Senate Service Toughening Up Easygoing Bergeson

Sen. Marian Bergeson has done something other legislators only dream about. She has quieted Assembly Speaker Willie Brown.

Bergeson, a Newport Beach Republican, clashed openly with the powerful San Francisco Democrat in the closing days of the Legislature’s 1987 session. Last week the usually irrepressible, outspoken Brown said he did not have time to talk with a reporter about it.

When his spokeswoman asked him if she could relay a statement on his behalf, Brown answered, “There’s nothing to say.”

Meet Marian Bergeson: the state Senate’s newest “tough guy.”

Once thought of mainly as a “lady’s lady” in the male-dominated state Senate, the 60-year-old Bergeson is making another impression these days. She is considered a tenacious fighter who will pursue a goal with persistence and savvy until she succeeds. She does not accept failure lightly, but she knows that compromise often is the only choice for a Republican who wants to get something done in a Legislature dominated by Democrats, and she is not afraid to deal.

One measure of how far Bergeson has come is the fact that she is believed to be on Gov. George Deukmejian’s list of finalists for appointment to the job of state treasurer, a post vacated by the recent death of Jesse M. Unruh.

Bergeson demurs to all this talk of change. She insists that if she is different it is only because she has more experience with the Capitol “process” now. She said she never encountered difficulty as a woman invading the fraternal Senate, where men--many of them old or old-fashioned--hold 36 of the 40 seats.

“People often ask me what it’s like in Sacramento for a woman in a man’s world,” said Bergeson, the first woman to represent Orange County in the Legislature. “I never accepted that it was a man’s world.”

But Bergeson carried a slightly different tune when she spoke to several Orange County women’s groups during a two-day stretch last week.

There, she told of how, in her first days in the Assembly, she was asked to leave the floor by a sergeant-at-arms who mistook her for a secretary. She spoke of the need for women to avoid being channeled into certain jobs or roles. And she said she feels a special burden to succeed so as not to block access to power for other women.

“You know, people say, ‘We tried it (choosing a woman) once and it didn’t work out,’ ” Bergeson told a gathering of Orange County business and professional women in Costa Mesa. “We never want that said about one of us, not just because we have a responsibility to ourselves but because of our responsibility to those who will follow us.”

When she first was elected to the school board in Newport Beach, Bergeson recalled, the superintendent said it would be nice to have a woman on the board: They needed someone who understood children. “So I decided to become an expert in education financing.”

That subject became Bergeson’s specialty when she was elected to the Assembly in 1978. People in the Capitol still think of education when they think of Bergeson. But the former teacher has been broadening her political horizons.

Bergeson’s 37th Senate District, roughly the size of Massachusetts, stretches from the Orange County coast through parts of San Diego and Riverside counties and covers all of Imperial County. That territory brings with it problems ranging from freeway congestion to water marketing, from rapid urban growth in affluent Orange County to the delivery of social services in the poor neighborhoods of Calexico.

Bergeson has parlayed her position as chairwoman of the Senate Local Government Committee into an influential role on several issues near the top of the Legislature’s agenda: transportation, growth, local government financing and the civil liability system.

This year, Bergeson authored a bill to allow counties to use their own money to build state freeway projects and then be reimbursed later, a subtle change in the law that is expected to reduce delays in highway construction. She carried another bill that would allow the state to hire private engineers for freeway construction projects when no government employees are available to do the work.

Caught up in partisan rancor, that bill stalled just short of final passage. It was passed in the Assembly but never reached a vote in the Senate--and it was that bill that led to Bergeson’s run-in with Speaker Brown.

Another setback for Bergeson came when she was accused by environmentalists of trying to push through a wide-ranging measure to create a special, privately controlled district to govern the early stages of development planned for the Bolsa Chica wetlands in Huntington Beach. Bergeson successfully maneuvered the bill through the Senate but shelved it for the year amid opposition in the Assembly’s natural resources committee.

Better Luck

She had more luck as a member of the Legislature’s budget conference committee, where she negotiated a fiscal bailout for rapidly growing counties. She worked with Deukmejian’s staff to devise a new formula that gave these counties more state money than they had received in the past under distribution plans that historically favored Los Angeles and San Francisco counties.

Later this month, Bergeson will sponsor a two-day conference that will focus, in part, on trends in growth management, including a look at the increasing popularity of citizens’ initiatives to control growth. She recently was named legislator of the year by the League of California Cities.

“I don’t like to get pigeonholed,” Bergeson said. “I’d like to become an expert in a lot of things.”

In branching out, Bergeson inevitably has run into more conflicts. Earlier this year, she successfully pushed through a bill to help coastal cities avoid litigation over accidents on public beaches. The measure had been stopped cold two years running in the Senate Judiciary Committee. That panel’s Democratic chairman, Sen. Bill Lockyer of Hayward, said the experience gave him new respect for Bergeson.

“She just hung in there with the issue year after year and bill after bill,” Lockyer said. “She pushed hard.”

Democratic Votes

Crucial to Bergeson’s success with that measure was her ability to obtain the votes of Democratic leaders David Roberti of Los Angeles and Barry Keene of Benicia, an accomplishment that illustrated her willingness to deal with the opposition party when necessary.

“She has the ability to compromise,” said former Garden Grove Assemblyman Richard Robinson, a Democrat. “Anyone can draw issues in terms of black and white, but it’s the individual who can find the middle ground who is successful.”

Still, it was a failure, not a success, that focused the spotlight on Bergeson this year.

At issue was her measure to allow Caltrans to contract with private firms for engineering and design work, a concept bitterly opposed by public employee unions. After Bergeson worked hard to get the bill through the Senate, Assembly Democrats amended language into the measure requiring Caltrans to try to use firms owned by minority groups and women for 20% of the work.

The amendments infuriated conservative Assembly Republicans, who object philosophically to affirmative action goals. Although the bill was supported heavily by the business community, the Assembly Republicans vowed to vote against it unless the affirmative action provisions were removed.

Argument With Brown

Speaker Brown wanted to move the bill through the Assembly, but Bergeson, fearing a Deukmejian veto, asked him to hold off. He wouldn’t. Amid some confusion, the two had an argument on the Assembly floor.

Brown yelled at Bergeson, then spun around to walk away. Bergeson grabbed him by the arm and told him he was wrong. Brown yelled some more as the two stood jaw to jaw, like an umpire and a baseball manager.

Anywhere else, such a confrontation between two rivals under pressure would not be considered extraordinary. But here, in a place where perception often conquers fact, the fight quickly became the stuff of legend. Whatever the outcome--and Bergeson clearly lost the legislative skirmish--the senator got credit for holding her own with Brown.

Sen. John Seymour (R-Anaheim) said he believes that the incident will pay “positive political dividends” for Bergeson.

“It takes a lot of courage and guts to stand up and look Willie Brown in the eye,” Seymour said. “If you do not do that, you will quickly pick up the reputation of being a wimp who will roll over at the slightest political threat.”

Evolution as Politician

Others saw the incident not so much as a watershed for Bergeson, but as an illustration of her evolution as a politician.

Bergeson began her partisan political career with an independent flourish when, in 1976, she finished second in a Republican primary for the Assembly, then ran as a write-in candidate. She didn’t win, but she attracted enough Republican votes to ruin the chances of the party’s nominee.

Bergeson was elected to the Assembly in 1978, then broke ranks with most of her Republican colleagues in 1980 when she was one of just four GOP members who did not side with Brown in his fight for the speakership. In 1984, as she was moving to the Senate, Bergeson ruffled feathers again by endorsing Ken Carpenter in the Republican primary to replace her in the Assembly. Carpenter lost to Assemblyman Gil Ferguson (R-Newport Beach).

Despite such incidents, Bergeson’s reputation remained that of a friendly, easygoing legislator. She was valued for her expertise in education, but otherwise was not considered a prominent player in the Legislature. Now, as her first term in the Senate moves into its final year and she considers a run for statewide office in 1990, Bergeson appears to be consciously changing her image.

What had been a gradual evolution took on more steam this year with Bergeson’s performance on the budget conference committee and her confrontation with Brown, after which her staff made a point of mentioning to reporters that Bergeson had not been driven to tears by the Speaker.

No Tears in Public

“I don’t cry in public,” Bergeson said later. “People have different ways of expressing their emotions. I just don’t cry in public. I never have.”

Bergeson raised her profile further when she sought the treasurer’s job, although, in typical Bergeson fashion, she did so only after her name had been mentioned by prominent politicos as a possible candidate for the post. Deukmejian has not said who he is considering, but he has said that a woman was among the finalists. Bergeson is the only woman known to be a serious candidate.

Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Long Beach) and state Sen. Ken Maddy (R-Fresno) also have been mentioned as leading candidates.

One of those who advised Bergeson to seek the post was Bruce Nestande, a former assemblyman and Orange County supervisor who is now an executive for a development firm. Nestande said he has seen a change in Bergeson over the years, and that she would do well in the job that Unruh transformed from a minor clerical position into a center of financial power.

“I think she has hardened herself somewhat to the process,” Nestande said. “You’ve got to control the process or the process will control you. You’ve got to stiffen your back and harden yourself to make sure you hold your ground.”

Said Bergeson: “You have to be tough. Tough is not hard. That’s something I couldn’t be. That’s not my style. Tough is more subtle than hardness. I think you can become cynical, and often people tread upon other legislators. I don’t like to do it that way.

“To me, toughness really is perseverance, and carrying forward and not backing down. It’s not difficult to do that.”