Since Gill Net Bill Got Hook, Author Angles for Initiative : Lawmaking: Colleagues say Assemblywoman Doris Allen has gone overboard in battling for ban. The Cypress Republican doesn’t take the bait; she’s casting her line to state voters instead.

Nowadays, when Assemblywoman Doris Allen gets going about her latest cause, some colleagues roll their eyes or mutter under their breath.

Last month, a fellow legislator went further. “Doris, you can be your own worst enemy,” he snapped during a committee meeting.

Let them rail. Allen won’t give up.

“I have passion for issues,” she said. “I don’t think most people up here even know me. They don’t know me, inside. They don’t know how I feel, they don’t know what makes me tick.”

Allen’s latest passion is not abortion, AIDS or Orange County oil spills.

The Cypress Republican is on the soapbox over gill nets.

She has taken on the formidable commercial fishing industry by calling for the ban of gill nets in near coastal waters ranging from Point Conception to the Mexican border. Not only are the highly efficient, thin-filament nets “strip mining” the sea of halibut and other fish stock, she claims, but they are indiscriminately killing whales, sea lions and porpoises.

So far, Allen’s impassioned pleas for a blanket ban of the nets has yielded little more than ill will and glazed eyes at the state Capitol. Now she has decided to sidestep the Legislature and take her cause directly to the people with a campaign to put an anti-gill net initiative on the November ballot.

Her high-profile efforts have immersed her in a long-running feud between the people who fish for a living and those who do it for sport, an unlikely spot for an elected representative from a landlocked district.

But Allen contends that her worries about halibut, whales, porpoises and sea lions is a matter of the heart.

“It’s very personal with me,” she said in an interview, during which her voice cracked with emotion and her eyes welled tears. “That’s what I told my staff last night. Very personal. Because of the animals.

“If I stop doing this, who’s going to do it? Tell me. If I walk away right now, who’s going to do it?”

Some legislators, however, say that Allen’s Joan of Arc role hasn’t played well under the Capitol dome, where compromise and collegiality are highly prized.

“The shrill nature in which she has raised her voice has unfortunately turned people off,” said Assemblyman Jim Costa (D-Fresno), who, as chairman of the Assembly’s Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee, has crossed swords with the Orange County Republican. “She’s made herself one of the least effective members of the Legislature.”

Before this got so nasty, Allen, 53, was just an obscure Orange County Republican toiling in a Democratic-controlled Assembly. She is a veteran anti-busing foe and an advocate of vocational education, state funding for school districts and a law requiring young motorcycle passengers to wear helmets--an idea she touted while holding an outdoor press conference astride a motorcycle.

Insiders claim she alienated her own party leaders soon after her 1982 election, when two Republican assemblymen drove to her Orange County office to talk caucus politics and were forced to wait 45 minutes, say insiders.

One That Got Away

Meanwhile, Allen began to turn over rocks when she was made vice chairman of Costa’s committee, an assignment she sought because of her interest in Southern California water issues.

Her attention shifted to the state Fish and Game Department, a natural interest considering that Allen is an accomplished equestrian reared in rural Missouri.

She began looking into the department in earnest at the request of a constituent, who sent her a newspaper clipping about the department’s inability to collect proceeds from outlets that sold fish and game licenses. She dashed off several letters, including one she called her “nuclear bomb” containing 125 questions.

Ignored by the department, Allen decided to go straight to Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) for help. Brown promptly arranged to have the department’s budget held hostage in the Legislature until administrators gave Allen what she wanted.

It did--in boxes of voluminous computer printouts. The undaunted Allen hired a consultant to sort through the material while she pressed for legislation for an official audit of the agency.

The results, published in a November, 1985, auditor general’s report, showed that Fish and Game had been woefully inept. Its poor administrative practices had left $1.2 million in hunting and fishing license revenue uncollected since 1980. The agency also had failed to collect $1.6 million in taxes from the commercial fishing industry.

But Allen’s victory didn’t last long. Instead of having the agency collect the money, the Legislature, prompted by panic from commercial fishers, passed a bill to forgive the back taxes--a measure Allen tried frantically to stop.

It was an awesome display of political power by a trade group that pays $60,000 a year for a full-time lobbyist.

Outside the Capitol, Allen found there was one group that sympathized--the hundreds of thousands of California sportfishermen who have nothing good to say about their commercial cousins.

“It’s a group that has a very focused interest and they’re die-hard,” said Kenneth Kukuda, who writes for South Coast Sportfishing, a Santa Ana-based magazine with a circulation of 45,000.

“I’ve always said that if you take 20 of my readers and 20 commercial fishermen and we have a rumble in a parking lot, I have no problem about who is going to win that one,” said Kukuda.

The enmity has always run high between the commercials and the recreationals. The ill will has been particularly acute in the last decade over what sportfishermen believe to be the dwindling number of halibut off California shores.

The main culprit, they say, is the gill net, a thin-filament mesh weighted down and unfurled under the water like a tennis net. Put out overnight, the nets--which are as long as 6,000 feet--use dark panels to trap the fish, which suffocate when they are trapped by the gills.

Yet the nets are also responsible for “incidental” kills of other marine life, such as sea lions, sea otters, harbor porpoises, gray whales and sea birds. The most recent California estimates show the nets kill nearly 3,500 sea lions, 1,900 harbor seals, 300 harbor porpoises and at least several gray whales each year.

The deaths of these animals, some of which are endangered or threatened species, has spawned 24 laws since 1980 closing all of the Northern California near-shore waters and selected portions of the central coast to gill net fishing.

But sportfishermen want to extend the ban to Southern California, where bureaucrats and some marine preservationists maintain the threat of incidental kills to endangered species is small despite scenes like those on Orange County beaches last year, when more than 50 dead sea lions washed ashore in a three-week period, apparently killed by gill nets.

The sportfishermen’s legislative ally is Allen, who crossed paths with Kukuda in late 1986 during her continuing fight against the Fish and Game Department. Eventually, Allen agreed to write a bill that would prohibit gill net fishing within three miles of Southern California shores.

Commercial fishermen figured she was proposing the ban on behalf of the wealthy. “What she wants is to make the near-shore waters of California a private sports-fishing lake for her favorite constituents,” said Craig Ghio, vice president of Ghio Seafood Products in San Diego.

Ghio and other commercial fishermen and seafood processors say the gill net ban would cause economic havoc in their industry. The 482 gill netters in Southern California catch about 20 million pounds of fish a year, compared to 250 million pounds caught throughout the state with other kinds of nets.

Sierra Club Won’t Bite

Surprisingly, the traditional environmentalists have been noticeably cool to Allen, who despite her gill net battle received low marks last year from the California League of Conservation Voters. Paula M. Carrell, lobbyist for the Sierra Club, said her group hasn’t joined Allen because it views the battle over gill nets as a war between the fishermen, not an environmentally inspired effort.

“It’s basically a competition of who gets their hook in the water first,” said Carrell. “My feeling is that the sports fishermen are hiding behind the marine mammal issue.”

Allen makes no secret of her support from sportfishermen, and has even worked hard to cultivate them. She formed a marine advisory committee that consisted of outdoors journalists such as Kukuda, who spread the word to hundreds of hunting and fishing clubs throughout the state.

“She has stepped in at the right time and has been very instrumental in organizing all the groups,” Kukuda said.

But the Orange County legislator says she’s pushing for a ban because, despite assertions to the contrary, she is convinced that gill nets are a threat to marine mammals living off Southern California shores. “I’m doing this for the whales,” she said.

And she downplays talk of economic tragedy, saying only 2% of the fish sold in California is caught in Southern California gill nets.

When Allen’s legislation first came up for a hearing last April, she underscored her concern for whales and other sea creatures by bringing to Costa’s committee the Hollywood actress who played the role of a marine biologist in “Star Trek IV.” And in her own remarks, the lawmaker refers to incidental kills as “tragic” deaths and “carnage.”

Even though her tactics have angered some of her colleagues, Costa agreed last April to hold an even more in-depth meeting on the subject and suggested that the committee convene an interim session in Southern California.

A November date was picked. “We had several thousand sportsmen, conservationists, environmentalists going to attend the hearing,” said Allen. “They thought that everything was hinging on this hearing.”

But, abruptly, the hearing was canceled. Costa informed Allen that, among other things, the committee didn’t have money for the trip and most of her colleagues simply refused to show up.

That decision led to an exchange of bitter letters between Allen and Costa, who was attacked in the sports fishing press as a “two-bit” politician and the equivalent to deposed Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega.

On Jan. 9, Costa’s committee considered Allen’s proposed ban one last time during a Capitol committee meeting. Still fuming, she refused to consider any weakening amendments, drawing the stinging public rebuke from Assemblyman Steve Peace (D-La Mesa). Costa said that when Allen began her remarks, some of his committee members rolled their eyes and muttered, “Do we have to listen to this again?”

They did--and then quickly killed the measure.

Allen and her allies are quick to point out the curious way the bill was allowed to die. No one actually voted against the measure, but instead decided to abstain, so there were not enough aye votes to pass it out of committee.

Of the seven members who declined to vote, five received a total of $2,932 in political donations last year from the commercial fishing lobby, public records show. That includes a $1,000 donation to Costa.

The committee’s action, along with the political contributions and the snub she received in November, led Allen to take the gill net issue out of the Legislature.

“Mr. Costa did more to bring about an initiative than anything I could do,” Allen said.

The initiative effort is the third time sportfishermen have tried to get a ballot measure against gill nets. The previous two attempts, sponsored by Kukuda, have failed to garner enough signatures for consideration on the ballot.

But with Allen’s support, there is hope this time, they say. So far, the legislator has helped to gather more than 300,000 signatures and raise $175,000. The goal: to collect more than 950,000 valid signatures by May 6.

And, not so incidentally, the initiative campaign has given the Orange County lawmaker a new statewide political base and excellent exposure. On Friday, for example, she was featured on radio talk shows in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

A Lot of Fight Left

In her wake, she leaves colleagues angered by a determination that they describe as being close to obsession. “The sad fact is that Doris, I think, is very narrow-minded and extremely petty and tends to take every difference of opinion by her colleagues as a personal affront, which they are not intended to be,” Costa said.

Allen said she doesn’t care how unpopular she’s become with fellow legislators.

“Call her hysterical--that’s a nice, chauvinistic thing to say,” Allen said. “Call her shrill. Call her a woman from Cypress who doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Why would she care about this issue?

“I would like to say, ‘Why wouldn’t I?’ I care about this issue and I’m tenacious.”