With the California March 5 primary election fast approaching, state Sen. Henry Stern is gearing up to represent the redrawn 27th Senate District with a new challenge: to convince the voters who live in his dramatically redrawn district that he will represent their interests.
For nearly 10 years Stern has represented residents in a vast swath of Southern California beachfront, including Malibu and other communities sprinkled from Topanga Canyon on the southeast border of his district to just short of Point Mugu on the northwest.
But the redrawing of his district — part of a statewide redistricting effort — meant that Stern lost all of the coast and many San Fernando Valley communities including Hidden Hills, Winnetka, Reseda and most of Canoga Park, as well as Westlake Village.
A former educator and environmental attorney, Stern in March faces contenders Susan A. Collins (D) — a board member of the Sherman Oaks Neighborhood Council and chair of its public safety committee — and businesswoman Lucie Volotzky (R).
Susan Collins, endorsed by former Los Angeles Sheriff Alex Villanueva and the Peace Officers Research Association of California, said in a phone interview that the most pressing issues affecting the district are homelessness and crime.
“We need to get people off the street,” she said. “If I had a magic wand, I would immediately withdraw us from the ‘housing first’ policy because it’s proven to be a disaster.”
She added, “We need to address homelessness in a way that it gets people the assistance that they need, but in a way that secures the surrounding communities and provides them with safety and a sense of well-being that they deserve.”
Collins said that inadequate funding for law enforcement has led to “a horrendous moral problem within all the law enforcement agencies whether it’s the Sheriff’s department or LAPD. They are overworked and don’t have enough staff.”
Candidate Lucie Volotzky, who has been a business owner for about 40 years, said small business owners and restaurant owners in Los Angeles struggle because of high taxes and burdensome regulations.
“It’s very difficult for small businesses to survive today,” Volotzky said, and she argued that raising the salaries for minimum-wage workers has backfired. “It’s like a snowball. The employers have to pay more taxes and it’s endless. Then as restaurant or small business owners, they have to raise prices.”
Small business owners, she added “are the backbone of the industry to survive for serving so many people out there. But the state and the city don’t think this way.” Volotzky picked up endorsements from former Los Angeles Supervisor Mike Antonovich, Los Angeles City Councilmember John Lee, and the Republican Party of Los Angeles County.
Incumbent Stern, who recently moved from Malibu to Sherman Oaks, said redistricting brought new communities into his district, and new challenges. “I get to fully embrace the Valley now,” he said. “And that’s what’s so exciting.”
One of the top issues facing the city and his district, Stern said, is figuring out “how to get people off the streets who are maybe mentally ill. Or are they just addicted? What happens when people get dismissed from (Men’s) Central Jail onto the street?”
Extreme floods and fire disasters become the key issues when they hit the region, but on a daily basis, he said, homelessness and public safety are the number one issues.
Henry Stern said he has been working on enhancing criminal penalties in the areas of public safety, retail theft and extreme speeding.
He has earned endorsements from Gov. Gavin Newsom, the California Democratic Party, the California Association of Highway Patrolmen, California Professional Firefighters, the Sierra Club and the California Teachers Association.
After winning the office in 2016, Stern authored the Wildfire Resilience through Community and Ecology Act in 2021, following the devastating 2018 Woolsey Fire that burned 96,949 acres and destroyed 1,643 structures including many homes. The law inspired Newsom to launch the California Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force to pinpoint high-risk buildings in wildfire-prone zones and beef up building standards.
Stern lobbied for the permanent closure of the Aliso Canyon Natural Gas Storage Facility, the site of the disastrous 2015 SoCalGas leak that drove more than 11,000 San Fernando Valley residents out of their homes. As chair of the Senate Natural Resources & Water Committee between 2018 and 2022, he led decarbonization efforts to cut the harmful impact of indoor air pollution caused by fossil fuels.
His district, reshaped by redistricting, contains nearly 1 million residents who are 55% white, 24% Latino, 12% Asian and 4% Black, according to the 2020 Census and live in communities such as Calabasas, Hidden Hills and Agoura Hills, far from the coastal areas that originally put him in office.
Joel Fox, adjunct professor at the Pepperdine School of Public Policy, said voters in his redrawn district will be different and their concerns will need to be addressed.
“He is going to have to probably adjust a little bit,” Fox said, noting that Stern is known as an environmentalist with a focus on climate change while more conservative voters in his redrawn district — communities such as Santa Clarita — might not see that as a top concern. “Issues like crime are going to be a paramount issue. He is going to have to talk about things like that.”
But redistricting hasn’t turned Stern’s district into a heavily right-leaning constituency, he added.
“There are a lot of independents” in the newly reshaped district, Fox said. “So which way do they go? Typically in California ‘no-party-preference’ voters lean Democrat. So he has a chance there, too.”
Even though Stern didn’t get enough votes in 2022 to be among the two top candidates in the runoff for the District 3 seat on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, Fox said, that close primary race likely helped him get exposure among Los Angeles County voters.
“The party will probably rally behind him because he’s an incumbent,” Fox said. “So despite the (redistricting) change in the district, he has advantages.”
Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University, says Stern remains the frontrunner and “he is the most likely victor.”
“While the degree of difficulty in this district is greater than the previous one, he is the incumbent,” Guerra said. “He still has higher name recognition. He will still have more funding and most of the Democratic endorsements.”
He said that Stern, “has to run a campaign a little bit harder than he did” in his failed bid for the Board of Supervisors. “And it looks like he’s doing that. So all indicators are that he should be able to win reelection. He will be one of the top two candidates after March and therefore be in the November ballot.”
Still, Stern’s key challenge in the election is to win over middle-class voters from communities like Valencia who are typically more conservative than middle-class voters from Malibu, some experts believe.
Joel Kotkin, the R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange, and executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism, said that when Stern lost the Malibu communities during the redrawing of his district, he exchanged typically progressive high-income voters for more middle-class constituents.
“The difference would be the different type of middle-class voters who make their livings differently,” Kotkin said. “A person in Valencia making $130,000 a year is a lot different than somebody in Malibu making $800,000. They both might think of themselves as middle-class but they’re two different classes.”
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2024 presidential primary election
Election Day: March 5, 2024. Polls close at 8 p.m.
Early voting: You can vote at the Los Angeles County registrar’s office beginning Monday, Feb. 5. The registrar’s headquarters are at 12400 Imperial Highway, Room 3002, in Norwalk. That office is open from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday to Friday.
Vote-by-mail: Ballots began going out on Thursday, Feb. 1. You can submit VBMs in three ways: By mailing them to the registrar’s office (VBMs include return envelopes with the correct address and postage already included); by placing them in an official drop box; or by dropping them off at any county Vote Center.
VBM deadline: VBMs sent via mail must arrive no later than seven days after the election, but they must be postmarked by March 5. The deadline to place VBMs in a drop box or deliver them to a Vote Center is 8 p.m. on Election Day.
Vote Centers: Vote Centers open 10 days before Election Day. This year, that’s Saturday, Feb. 24. You can vote at any Vote Center in Los Angeles County. Prior to Election Day, the Vote Centers will be open from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. On Election Day, they will be open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.
About the ballots: In California, the order races are listed on ballots goes from local to federal, meaning the nominees for president will be listed at the bottom. Except for presidential races, California’s primaries for “partisan” offices – now known as “voter-nominated offices” have a top-two system. That means the top two vote getters in a given race advance to the general election, regardless of political party.
To find a drop box or Vote Center and for more information: lavote.gov.
Name of race: California State Senate District 27
Candidates: Susan A. Collins, Lucie Volotzky and Henry Stern
Term length: 4 years
District boundaries: Granada Hills, Universal City, Moorpark, Thousand Oaks and Santa Clarita.
Registered voters: 645,924 as of Jan. 5, according to the California Secretary of State’s office.
Key issues: homelessness, public safety and environment.
Information: lavote.gov