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GOP group can't name favorite for supervisor
| Thursday, Mar 30 2006 11:25 PM
Last Updated: Thursday, Mar 30 2006 11:29 PM
The Bakersfield Republican Assembly on Thursday night failed to endorse a candidate in the 3rd District County Supervisor's race.
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The conservative Republican group has often clashed with moderate Republican power-broker Mark Abernathy.
But 20 members of the group voted for Dean Haddock, Abernathy's candidate for the 3rd District.
Only 19 voted for Mike Maggard, a longtime BRA member and Bakersfield City Council member.
Neither man got the two-thirds vote needed for endorsement.
Group member Rosalyn Strode said she knows why the anti-Abernathy Bakersfield Republican Assembly voted for an Abernathy candidate.
She blamed a recent flood of new Bakersfield Republican Assembly members.
The applications for membership came in all in a single day, Strode said, bundled together.
And all of them were supporters of General Holding, Inc., she said, a land developer that has been locked in a bitter feud with Maggard for more than a year.
"I have heard numerous allegations that there was a concerted effort to stack the deck tonight," Maggard said. "If that is the case, it will be much harder to stack the deck with the general public."
Assembly president Karen Norton said the feud between the Republican Assembly and Abernathy is part of her group's past.
"The so-called Abernathy machine candidates were more moderate back in the 1990s," she said.
That has changed, she said. She did acknowledge that the "old guard" membership of the BRA is still anti-Abernathy.
But, she said, "I'm not anti-anybody."
She acknowledged that some of the new members were affiliated with General Holding.
General Holding project manager Robert Kapral joined, she said. Kapral was at Thursday night's meeting.
The father of Building Industry Association official Brian Todd, a General Holding supporter, also joined, Norton said, as did General Holding consultant Tracy Leach's husband, among others.
Late night calls to Leach and Kapral were not immediately returned.
But General Holding wasn't the only group pushing votes in the situation, she said.
"Maggard had five people join in the last two weeks," Norton said. "That is awfully interesting to me. That's what you do in politics, you whip up the vote."
Maggard's supporters were too late. They did not have the required 30 days of membership required to vote, Norton said.
Strode, who supports Maggard, still counted Thursday night as a victory.
"We stopped them. They didn't win," she said. "They wanted to endorse Haddock."
The Bakersfield Republican Assembly did endorse candidates in two state Assembly races.
Members voted to endorse businessman Stan Ellis in the 32nd Assembly District race.
They also endorsed retired California Highway Patrol officer Danny Gilmore as the Republican candidate for the 30th Assembly District.