[2][3][4][5] In 1977, he was the Northwest San Fernando Valley chairman for Senator Alan Robbins' anti-busing initiative and amendments before being on the steering committee for Yes on Proposition 13 in 1978.

[7] Bernson and Barbara Klein led the pack of sixteen candidates who in 1979 ran in Los Angeles City Council District 12, in the northwest San Fernando Valley, to succeed retiring Councilman Robert M. Wilkinson.

Bernson was reelected in every vote thereafter until his own retirement in 2003, although in 1991 he was forced into a runoff with Julie Korenstein, who was one of the challengers who attacked him for backing the controversial Porter Ranch development in his district (below).

The Times said of that Bernson was the most avid proponent of seismic safety on the Los Angeles City Council for more than a decade, spearheading a slew of safety-minded ordinances, including a widely copied law requiring the retrofitting of thousands of unreinforced masonry buildings.

"[15] In 2002, at age 71 and cited as the "dean of the Los Angeles City Council, he served as chairman of the LACMTA, the rail authority and the Southern California Association of Governments at the same time.

[5][16] The Times noted that Bernson's service on these boards made him the "Stipend King" of the City Council because he was able to collect thousands of dollars in extra pay for attending their meetings.

[24] The city's Ethics Commission found in 1994 that Bernson had failed to disclose the source of $11,000 in campaign contributions made by a private company and ordered him to repay the funds.

[25] In 1997 Bernson ended a two-year battle with the Ethics Commission by paying a $1,500 fine levied against him for spending $1,140 in officeholder account funds to buy season tickets to the Hollywood Bowl.

[26] Later the same year, the Ethics Commission rejected a Bernson request to let his staff use Hollywood Bowl tickets that were intended for poor and disabled constituents, after about a hundred of them were left unused because residents who had asked for the complimentary passes never claimed them.

[29] An investigative feature by the Times found in April 1990 that Bernson was the "top travel spender" in City Hall, having paid out $120,622 of his campaign funds in three years for trips to places like Louisiana, Hawaii, Israel and Italy, in the latter two of which he and his wife stayed in "luxury hotels."

Other trips were made by the couple to Paris, Hong Kong, London, Beijing, British Columbia, New York, Seattle, Boston and Carmel, California.

[30] In the 1980s and 1990s, Bernson was "the major foe"[31] of a controversial proposed enlargement of a landfill project, or dump, in Sunshine Canyon in Granada Hills, at the eastern end of the Santa Susana Mountains.

In 1992 he sued Browning-Ferris Industries, operator of the landfill, for libel, alleging that the company "leaked to news reporters a dossier containing false claims about Bernson's spending of public and private funds on travel" (above) in an attempt to discredit him.

Bernson pushed a proposal through the City Council in 1985 that would have made it easier to evict some of the three thousand tenants in the crime-plagued, predominantly Latino Bryant Street-Vanalden Avenue neighborhood of Northridge,[34] but backed off when Mayor Tom Bradley said he would veto it.

[35] The councilman said he "packed" a meeting in December 1985 with more than seven hundred Northridge residents, most of them Anglos who "repeatedly cheered" their approval of Bernson's controversial proposal to force out some of the tenants.

He won approval in 1985 of an ordinance prohibiting new adult businesses, such as sexually oriented movie theaters, bookstores and night clubs, from opening within 500 feet of churches, homes and schools.

Bernson was the only "no" vote in 1987 on a City Council offer of $10,000 for relocation assistance for Central American refugees allegedly threatened by El Salvador death squads.

[41] A Times reporter wrote that "Bernson has lobbied for two decades" to preserve the reservoir that "he says should stand as a legacy of the San Fernando Valley's past for future generations.

Holleigh Bernson, an "aspiring film director," was killed in a one-car traffic accident in October 1995 when she lost control of her car in a night drive through Griffith Park and it went off the road.