Bill Bradley Presses the Fight Despite Few Victories

Bill Bradley has been fighting liver cancer for two years, and sometimes the San Marcos assemblyman thinks he’s making more progress against the disease than against his other persistent nemesis: California’s powerful environmental movement.

Bradley, a civil engineer in his third term in the Legislature, has spent much of his career here butting heads with the Sierra Club and its ilk over land use, coastal access, toxic waste and other environmental issues. A low-key Republican with a small staff and few connections to power, Bradley almost always is the loser in such battles.

But Bradley, whose loyalty to private-property rights makes him something of an enigma in this era of growth controls, keeps fighting.

This year alone, he has introduced legislation that his foes have said would open thousands of acres of coastal farmland to development, gut the voter-approved anti-toxics initiative, Proposition 65, and leave San Diego County’s water table vulnerable to contamination from the chemicals in manure and urine that flow from dairy farms.

Says Dangers Overstated

Bradley believes politicians have overstated the danger of toxins in the state’s drinking water supply, and he is fond of quoting a respected UC Berkeley professor who believes drinking a glass of beer a day is 10,000 times more dangerous for cancer than drinking a quart of contaminated well water from the Silicon Valley.

A former city administrator himself, Bradley believes bureaucrats often go too far in regulating private industry. And on land use, Bradley says he is hoping that the U.S. Supreme Court will rule in favor of a Ventura man who is challenging the California Coastal Commission’s order to provide public access to the beach through his property.

“If you want to acquire beachfront for the benefit of the public, then pay the people for it because they paid to get the property,” Bradley said in an oft-repeated harangue about the demise of private property rights.

Especially irksome to Bradley is the degree of recent success environmentalists have enjoyed in slowing the pace of development in several communities around the county and the state. He says he supported the Sierra Club “when they were saving redwoods and buying parks.” But no longer.

“They’ve gotten control of local government because they’re the squeaky wheel,” said Bradley, who was city manager of San Marcos before running for the Assembly. “Ten people show up at a City Council meeting, and good plans go down the tubes because they scare the hell out of local politicians. The supporters don’t show up at council meetings. They stay home. But the negatives always show up and the local elected officials react to that, thinking that’s representative of the community when it’s not at all.”

So Bradley, 67, a lanky man with a full head of graying hair, fights the battle here, where--much to his chagrin--the Democrats who control the Legislature and who are supported by environmentalists routinely scuttle his more extreme proposals.

Unlike his cancer, which he has tamed more effectively than doctors at first said he would, the environmentalists haven’t receded, despite Bradley’s efforts.

Bradley’s farmland bill, for example, would have made it easier for coastal land owners to convert their acreage from crops to condos by claiming that the land was no longer profitable in farming. It was shelved by the Assembly Natural Resources Committee.

Anti-Prop. 65 Bills on Hold

Two Bradley bills on Proposition 65, one sponsored by the County of San Diego and the other by the Assembly Republican Caucus, would have hampered enforcement of that measure, which requires businesses to warn consumers and workers of exposure to certain cancer-causing chemicals. Neither bill was given much chance of passage and both have been put on hold by their sponsors.

That leaves the dairy bill, in which Bradley proposed exempting dairy farms from regulation by the state’s Water Quality Control Act. That bill, which Bradley described as a “club” to get state regulators to pull back newly instituted controls on San Diego dairy farmers, has not been acted upon, but it has spurred the negotiations Bradley sought.

Past Bradley efforts included a bill to abolish the California Coastal Commission--a goal he shares with Gov. George Deukmejian--and a move to exempt 5,000 acres in Carlsbad from the commission’s control. Both failed.

Perhaps his most notable achievement in environmental legislation was a bill that ended a program requiring Carlsbad builders to pay $27,000 an acre for the right to build on protected farmland. The money collected was intended to be used for subsidies to induce other land owners to keep their property in agriculture.

Little Support Attracted

But for the most part, Bradley’s efforts, like his soft voice and unassuming manner, have attracted little attention and support in Sacramento.

“I’m not a wild-eyed missionary up here,” Bradley said in a recent interview. “I don’t go off on flaming causes. I don’t scream about it and hold press conferences.”

Neither is Bradley known for aggressively “working his bills,” the behind-the-scenes deal-making and compromising that inevitably takes place before controversial legislation becomes law.

“He doesn’t seem to have an approach to selling or convincing people that what he wants to do is what is necessary,” said Paula Carrell, a lobbyist for the Sierra Club. “He makes a flat blanket statement and assumes that everyone should agree with him. You should believe him, but if you don’t, that’s not his problem, that’s your problem.”

Pays Attention to Detail

Assemblyman Byron D. Sher, a Palo Alto Democrat who chairs the Assembly Natural Resources Committee, where many of Bradley’s bills are killed, said Bradley is known for his attention to detail, if not his love of compromise.

“He has strong policy feelings, and he reflects them in the bills he carries,” Sher said. “But he lets the legislation speak for itself. If he doesn’t have the votes, he doesn’t go around wheeling and dealing or trading. He accepts it if the bill goes down. But then he always comes back with another one.”

Normally congenial, Bradley does on rare occasions exhibit a temper.

He once hung up on a reporter who was asking him about the genesis of his legislation benefiting Carlsbad landowners. And the other day he fired off a letter to the California Farm Bureau’s Sacramento lobbyist criticizing the bureau for failing to support two of his bills, which he thought would aid farmers. In the letter, Bradley unleashed what for him is the basest of insults:

“Sometimes, I wonder if you aren’t supporters of the Sierra Club.”