7 minute read
Complaint filed against opponent of trans Seal Beach, CA council candidate
by Matthew S. Bajko
The runoff race opponent of a transgender City Council candidate in Seal Beach, California is facing questions about her eligibility to seek the district seat, the ballot designation she used, and her professed three decades of experience as an accountant. It comes as the two women will face voters again January 31 in their bid to help lead the coastal city.
In their November 8 matchup Stephanie Wade, a trans veteran, received the most votes, 967, in the three-person contest for the District 3 seat on the Seal Beach City Council, while Lisa Landau came in second with 912 votes. Because neither garnered more than 50% of the vote to win outright, they landed in next Tuesday’s runoff race.
Wade, who works for an Orange County supervisor, would be the first transgender person elected in the county should she win. She would also be one of only a handful of trans elected officials in California.
Two weeks prior to the runoff election, a voter filed complaints with California elections officials questioning Landau’s residency in the council district, the Bay Area Reporter has learned. It contends that Landau really lives in the city’s District 1 and that the address she re-registered at last year is merely an investment property that has been under construction for years and isn’t habitable.
It is also unclear why Landau’s ballot designation did not include any professional information and merely described her as a “community organizer.” According to the California Department of Real Estate Landau is a licensed salesperson under her married name of Lisa Anne SunsteinElder – which she had changed back to her former name in 2010 – and most recently worked for Seal Beach real estate firm American Beachside Brokers.
As explained in the handbook for Orange County candidates in 2022, the use of “Community Volunteer” is only to be used by someone working pro bono for a nonprofit, government agency, or educational institution at such a level that it is their “sole, primary, main, or leading professional, vocational or occupational endeavor.” It is not to be used if “the candidate does have a principal profession, vocation, or occupation.”
The handbook also advises that candidates with up-to-date business licenses issued by the state are “entitled to consider it one of his/her ‘principal’ professions, vocations, or occupations.” Landau’s state license doesn’t expire until 2024.
Other online records have listed Landau as an executive and investor in a real estate development company specializing in vacation homes and waterfront properties in Baja California. Up until September 2021 at her Twitter account, https://twitter.com/ lisalandau714, Landau would retweet posts from the account of the company, the International Land Alliance.
Yet in her ballot statement to election officials, and on her campaign website bio, Landau makes no mention of her real estate experience. Instead, she boasts about being “an accountant with over 30 years of experience.”
The Orange County Register newspaper had listed Landau’s current job title as “accounting manager” based on the responses to a questionnaire it had sent her. However, a search via the website of the California Board of Accountancy found no one licensed under any name matching that of Landau.
‘Georgette Santos’
“This is Georgette Santos; this is his sister,” Wade, 55, told the B.A.R. during a recent phone interview, referring to gay Republican Congressmember George Santos from Long Island, New York, who has been found to have lied about myriad aspects of his life, from where he attended college and his professional pursuits to his family’s religious background and how his mother died.
“She says she is an accountant. But there is no record of her having a job as an accountant,” said Wade. “No one heard her describe herself as an accountant until she ran. We believe she has only an associate’s degree.”
Landau, 60, has yet to respond to the B.A.R.’s requests for an interview about her professional background and where she resides in Seal Beach. According to her campaign bio, her family has called the northwestern Orange County city home for more than four decades.
Orange County Registrar of Voters Bob Page told the B.A.R. Monday in emailed replies to questions that he “cannot confirm or deny whether a complaint has been filed” with his office about a candidate for elected office. He did say his office’s standard protocol is to forward any complaints it receives to the county’s district attorney or to the office of the secretary of state, who oversees elections in California.
Neither the office of Orange County D.A. Todd Spitzer nor of Secretary of State Shirley Weber has responded to the B.A.R.’s request for comment regarding the complaint filed against Landau. As of press time the county registrar’s webpage for the Seal Beach runoff races, as no candidate won the District 5 council seat outright in November, indicated that they would both take place next week as scheduled.
In regard to questions about Landau’s ballot designation, Page directed the B.A.R. to contact Seal Beach City Clerk Gloria Harper, as she signed off on listing Landau on the ballot as a “community volunteer.”
“The Registrar of Voters is administering the election at the request and direction of the city. The City Clerk approved the candidate ballot designations, not the Registrar of Voters,” wrote Page in his emailed reply.
Reached at her office Monday, Harper told the B.A.R. that she doesn’t “respond over the phone” and requested questions about Landau’s candidacy be emailed to her. As of press time, Harper had yet to respond to the B.A.R.’s emailed inquiries.
Ed Hirsch, 55, who grew up in Seal Beach and relocated to his hometown a decade ago, filed the initial complaint regarding where Landau lives with city and county elections officials last week. Speaking to the B.A.R. by phone January 23, he said he began digging into her candidacy filings after being incensed by seeing Landau and her supporters repeatedly refer to Wade as a recent transplant to Seal Beach.
Landau has contended Wade did so in order to use election to the council seat as a jumping off point for higher office. The attack strikes Hirsch as having more to do with longtime Seal Beach residents who are white wanting to keep people of color and others from moving there.
“Lisa just kept calling Stephanie like some kind of interloper, nonlocal, out-of-towner who has not been here long enough and is bringing in these outside influences,” said Hirsch, a retired lawyer. “It really bugged me, having grown up here in this town with this locals’ only culture.”
It also struck a wrong note for Hirsch, as he lives two blocks from the house that Landau said she lived in on her candidacy paperwork. Yet the house, which Hirsch passes on a daily basis, has been under construction for some time, he told the B.A.R.
“The more they said Stephanie Wade had only been here a year, I would think, ‘Wait a minute, Lisa hasn’t been here even for a year.’ Lisa hasn’t been here at all in the district,” said Hirsch. “I am as surprised as anyone to find when I dug into this that Lisa Landau never lived in that house. She has already tried to flip that house twice. It is uninhabitable now.”
According to Hirsch’s complaint, court filings and other documents reviewed by the B.A.R., Landau changed her voter registration to 1771 Crestview Avenue on the day last August that was the deadline for candidates to file to run for office on the November ballot. Until then, Landau had declared her residency as being at 138 6th Street, a rental property in Seal Beach located in the City Council’s District 1.
Filings in a court proceeding in which Landau is suing the owners of the 6th Street property show that in both late November last year and January of this year, Landau listed the rental home address as her primary residence, noted Hirsch in his complaint.
“Based on all the aforementioned documents, I believe there is sufficient evidence to show that Ms. Landau does not currently reside in District 3 and should be removed from the race expeditiously. At minimum, there appears to be issues of perjury and at worst – fraud,” wrote Hirsch in his emailed complaint to elections officials. “The residents of District 3 deserve to have a representative that lives within their boundaries, so as to best represent the needs of their community.”
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Referring to the Crestview property in her campaign bio, Landau wrote, “My younger son and I were blessed to be able to purchase the McNerney home on the Hill last year. Pat McNerney was a beloved member of St. Annes Church and loved Seal Beach ... her paradise, like all of us do.”
