Supervisors Reject Proposal to Condemn Decision on Strikes

Although unanimously opposed to public employee strikes, Orange County supervisors on Wednesday rejected a resolution calling for a state ban, partly because they said Supervisor Bruce Nestande was grandstanding in supporting the measure.

Knowing in advance that he didn’t have enough votes to win, Nestande pressed the board Wednesday for a resolution condemning a recent California Supreme Court decision upholding public employees’ right to strike. The resolution asked the state Legislature to approve pending bills that would prohibit such strikes.

Although all five supervisors strongly oppose public employee strikes and favor legislation outlawing them, Nestande’s resolution was defeated, 3 to 2. Supervisors Ralph Clark and Roger Stanton joined Chairman Thomas F. Riley in opposing the resolution while Supervisor Harriett Wieder voted with Nestande.

Nestande’s motives became a key issue.

‘Trying to Make Headlines’

“If it were me doing this, it could only be because I was trying to make headlines and make three other supervisors look bad in public,” Riley said of Nestande in an interview after the vote.

Nestande countered that some supervisors were sidestepping an important public issue and were afraid to take a leadership role.

Under board procedures, Nestande’s resolution would normally have gone first to the county’s Legislative Planning Committee, composed of all five supervisors and the top officers. But Nestande bypassed that step.

Nestande plans to run for lieutenant governor, and many of his actions at board meetings are now being attributed by fellow board members and political activists to his campaign effort.

Moreover, one of Nestande’s potential rivals for statewide office, Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich, had already succeeded in persuading his colleagues to adopt a similar resolution.

“Nestande said during the meeting that we’re sidestepping the issue, but we’re not,” said Stanton, a union member in the 1950s and 1960s. “The issue is a manufactured one cut out of whole cloth, for no good reason . . . . It’s not even good politics. We’re in negotiations with county employees over next year’s contracts, so why tweak labor right now? We can deal with it when it comes up legislatively, through the normal course of events.”

‘Symbolic Gesture’

During Wednesday’s meeting, Riley, the board chairman, said that calling on the Legislature to act is a “symbolic gesture at best . . . . I do feel that we would be opening ourselves to claims of political posturing with no benefit to the constituency we represent here in Orange County.”

Nestande said during the meeting that the issue was not of his making but of the Supreme Court’s.

The court is a frequent target of conservatives, and some Republicans have attempted to make next year’s reconfirmation vote on Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird and other justices a partisan issue.

Meanwhile, some board members and political activists believe Nestande is attempting to curry favor with hard-line conservatives because they dominate statewide Republican primary struggles. Nestande is known as a moderate Republican in party circles.

In an interview after Wednesday’s defeat at the hands of two Republicans--Stanton and Riley-- and a Democrat--Clark, Nestande said:

“Of course I posture on political issues I think are important. This is a political body, and we’re supposed to take positions on political issues.

“I’ve always done that. I did it in the Assembly, and I’ve done it for all the five years I’ve been a county supervisor . . . . I’m not doing anything out of the ordinary. Now if someone like Riley did it, it would be highly unusual, and you’d have to ask yourself, why is he doing this. But I haven’t changed.”

Nestande added:

“Once I run for lieutenant governor, everything I do is going to be suspect. That’s unfortunate, but I’m not going to let it bother me. If there’s an issue out there, you can bet I’m going to jump on it.”

Riley pointed out that Nestande had garnered headlines for recently proposing that the sheriff-coroner’s office be split apart to avoid conflicts of interest, only to later support retaining combined operations, and that Nestande had followed a similar pattern in first proposing and then rejecting mandatory restrictions on smoking in public workplaces.

“I guess he got his headlines today,” Riley said.