were going to have 10,000 voters on pledge cards who said they would not vote for a candidate unless he was right with the LAX issue. With those voters, we would be able to determine who were going to be in the runoff. We had real clout in the campaign.
One of the interesting side stories concerned going to Jimmy Hahn. It turned out that Mayor Riordan and Jimmy Hahn shared the same political brain. His name was Bill Wardlaw, a major political power for years. He was the man behind the throne for Dick Riordan, the man behind the throne later for Jimmy Hahn.
Bill Wardlaw had been my brother’s best friend in high school. I went with Mike Gordon to Bill, and I said, “Billy, we are going to have 10,000 voters on pledge cards. Jimmy is not going to make the runoff unless he is willing to stand up for a regional airport solution in opposition to Riordan’s do-it-all-at-LAX.”
After a few days, Jimmy got right with this issue and signed the pledge.
We had a press conference next to a little park, near an In ‘n Out burger, where Sepulveda hits Lincoln, and right under the flight path. We had Congresswoman Maxine Waters and Congresswoman Jane Harman, Ruth Galanter, the great champion of L.A. city for the regionalization of aviation, and Mike Gordon, and lots of South Bay elected officials.
We took the signed pledges and blew them up like huge posters, 3 by 5-foot posters and put them on easels around the stage. Some of the candidates were there.
Just as the press conference started, Mike Gordon stepped to the microphone, and this voice started going “Wait a minute! Wait a minute!” In came a guy from Steve Soboroff’s staff with a signed pledge. With that, everybody had signed. What a dramatic moment. If you had written this scene for a movie, no one would believe it happened that way.
Well, now, since all of them had signed the pledge, that meant we would not have to do any mailing to voters.
In fact, we wouldn’t even have to continue our canvassing.
In fact, I don’t know if we ever had more than 500 pledge cards signed!
