Gray Davis Sees Red in Peachy Office

Angered by Gov. George Deukmejian’s decision to give Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy a Capitol office he covets, state Controller Gray Davis vowed Thursday to vacate the luxury private building where he is now located and move to cheaper quarters closer to the political action.

“I can’t perform my job here,” Davis said just hours after penning a terse letter to the governor in which he announced his intention to move from his isolated, 18th-floor penthouse. Deukmejian, he said, is “determined to prevent me from returning to the Capitol.”

The newly elected controller asked that the keys to the office not be given to McCarthy and that the governor, at the very least, find new quarters befitting the penny-pinching image that Davis is trying to foster.

“I am the state’s official tightwad,” Davis declared.

Taking Possession

The latest development in the political skirmishing over Capitol office space came one day after McCarthy told The Times that he had prevailed and would soon be taking possession of the spacious, much-sought-after corner suite with its expansive view of Capitol Park.

The office would have belonged to Davis if not for the expensive tastes of Democrat Ken Cory, his predecessor, who decided just before retiring from public life to abandon those quarters for a hulking steel-and-glass building closer to the Sacramento River, 10 blocks from the Capitol.

That left Davis--an up-and-coming politician and self-proclaimed penny-pincher--with one of the most lavish and expensive headquarters in state government.

“I don’t know what the governor is thinking,” Davis said of Deukmejian’s decision to give McCarthy and not him the corner office.

“It’s simply not defensible to force the controller out of his Capitol office and isolate him on the top of this building. I can’t do the job if I’m out of the information loop,” he said.

Deukmejian’s office was closed for a state holiday and no one was available from his staff to comment.

To the uninitiated, all this squawking over office space might seem like small potatoes for elected officeholders in the nation’s most populous state. But there is more at stake here.

Status around the Capitol is largely determined--as it is throughout society--by such symbols as square footage and office location. Among legislators, for example, the first sign of who is on the rise is often a construction crew tearing out walls and installing windows in a well-situated office.

Conversely, those on the way out sometimes find themselves shoehorned into closet-sized offices down the hall from the bathrooms. With McCarthy and Davis being prominently mentioned as possible rivals in a future gubernatorial bid, neither would benefit much from looking like he is being upstaged.

Davis, however, insists on casting the debate in more lofty terms, saying that he can both save taxpayer money and better “perform my job as the state’s chief financial officer” by being closer to the corridors of power.

Beautiful View

Finding a tenant for Davis’ current, remote office should be no problem, because it commands one of the best views in Sacramento--with sweeping vistas of the river, the High Sierra and the Capitol--and comes complete with balconies and strategically placed “panic buttons” installed by a security-conscious Cory.

In order to move, however, Davis would need some help from the Deukmejian Administration. The General Services Department has the job of negotiating leases with private landlords, and the governor’s office would have to give the OK for a move back to the Capitol. Davis acknowledges that he could be tempting fate.

Among the offices that may still be available is McCarthy’s own cramped, windowless cubbyhole, only one-third the size of the 9,000-square-foot office Davis now occupies.

“I’m not competing with my former boss in terms of austerity,” insisted Davis, who as former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr.’s chief of staff was largely credited with forging Brown’s penny-pinching image. “I’m not looking for a hovel, and I’m not going to locate in a tent in Capitol Park. It has to have four walls and a roof.”