Bilbray Sets a Fast Pace on Board : Brash, New Supervisor Provides Some Lively Surprises

When Brian Bilbray was running for county supervisor a year ago, people said he was brash and blunt, a loose cannon with a big ego.

Today, three months after Bilbray took his seat on the board, mention of his name still evokes a picture of him as mayor of Imperial Beach, sitting atop a bulldozer and fighting to dam the flow of Mexican sewage seeping over the border into his city. Bilbray’s straight blond hair still hangs in his eyes the same way it did when he quit working as a lifeguard almost 10 years ago. His language hasn’t changed much since then, either.

But Bilbray has begun to dent the old image a little bit. His commentaries on regional issues are published in major newspapers now, and people aren’t as shocked to hear him talk about gasoline taxes, the county’s deteriorating roads or the effect that cuts in the federal budget might have on local social programs.

“I think he’s surprised a lot of people on the county staff and elsewhere with his knowledge of issues throughout the county,” said Bob Hudson, a longtime friend of Bilbray and now one of his aides. “A lot of people had the feeling that this guy coming from the extreme southwest corner of the county would have a hard time figuring out what was going on outside the Imperial Beach city limits, let alone the rest of the First District or the county.”

“It’s been amazing,” added David Malcolm, a Chula Vista city councilman and member of the California Coastal Commission who supported Bilbray’s opponent for the seat. “I talk to a lot of people up and down the state and everything I’ve heard is that he’s matured, that he’s not just a young surfer anymore. He’s tempered it, but I hope he never tempers it so much that he loses that energy to be willing to say what he believes.”

If Bilbray’s first three months in office are any indication, Malcolm needn’t worry.

Bilbray, who at age 33 defeated incumbent Supervisor Tom Hamilton last June to win his seat on the board, has not abandoned the folk-hero image that helped elect him.

Bilbray’s spontaneous personality has brightened the board’s staid third-floor suite at the County Administration Building, where he is known to charge out of his private office and into the lobby, his eyes bulging and his mile-a-minute mouth moving with outrage over some injustice or another.

“Brian keeps things lively around the board offices,” said an aide to one of the other supervisors. “He has an energy level that is unbelievable.”

“He’s just a grown-up kid,” said another longtime observer of the board.

More than any of his colleagues, Bilbray enjoys the give and take with reporters who cover county government for the metropolitan newspapers. From the supervisors’ dais he will raise an eyebrow or roll his eyes at a reporter, signaling his opinion about the flow of the debate. During interviews in his office, Bilbray is apt to prop his feet on a cabinet and peer through binoculars at the Navy ships in San Diego Harbor as he speaks.

At the board’s weekly meetings, Bilbray speaks often and loudly, the product, he says, of growing up in a family of six. Rarely eloquent, Bilbray will usually get his point across if given enough time.

He can be blunt, as he was when the board was asked in February to provide more county aid for the homeless.

“We’re heading for a hard time,” Bilbray said. “I think it’s time we start biting the bullet on a lot of projects and say we’d like to do this, but we need to pick priorities. Right now, this supervisor’s priority is not transients.”

He can be cutting, as he was when he criticized Rancho Santa Fe residents for wanting the county to assume the legal liability associated with that community’s insistence on a minimum of street lights.

“I think they’ve got a little Camelot placed up in the hills, and they want to maintain that Camelot,” Bilbray said. “But I don’t want to do it at (a cost to) the rank and file, those of us, the serfs down in the valley who have to carry the burden.”

And sometimes, Bilbray can spew forth a stream of consciousness that leaves his listeners shaking their heads in bewilderment. Last week, for instance, he uttered this sentence while discussing whether the supervisors should rescind a policy that keeps them from talking to the county’s planning staff about specific land-use issues:

“I just have a problem that it just seems like there’s such a, you know, hypersensitivity to ‘don’t receive any evidence outside of a hearing,’ that it’s, we seem to be building in a process to guarantee that beyond a shadow of a doubt there was nothing said outside the hearing that we’re reaping a harvest of ‘let’s make sure that everything is so squeaky clean,’ that we’re going to be absolutely, that the board is going to be absolutely ignorant of the facts walking into the hearing, and that it is better to have a uninformed decision than . . . the possibility of the appearance of an influenced decision.”

It is quotes such as this that have always made Bilbray’s intellect the subject of behind-the-scenes political discussion, a fact that doesn’t seem to trouble him.

“I’ve never worried about that,” he said in an interview. “I’ve never made my image as being intelligent or always being on top of whatever. My image is I’m sincere, that I’m committed. If there’s one thing I’m known for, it’s that I’m totally committed and totally involved and I try harder than the average person.”

Elaborating, Bilbray paraphrased what he said was Albert Einstein’s famous quote about genius being more a product of perspiration than inspiration. The fact that the quotation actually came from Thomas Edison, not Einstein, didn’t seem to detract from the point Bilbray was making.

Since taking office in January, Bilbray has been working full time to rid the South Bay of the second-rate status he says it gained during the eight years Tom Hamilton served as supervisor.

Hamilton, he says, was a good man in the wrong job: when dynamism was needed, Hamilton was bland; when circumstances called for a strong backbone, Hamilton responded with weakness.

“I would fault Tom more for his style than his intent,” Bilbray said. “I never said this man was bad. I said we needed to do more.”

And though he sometimes seems less like a statesman than a youngster kicking his way through a neatly raked pile of leaves, Bilbray is doing more.

Just days into his term, the new supervisor asked the county staff for a report on Tijuana sewage, a problem that has plagued the South Bay for decades. Within weeks, the board had agreed to work more actively with the city, state and federal governments searching for a solution, and Bilbray was sent to Mexico City as the county’s envoy to a series of international discussions of the issue.

“Brian has a totally different attitude,” Malcolm, a Hamilton supporter in the 1984 election, said. “When other people might say ‘Hey, let’s study this issue some more,’ Brian will say ‘It’s been studied enough, let’s do something.’ His energy level is 100 times greater (than Hamilton’s).”

On another long-simmering South Bay issue, Bilbray has argued for an end to the piecemeal annexations of unincorporated land by Chula Vista, a practice he says robs the county of money it needs to provide municipal services to rural areas.

Mostly, Bilbray has complained that his district has shouldered more than its fair share of the county’s social burdens.

The First District, he points out, is already home for the county’s only hazardous waste dump, and ground will soon be broken for a state prison in Otay Mesa. In addition, Bilbray argues, his district is the site of too much government-subsidized low-income housing.

Although he has concentrated on issues affecting his district, Bilbray hasn’t shied away from regional topics. He toured Poway to learn more about one of the county’s youngest cities and he spent an afternoon at the troubled Edgemoor Geriatric Hospital in Santee, which has been the subject of much criticism and is now the target of a state audit. Bilbray was the local representative when four members of the County Supervisors Assn. of California came here to speak on issues of statewide concern.

On social issues, Bilbray has supported the county’s new affirmative action plan, voted to create a human relations commission and, despite initial objections, agreed that the county’s restrictions on welfare for the homeless should be relaxed.

“A lot of people were concerned because of his crazy remarks and his getting on the bulldozer and all that,” one longtime observer of county government said of Bilbray. “He’s a little dramatic, but he’s solid.”

As a supervisor, Bilbray seems at ease with himself, less worried than his colleagues that something he says or does might offend. His ego is as big as ever--he has compared his popularity to that of President Reagan--but Bilbray says he’s more than happy to be overshadowed at times by the four other supervisors on the board.

“At Imperial Beach, the council and the staff desperately relied on my opinion for a lot of things,” Bilbray said immodestly. “If I made a mistake, there was always the fear it was going to be a deadly mistake for 25,000 people. Here, I’m one of five, and if I make a mistake, there’s usually enough other supervisors around that know what’s going on to keep it from becoming a chronic problem.”

TUESDAY: Supervisor Susan Golding, representing the 3rd District, is seen as the most political of the three new supervisors.