Richard Alarc & #243;n has thrived in the role of the underdog.

Starting in the shadow of a pack of better-known candidates, he emerged as the first Latino elected to the Los Angeles City Council from the San Fernando Valley. Later, he took on a heavily favored state legislator for a Senate seat and eked out a victory after a tough campaign.

Now, as he runs for mayor of Los Angeles, Alarc & #243;n is once more the underdog. Except this time, despite what many regard as impressive showings in mayoral debates, the odds against him may be just too great.

He’s the least financed of the five major candidates, with a mere $356,000 cash on hand, and in the first major independent poll earlier this month, he pulled in 3 percent support.

“He’s a sharp guy and there’s nothing wrong with his campaign. But it just doesn’t appear to be in the cards for him,” said Raphael Sonenshein, professor of political science at California State University Fullerton and a longtime observer of L.A. politics.

He was the first major candidate to challenge incumbent Mayor James Hahn, but before he could get off the ground, former Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg entered the race, giving Alarc & #243;n competition for the San Fernando Valley vote. Then Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa announced his candidacy, depriving Alarc & #243;n much of his hoped-for Latino support. Finally, the city’s labor unions his only other potential base sided with the incumbent Hahn. Campaign donations dried up.

“It’s become a vicious circle. He’s got little money to increase his name identification and he has little name identification to increase his money,” said Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University.

Populist themes

Alarc & #243;n doesn’t see it this way. He maintains that media polls have never captured the true extent of his support and that he fully expects to make the May runoff. “People turn out for me that don’t vote in other elections and they will turn out for me again,” he said.

In the state Senate and on the campaign trail, Alarc & #243;n sounds populist themes. Two years ago, he formed the Senate Select Committee on Ending Poverty in California and held hearings around the state, even asking the state Chamber of Commerce to join in his crusade.

“People thought the war on poverty was over with the Johnson administration. Not Richard Alarc & #243;n. His hearings proved otherwise,” said Miguel Contreras, executive secretary of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor.

In the mayoral debates, he attacks “special interest” lobbyists and contractors that he says dominate City Hall. His solution: have voters pass a ballot initiative banning contributions of more than $100 from contractors, developers and lobbyists.

He also joined in a lawsuit seeking to rescind the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars from the Department of Water & Power to the city’s general fund, and he vows to give neighborhood councils the power to approve or reject development projects.

Alarc & #243;n has a long history of advocating for change.

In Sun Valley, where his father ran a furniture upholstery shop, he became student body president at John H. Francis Polytechnic High School. Drama teacher Enrique Duran remembers how Alarc & #243;n lent his support to a classmate seeking to become the first Latina homecoming queen. She won. “He wanted the underdog to get a piece of the pie and he was very effective in making his case,” Duran said.

Alarc & #243;n also reached out to neighboring high schools to create an informal alliance of Latino activists during the height of the Chicano power movement. Those networking skills came in handy a dozen years later when Alarc & #243;n, then a local chair for the Mexican-American Political Association, fought for redistricting reform to bring greater representation for Latinos, both on the L.A. City Council and on the L.A. Unified School District Board of Education.

Family tragedy

After marrying and graduating from California State University, Northridge, he took a job in then-Mayor Tom Bradley’s office managing an anti-gang contract.

“We were really impressed with his commitment to working directly with the community,” said Mike Thompson, the program administrator who hired Alarc & #243;n. “He was energetic, enthusiastic and very serious about what he was doing.”

Another colleague at the time, L.A. City Councilwoman Wendy Greuel, described the young Alarc & #243;n as “very passionate about his work, about his ideas.”

In 1987, tragedy struck when the youngest of his five children, three-year-old Richie Alarc & #243;n, was killed in a crash caused by a drunk driver. The boy’s grandmother, the mother of Alarc & #243;n’s wife, Corina, was also killed.

“He took his grief and directed it towards other things. He became active in Mothers Against Drunk Driving and he became even more committed to the youth and gang prevention programs he was working on,” said Rose Ochi, Alarc & #243;n’s boss in Mayor Bradley’s office of criminal justice planning.

Alarc & #243;n’s perseverance soon caught the attention of Bradley, who in 1989 appointed him deputy mayor for the San Fernando Valley. This gave him a springboard for elected office, providing a base of prominent business and community officials. “He was everywhere, talking to everybody,” Greuel said.

As Bradley’s final term wound down, Alarc & #243;n filed to run for the northeast San Fernando Valley district seat being vacated by retiring Councilman Ernani Bernardi. He faced a crowded field that included the widow of former Councilman Howard Finn, a popular fire captain and one of Bernardi’s deputies.

Although he lagged in fundraising, Alarc & #243;n made the most of his contacts and placed second to fire captain Lyle Hall.

To win the 1993 runoff in a district with a majority Anglo electorate, Alarc & #243;n focused on what would become his election trademark: registering thousands of new Latinos who made up 70 percent of the district’s population. He also courted the union vote, meeting with Contreras who was then the County Federation’s political director.

“I remember very clearly my first meeting with him,” Contreras said. “I was caught off-guard by his youthfulness. He also looked like a character right out of one of those old Zoot Suit plays, with his slicked back hair. But he impressed me during the interview and we ended up supporting him in the runoff.”

Alarcon won by 130 votes in one of the closest city council races in L.A. history.

Alarc & #243;n’s introduction to the council was hardly auspicious. He had to fight to claim his seat at one end of the alphabetically arranged council horseshoe.

“He displaced Richard Alatorre at the end of the horseshoe, but Alatorre wouldn’t move down a seat until (then Council President John) Ferraro made him do so,” said former City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter.

Once seated, Alarc & #243;n focused on bringing home more resources for his district, which had suffered decades of neglect. “He was tenacious in getting a fair share,” Galanter said.

Just a few months before Alarc & #243;n took office, General Motors Corp. had closed its Van Nuys plant, throwing 3,000 employees out of work. Alarc & #243;n worked with Mayor Richard Riordan’s business team to craft a redevelopment plan for the 100-acre site.

They finally arrived at a development agreement calling for a mixture of retail and light industrial tenants with the city kicking in $4 million for local infrastructure improvements. The project opened in 1998 with three dozen retail stores, including a Home Depot and a cinema megaplex. Private sector investment in the site eventually totaled $75 million.

Alarc & #243;n considers the GM project the crowning achievement of his tenure on the council. However, the new jobs pay much less than the high wage jobs they replaced and that Alarc & #243;n says the city needs to add to its economy.

On the council, he also reached out to new constituencies.

“Richard was annoyed that the League of Conservation Voters did not endorse him in his run for council. So he decided to go prove to them that he was an environmentalist,” Galanter said. “He fought for a new library building with all the latest sustainability features in his district. It turned out to be a very expensive project.”

Campaign controversy

Alarc & #243;n handily won re-election in 1997. Then, just months later, he announced plans to run for the state Senate seat vacated by termed out Herschel Rosenthal. He was taking on former state Assemblyman Richard Katz, who had been the Assembly Democratic leader and had shown the ability to raise impressive amounts of money. Again, Alarc & #243;n was regarded as an underdog.

“This was one instance where he wore his ambition on his sleeve,” said one longtime friend. “He decided to bypass the usual route of going for the state Assembly first and went directly for the upper house.”

The primary campaign was bitter and in the end, Alarc & #243;n outraised Katz. But the campaign will be remembered for what happened in its closing days. A mailer was sent to every registered voter with a Latino surname linking Katz to an infamous incident in Orange County in 1988 when Republicans had hired security guards who forcibly shooed away Latino voters from the polls. The letter was signed by Democratic then-Sen. Richard Polanco, an Alarc & #243;n supporter, and paid for by a Polanco-controlled committee.

The allegation was false: Katz was helping the Democratic candidate in the race, and actually was the one who initially exposed the poll guard incident and pressed for a federal investigation.

Local Jewish leaders immediately accused Polanco and by extension, Alarc & #243;n of intentionally seeking to fan racial flames, which led to months of bitter exchanges between leaders of the two ethnic groups. A month later after the election Alarc & #243;n said that the mailer was drafted by his own campaign consultant, Richie Ross.

The election itself proved a nail-biter. When the initial tally was completed, Alarc & #243;n had won by 32 votes, with hundreds of ballots outstanding. The final count made Alarc & #243;n’s margin 29 votes, making it one of the closest races in state history. Although he was entitled to ask for a recount, Katz decided against it.

Power broker

He quickly adjusted to Sacramento politics. He won appointment to the powerful Labor and Industrial Relations Committee and within a few months was appointed chair. With constant clashes between labor and business interests, the committee had a reputation for being the most polarized in the Legislature.

Alarc & #243;n soon had a reputation for running a tight ship.

“Woe betide anyone who came before his committee unprepared. It didn’t matter if it was a university president, a corporate titan or a labor leader. He let them all have it,” said Pat Henning, then a consultant for the committee and now director of the state Employment Development Department.

Alarc & #243;n also was seen as treating business fairly, despite his philosophical tilt towards labor.

“I’ve worked with him representing employers and found him to be willing to listen and not to come in with a predetermined view,” said Lori Kammerer, who lobbies on workers’ compensation issues. “If there’s an area where both sides differ in opinions and that happens frequently in workers’ comp he will often defer to a study and then adhere to the study’s recommendations.”

Yet Alarc & #243;n pushed through an increase in unemployment insurance benefits, despite intense opposition from business groups, and legislation requiring all public works construction projects to pay prevailing wages.

Each year, Alarc & #243;n also succeeded in getting bills passed that increased benefits for injured workers. For the first three years, the centrist-leaning Gov. Gray Davis vetoed Alarc & #243;n’s legislation, saying it would drive up costs for employers. Then, in 2002, Davis decided he needed to shore up his Democratic base as he prepared for re-election. He agreed to sign the same benefit increase he vetoed months earlier.

Employer groups, who were left out of the negotiations, protested. They faulted Alarc & #243;n for refusing to wait for studies on the financial impact of benefit hikes.

Less than two years later, after Davis was recalled, Alarc & #243;n proved flexible in negotiating with Republican leaders. “He was willing to go after the cost-drivers, even if it meant going against some of his supporters,” Kammerer said.

While Alarc & #243;n was in Sacramento, his family life fell into disarray. His marriage collapsed in early 1999, just as Corina then a city commissioner was launching a bid for her husband’s old seat on the City Council. She withdrew her bid, saying it was at her husband’s request. The marriage ended up in divorce proceedings the following year.

Later, Corina Alarc & #243;n declared bankruptcy, pointing to a lavish lifestyle beyond the couple’s means and combined debts that ran into the tens of thousands of dollars. In the court papers, Richard Alarc & #243;n admitted there were financial problems, but said Corina could have helped alleviate them by devoting more attention to her insurance brokerage business or finding more lucrative employment.

The marriage fallout also had political consequences. In the race to replace him on the council, Richard and Corina Alarc & #243;n endorsed different candidates she supported Alex Padilla while he endorsed longtime community activist Corinne Sanchez. Padilla ultimately won the support of local unions and of then-Mayor Riordan and he went on to become the second-youngest L.A. city councilman ever elected.

To this day, the two Alarc & #243;ns remain on opposite political sides: Corina is a police commissioner supporting Hahn for re-election.

Secession decision

Two years after his marriage breakup, Alarc & #243;n faced a new political dilemma: the San Fernando Valley secession movement. As one of the most prominent elected Valley officials, he had been courted furiously by both sides. Secession proponents saw him as a leader in the eyes of thousands of voters, which is why the opponents tried to keep him out of the fray.

For a few months in early 2002, Alarc & #243;n toyed with the idea of running for mayor of a proposed Valley city, but ultimately decided against it, choosing to run for re-election to the state Senate. He now maintains that the prime reason was because the secession documents were poorly drafted and had loopholes that could prove difficult for a fledgling city.

But he also faced an uphill battle with labor unions, a key leg of his support, that were vehemently opposed to secession.

Alarc & #243;n, facing term limits in 2006, was expected to run for a statewide post or for state Assembly. But he also cast an eye towards the upcoming L.A. mayor’s race, although he was leaning against taking on an incumbent mayor and had been warned by Contreras that the union vote would likely go to Hahn.

In early 2004, as the “pay-to-play” investigations began to rock City Hall, Alarc & #243;n saw the prospect of Hahn being weakened and decided to jump in. A year later, Hahn’s favorable rating had dropped to 50 percent in a recent Los Angeles Times poll, but Alarc & #243;n’s hopes have been virtually dashed as first Hertzberg, then Bernard Parks and finally Villaraigosa entered the fray.

“Villaraigosa’s entry was the key blow,” Sonenshein said. “For months, no one was sure whether he was going to go to Washington as part of a (John) Kerry administration.” If that had happened, he added, Alarc & #243;n would have been the only Latino in the race and would have been in a much stronger position.

But even if Alarc & #243;n fails to make the runoff, he could still come out ahead politically.

“He may very well be going back to voters for some other position in the future and they will remember his name and that he ran a decent campaign,” Sonenshein said. “That can only help him.”