The Great Eleventh

The overheated race for mayor won't be the only local contest worth following once the national referendum on good vs. evil is over in November. The fight for the right to replace Cindy Miscikowski as the city councilperson for the 11th district has been raging for months. This is the cream of city council terrain if the measure is affluence (and, ahem, high-rolling campaign contributors) — Brentwood, Pacific Palisades, Venice. In the cover story in the current L.A. Alternative Press, Marc B. Haefele goes around with the lead combatants, former Adelphia public affairs host Bill Rosendahl and Flora Krisiloff, a veteran of Westside politics and the Brentwood Community Council.

It’s the Los Angeles that everyone who doesn’t live here likes to think of as Los Angeles. Where the glitz and the glamour dwells...It’s where Dick Riordan lives, O.J. lived and Nicole Simpson died. It’s got 20,000 acres of up-country wilderness area, and an increasing number of gated communities basking in the city’s coolest climate. It has LAX and the monumental Getty Museum, plus reams of costly, comfy, Ozzie and Harriet-style Westside housing, the Venice of the raffish shoreline bohemia and its other kind of wilderness: the Boardwalk — the nation’s year-round, most renowned seaside funkathon.

Miscikowski is excused from further service due to term limits; before her, Marvin Braude ruled the 11th for 32 years. The rare open seat will invite a flood of contributions and endorsements from outside the district, which as Haefele points out, has already begun.