Kathleen Brown Named to Seat on L.A. Board of Public Works

Kathleen Brown, the sister of one California governor and daughter of another, was named to a top job in Los Angeles City Hall on Monday, reviving a political career she gave up seven years ago by leaving the Los Angeles school board to follow her husband to New York.

The new post, a seat on the Board of Public Works, is one of the most visible and coveted appointed positions that Mayor Tom Bradley controls. The board oversees public services such as trash collection, sewers and street lights and also guides the selection of contractors for major city construction projects.

It also is the only one of more than 30 city boards and commissions whose five members are paid full-time salaries. If Bradley’s nomination of Brown, 42, is confirmed by the City Council, she will be paid $60,356 a year.

Brown was 29 when, in 1975, her famous name helped her win a seat on the Los Angeles Unified School District. Her brother, Edmund G. Brown Jr., had been elected governor a year earlier, and her father--Edmund G. (Pat) Brown--had been governor for two terms before being defeated in 1966 by Ronald Reagan.

At the time, the youngest of the liberal Brown clan was known as Kathleen Brown Rice. On the school board she provided a key vote that in 1975 temporarily banned corporal punishment in Los Angeles city schools, and later formed a part of the board majority that opened the era of mandatory busing for desegregation.

With her political pedigree, and her brother in the governor’s office, Brown came to be the liberal on the board who matched wits most often with conservative suburban activists. These activists rode to power on the backlash against busing and finally took control of the board.

She also was probably the best-known school board member in California, if not the country. She lived in Hancock Park, raised money for her Los Angeles reelection campaign at posh Georgetown parties and got as much media attention as any local politician except Bradley. In 1980, she went on the road to help her brother’s campaign for President.

After easily winning reelection in 1979, Brown was divorced from attorney George Rice and, in 1980, married Van Gordon Sauter, a television news executive. Soon after the wedding, Sauter was named president of CBS Sports, and Brown resigned from the school board with three years left in her term to move to New York.

Her departure stunned local liberal leaders since it came in the midst of a struggle for ideological control of the school board and ensured that anti-busing conservatives would hold the majority for several years. Brown explained at the time that she decided to move to New York after a fortune-cookie message had urged her to “go for it.”

In New York, Brown enrolled her children in private schools and herself in the law school at Fordham University. She was graduated in 1985 and immediately joined O’Melveny & Myers, the huge and prominent Los Angeles law firm, as a New York associate.

A Key Player

Brown is the latest new face with connections to Michael Gage, Bradley’s new chief of staff, to join the Bradley Administration. Gage was a key player in her brother’s 1980 campaign for President.

On the Board of Public Works, Brown would face a bubbling controversy over the damage done to fish and marine life in Santa Monica Bay by the dumping of city sewage into the ocean.

Under the terms of a settlement in a federal lawsuit against the city, Los Angeles must stop depositing sludge--the concentrated form of sewage--in the Pacific by the end of this year. The sludge will eventually be burned to generate electricity in a state-of-the-art power plant under construction in El Segundo, but if the plant does not perform as predicted the sludge will have to be trucked to inland landfills.

The Board of Public Works has come under fire in recent years for sewage spills and failures that have led to stiff fines against the city.

Brown was named to fill the vacancy left when the board’s longtime president, Maureen Kindel, resigned last week to enter private business. Another commissioner, Ed Avila, was elected president of the board last week.