Feisty Ferguson Faces Only Token Opposition

Just over a year ago, the powerful lobbying coalition that represents state law enforcement agencies was up in arms.

Gil Ferguson, a little-known Republican assemblyman from Newport Beach, had introduced a bill that threatened to weaken the authority of California’s 36 sheriff-coroners.

From Imperial County on the Mexican border to Modoc County near Oregon, California police chiefs, district attorneys and sheriffs wondered why anyone would be so hellbent on separating two county offices that had been combined in some areas for 113 years.

And who, they asked, was Gil Ferguson?

A year later, the law enforcement chiefs were still fighting Ferguson’s plan to break up the sheriff-coroner combination--even though the proposal was eventually watered down and limited to Orange County.

By then, however, just about everyone in Sacramento had heard about Ferguson, who has demonstrated an uncanny knack for inciting controversy.

Ferguson, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel who earned the nickname “Rambo” after he called Democratic Assemblyman Tom Hayden a “traitor” in his first Assembly floor speech, has become practically a household word in the state capital. For better or worse, none of the three other freshmen in the 1985-86 Legislature have garnered as much attention as the Orange County Republican.

This year, Ferguson is encountering only token Democratic opposition in the most solidly Republican district in the state, and it looks increasingly likely that the 63-year-old native of Missouri will be back for another term.

Both Ferguson and Democrat Geoffrey Gray of Corona del Mar are running unopposed in their respective 70th District primaries on June 3.

Gray, a 38-year-old attorney in his first political race, jokingly refers to himself as the Democrats’ “sacrificial lamb.” Gray said an associate in the same Santa Ana law firm, Democratic activist John Hanna, approached him last February, only an hour before the deadline for declaring candidacy, and persuaded him to file.

“I think there is something repugnant about an incumbent running without a challenge,” said Gray, who chuckles when asked to assess his chances of winning.

The 70th Assembly District, which Ferguson calls the most solidly Republican in the nation, includes the rich Orange County coast from Newport Beach to Dana Point, plus inland canyons and foothills. Registration figures show that only 27.9% of the district’s 195,000 registered voters list themselves as Democrats, while 61.5% are Republicans.

‘Real Fluke’

Still, victory isn’t altogether impossible, Gray said, noting that a “real fluke” occurred in 1976, when Democrat Ron Cordova won the district with the aid of a write-in campaign. One indication of how seriously Gray takes his candidacy is the postponement of his wedding, originally set for this fall, to the spring of 1987.

Gray said that if he is able to raise any money to launch a campaign--so far, he has only been able to recover his $371 filing fee--Ferguson might be hurt for not strongly opposing oil drilling off the California coast.

“That’s an issue that crosses party lines,” Gray said.

Ferguson said he, too, opposes offshore drilling as long as national policy-makers take other steps to make certain “our children” do not “have to go to war to ensure the lifeblood of oil to America.”

However, as co-founder of the Council for Environment, Employment and Economy Development, an Orange County-based coalition of builders, developers and construction unions, Ferguson encouraged renewed offshore oil drilling in the Santa Barbara Channel in the mid-1970s. Also, he advocated repeal of Proposition 20, the initiative that led to creation of the state Coastal Commission.

When Ferguson was the council’s executive director, he was a vocal opponent of anti-growth policies and building restrictions throughout Orange County.

A graduate of USC, Ferguson is a former public relations vice president of the Irvine Co., who left in 1972 to form his own advertising and public relations firm. He and his wife, Anita, also own a custom home development company.

High Marks for Term

The freshman assemblyman gives himself high marks for his term in Sacramento. Since he won election in 1984 with more votes (111,507) than any other Assembly candidate in a contested race, he has raised around $600,000 in campaign contributions for himself and the pro-business, pro-development political action committee he chairs.

Because of his strong victory, his affluent constituents and business contacts, Ferguson said, party leaders expect him to raise money and divert much of it to help elect other Republicans. And, because of the lopsided registration figures in his district, GOP conservatives in the Assembly expect him “to provide the hard, tough leadership of Republicanism,” he said.

Indeed, Ferguson, who considers himself one of the “anchors” of conservative causes in the “great legislative tug of war,” said he measures his success by blocking liberal legislation as much as passing conservative measures.

His major legislative goals next year, he said, will be toughening standards to “to make it more difficult to get a driver’s license” in California, and helping to work out a solution “to traffic and transportation problems in Orange County.”

Take on Democrats

Ferguson said he can take on Democratic legislative leaders, including powerful Assembly Speaker Willie L. Brown Jr. (D-San Francisco), at times when others might fear reprisals. Although several colleagues voted against it, Ferguson was the only assemblyman recently to speak against Brown’s bill appropriating $50,000 to the Statue of Liberty restoration effort.

“I guess if I’m going to be the one to look the Speaker in the eye and tell him he’s got a bad bill, I’m going to make a name for myself,” Ferguson, who opposed the bill because he felt the restoration should be funded from private sources, said.

Ferguson had spent five weeks in Sacramento before he introduced the first version of his sheriff-coroner bill--his first piece of legislation--and he did not make a speech on the Assembly floor until May 2, four months after the session began. But once he got started, the plain-spoken conservative began making an impression.

It was during his first speech, in support of a resolution honoring Vietnam War veterans, that Ferguson turned toward Hayden and said, “We will never forgive traitors.”

The statement plunged Ferguson into controversy and launched him on a campaign to oust Hayden, a former war protester, from the Assembly under an obscure constitutional provision that a person who “advocates support of a foreign government” cannot hold public office.

‘Right-Wing Assemblyman’

Hayden, who has twice been elected from his West Los Angeles district, said his constituents, “not a right-wing assemblyman from Orange County,” should decide whether he serves in the Legislature. He called Ferguson’s accusation “totally outrageous” and dismissed him as “a retired Rambo” looking for “a new war to fight.”

At about the same time, Ferguson was getting his first lesson in legislative give-and-take. When an Assembly committee considered his first sheriff-coroner bill, he told panel members he did not have to explain why sheriff-coroners should not investigate jail deaths because it was such a “simple issue of justice.”

The panel, unreceptive to such an attitude from a political newcomer, promptly defeated the measure. Ferguson said it has been his biggest legislative disappointment so far.

Still, Ferguson remains combative. When the same panel a year later defeated “a watered-down” sheriff-coroner bill suggested by the Orange County Board of Supervisors, he publicly scolded assemblymen who did not vote for it.

Took Offense

Some legislators took offense after Ferguson was quoted in a March newspaper interview as referring to a popular 79-year-old Sacramento lobbyist, James D. Garibaldi, as “an old man whose . . . time is past due.”

And some Japanese-Americans were offended last September when Ferguson--urged on by Assembly colleagues chanting “Rambo! Rambo!”--argued against an appropriation for a Japanese-American heritage museum saying, “I would like to remind you that after World War II, the U.S. Marines paid for their memorial with their own nickels and dimes. If the Japanese can’t afford one, they don’t deserve one.”

Ron Wakabayashi, national director of the Japanese-American Citizens League, accused Ferguson of leading an “exhibition of bigotry and ignorance.” But Ferguson, a veteran of three U.S. wars, said most of the uproar that followed the museum debate was caused by one newspaper and its affiliated wire service, which he said took his comments out of context and misquoted him.

In the newspaper account, Ferguson was quoted as saying, “I would like to remind you of World War II,” instead of “I would like to remind you that after World War II . . . “

Wakabayashi, who admits he initially read and reacted to the apparent misquote, said Ferguson’s comments were somewhat offensive, even as accurately characterized in several other newspapers.

And since Ferguson never repudiated his colleagues who chose to chant and catcall during the incident, Wakabayashi added, “I view him rather cynically.”