Brad Smith Not Ready to Concede

Most of Brad Smith's supporters had straggled away from his Granada Hills campaign headquarters by midnight. Though his opponent for a seat on the City Council from the 12th District, Mitch Englander, was ahead by a wide margin, Smith was not ready to concede.

Instead, the Granada Hills activist, a business development specialist for Pasadena-based Parsons Corp., said he would wait to see whether new results trickling in from the city clerk's office would lead to a runoff with Englander.

Even before the first votes were posted, Smith thought he had put a scare in the campaign of Englander, the most well-funded of all city council candidates. "I didn't think they would go as hard as they did," Smith said. "He raised more money than even the incumbent candidates."

Smith noted that he had never run for office other than for a place on his neighborhood council.  His opponent, on the other hand, was a political insider, he said, with a history of putting  deals before the interests of northwest Valley constituents.

Smith said he decided to join the race four and a half months earlier to give voters in the district a viable choice. Should he and the four other candidates in the contest deny Englander a majority, voters would get a second chance  at a choice in a runoff election, he said.

The initial returns, based on mail-in votes, had Englander ahead with 58.11 percent of the vote. As midnight approached, Englander still held the lead with 57.88 percent. Based on the trend, Smith would not count himself out of the race.

Earlier he had thanked volunteers who had campaigned on his behalf, starting with his wife Maria. With a voice that barely kept from breaking, he also thanked his parents, both of whom had died within the last three years.  They moved to the Valley in 1948, he said, and lived in Northridge when he was born.

Among those at his campaign headquarters was apparent third-place finisher Kelly M. Lord Jr., who garnered about 6.5 percent of the vote, based on early returns.