7 Years in the Fast Lane: Gianturco Recounts Slings and Arrows

There it was, the largest single department in California state government, the $2 billion-a-year control center of the most glorious web of freeways and intricately stacked interchanges ever conceived in the secret hearts of engineers.

And there she was running the California Department of Transportation, a plain-spoken liberal arts graduate of Smith College and UC Berkeley, a Bostonian with no sense of the mystic union that occurs when Californian meets automobile, a woman who kept talking about such things as mass transit and van pools and shaking her head at $200-million freeway projects like expensive desserts.

It was seven years of political audacity that had Republicans and Democrats, engineers and land developers, commuters and city council members--anyone committed to restoring the sanctity of California’s freeway system and expenditures thereto--committed to seeing an end to Adriana Gianturco’s reign as Caltrans director.

Bills were introduced to cut her salary from the state budget. Orange County Supervisor Ralph Clark demanded that she be fired. One senator proposed a requirement that Caltrans’s director be, as highway directors were intended to be from the beginning of time, an engineer.

In the end, she survived in the job as long as the man who appointed her, former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr., remained in office. And when she left the post in 1983, a little of that political audacity left with her. The only non-engineer to ever head a local Caltrans district, one appointed by Gianturco, has been replaced. Gianturco’s own replacement, Leo Trombatore, is an engineer. And Orange County has $500 million in state freeway construction funds on the way during the next five years.

On Wednesday, Gianturco, 45 now and writing free-lance articles on state government, spent several hours with a group of UC Irvine students combing over those seven years with Caltrans. Only now, she said, is she beginning to understand the mistakes she made that so alienated her from the state’s political establishment.

Her biggest errors, she says now, were in refusing to blame past administrations for the transportation quagmires that simply became apparent during her reign --including the Santa Monica Freeway’s ill-fated diamond lanes--and being “naive” enough to believe she was expected to help cut air pollution, promote mass transit and reduce overall costs.

“You had one person, an individual with a particular history, thrown into a situation where there were, as I look back on it, inevitable problems that would arise,” she told Prof. Judith Rosener’s class on politics in management.

Gianturco said she never received the support she should have from environmental groups and the governor himself.

“Jerry Brown’s style as an administrator was to pretty much leave department heads alone, which gave you a lot of freedom. It also meant that when the going got tough, you were out there on your own.”

Occasionally, she said, she would announce that a bill was contrary to the Administration’s goals, only to see it signed into law by the governor several months later. “I, in many instances, lacked active support from the governor, and I didn’t get support from what should have been my natural allies, like the environmentalists and the lung association, for example, because they figured we have other battles to fight and she can do it on her own.”

“What happened,” she said, “was they lost some of the battles that with just a little bit of effort could have been won. I was very disillusioned with that.”

Gianturco became even more unpopular with state and local lawmakers when she began reviewing long-planned highwayconstruction projects for cost effectiveness and found that many failed to pass muster. She announced opposition to the $1.6-billion Century Freeway project. She axed plans for a $200-million freeway through Eureka.

The opposition came from legislators who had nursed projects within their districts for years--and in some cases from her own Caltrans district directors who had developed close political ties within their communities, Gianturco said.

“The legislators’ objectives, I’d have to say, I think I was totally naive about. The principal objective of state legislators is to get elected, pure and simple,” she said. That, she said, means raising campaign funds--largely from land developers seeking new highway projects--and stirring controversies that attract publicity.

Goals like reducing air pollution and cutting costs get low billing in the Legislature when it comes to highway projects, Gianturco charged. “Saving money is just not the point. It certainly is not the point in highways,” she said.

Thought All Would Support Her

“I thought when I took this job I would have an easy time of it because everybody would support me. I’d have the Democrats behind me because I’d been appointed by a Democrat, and the Republicans would support me because I am, I’ve always been, a fiscal conservative . . . .

“The fact of the matter is I didn’t have either the Democrats or the Republicans because what I didn’t realize and what I’ve come to believe is that highways are really the domestic equivalent of defense spending . . . having a highway or a project in your district that you can point to becomes the ultimate goal.”

That meant inevitable, and frequent, clashes with state legislators, a long history of unpleasantness that Gianturco says may have been her own doing. “I think that style is very important in politics, and my style is very direct, and it’s a style that really jars on elected officials . . . . I just never learned, and I don’t think I want to learn, how to talk out of both sides of my mouth,” she said. “When I look at government and see the mealy-mouthed, wishy-washy stuff that goes on, it just makes me sick. I did not do that, and consequently, I was not one of the most popular figures in government at that time.”

‘Giant Turkey’

A continuing source of irritation, she said, was references to her as an “East Coaster” or a “Bostonian” --she is a Californian who lived in Boston only just before her appointment--and the Legislature’s favorite nickname for her, “Giant Turkey,” a sobriquet she insists is an “ethnic slur” because of her Italian name.

The East Coast misperception persists, she said, recalling a recent newspaper interview with Orange County Supervisor Bruce Nestande, now chairman of the state Transportation Commission. “He made that comment, about a year-and-a-half ago; what did he think now that Deukmejian was in and so on, and he said, ‘It’s just great we don’t have to deal with that Adriana anymore. Of course she’s from Boston and she doesn’t understand . . .’ ”

But it was the Santa Monica diamond lanes that Gianturco looks back on as one of the greatest injustices of her years at Caltrans, an albatross hung on her Administration that she says was the doing of Ronald Reagan-era transportation planners, Southern California regional governments and federal clean air requirements.

Nonetheless, when West Los Angeles commuters sat choking in traffic while the diamond-designated bus and car-pool lanes remained clear, their wrath was directed at the woman in Sacramento who kept defending the experiment she had inherited. There was almost an ominous connection. After all, hadn’t the car-pool restrictions taken effect on March 15, 1976, at 7 o’clock in the morning? And hadn’t Adriana Gianturco started on the job on March 15, 1976, at 7:30?

Her first phone call came from the governor’s office, announcing a “revolt in Los Angeles” over “this diamond-lane thing” about which she was ordered to “do something.”

The Los Angeles Times editorialized “relentlessly” against the project, she said, “and we had the Libertarians against it; they called it social engineering. What we were doing was forcing them out of their cars. And worse than that, we were forcing them into other people’s cars. We were forcing them to associate with people they didn’t want to, and it was un-American.”

Stopped for Hamburger

Later, Gov. Brown traveled with her to examine another potential diamond-lane project proposed for the San Diego Freeway. After the field trip, she recalled, “We stopped at some hamburger place for lunch, and he asked every person in the place who came up to the table--and this was the governor, a lot of people came up to the table--what they thought about diamond lanes. Not one of them had anything good to say, and I said, oh boy, if we’re going to make this decision based on the clientele in this McDonald’s . . . .”

The new car-pool lanes were never opened.