He Brought a New Style of Politicking

“This is the longest I’ve held any job,” Bruce Nestande joked as he took the chairman’s gavel earlier this month in his sixth year on the Orange County Board of Supervisors.

Indeed, Nestande’s 18-year career in public office has been marked by an ambitious quest for political power through various jobs and political activities, none of which occupied his attention for more than six years, and all of which generated controversy.

And although Nestande denied any connection, the 48-year-old ex-Marine on Wednesday became the second Orange County supervisor to depart in the wake of the political scandals involving former Anaheim fireworks manufacturer W. Patrick Moriarty or Moriarty’s associates.

Under Investigation

Nestande’s involvement in efforts to turn county landfill sites over to private operators, including a former Moriarty business associate, is a subject of an ongoing, joint investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles and the Orange County district attorney’s office.

Last year, Ralph B. Clark announced that he would retire as a county supervisor, partly because of allegations by a former Moriarty business associate that he had accepted the services of a prostitute. Clark, who left the board earlier this month, strongly denied the charge.

Months of rumors circulated by county staff and political activists preceded both Clark’s and Nestande’s announcements, but Nestande’s decision to bow out of electoral politics was seen by many as uncharacteristic.

“He’s a person who always wanted to seek higher office and who gave people the impression he would remain undaunted in whatever he was doing,” said former Assemblyman Ron Cordova, who is a possible successor to Nestande on the Board of Supervisors. “This is very unlike Bruce.”

Unsuccessful in his bid to unseat Secretary of State March Fong Eu last November, Nestande had boasted that he would not only remain in public office but added that his defeat marked only the first of what might be several attempts to gain statewide office.

Two Controversies

During his woefully underfunded campaign, however, he acknowledged that his effort was hampered by negative publicity involving Moriarty, as well as votes on matters affecting his campaign contributors, and bydisclosures that phones in his office had been used repeatedly over several months for Dial-a-Porn calls. (A Nestande aide eventually took responsibility for the calls, resigned and paid restitution to the county.)

Even before the 1986 election, Nestande had been involved in a series of controversies, ranging from a split with fellow Republicans over his authorship of California’s moratorium on construction of nuclear power facilities to his recent effort to make construction of new roads a condition for growth in unincorporated areas of the county.

A former correspondence secretary for then-Gov. Ronald Reagan and a friend of former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Michael K. Deaver and former Cabinet Secretary Craig Fuller, Nestande also has had strong ties to the Deukmejian Administration in Sacramento, which has appointed two former Nestande aides to sub-cabinet level positions.

Nestande, who had been widely regarded as the county’s most ambitious and influential politician, got his start in Orange County politics as a young GOP volunteer, a protege of the late, arch-conservative Walter Knott, who hired Nestande as the first director of the Independence Hall replica built at Knott’s Berry Farm.

He was born and raised in Minnesota, where, as a student at the University of Minnesota, he admired liberal Democrats Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy.

Nestande, who is divorced and remarried, settled in Orange County after serving in the Marines during the Vietnam war. Throughout his political career, he has refused to discuss his military service, saying that his assignment was classified as secret.

A former state GOP executive director, he ran unsuccessfully against then-Assemblyman Ken Cory (D-Westminster) three times before 1974, when he took a new seat created by reapportionment.

Lost to Hallett

In September, 1979, Nestande, who was then Assembly GOP caucus chairman, lost a bid to become Assembly Republican leader to Carol Hallett of Atascadero. Within weeks, he was campaigning to unseat Orange County Supervisor Edison W. Miller, a controversial former Vietnam prisoner of war. Miller was appointed by then-Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. to fill a vacancy created when Supervisor Ralph Diedrich was sent to state prison for bribery.

During the same era, two other supervisors left the board under a cloud of political corruption charges: Philip L. Anthony, now a lobbyist and water district trustee, was defeated shortly before he pleaded “no contest” to charges of laundering campaign funds, and attorney Robert W. Battin was removed from office as a result of his conviction for misusing public funds.

Once on the board, Nestande became its most contentious member, forcing elimination, consolidation or board takeovers of various agencies, including the county Housing Authority and the Office of Consumer Affairs.

At one point, he served simultaneously as a member of two presidential advisory panels, a gubernatorial task force, a state commission, and the boards of the South Coast Air Quality Management District and the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

As SCAG’s chairman, he drew opposition when he proposed mergers of some cities (thus eliminating their separate identities) to reduce the number of bureaucracies performing duplicate tasks and by proposing creation of regional agencies to make legally binding decisions about regional issues such as pollution and construction of new airports.

Named to Commission

In a surprise move, then-Gov. Brown appointed Nestande to the state Transportation Commission in 1982 with the support of county business executives, Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D--San Francisco) and then-Assemblyman Richard Robinson (D-Garden Grove), once Nestande’s closest friend. During his tenure on the state commission, funding for Orange County highway projects has more than doubled.

In 1983, Nestande said he had returned campaign contributions to Moriarty after discovering that the money came from the fireworks manufacturer, not the employees and business associates whose names appeared on the checks. Nestande denied any involvement in Moriarty’s activities.

Throughout Nestande’s six-year tenure on the board, he clashed frequently with Clark over mass transit issues and proposed sites for new jails, and with Supervisor Thomas F. Riley on airport expansion issues.

Last year, he acknowledged that executives of a Wall Street brokerage firm had promised to lend financial aid to his ailing statewide campaign for secretary of state before he voted to award the same firm a lucrative bond-underwriting contract.

During the same campaign, Nestande became the first supervisor to take advantage of an obscure provision in the county’s campaign-contribution ordinance in order to vote on an airport matter affecting a major donor, George Argyros, who was then a part owner of AirCal. The provision allowed Nestande to cast a vote after Argyros signed an affidavit declaring that his contribution was made as a private citizen and was not connected with his business interests.

Tried to Overturn It

Earlier, he tried unsuccessfully in court to have the same county campaign ordinance declared unconstitutional because, he said, it was hampering his ability to raise funds for his statewide race.

Nestande’s fellow board members and Orange County political observers say he brought a touch of Sacramento to the Board of Supervisors--a level of rough-and-tumble political sophistication and ambition rarely seen by his board colleagues.

He has had a reputation for maneuvering, both openly and behind the scenes, to get what he wanted, attacking some people one day and forming alliances with them the next.

“Bruce is a master of embarrassing a supervisor one week, and the next week, he’s right with them, he’s their best friend,” Shawn Cassidy, a former aide to two other supervisors, said of Nestande in a 1984 interview.

Cassidy and other sources cited several instances in which Nestande allegedly created controversies in order to establish political IOUs, including a debate over likely sites for a new jail complex.

Such was the case between Nestande and Cassidy’s former boss, Supervisor Roger R. Stanton.

Sitting in a Sacramento bar with a Times reporter one evening, Nestande and his friend Robinson hatched a plot to spread rumors that Robinson was going to leave the Assembly to run against Stanton--a tactic intended to scare Stanton into backing down on an issue.

But Nestande and Stanton became friends after that, and the two men have shared a similar voting record.

“I’m probably too contentious at times,” Nestande conceded during a 1984 interview, but he added, “I wasn’t elected to sit here and be Mr. Nice Guy.”