Measure S Wins by 17 Votes; Outstanding Ballots Will Determine Final Result

By Jorge Casuso

June 4 -- Tuesday’s vote on Measure S was so close, it took some of the top minds at the school district to determine the exact margin of victory. And the answer is still subject to change when all the absentee and provisional votes are counted.

The final tally showed Measure S topping the 66 percent needed by 17 votes, pulling in 11,278 votes (66.77 percent), to the opposition’s 5,614 (33.23).

No one is sure how many mailed absentee ballots the County Registrar received on Tuesday, how many were walked in by voters at Santa Monica and Malibu polls and how many provisional ballots were cast.

Those outstanding votes -- which should be counted on Thursday -- will determine if the victory will hold, giving the cash-strapped district $6.5 million a year for the next six years and saving the jobs of dozens of teachers, nurses, administrators and custodians who have been handed their walking papers.

“Barring anything not known at this point, we’ve won,” School Superintendent John Deasy told the less than two dozen supporters who waited until after midnight at Moonshadows restaurant in Malibu for the results. “The number meets the letter of the law.”

“Every one of you who worked this campaign could be responsible for the razor-thin margin,” said Santa Monica Mayor Richard Bloom. “We have to hang in there for another week.”

Opposition leader Mat Millen, who ran a shoestring campaign, said he is not conceding until all the votes are counted. If the margin of victory remains close, Millen said, he would ask for a recount “if it doesn’t cost anything.

“I’m not going to concede,” said Millen, whose campaign spent all of the $7,000 it raised. “Maybe the absentees will go their way, maybe there’s a lot of absentees in Malibu” that opposed the measure.

There was an overwhelming sense of relief when the final votes appeared shortly before midnight on the computer screen in a cramped back room of the restaurant on the Malibu coast. Supporters had stared at a 66.5 percent margin ever since the results of the absentee ballots counted had popped up on the screen shortly after 8 p.m.

They waited more than two hours in the cramped quarters under the intermittent glare of lights and boom microphones filming a PBS documentary for the results of the first four precincts to appear, and still the margin remained at barely above the two-thirds needed.

And they remained riveted to the screen after the margin stuck at little more than 66 percent with 23 of the 35 precincts counted. For nearly two hours the “reload” button failed to deliver an update, as the exhausted crowd of supporters around the bar dwindled.

When Deasy wound his way from the back room through the restaurant -- the television crew trailing, the sounds of the surf pounding in the background -- it took time for the news he delivered to the die-hard crowd to sink in.

Then came the cheers and the hugs, which seemed to well up more from a sense of relief than jubilation. “Power to the children,” someone shouted.

“If it holds, we’re ecstatic,” said Ralph Mechur, a campaign co-chair. “This is just so great for the community in so many ways. It keeps our education whole. It really is the beginning of a solid financial basis for education.”

“I’m relieved and tired, very tired, bordering on exhaustion,” said Harry Keiley, the teachers union president.

“I’m very happy,” said School Board president Julia Brownley. “This is what we needed. We started out low, it was very scary, and we’re happy.”

In the end, it seemed that what some had called a “stealth” campaign strategy worked. Proponents mounted an intensive effort to get out the vote that resulted in an unusually high number of absentee ballots cast -- about 7,000 of the 16,892 votes counted Tuesday.

The campaign -- run by political strategists for Santa Monicans for Renters’ Rights -- also outspent the opposition by more than $200,000 to $7,000. Strategists were able to carefully target parents with children in the public schools, renters and Democratic homeowners without inciting the conservative homeowners opponents lacked the money to reach.

“It was a great coalition, great teamwork,” Mechur said.