Jerry Brown’s Morphing Again

Has the Moonbeam become a laser ray?

According to aides at Oakland City Hall, Mayor Jerry Brown -- the former California governor whose dreamy political visions earned him the nickname “Gov. Moonbeam” -- suddenly has become focused on this troubled city’s affairs as never before.

Brown recently fired Oakland’s popular city manager, with whom he had feuded over a proposed downtown baseball stadium. Last week he dismissed two senior planning officials and announced that more heads would roll in Oakland’s “top-heavy” bureaucracy.

“I’m definitely flattening the organization chart,” Brown said almost gleefully in a hallway interview. “There’s 4,000 employees here. It’s not a perfectly oiled machine with no redundant parts ... that I promise you.”

In an effort to “simplify” his own life, the maverick scion of a California political dynasty also recently moved out of his 17,500-square-foot “We the People” communal loft, where he had lived for eight years with a revolving set of roommates that included a recovering drug addict, a philosopher and a pistol-packing, French-speaking confidant/bodyguard and a dog named Dharma. His new digs, “one-tenth the size,” are in a converted Sears Roebuck outlet on Telegraph Avenue.

All the signs are there that the 65-year-old Brown, the master of political reinvention who once recovered from a failed presidential bid by traveling to the slums of Calcutta to serve under Mother Teresa, is morphing again. The new Brown is an aggressive, hands-on, budget-slicing city leader with renewed statewide political ambitions.

“He is really digging into details in a way that only Jerry Brown can do it,” said Anne Campbell, his chief of staff.

Press attache T.T. Nhu said, “He is finally asserting himself as a strong mayor.”

At Meetings

Last week, for the first time in five years as mayor, Brown participated in City Council committee meetings, getting mixed reviews from participants startled to find hizzoner in attendance and holding forth.

“He was nonresponsive, he’s off-point, he doesn’t understand the program,” one baffled participant told a reporter for the Oakland Tribune. “It’s like talking about a novel you haven’t read.”

Countered Councilwoman Nancy Nadel, normally a strong critic of Brown: “I found it refreshing, having him at committee meetings for the first time. I thought he made some astute observations.”

Meanwhile, Brown’s firing of longtime City Manager Robert Bobb and the promise of more dismissals to come, have produced an atmosphere of fear in city offices. City Atty. John Russo, usually a Brown ally, described the mayor’s abrupt personnel actions as whimsical and compared them with an 8-year-old boy’s shaking an ant farm just “to see what happens.”

Critics scold Brown for firing experienced city officials while keeping his longtime political advisor and former loft-mate, Jacques Barzaghi, on the payroll as his assistant at a salary of $89,500. Barzaghi, a stylish, multi-tattooed former member of the French Foreign Legion who acts sometimes as Brown’s armed bodyguard, used to make $126,000 a year as director of the city’s Craft and Cultural Affairs Department. His salary was reduced recently, however, after the city agreed to a $50,000 settlement in a sexual harassment case involving Barzaghi and a female city staff member.

Other longtime Brown watchers see other possible motives for the mayor’s revived attentiveness to city affairs. “I think he’s preparing another run for statewide office -- maybe attorney general,” said an Oakland attorney and school board member, Dan Siegel.

Brown, whose extensive political career has included stints as a member of the Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees, California secretary of state, state Democratic Party chairman and three-time candidate for the U.S. presidency, confirmed that he has his sights on the job as the state’s chief legal official. The position, like the governorship, was held previously by his father, the late Pat Brown.

“Sure, I’m looking at the attorney general,” Brown said, standing outside City Hall near his black Lincoln Town Car. “I’m a lawyer and I enjoy the practice of law. I know a lot about state agencies. I’ve been involved in crime fighting.”

As a candidate for attorney general, Brown would almost certainly be engaging and controversial.

As mayor of a city with a chronic crime problem, Brown recently has become an outspoken critic of the state criminal justice system, which he says demands that cities do the job that prisons fail to do: take hardened criminals and turn them into productive citizens.

The problem of criminal recidivism is especially acute in Oakland. According to state Department of Justice statistics, about one of every 14 adult males in Oakland is on parole or probation.

“It’s a treadmill; it’s a merry-go-round; it’s a scandal,” Brown told a recent meeting of the Little Hoover Commission in Sacramento. California prisons, Brown charged angrily, are nothing but “postgraduate schools of crime.”

To the surprise of some, particularly those in the leftist political milieu that initially supported Brown, the mayor has been a strong supporter of the Oakland police force, riding with officers on late-night patrols and sponsoring an unsuccessful ballot measure to increase the ranks by 100 officers.

Brown, whose grandfather served in the San Francisco Police Department, also backed the Police Department in April when officers fired nonlethal weapons into a crowd of antiwar demonstrators at the Port of Oakland, wounding 22 people, including six dockworkers.

If Brown expects to move up from Oakland before his final term expires in 2006, he feels he must first assert himself more as mayor. Six months after he was elected to his first term in 1998, Brown got voters to approve a “strong-mayor” ballot measure that shifted more power to his office and away from the city manager’s. Several mayors before him had attempted the change, but only Brown, who won election with 59% of the vote, succeeded. Under the old system, the mayor sat as one at-large member of the nine-member City Council and was barred from dealing directly with city employees. Under the strong-mayor format, Brown participates in council meetings only to break tie votes. He has the uncontested power to hire and fire the city manager and to deal directly with city department heads.

Brown took office with the Bay Area in the midst of a dot-com boom. The city manager, Bobb, held a fresh four-year extended contract issued by the City Council. As a result, Brown said, he never fully exercised his strong-mayor powers until this year. The most symbolic moment came in June with the firing of Bobb, a highly respected administrator who had built up considerable loyalty in the city bureaucracy.

Popularity on the Wane

“These were two guys who were both very competent, very intelligent and a wee bit arrogant,” said Randy Hamilton, visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies. “At first they coexisted. But in the end, they were like two locomotives going down the tracks in opposite directions.”

Adding to the urgency, the mayor is facing a rapidly approaching deadline that could cause him to lose his strong-mayor powers. Brown’s attempt to make the strong-mayor system permanent was narrowly defeated by voters in 2002, partly because it was opposed by the influential League of Women Voters, which wanted more public discussion of the matter.

The issue is expected to go before the voters again in March 2004 in a slightly revised form and, if it fails then, again the following November. If it fails in both those elections, the city will revert to the old council-manager system. Brown’s role will be reduced to that of a mere city councilman with a loftier title and a slightly larger office than other council members. His extra mayoral duties would be reduced to ceremonial functions, such as handing out keys to the city.

“Maybe I moved too slowly,” Brown said. “But at some point I decided it was time to reorganize, to streamline. I saw the possibility that I had only a year left to leave my imprint on the city.” What really brought the matter to a head, Brown said, was the state financial crisis.

“We are facing a fiscal crunch, the dimension of which is not fully manifested,” Brown said. “I had to face it head-on. I figured that, if I am going to exercise my responsibilities, I’d better do it now.”

Brown’s task will be more difficult because his popularity has waned since he first took office. Brown contends much of the criticism of his administration, particularly concerning his policies on crime and schools, comes from a die-hard cadre of old leftists. “Their views are very Bolshevik, totalitarian,” Brown said.

Of all the political slights, Brown is most bitter about opposition to one of his pet projects, a 400-student military charter school for underachieving students. When the Oakland school board refused to fund the military school, housed at the old Oakland Army Post, Brown successfully acquired state funds and the help of the California National Guard to supervise the students.

Last Friday, Brown, who never served in the military himself, proudly reviewed the uniformed new cadets.

“You have voluntarily chosen to join the ranks of the Oakland Military Institute,” Brown told the cadets. “We have a long way to go but we are going to make this one of the greatest educational institutions in the United States. That is what we are striving for -- excellence.”

Afterward, as emotional parents streamed forward to thank him for the school, Brown railed against critics who had tried to block the school’s creation.

“I think they would rather see these kids fail than have them succeed in a conceptual framework that is contrary to their particular set of beliefs,” Brown said, as a platoon of middle schoolers marched past, more or less in step. “These kids have a tough time. How are you going to straighten them out if you don’t put some formation in their life?”