Republicans, environmentalists praise tenancious Democrat who is influencing how state is handling toxic waste : Sally Tanner: A Study in Contradictions

As she puffs on a long brown cigarette during an interview in her Baldwin Park condominium, Assemblywoman Sally Tanner confides that in the next legislative session she hopes to tackle the problem of indoor pollution.

No, she is not about to give up smoking, or vote to ban tobacco on the floor of the Assembly. Instead, Tanner explains, she is talking about the toxic fumes that accumulate in houses and offices from building materials and other sources.

But the fact that Tanner can fret about the health effects of bad indoor air while holding a More cigarette in her hand is just one of her many contradictions.

“She is very complex,” said a lobbyist who has followed her career in Sacramento. “She is also unpredictable.”

Friends on Other Side

Tanner is a mainstream Democrat, but most of her best friends in the Assembly are Republicans. She is a champion of women’s rights, but strongly opposes abortion. She finances her political campaigns with large donations from chemical, oil and waste-hauling interests, but her record is praised by environmentalists.

Now, as she prepares for her 10th year in Sacramento, Tanner is winning recognition as a skilled and tenacious legislator who has strongly influenced the way that the state deals with toxic waste and pollution by drafting laws that reconcile the interests of environmentalists, the chemical industry, agriculture and others.

Kent Stoddard, an assistant to Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, who follows toxic-substance issues, said that Tanner’s committee on toxics is known as a place where “good compromises are achieved.” California has led the nation in many areas of toxic regulation, Stoddard said, and Tanner “has been in the middle of all of it.”

Minimum Expectations

Tanner said she had no formal education or technical training to prepare her for the subject that has come to dominate her legislative career. “I didn’t know anything about toxics,” she said. “I was an art student.”

But, she said, she did know that the air should be safe to breathe and the water safe to drink.

And so, after news articles in 1979 disclosed that water wells in the San Gabriel Valley had become polluted with industrial solvents, Tanner got permission from the Assembly Speaker to convene a legislative hearing. She said testimony showed that the agencies that should have been dealing with pollution did not communicate with each other and that no one was prepared to assess the health danger from chemicals in the water supply.

From that beginning, Tanner gained the chairmanship of a subcommittee, which evolved into the Environmental Safety and Toxic Materials Committee.

Role in Key Legislation

She helped create the state Superfund for toxic-substance cleanup in 1981, was the author of a landmark bill to require the state to identify hazardous chemicals and pesticides in 1983 and secured passage last year of a measure that forces every California county to develop a plan to manage hazardous waste.

She was instrumental in putting contaminated ground-water areas in the San Gabriel Valley on both the state and federal Superfund lists, making money available for cleanup and water purification.

This year, she organized a bipartisan coalition of legislators from the San Gabriel Valley and the Inland Empire to push for bills on trash disposal and air pollution benefiting those areas. It was the first time that legislators from the two areas formed a united front, and they showed their influence by obtaining approval of bills whose passage had seemed doubtful. One bill prohibited new industrial facilities from adding to pollution there, and the other is aimed at forcing communities elsewhere to handle their own trash instead of sending it to dumps in the San Gabriel Valley.

Early Advocate

Tanner also played a key role in killing proposals to build trash-incineration plants in the San Gabriel Valley by conducting hearings, by publicly opposing the projects and by developing legislative strategy.

“She’s been our savior on many things,” said Wil Baca, a Hacienda Heights engineer who has been a leader in grass-roots organizations fighting air and water pollution in the San Gabriel Valley.

Baca said Tanner started working on pollution problems “when it wasn’t fashionable. She did the groundwork. I give her a lot of credit. She has emerged head and shoulders above other politicians.”

But the praise for Tanner is not universal. One environmentalist in Sacramento said her chairmanship of the Assembly Environmental Safety and Toxic Materials Committee has “been a disaster” because she has moved so cautiously.

And there are both Democrats and Republicans who consider her politically vulnerable despite the large Democratic registration edge in her district, which takes in Baldwin Park, El Monte, the City of Industry, La Puente, Rosemead and part of West Covina.

Richard Hernandez, a prominent San Gabriel Valley attorney, started to run against Tanner in the Democratic primary in 1984, but withdrew under pressure from Democratic leaders who did not want an intra-party fight. Hernandez said he pulled out of the race because he would rather spend time with his family than commute to Sacramento. But, noting the large Latino population in the district--54%--Hernandez said he is convinced that “a strong Hispanic who had name recognition could give her a horse race.”

Nevertheless, Hernandez said he has been impressed by Tanner’s accomplishments and is no longer interested in running against her. “I think she’s done an excellent job,” he said. Although many officeholders act as if they were primarily in the political fund-raising business, he said, Tanner “has the sense to spend her time trying to solve problems.”

But Hernandez also said that the strong showing against Tanner last year by Republican challenger Henry Velasco demonstrates her vulnerability. Although Republicans had only 31% of the registered voters, Velasco picked up more than 45% of the ballots.

The Republican Assembly leadership put $213,000 into that effort to defeat Tanner, giving the race top priority.

Assemblyman Robert W. Naylor of San Mateo, California’s Republican chairman, said the results indicate that the district can be won by the GOP.

The 60th Assembly District is Democratic but conservative, he said. “We were able to pull a lot of crossover votes.

“We were very encouraged. We view any close race like that as an opportunity. In all likelihood, it will be targeted again,” Naylor added.

Sensitive to Attacks

Velasco, a former El Monte councilman, said he has not decided whether to run again. What surprised him most about last year’s campaign, he said, was how thin-skinned Tanner was when he leveled charges against her. Velasco accused Tanner of living in Sacramento instead of the district, taking campaign funds from polluters and being soft on crime.

Velasco said the political mailers against Tanner were mild and that he has been surprised to find himself snubbed by members of Tanner’s staff when he sees them at community events.

“I did take it personally,” Tanner said, adding that politicians who allow themselves to be attacked and just shrug it off as “politics” risk losing their sensitivity.

Tanner’s political vulnerability is increased by the fact that she raises less campaign money than many other incumbents.

“I don’t personally attempt to raise money,” she said. “I don’t make the phone calls. I suppose I should, but I don’t.”

She had to scramble for funds last year when the Republican Party poured money into the campaign. She wound up raising $156,000, with the help of labor unions and companies such as Dow Chemical, which donated $5,000, and of the International Technology Corp., which is in the hazardous-waste transport and disposal business and which donated $4,000.

Entry Into Legislature

Tanner first won election to the Assembly in 1978, when Joseph Montoya vacated the office to move up to the state Senate. She finished first in a field of seven candidates in the Democratic primary and then won the general election.

Her interest in politics began in the 1956 presidential election when she saw Adlai Stevenson on television, and was so impressed that she volunteered to work in his campaign. Before then, Tanner said, “I didn’t think about politics at all. I was interested in art and family.”

She was born in Indiana, the youngest of eight children in a Polish Catholic family.

After graduating from high school, Tanner moved with her parents to Alhambra. She studied at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and became a commercial illustrator. She held jobs with an Alhambra department store and an El Monte newspaper before she married a man in the shoe-repair business, moved to Duarte and began raising a family.

Today, she has two grown sons. One is a carpenter who lives in a small town in Oregon. The other is an artist and actor who lives in New York City. She is divorced and splits most of her time between two homes, in Sacramento when the Legislature is in session, and in Baldwin Park on weekends.

Won’t Tell Age

Tanner is candid about many things, but not her age. She said she reads newspaper stories giving ages and “can’t imagine why that is necessary”--that it seems like an outdated practice, in the same category as listing a person as a divorcee.

Tanner is 5-foot-3, with light brown hair and a big, friendly smile. Her appearance suggests that she is in her 50s.

After being drawn into politics as a volunteer in 1956, Tanner helped form a Democratic club in Duarte and then worked as an aide to the late Assemblyman Harvey Johnson and to former Rep. George Danielson. She described her experience on Danielson’s staff as an unhappy one, but said she adored Johnson and ran his political campaigns.

The 60th Assembly District Democratic primary was wide open in 1978. Several candidates were better known than Tanner, but she ran the best campaign, said Douglas A. Stevens, a former legislative aide who was one of the runners-up. Stevens, who is now executive director of the Mid-Valley Community Mental Health Council in Baldwin Park, said Tanner ran “a sophisticated campaign for that era. She was very thorough. She did a lot of opinion-polling.”

But Tanner remembers it as a shoestring campaign in which she had “a terrible time raising money.” When she ran out of funds, she said, she would go to the Royal Turtle restaurant in Arcadia, where a number of friends, mostly businessmen, always had lunch, and ask one of them for, say, $500 to pay for the yard signs she had ordered. The business people came through repeatedly, even though most were Republicans.

Initially Cagey

Much of her campaigning was door-to-door. Proposition 13, the measure to cut property taxes, was the hot issue that year. Tanner said, “I remember in the first block that I walked, a woman asked how I felt about Proposition 13 and I tried to judge how she felt about it. I didn’t give her a direct answer. And walking away from that door, I felt like I needed to go home and take a shower. I decided I would never do that again.”

Tanner took a position against Proposition 13, and was elected even though the measure passed in her district. In last year’s campaign, she went against the prevailing opinion in her district by supporting the retention of Rose Bird as chief justice of the California Supreme Court.

Tanner said her first months in Sacramento were filled with awe and confusion. She remembers being “so worked up and nervous” when she introduced her first bill that “I was a wreck. I thought all these people are so much smarter than I am. I really did.”

To further deflate her ego, she said, then-Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. couldn’t seem to get her name straight. “He thought I was someone else; I can’t remember who,” Tanner recalled. “He called me Mary or something.”

Tanner’s gained her first recognition in the Legislature through sponsorship of a bill to force auto manufacturers to replace new cars that are hopelessly defective or give customers their money back. It became known as the Lemon Law.

The bill originated, Tanner said, when a constituent came into her office and told a horror story about trying to get his new car repaired. She recalled that the man stated: “I’ve got a lemon and nobody will agree that I’ve got a lemon, and I can’t do anything abut it,”

Tanner said her reaction was: “There ought to be a law.”

Car makers fought Tanner’s bill.

She said that successions of lawyers and lobbyists would harangue her with “legalese talk” and ask, “What do you know about cars?”

” And,” she replied, “I would say I know nothing about cars except that they ought to work.”

She enlisted the support of television consumer reporters and dramatized the issue during the Assembly debate by putting a lemon on the desk of every member. After the bill failed, she was back the next year with the same bill and with lemon drops on each legislator’s desk.

“I really did a public relations thing, and pretty soon the legislators began to see that they had a lot of constituents with lemon automobiles,” Tanner said. “I had a group of legislators over to my house in Sacramento for dinner. I really worked.”

The bill was enacted in 1982 on Tanner’s third try.

Tanner grabbed all the headlines she could with the Lemon Law, but her approach to toxics issues has been low-key. She said she has sought to avoid partisanship because pollution is not an issue that should divide Republicans and Democrats.

Donald E. Burns, president of the California Council for Environmental and Economic Balance, a labor-industry coalition, said that Tanner is good at listening to all points of view.

“That is not to say that she doesn’t have a temper or strong feelings about issues,” Burns said. “But she doesn’t take the cheap shots.”

He said toxics issues “are very easy to demagogue on. People don’t understand them, and it is easy to frighten them.”

Burns said Tanner has a firm grasp of the issues that come before her committee. “She is not a patsy,” he said. “She is not just a blotter who soaks up what the last lobbyist told her.”

Michael Paparian, state director of the Sierra Club, said that the assemblywoman has a strong staff to help her with technical matters. “Arnie Peters (the principal consultant to her committee) understands the minutiae of toxics better than anyone up here,” Paparian said.

But Michael Picker, executive director of the Toxics Coordinating Project, a statewide network of 130 groups, said that the Legislature in general and Tanner, in particular, have been slow to address issues.

For example, he said, the Legislature should not just worry about hazardous-waste disposal in public dumps, but should be trying to reduce industry’s use of hazardous materials and the amount of toxic waste that is created. He said the Legislature “is consistently behind the real strength of the debate” on toxics issues.

“In Mrs. Tanner’s defense, we don’t expect the Legislature to provide the leadership, but we do expect more (than we have received) from the chairman of the committee,” Picker said.

Stoddard, the toxics expert on the Assembly Speaker’s staff, said that no doubt “there is a frustration that we don’t make things happen faster,” but that toxic regulation is extremely complex. It is easy, for example, he said, to say that industry should produce less poisonous waste, but difficult to draft a regulation that will accomplish that goal.

Stoddard said Tanner’s legislation has laid the groundwork for major progress. It was Tanner’s bill that in 1983 established a state program to identify and regulate toxic pollutants in the air. Critics say the process, involving scientific review panels, has taken too long, but that it has been a pioneering effort.

Doesn’t ‘Grandstand’

And it was her bill, signed last year by Gov. George Deukmejian after he had twice vetoed similar measures, that will end the disposal of untreated hazardous waste in dumps by January, 1990, and creates the “Tanner process,” requiring counties to develop plans to manage hazardous waste.

Burns said the hazardous-waste-siting plan developed under Tanner’s leadership is a compromise acceptable to environmentalists, disposal companies, toxic-waste producers and other interests. He said she has been able to secure agreement from divergent groups “by force of personality. She won’t let you go until you agree to something.”

Assemblywoman Marian LaFollette (R-Northridge), who is vice chairman of the Environmental Safety and Toxic Materials Committee and Tanner’s closest friend in the Legislature, said that some Democrats on the committee have “a tendency to grandstand and push extreme measures,” but not Tanner. “She makes a real attempt to keep it nonpartisan,” LaFollette said.

Nevertheless, committee members do vote along party lines on a number of issues, she continued. “Many times, I vote against (Tanner’s) bills and raise objections to them. She understands.”

Tanner, though, said she doesn’t understand how she and LaFollette can get along so well socially, go fishing together, agree on so many things in casual conversation, and then wind up voting against each other in the Legislature.

“When we sit and talk, she talks like a reasonable woman,” Tanner said. “But on the floor she votes so Republican that I can’t really believe that we are in tune on a personal basis.”

LaFollette attributes the differences to upbringing. She said her father was a very independent man, while Tanner’s family apparently put its trust in labor unions. She said she and Tanner share concern about problems, but that Tanner’s solutions are always “more money for a lot of government programs” while her own preference is for “less government and more encouragement to give people the tools to help themselves.”

Tanner said LaFollette’s suggestion that she is a Democrat because of her heritage is wrong, that she arrived at her political philosophy not by birth but “through reading.”

Friendship Isn’t Everything

Nevertheless, Tanner said, for reasons that are unclear to her she has more good friends on the Republican side of the Legislature than the Democratic. But that has not kept Republicans from targeting her for election defeat.

LaFollette said that the Assembly Republican caucus under Minority Leader Pat Nolan (R-Glendale) could find a better use for campaign money than Tanner’s district, but concedes “I have very little say in that.”

There are times, Tanner says, when friendship is more important that politics. “I have not, will not, would never campaign against Marian LaFollette, or let a dime of my money be spent against her,” she said.

And she added that she would never campaign against any of the women now in the Legislature “until there is a little bit of balance” in the number of men and women. Only 13 of the 80 Assembly members and four of the 40 state senators are women.

“I just think women need to be in the Legislature,” Tanner said. “I see there is a sensitivity among women regardless of their philosophy, whether it is very conservative of very liberal. There is a difference.”

Asked to elaborate on the differences, Tanner said, “I don’t want to alienate the men, but in most cases, women spent more time at (their work).”

Besides, she said, “women don’t get involved socially in the evenings as the men do. Men meet at dinner houses or local places, and the women don’t.”

All of the women legislators meet once a month in each other’s homes to discuss issues and become better acquainted, Tanner said, adding, “I’ve seen important legislation passed because women are supportive of each other.”

She noted that anyone who serves in the Legislature gives up some personal life and privacy, and that she has been willing to do that. But she draws the line at giving up cigarettes.

In September, the Assembly Rules Committee bottled up a bill that would have banned smoking on the floor when the chamber was in session. Assemblyman Tom Bane, committee chairman, attributed the delay to consideration for Tanner and her desire to smoke.

“I’d say if it weren’t for Sally, we’d go ahead and hear it,” Bane said.

Tanner told a reporter that she was delighted that her opposition had sidetracked the bill, and added that if the smoking ban is enacted, the Assembly sergeants-at-arms will “have to arrest me every day (because) I intend to smoke on the floor.”

Tanner said her defiant statement brought her a $100 campaign contribution from a smoker in San Diego, but that she now regrets making it. Of course, she said, she will obey the Assembly rules.

‘A Good Point’

Assemblyman Gerald N. Felando (R-San Pedro), who proposed the smoking ban, observed last September that it is “a little disconcerting that the chairman of the toxics committee would be responsible for spreading toxic residue into the air that we all breathe.”

Tanner said Felando “has got a good point. If the truth were known, he’s got a good point.”

But, Tanner said, “you give up a lot to serve in Sacramento. And I am not going to give up smoking. I just feel I have a right to decide whether I want to smoke or not. I like to smoke.”

Tanner said she has no political ambitions beyond the Assembly, although she would consider running for the state Senate if Montoya were to give up the seat.

“I love what I’m doing,” she said. It is a hectic job and the hours are long, but “the kids are grown and gone, and they don’t have to worry about what mom is doing or whether she’s lonesome.”