State Workers Do Assembly’s Personal Tasks : Legislature: Assemblywoman Sunny Mojonnier of Encinitas and colleagues call on sergeants-at-arms to perform as chaffeurs, errand runners and valets.

When Marc Mojonnier can’t find a ride home, he doesn’t worry.

One call from his mom--Assemblywoman Sunny Mojonnier--and a state-paid sergeant-at-arms whisks over to a Sacramento high school to drive the teen-ager home in a state car, on taxpayer time.

And, when the Encinitas Republican herself needs a lift after partying at a fund-raiser, one sergeant-at-arms plays chauffeur while a second follows in Mojonnier’s car to make sure it is in her garage for the next morning.

“They’re trouble-shooters,” Mojonnier said of the sergeants-at-arm.

But critics have long claimed that Mojonnier and some of her colleagues are abusing their privilege by turning the sergeants-at-arms into high-priced personal servants. A review of 1989 legislative logs by United Press International and The Times shows that lawmakers such as Mojonnier continue to call on the 80 sergeants-at-arms and chauffeurs to perform such tasks as picking up laundry, standing in line at the bank, turning off kitchen appliances and making sure there is enough cat food in the house.

The more visible tasks for the sergeants, who are given badges and cost taxpayers more than $2 million a year, are to provide security for lawmakers and keep order during legislative floor and committee sessions. They shush a noisy crowd, carry notes to legislators during committee hearings and screen visitors to the Assembly and Senate floors.

Beginning in the 1960s, legislators began using sergeants for transportation to the airport. Since then, their duties have multiplied to the point that they perform even the smallest tasks at the whim of lawmakers, records show. Newspaper stories have revealed that the sergeants-at-arms have been used to fetch a legislator’s birth-control pills, as well as to buy live mice for a prominent Assembly member’s pet boa constrictor.

“The idea is that they’re there to accommodate the legislators and their time constraints,” said Bob Connelly, chief administrative officer of the Assembly Rules Committee. Any task is deemed to have a legislative benefit, he said, “if it saves a member time or assists them in performing a function.”

However, Danny Lynch, a former Assembly sergeant who quit to become a private investigator, told UPI last week that the job has become nothing more than “a glorified bellboy position.”

“You go under the pretense of being a peace officer, and you get a badge, but it pretty much stops there,” he said.

Mindful of the possibilities for abuse, the Senate has tried to rein its use of sergeants, but the Assembly allows wide discretion. The sergeants themselves are told to remain quiet about legislative requests, a policy that continues even after some leave their jobs.

“There were times when I picked up a girlfriend one day and a wife the next, and I just kept a straight face,” former sergeant Lydia Sims told UPI. Sims recently received a $95,500 settlement in her sexual harassment lawsuit against the Assembly and her former supervisor.

The review of last year’s logs reveals a number of instances in which Mojonnier and other lawmakers used the sergeants in a manner more befitting the Morgan Freeman character in the movie “Driving Miss Daisy.” The review shows:

Mojonnier routinely uses sergeants-at-arms, calling on them at least 62 times last year to pick her up at home, drive her cars, chauffeur her children, haul wine from her car to her office and make sure she got home safely from evening excursions. She called on sergeants to drop off or pick up her son 22 times from classes at Kennedy High School, about 7 miles south of the Capitol. One notation shows that a sergeant took the teen-ager home from school, then drove him to the YMCA.

Mojonnier also acknowledged that she once sent a sergeant to Nevada City to deliver a sleeping bag, blankets and snacks to her son, Marc, who at the time was enrolled in a private school there.

Assemblyman Pete Chacon (D-San Diego) called on the sergeants last November to drive his wife from their Placerville home, 40 miles outside of Sacramento, to the San Francisco airport to greet their son. Chacon at the time was stuck in San Diego, where his flight to Sacramento was delayed two hours.

Assemblyman Elihu M. Harris (D-Oakland) sent a sergeant to his home to turn off his crock pot and put it in the refrigerator.

Assemblymen Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles), Curt Pringle (R-Garden Grove) and other legislators hitched rides to the Capital Athletic Club, only 4 blocks from their offices.

Polanco, Mojonnier, and a host of other legislators routinely use sergeants to drive them to restaurants only one or two blocks from the Capitol. Assemblywoman Carol Bentley (R-El Cajon) once had a sergeant drive her to Weinstock’s department store, just two blocks away.

Rather than drive himself to his Santa Clara home on weekends, Assemblyman John Vasconcellos (D-Santa Clara) has a sergeant drive his convertible so he can rest or read. Another sergeant-at-arms follows in a second car to take the first driver back to Sacramento.

Sen. Alan Robbins (D-Tarzana) had cat food delivered to his home and office. Sergeants-at-arms told UPI that Robbins once asked that his cat be brought to the office, but the request was refused.

Other jobs for sergeants have included taking lawmakers or their children to ballgames, movies and rock concerts. They have also fetched prescriptions from nearby drugstores, purchased underwear, carried out household garbage and moved furniture into lawmakers’ homes.

Legislators such as Mojonnier say having the sergeants perform these tasks is important because it saves time.

“We’re working 12, 15, 18 hours a day,” Mojonnier said this week. “Everybody suffers. Our families suffer. These are things you do. . . . The workload is such that it’s not out of line.”

Mojonnier said that, as a single mother, the use of the sergeants is particularly crucial in tending to her son, Marc. Most of the time, she said, he rides to and from school with friends, but there are occasions when he is left stranded and she can’t get away from the public’s business.

“There’s a lot of people in the private sector who use their staffs to do these things,” she said. “Working mothers are the ones who are going to use it more.”

Such was the case more than a year ago when, Mojonnier said, her son, Marc, then attending a private school in Nevada City, called during a cold snap. “I didn’t realize it was so cold, and he called and said he was freezing,” Mojonnier recalled. “He needed to have a sleeping bag and blankets brought up to him, so I sent some blankets up and some food.”

Mojonnier said there is another reason for calling on sergeants-at-arms after hours: “In this state, you have laws that you don’t drink and drive, and there are a lot of different functions” that legislators attend.

Records show that it took two sergeants to help Mojonnier home on the evening of Feb. 15, 1989. One picked her up at the Hyatt Regency hotel--right across from the Capitol and the site of many receptions--and drove her home at 11:49 p.m.

Six minutes later, a second sergeant drove Mojonnier’s car to her south Sacramento residence, the records show.

On July 17, Mojonnier kept the sergeants hopping. A sergeant took her home at 5:45 p.m., then, at 6:06 p.m., drove her to Ricci’s, an Italian restaurant and bar near downtown. At 7:58 p.m., another sergeant picked Mojonnier up at the restaurant and drove her to an outdoor theater, Music Circus, where she watched a performance. A sergeant returned to pick her up at 10:18 but had to return at 11:10 p.m. because the “member (was) not ready,” according to the logs.

While lawmakers intone the merits of ride-sharing to the public, they often have separate cars pick them up at the airport, even if they are on the same flight, or their arrivals are only a few minutes apart.

On the Senate side, UPI reported that logs show Robbins regularly using sergeants-at-arms to carry his boots to be shined on the first floor of the Capitol, to carry personal and campaign letters to a secretarial service and to ferry his girlfriends to the airport, where the sergeants also retrieve the tofu he has delivered by plane.

Robbins also called on sergeants to fetch cat food, a notation in the logs that he disputes. The legislator said the errand was actually to retrieve an antibiotic for Daisy, a 6-year-old office cat that was suffering from a digestive ailment. Robbins said he paid the Senate Rules Committee $1,260 in the last year to cover the cost of personal services provided by the sergeants.

Robbins told The Times that his use of the sergeant-at-arms was “appropriate.”

“I certainly would never want to tell the people of the San Fernando Valley that some Valley park measure or transit measure . . . lost because I was away from the Capitol running a personal errand, picking up medication for my cat or something similar.”

Times staff writer Mark Gladstone contributed to this article.