Alarcon, Hall Lead; Picus Forced Into Runoff : 3rd District: The four-term incumbent will face her former deputy in a June 8 rematch for the southwestern Valley seat.

An electorate bent on change has forced Los Angeles City Councilwoman Joy Picus into a runoff election against her former deputy, Laura Chick, for the council seat representing the southwestern San Fernando Valley.

Picus conceded, as election returns neared the halfway point Tuesday night, that she would be forced into a runoff June 8 against Chick. They were the top two vote-getters of six candidates for the seat representing the 3rd Council District.

“I’ve never had such a well-financed opponent,” Picus said of Chick, complaining that she felt betrayed by her former deputy’s candidacy. “It’s like a business in which a trusted employee takes your trade and clients,” Picus said.

Chick, 48, who positioned herself as an agent for change while painting Picus, 62, as out of touch with constituents, told a jubilant gathering of her political staff in Reseda that she had “connected with the voters’ anger and frustration.”

Chick, who raised unusually large amounts of campaign funds for a challenger, also was a tireless campaigner, spending long hours walking precincts.

“I walked precincts seven days a week for two months,” Chick said. She quipped that she had bought a new pair of sandals Tuesday to wear during the runoff, claiming she had worn out one pair of Birkenstocks on the primary.

Chick was Picus’ field deputy from 1989 to 1991.

As the incumbent, Picus was the target of voter unhappiness and rancor over crime, urban decay and the failings of the city’s school system.

Picus’ dilemma was magnified by her support for one plan to increase property taxes to pay for 1,000 more police officers and her opposition to yet another plan to limit the terms of city elected officials. Both measures were on Tuesday’s ballot.

These two positions put Picus at complete odds with all five of her challengers and appeared to mark her as an entrenched incumbent “out of touch with her constituents,” said Harvey Englander, Chick’s political consultant.

On precinct walks, Chick played heavily on the theme of change. Mayor Tom Bradley is finally leaving office, Chick was fond of telling voters, and now it’s time for Picus to go too, after 16 years in office.

Meanwhile, Picus leaned on her record, including an agreement she got from Southern Pacific Railroad to stop running noisy trains at night through Woodland Hills residential areas and, in the wake of the highly publicized drowning of Adam Bischoff in the Los Angeles River, her initiation of a swift-water rescue program to prevent similar deaths in the concrete-lined river channel.

At forums, Picus conceded that crime was hurting the West Valley. But in the same breath she claimed credit for an LAPD program that has reduced gang problems at Lanark Park in Canoga Park.

“We have taken back that community from the gangs,” Picus insisted, as she promised more of the same if reelected.

Most of the sharpest exchanges of the campaign occurred in the final days.

Identifying her former aide as her biggest threat, Picus distributed a political mailer calling Chick a carpetbagger, out of sync with West Valley concerns. In fact, Chick moved into the 3rd District only last summer. Previously, she had lived in Sherman Oaks.

Picus told a crowd at a forum last week that by contrast, she had resided in the West Valley for 30 years and had spent time with many of them talking about city issues “over the vegetables in the supermarket.”

Meanwhile, Chick accused the incumbent of being arrogant, revealing in a mailer of her own that Picus had charged the city $433 to stay in a downtown Los Angeles hotel while attending a local, two-day convention. The city controller said, however, that the bill was a legitimate city expense.

Both Chick, a field deputy in Picus’ Reseda office from 1989 to 1991, and Dennis Zine, an LAPD sergeant, got into the race in August even as Picus was testing the idea of running for mayor as an alternative to seeking a fifth term in the office she has held since 1977.

With help from her husband, Robert Chick, an insurance executive who was appointed by Bradley to the city’s Airport Commission, Chick scored early successes in raising campaign money from City Hall insiders.

Chick also attracted a small cadre of volunteer political workers who had earned their stripes in the Clinton-Gore campaign.

The Picus campaign got off to a sluggish start but finally managed to compete dollar-for-dollar with Chick in the important battle for political money.

In campaign finance disclosure statements filed Friday, Picus reported that she had raised $208,000, compared to $195,000 for Chick.

Still, the numbers spoke of perils for the incumbent. In 1989, despite outspending all five of her foes by a 4-1 margin, Picus won reelection in the primary by only 52% of the vote.

Chick also was attacked by her fellow challengers, Zine and Robert Gross.

The Zine campaign--which lost the full-time services of its candidate just before the election when he returned to duty amid LAPD preparations for the Rodney G. King civil rights trial verdicts--zapped Chick as a Picus clone.

Both Zine and Gross warned voters that Chick was not a credible vehicle for “real change” in the leadership of the 3rd District because she was a former Picus team member and confidante.

“It’s a situation of the teacher and the pupil,” Gross would tell reporters. “And now Chick is giving Picus a few lessons.”

As the campaign collided with mounting fears of urban violence, including the fatal shooting of a child at Balboa Park, Zine tried to capitalize on his 25 years as a police officer.

“Not one of the other candidates has ever arrested anyone,” Zine told a candidate forum crowd this week.

Zine also tapped into the Valley’s long-simmering sense of political disenfranchisement when he urged--in a move that set him apart from the other candidates--that the Valley secede from Los Angeles, or at least convincingly threaten to do so to get its fair share of city services.

Meanwhile, Gross, a longtime aerospace industry manager and Woodland Hills homeowner activist, pitched himself as having the business experience needed to guide the city in its hour of fiscal need. The city now faces huge budget deficits.

Gross also sniped at Picus for failing to block the controversial proposal to build an office complex on the grassy slopes of Warner Ridge. “She didn’t handle it correctly,” Gross recently told Woodland Hills voters, meeting only a block from the 21.5-acre Warner Ridge site.

Gross himself was a former Picus ally. It was Gross who warned the lawmaker in 1989, as she prepared to run for reelection, of grave political perils if she did not fight the Warner Ridge project.

Picus’ bitter efforts to stop the project became a hallmark of her fourth term in office. Those efforts were defeated by a series of court rulings after the developers sued the city for $100 million. Gross accused Picus of bungling the effort, even as political enemies blamed her for the expensive settlement the city had to make with the developer.

Times staff writers Josh Meyer and Sharon Bernstein contributed to this story.