Legislative Aides’ Campaign Role Growing, Critics Say : Political Troops Often on State Payrolls

When soldiers are needed in political wars--as was the case in a heavily bankrolled state Senate election last week--the Legislature can call up small armies of Democratic and Republican militia, drawn from the 2,300 legislative employees whose salaries are paid by taxpayers.

The troops come out of the lawmakers’ Capitol and district offices, where they have no job security and their livelihoods depend on helping make sure that their bosses wind up on the winning side of election campaigns, especially their own.

In the latest example, hundreds of legislative employees converged on Southern California--by bus, by car, by chartered plane--in a critical special election last Tuesday to get out the vote. Depending on the party loyalties of their bosses in Sacramento, they worked either for Norwalk Democrat Cecil N. Green, the underdog winner, or for Republican Assemblyman Wayne Grisham of Norwalk, whose loss led to a shake-up of GOP Senate leadership.

Neither side will say exactly how many legislative staffers actually flocked to the district. Republicans acknowledge close to 100 on their side. Democrats talk of between 150 and 200 on theirs. Some observers say the real figures are much higher.

At a recent cocktail reception for lawmakers and staff members in Sacramento, one legislative employee commented to a reporter, “There’s not a staff person in this room who’s not involved in the 33rd (Senate District race).”

Legislators have always placed political troops on their office staffs--people paid with state funds who move easily between the worlds of campaign strategy and legislative business. This is a great advantage for incumbents over their reelection challengers, who for the most part have no taxpayer-financed staffs to draw from and must depend solely on private contributions to pay aides.

As long as the legislative staff members take unpaid leaves of absence from their state jobs or do campaigning after hours, on weekends or on vacation time, their politicking is legal. But it is difficult to prove whether legislative employees have, in fact, taken leave when they work on campaigns, particularly in the Senate, which has instituted a policy of destroying leave and vacation records once an outside audit is completed each year.

Some critics, including former legislative leaders, contend that the number of political operatives on the Legislature’s growing payroll is out of control and is a waste of taxpayers’ money. They also complain that the dividing line between staff experts, knowledgeable in specialized areas of government, and political aides has become blurred as leaders in both parties become more concerned about winning elections.

Legislators “have too much staff and too much of it is purely partisan in nature,” said former Assembly Speaker Robert T. Monagan, a Republican who now is chairman of the state World Trade Commission. “It’s completely out of hand.”

Period of Rapid Growth

Legislative budgets and staffs have continued to grow at a rapid pace for two decades, a period when annual spending increased more than eight-fold--from $19 million in 1968 to $181 million planned for next year--more than half of it for staff salaries and benefits.

Since 1969, the size of the Senate staff has almost tripled from 393 to 1,018, according to figures provided by the Senate Rules Committee. Information from the Assembly Rules Committee shows 1,227 people on the Assembly payroll and an additional 47 employees who work for both houses. The Assembly Rules staff declined to provide past employment figures.

Legislative leaders say that the staff growth has merely kept pace with increases in the overall state budget.

A review by The Times of hundreds of legislative and campaign records, as well as interviews with a number of legislative employees, revealed that many turn up as foot soldiers in election wars. Most say they do so without coercion from their bosses, but some acknowledge that there is “pressure.” Technically, participation in campaigns is optional, said a former legislative committee consultant who asked not to be identified, “but sometimes it didn’t seem so optional.”

A current legislative staffer said, “They (legislators) have ways of letting you know that it is a good idea to go down there, that you ought to take a day off and walk a precinct.”

Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) said, “There is no pressure to my knowledge by anyone.” But he added that “there is a lot of solicitation”--staffers are asked to help but are not coerced into doing so.

When asked before Tuesday’s special election how the Legislature would carry on its business with perhaps hundreds of staff members taking leave or vacation to help get out the vote in Southern California, Brown compared it to the opening day of the baseball season or the state fair: “I don’t believe there will be any more absentees on Election Day here than any other normal day when there is a competing event.”

In addition to those who work on campaigns for free, scores of legislative workers turn up on the payrolls of legislative campaign committees, including a number who take time off from their legislative duties for months at a time during the election season.

In the special election for the vacant Senate seat, for example, one Assembly staff member, Dale Hardeman, was campaign manager for his legislative boss, the losing Republican candidate, Grisham, while a Senate staffer, Larry Sheingold, directed the campaign of Democratic winner Green.

Like many of the politically active legislative staffers, Sheingold said he “burns up” accumulated vacation time or takes a leave from his legislative job--in his case a position as $71,424-a-year staff director to Senate majority whip Henry J. Mello of Watsonville.

Hardeman, who said he got into politics as a professional jingle writer, was Grisham’s field representative, receiving $16,467 last year for his mostly part-time legislative job. Grisham’s campaign committee paid Hardeman $17,000 through April 25 for his work in the Senate race.

A number of well-paid legislative staff members run their own campaign-related businesses on the side. Sheingold, for example, is a partner in an embryonic political consulting firm, Directions, and said he hopes to leave the legislative payroll permanently one day and work full time on campaigns. The Green campaign has thus far reported paying Directions more than $20,000 for its services.

Although no longer a legislative employee, David Townsend, a highly regarded Democratic campaign consultant, has a $2,500-a-month contract with the Senate to advise lawmakers how to design letters to their constituents. Owner of Townsend & Co., he is also a partner in Statewide Information Systems, a campaign computer firm that was paid $33,942 by the Green campaign.

Also Running for Office

Illustrative of the political nature of most legislative employees, many over the years have run for office themselves. A handful currently hold local elected posts. Last year, seven legislative aides ran for Assembly seats, including two who succeeded--Assemblywoman Bev Hansen (R-Santa Rosa), once a field representative for former Senate Republican Leader James W. Nielsen (R-Rohnert Park); and Assemblyman Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles), who was an aide to former Democratic Assemblyman Richard Alatorre.

A smattering of legislative employees appear to have the right political pedigrees for their jobs. Two of state Treasurer Jesse Unruh’s children have held legislative jobs recently: Linda Unruh, who worked for Assembly Speaker Brown last year, and son Randall, who works for Senate President David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles). Leola M. Dellums, wife of Rep. Ronald V. Dellums (D-Oakland), represents the Assembly in Washington, where she works out of her home. Relatives of several legislators, including Assemblyman Curtis R. Tucker (D-Inglewood), Sen. Daniel E. Boatwright (D-Concord) and Assemblyman Pete Chacon (D-San Diego), hold legislative staff jobs.

“We don’t have organized parties (in California),” commented one former top legislative aide, who asked not to be identified. “The Legislature takes the place of old ward politics.”

Some past and present legislative employees complain of what they see as increased pressure to participate in campaigns and to contribute to campaign coffers. They speak bitterly of a once-proud professional staff, now dominated by a corps of political operatives who devote themselves to keeping incumbents in office.

“You cannot run committees with temporary employees using a slot to keep a person on the payroll between campaigns,” asserted former Democratic Senate President Pro Tem James R. Mills. Referring to Roberti’s successful effort to oust him from power, Mills said, “I could have remained pro tem if I had offered the same inducements to vote for me.”

Senate employment figures show that there was an acceleration of hiring after Roberti succeeded Mills.

Legislative leaders say that current practices reflect what has always been true: that those who choose to work for politicians are people who are attracted to campaign politics and see political work as part of their jobs.

“The people that are here dig that stuff,” said Nielsen, who was toppled from power in large part because his side lost Tuesday’s election.

Carrying Out Policy

Roberti said that many legislative employees “are involved in state government because there are certain policies they want to see carried out. One way to see policy carried out is to see your side win elections. Why would anyone want to work here? There is absolutely no job security. They are true believers; they want to do something to change the world.”

But whenever Senate employees do something political, Roberti insisted, they leave the state payroll. “If you take part of a day off (to work on politics), you take time off,” he said.

And Brown said: “If I catch (an employee) at any point screwing around on public payroll and doing something political, (that person is) terminated. I’m not going to have my speakership tarnished in any fashion by mixing the two (legislative and political work).”

Brown and Roberti both said there was a time when employees were not so careful about avoiding political activity at taxpayers’ expense.

Brown said: “In (former Assembly Speaker) Jesse Unruh’s day, there was no strict adherence to the requirement of no participation in the political process on public time. Jesse Unruh left the speakership in 1968 and, let me tell you, a Willie Brown speakership is subject to about a million more inspection stations than Jesse Unruh’s speakership was ever subject to.”

Aimed at Lobbyists

Unruh, who now is state treasurer and is credited with having fashioned the modern California Legislature, declined to be interviewed. But Mills, an Unruh ally in the ‘60s, said the buildup of legislative staff was an effort by Unruh to end legislators’ dependence on lobbyists. “You’d pick up a bill and ask a lobbyist what the bill did, and a lobbyist would tell you,” Mills said. “We wanted an independent capacity, people we thought were objective.”

One of Unruh’s key aides, Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, contended that Unruh always made a point of insulating the large cadre of issues-oriented experts on the legislative staff from campaign activity.

Jeffe, now director of the state legislative leadership study project at USC’s Institute of Politics and Government, said that when she asked Unruh for a leave in 1968 to work for Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Unruh was adamant in denying her request, although he was chairman of the Kennedy campaign in California. She quoted Unruh as saying: “I’ve worked too long and too hard to build this concept of nonpartisan legislative staff. I can’t have one of my own people go off on a campaign and come back on my staff.” So Jeffe quit and did not return.

Today, Jeffe complains that committee consultants are no longer shielded from politics and in fact are under pressure to participate in campaigns and donate money to political treasuries. One obvious sign that she cited: the use of committee staff to sell tickets to Brown’s annual End of Session Bash, a $50-a-ticket Democratic fund-raiser. “They are given quotas of tickets to sell,” she said, deploring the practice as a form of political “tithing.”

Requests From Advisers

A former committee consultant, who agreed to speak only if not identified, said that the requests to sell tickets to the fund-raiser never came directly from assemblymen, but from high-level advisers to the Speaker.

“To me it was part of doing business,” said the former consultant, now a lobbyist. “If I was working in the corporate world and my company president was giving a party, I would want to show up, not that I thought his wife was that interesting. Around the Capitol, running for reelection is part of the business.”

The former consultant said that among the people the legislative staffers now sell tickets to are the very lobbyists they regularly deal with. And “over time,” the former consultant said, the professional staff system that Unruh set up in an effort to gain independence from special interest groups “has fallen down.”

Richard P. Ross, who until last September was Brown’s chief of staff, acknowledged that staffers have been asked to sell tickets to the end-of-session Democratic fund-raiser. But he insisted that no one was forced to. “There was no reward or punishment meted out,” he said.

Healthy Income

Through last year’s fall elections, Ross was in charge of coordinating the Assembly Democratic campaigns, which he did through a series of companies he owns. These companies have provided him with a healthy income, he conceded.

While working on campaigns, Ross took unpaid leave or used up vacation time, he said. Assembly records show that he was paid $24,880 in state salary last year for less than three months work.

How could Brown function for so much of the year without a full-time chief of staff? When on the Speaker’s payroll, Ross functioned as just “another staff person” whose state work could be picked up by others, Brown said. “I am my chief of staff.”

Ross recalled bruising battles with legislative policy consultants, who he said regarded him and other political staff members as “whores, stepchildren, a necessary evil.”

“I have always felt that the political staff is in closer touch with the people and their needs,” Ross said. “I view politics as a contact sport. If I didn’t (work on campaigns), a lot of people (working for the Democratic legislators) wouldn’t hold a job.”

Most Visible Example

Ross is only the most visible of politically active legislative employees who spent a good deal of 1986 away from their state jobs while working on campaigns.

As a legislative employee, Robert Morales, 31, is the $65,000-a-year, Los Angeles-based principal consultant for the Senate Toxics Committee. Last year he took six months of unpaid leave in addition to his vacation time to run a statewide Democratic voter registration drive. Later in the year, he began working on an unsuccessful campaign to put school board member Larry Gonzalez on the Los Angeles City Council. Records show that Morales received close to $30,000 from political campaign committees for his election work last year.

Morales estimated that he has been involved in as many as 25 campaigns since he first went to work for Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles), now the toxics committee chairman. “My interest is in Art Torres,” Morales said in a recent interview. “I like him, I respect him. I’d like to see him be governor.”

Among other staffers, David W. Titus and Christopher Kent Jones last year took time away from their minority consultant jobs with Assembly Republican Leader Pat Nolan of Glendale to work on the Assembly campaign of another GOP legislative employee, Henry A. Olsen III.

Tore Down Signs

On one of those legislative leaves, a San Jose policeman caught them tearing down the campaign signs of Olsen’s opponent in the Republican primary and putting up Olsen signs in their place. Each agreed to pay $200 to the campaign committee of Republican Charles Quackenbush of Saratoga, whose signs they had torn down and who went on to win the Assembly seat in the November election.

Calls to Titus and Jones as well as other Republican Assembly staff members were referred to Anne Richards, press spokeswoman for Nolan. Richards said that Nolan would not permit the staff to talk to the press.

And, unlike other legislative leaders, Nolan refused to be interviewed as well.

Nolan and his staff may still be smarting from criticism of Republican tactics in last fall’s elections, according to Mike Pottage, press spokesman for the Assembly Republican Caucus.

In several legislative races, Republican candidates sent out phony presidential endorsement letters, which were not approved by President Reagan or his aides. Among those identified by the White House as responsible were Olsen and a former Republican staff member, Richard Temple, now director of the Assembly Republican Political Action Committee.

“It’s like touching an antenna on a snail--everybody withdrew,” Pottage said.

LEGISLATIVE AIDES WHO DOUBLE AS POLITICAL PROFESSIONALS Scores of legislative employees end up on the campaign payrolls of their lawmaker bosses. Many say they take unpaid time off from their taxpayer-supported legislative jobs to work on campaigns; others say theydo the political work in their free time--evenings, weekends and vacations. Here, gleaned from public records, is a sampling of some aides who also have worked for political campaigns: LEGISLATIVE AIDE Richard P. Ross DUTIES Although listed as Assembly Speaker Willie Brown’s chief of staff until Sept. 1, 1986, he drew state pay ($24,880) for less than three months last year. COMMENTS Owns Ross Communications, the political consulting firm that coordinated numerous Democratic Assembly campaigns last year; is a partner in Graphic Studio, Delta Productions, and Statewide Information Systems--firms that many Democratic candidates pay for campaign-related services. Also rents an office in a Sacramento building he owns to the Willie Brown Campaign Committee, which paid more than $10,000 in rent last year. LEGISLATIVE AIDE Eleanor Johns DUTIES Senior assistant to Assembly Speaker Brown; employed full-time in his San Francisco office, for which she was paid $32,928 in 1986, when she took an unpaid leave of seven weeks. COMMENTS Earned $25,000 last year as bookkeeper for Brown controlled campaign committees. Brown says she is part of his trusted political family, a fastidious record keeper who has a computer with his campaign records in her home. Also paid between $1,000 and $10,000 by Brown’s private law practice for handling some of Brown’s personal financial affairs, making sure his bills are paid and dealing with his landlord, Brown said. LEGISLATIVE AIDE James Nelson Moore DUTIES Worked part-time for a year in the Assembly Office of Majority Services, a cadre of workers who help Democratic incumbents thought vulnerable to election challenge. Drew $12,000 from the state for three months work in 1986. An expert in following shifting voter trends by computer, he helped Democratic lawmakers target state-paid mailings to constitutents. COMMENTS Owns Moore Methods, a widely used Democratic campaign computer research firm; also a partner with Speaker Willie Brown’s former chief of staff, Richard Ross, in Statewide Information Systems, which sells computer services to Democratic candidates. LEGISLATIVE AIDE Kirk Briggs DUTIES Worked as an aide in the Assembly majority services office, for which he was paid $10,529 for five months on the legislative payroll in 1986. Helped potentially vulnerable Democratic lawmakers respond to constituent problems. COMMENTS Earned more than $10,000 in 1986 from a company he owns which produces political signs and placards. Also paid more than $10,000 by Assembly Democrats campaign committee for political consulting. Currently managing an anti-crime initiative campaign--Dimes against Crimes--for Democratic Secretary of State March Fong Eu, who is running for U.S. Senate. LEGISLATIVE AIDE James F. Nygren DUTIES Employed by the Assembly Republican Caucus as a $41,388-a-year aide, serving GOP lawmakers. COMMENTS Took a four-month unpaid leave from his legislative job in 1986, to manage the successful Assembly campaign of Republican Tim Leslie of Carmichael. LEGISLATIVE AIDE Dale F. Hardeman DUTIES Hired as a field representative to Assemblyman Wayne Grisham (R-Norwalk). Earned $16,467 in 1986 while on the Legislature’s payroll, working half-time for five months, full-time for three. COMMENTS Managed Grisham’s unsuccessful state Senate campaign, for he has so far reported being paid $17,000. In 1986, Grisham’s campaign committee supplemented Hardeman’s legislative salary although there was no serious challenger to Grisham’s reelection to the Assembly. Hardeman himself is an elected official--President of the Cerritos Community College Board of Trustees. LEGISLATIVE AIDE Jerome Haleva DUTIES $81,264-a-year staff director for the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Fire, Police, Emergency and Disaster Services, he serves as chief of staff to Republican Sen. William Campbell of Hacienda Heights. Took all of October off on upaid leave. COMMENTS Operates his own political consulting firm, Sergeant Major Associates. Was paid $15,000 in 1986 for his work on Sen. Campbell’s unsuccessful campaign for state controller. Was also paid between $1,000 and $10,000 for consulting to the Political and Economic Exchange Foundation, a non-profit group that subsidizes trips to California for foreign government officials. LEGISLATIVE AIDE John Feliz DUTIES Works as a senior consultant to Republican Sen. John Doolittle of Citrus Heights, at $56,472 annual salary. COMMENTS Owns Communications Consulting Group, which paid him $1,000 to $10,000 for political work in 1986; an organizer of a computer research firm used by a number of Republican candidates and which paid him $1,000 to $10,000 last year. Feliz and Doolittle were both fined this year by the Fair Political Practices Commission for failing to report their aid to a Democratic candidate, in a 1984 Senate race, in which the Democrat’s votes helped Doolittle beat an independent candidate. LEGISLATIVE AIDE Larry Sheingold DUTIES Employed as $71,424-a-year staff director by the Senate’s majority whip, Sen. Henry J. Mello (D-Watsonville), taking unpaid leave and using vacation time to run election campaigns. COMMENTS Partner in Directions, a firm that runs Democratic political campaigns, including that of newly elected Sen. Cecil Green of Norwalk who won last week’s special election in the 33rd Senate District. The Green campaign paid Directions $20,000 through April 25; the firm also worked for Lt. Gov. Leo T. McCarthy’s successful reelection campaign in 1986. LEGISLATIVE AIDE Robert Morales DUTIES Works out of Democratic Sen. Art Torres’ district office as the principal consultant to the Senate Toxics Committee, a job with a $64,632 annual salary. He took lengthy unpaid leave last year. COMMENTS Active in numerous political campaigns, Morales owns his own campaign consulting firm, Robert A. Morales & Associates. In 1986, Morales ran the Democratic statewide voter registration campaign; and was a paid consultant to school board member Larry Gonzalez’ unsuccessful Los Angeles City Council race. Records show he was paid $30,000 or more for his political campaign work last year. LEGISLATIVE AIDE Clifford Berg DUTIES In his $90,552-a-year-job as the Senate Rules Committee’s chief executive officer, is Senate’s top administrator. Like a number of top aides to Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles), provided professional services to Roberti’s political campaign committee, for which he received more than $3,000 last year.