City Hall Experience Both a Burden and a Blessing

When the thrice-weekly governing sessions at City Hall disintegrate into pettiness, as they often tend to do, an exasperated Councilwoman Ruth Galanter wonders what it would be like if her friend Cindy Miscikowski was on the City Council.

In Galanter’s musings, the collegial, even-tempered Miscikowski would bring the discussion back to the issues, while refraining from the temptation to mud-wrestle with the others.

Miscikowski, 48, would like to join Galanter and company at City Hall. She has dreamed of doing so for most of her 22 years as a planning aide and chief of staff to retiring Councilman Marvin Braude.

But Miscikowski’s City Hall experience is both a blessing and a burden in her campaign.

While it has brought her enviable support, monetary and otherwise, from the downtown crowd, and popularity with many leaders of the homeowner community who have worked with her, “insider” is not an endearing word with voters these days.

Miscikowski is not helped by her marriage to land-use attorney Doug Ring, an influential city and county lobbyist who successfully challenged the city’s ethics disclosure law in the late 1980s as unconstitutional.

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Hoping to defuse the issue, Ring quit paid lobbying more than a year ago, though he still takes on pro bono clients who need help in navigating the city bureaucracy.

Ring’s late father and uncle were major real estate developers in the ‘50s and ‘60s. The family business has substantial real estate holdings and is a major leaseholder in Marina del Rey, which is built on county, not city, property.

For her part, Miscikowski displays her City Hall experience to full advantage at public events, using her encyclopedic knowledge of the district to present herself as a knowledgeable ally, not a member of some distant City Hall cabal.

As she walks precincts, Miscikowski reports that constituents may not recognize her at first, then suddenly recall how she helped them in some long-ago battle over a stop sign, a pothole or a tree.

“She seems to know why every tree is where it is,” Galanter said.

Using praise from Braude and County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, Miscikowski is appealing to voters in this environmentally sensitive San Fernando Valley-Westside district by reminding them of her key role in the passage of ballot measures banning oil drilling off the coast and limiting development.

“She’s someone who has made more difference than anyone in City Hall,” Yaroslavsky said in his endorsement of Miscikowski.

Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn. President Richard Close is illustrative of homeowner leaders who back Miscikowski. Close said he and others appealed to more than one council member--including Braude--for help in curbing traffic and development on Ventura Boulevard. Nothing came of it until an appeal to Miscikowski, who was instrumental in getting everyone together and hammering out the Ventura Boulevard Specific Plan to address the problems, Close said.

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A military brat who wanted to be a nun, Miscikowski moved around a lot as a child, settling down for high school in Washington. She started college at Ohio State on a science scholarship and transferred to UCLA as a chemistry major.

“I wanted to be the first woman astronaut,” she said. But it was the ‘60s and Miscikowski got caught up in politics, especially the campaign of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and switched her major to political science.

She met Braude while working in his unsuccessful campaign for county supervisor and joined his city staff working in the district office. A bit of a planning wonk, Miscikowski earned a certificate in city planning while working for Braude. To round out her resume before running for office, Miscikowski left the city in 1993 and went to work for the Skirball Museum briefly before resigning to campaign full time.