Opponents of Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s expansion into the area are pointing to the grass-roots campaign that ousted two Rosemead City Council members last week as a blueprint for keeping the retail giant out.

Wal-Mart last year received unanimous approval from the five-member Rosemead City Council for construction of a 230,000-square-foot Supercenter, and two of the three members up for re-election last week were turned out by voters.

“The election was in many ways a referendum on Wal-Mart,” said Roxana Tynan, director of accountable development for the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, which advised anti-Wal-Mart candidates. “It’s an indication to politicians that Wal-Mart can be very unpopular. Those other municipalities should really understand what they are getting into.”

Such backlashes over a single issue are common, particularly in smaller cities, said Raphael Sonenshein, a political science professor at California State University, Fullerton. They can also backfire.

“These insurgencies can bring unskilled officials who are one-issue people that don’t know what they are doing,” said Sonenshein.

That said, there are times such a groundswell can propel “some of the finest public servants who ride a wave of discontent over one issue into the start of their career,” he said.

One such outcome was the candidacy of Marvin Braude, who won an L.A. City Council seat in 1965 based on Westside residents’ fear that the Santa Monica Mountains would be over-developed. He wound up becoming a legendary figure in L.A. politics, serving on the council for 32 years.

The Rosemead election may in the end prove a Pyrrhic victory for Wal-Mart opponents. The approvals cannot be rescinded legislatively; the only hope now is in the courts, where a pending lawsuit questions the validity of the company’s environmental impact report.

“The City Council majority still supports the project,” said Peter Kanelos, a Wal-Mart spokesman. “But anyway, it’s irrelevant because we already have our entitlements. The election has no impact and quite frankly, for the unions to claim victory is ludicrous.”

John Tran, one of the candidates swept into office by running against the Wal-Mart approvals, said he plans to meet with the City Attorney’s Office to “find some loophole” in Wal-Mart’s approvals.

With the outcome of the vote, he said he hopes at least one of the three remaining councilmembers that originally supported Wal-Mart will change his or her mind. If not, Tran said, the voters will be given another chance to express their discontent.

“If we can get one City Council member on board, we would have an opportunity to stop the development,” said Tran. “If they don’t want to support this, let’s do a recall on the other councilmembers.”

Other Races

Development interests had a mixed record in last Tuesday’s municipal elections.

There was a victory in Beverly Hills as voters approved a referendum on the $200 million Montage Hotel and public gardens project in that city’s Golden Triangle. Developer Athens Group and the Montage Hotel & Resorts spent more than a million dollars in mailers and cable television commercials in support of the project. Opponents, including several local merchants and the Peninsula Hotel, also spent upwards of seven figures in one of the most expensive campaigns in Beverly Hills history.

In Redondo Beach, development interests did not fare as well. Voters rejected the concept of a mixed-use project of hotel rooms and residences for a 76-acre site now occupied by a power plant being phased out of use. They chose instead to back the creation of a huge park.

Redondo Beach voters also approved a 2 percent increase in the city’s hotel bed tax. But in a victory for local businesses, they rejected a measure that would have indexed the city’s business license tax to inflation.

Finally, in South Gate, a 5 percent utility tax went down to defeat by more than a two-to-one margin. The tax would have hit businesses in the city the hardest.

Westside Tussle

The hotly contested runoff to fill L.A. City Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski’s 11th Council District seat is likely to turn on two factors.

One is the extent to which labor unions rally their troops for former cable television executive and talk show host Bill Rosendahl, who emerged from Tuesday’s primary with a slight 45 percent to 41 percent edge over his opponent, community activist and former area planning commissioner Flora Gil Krisiloff.

If labor comes out in force for Rosendahl and pushes him over the top, expect him to be a reliable union supporter on the City Council, along with Eric Garcetti and Martin Ludlow.

The other factor is how intensely both candidates will go after the 14 percent of voters who chose the third primary candidate, Angela Reddock, an attorney and city commissioner who lives in Westchester. (Rosendahl lives in the Mar Vista area, while Krisiloff lives in Brentwood.)

Westchester is the L.A. center of opposition to the massive $11 billion airport overhaul plan that was on the table for much of last year. Many in the community are even opposed to the Miscikowski compromise that pushes some of the more controversial projects including the Manchester Square remote check-in terminal off to the side for future consideration.

Both Krisiloff and Rosendahl want to see these “yellow-lighted” projects axed altogether from the plan. But expect the rhetoric to be turned up a notch as they compete for those Westchester votes.

Staff reporter David Greenberg contributed to this column. Staff reporter Howard Fine can be reached by phone at (323) 549-5225, ext. 227, or by e-mail at

[email protected]

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