Brown Aide Used State Funds for Assembly Democrats’ Phone Survey

A telephone boiler-room operation was set up at state expense for six months last year by Assembly Speaker Willie Brown’s top assistant to make calls on behalf of four Assembly Democrats who were regarded as vulnerable to Republican challenge in the 1986 election.

Richard Ross, Brown’s chief of staff and leading campaign strategist, confirmed that he hired phone-bank operators to conduct nighttime surveys of voters between July and December about various legislative issues championed by the four--Richard Katz of Sepulveda, Lucy Killea of San Diego, Jean M. Duffy of Citrus Heights and Steve Clute of Riverside.

All except Duffy intend to seek reelection, and each represents a district where Republican strategists are planning well-financed efforts to win their seats.

$27,000 in Salaries

Payroll and expense records of the Assembly Rules Committee show that the project ran up nearly $27,000 in salaries and as yet untotaled telephone costs estimated at $10,000.

It is against the law to use public funds for election campaign purposes. But the line separating legal communication with constituents on issues of public concern from illegal partisan activity is difficult to draw.

Assembly Republican leader Pat Nolan of Glendale said while the telephone operation may have been legal, “it is certainly close to the line.”

“Whether it is technically legal or not, I don’t think the public will understand them having an operation like that for the districts where we have targeted the incumbents for defeat,” Nolan said.

Democratic lawmakers and high-level Assembly aides defended the publicly financed project as merely a novel way of communicating with constituents.

‘Absolute Nonsense’

Killea, one of the beneficiaries, said suggestions that the project was improper are “absolute nonsense.”

Assembly Rules Committee Chairman Louis J. Papan (D-Millbrae), who approved the operation, agreed.

“The point must be made,” he said, “that the questions that were asked during those phone calls were dealing with legislative issues. . . . If it was illegal, Mr. Nolan knows where to take it.”

Neither the attorney general’s office nor the Fair Political Practices Commission has been asked to investigate, spokesmen said Friday. But Nolan said, “I’m having my staff look into it.”

Ross, who takes credit for the idea, said the intent of the operation was to drum up grass-roots support for “real Populist” legislative issues in which the four lawmakers are involved. It was an experiment, he added, to see if the telephone communications would be cheaper and more effective than legislative newsletters to constituents that long have been authorized.

Not a Coincidence

Ross conceded it was no coincidence that he chose “targeted” districts--those in which Republicans are planning major campaign efforts. But he insisted that the surveys were “legitimate state legislative business,” and legal.

Papan said he approved the project when it began last summer, although he did not know at the time which districts would be surveyed. In retrospect, he said, he still would have approved the project if he had known that the non-scientific surveys were being made in targeted districts of Democrats.

The question of whether the operation was political “just never came up,” Papan said, noting that Republicans would be free to do the same thing.

The project was conducted by the Office of Majority Services, a branch of the Speaker’s office with duties that include constituent communication for Democratic Assembly members. A similar Office of Minority Services has a staff of consultants that answers to Nolan and provides similar services for Assembly Republicans.

Leased Office Building

The project operated in an office building leased by the state two blocks from the Capitol. It houses both staffs.

Ross, a well-known Democratic political operative, headed the Majority Services office until last year, when he was appointed Brown’s chief of staff.

Because of high turnover, the boiler-room project involved the hiring of 55 temporary staffers. No more than “a dozen to 15” of them conducted the telephone surveys at any given time, Ross said.

Ross said the staffers for the phone bank, some of them high school and college students, were hired through classified ads in Sacramento newspapers.

“It wasn’t a big cloak-and-dagger operation,” he said, insisting that names, addresses and anything else gathered as a result of the operation would not be added to computer data bases used for Democratic campaigns. “It’s a felony to do that.”

Read From Script

One questionnaire used by the phone bank operators read as follows:

“Hello, this is (your first name) and I’m calling for Assemblywoman Lucy Killea. May I speak to (read name off computer page)?” The caller would then ask if there were veterans in the household, and said Killea wanted to identify veterans “in order to notify them about important veteran issues.”

Some of the telephone bank employees told reporters that they were given specific instructions not to say that they were calling from Sacramento or that they were being paid to do so. Ross said that he gave no such order, but that one project supervisor may have done so.

Good Question

“I haven’t got a clue,” Ross said when asked why the supervisor might have issued such an order. “It’s stupid. . . . We never made any attempt to hide any of this,” he said.

Ross and some of the legislators involved said the telephone project produced good results.

The first survey, conducted for Clute, helped secure unanimous passage by the Assembly last week of Clute’s bill making the laundering of illegal drugs profits a crime, Ross said.

Ross said the phone calls and follow-up contact prompted responses from 20,000 of Clute’s constituents, who sent letters and postcards and made phone calls in support of the bill. The outpouring, he said, not only influenced legislators, but also forced both banking institutions and the American Civil Liberties Union to temper their opposition to the measure.

Clute said another survey helped to bring pressure that has forced relocation of a toxic incineration plant that had been proposed for his Riverside County district.