CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS / GOVERNOR : Both Wilson, Feinstein Seen as Allies by Local Leaders

Californians in November will elect a former big-city mayor as governor for the first time in more than half a century, to the delight of problem-plagued leaders of California’s 58 counties and 456 cities who look forward to having an experienced ally of local government in Sacramento.

They will have such a friend regardless whether California voters choose former San Diego Mayor Pete Wilson, a Republican U.S. senator, or former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat. Both nominees have already pledged to develop a stronger, more sympathetic relationship between state and local government.

If they can deliver, their proposals could lead to the most significant realignment of governmental powers in California in decades, and certainly since the passage in 1978 of Proposition 13, the property tax-cutting initiative that precipitated a major shift of power and finance from city halls and county courthouses to Sacramento.

Wilson left the state Assembly in 1971 to win election as mayor of San Diego, serving in that post through 1982. Feinstein was the chairman of the San Francisco city-county Board of Supervisors in November of 1978 when Mayor George Moscone was shot to death, and she automatically succeeded to the mayor’s office. Feinstein subsequently won election to two full terms ending in early 1988. Wilson has been president of the League of California Cities, and Feinstein has been a league board member. Since San Francisco is both a city and a county, her administration also was active in the County Supervisors Assn. of California.

Both candidates have made strong statements of support for local government programs. Each has vowed to stop the Legislature’s practice of dumping additional responsibilities onto cities and counties without giving them the money or revenue sources to finance such duties. Each has promised to establish an intergovernmental structure to involve cities and counties in the formation of state policy and budgets.

Feinstein has gone further than Wilson in supporting the goals of the county supervisors--to suggest, for example, that the state take over all financing and administration of welfare from the counties. Wilson told The Times last week that he opposes such a move and is more inclined to decentralize welfare administration to give counties more discretion in running the system.

The candidates also differ over the creation of a split property assessment roll to require businesses to bear a bigger share of the property tax burden than residences. Feinstein has said a split roll “makes a lot of sense to me.” Wilson opposed the split roll because, he said, heavier business taxes would be bad for economic development.

Their differences, however, do not dampen the enthusiasm of local officials for having two nominees for governor who have experienced their problems firsthand as local administrators.

Donald C. Benninghoven, executive director of the League of California Cities, said, “They have been on the firing line. They have been major managers of an urban area. They understand what it’s all about. We’re just delighted to work with both candidates in coming to grips with issues that need to be dealt with.”

Larry E. Naake, Benninghoven’s counterpart at the County Supervisors Assn., said that George Deukmejian also pledged to work closely with local government when he became governor in 1983. He established a local-government liaison in the Office of Planning and Research. The system “worked pretty well for a couple of years, but now has just sort of petered out,” Naake said. While the local government emissary was a member of the governor’s staff, the office was in a building away from the Capitol and did not have the access to power enjoyed by staff members within the governor’s Capitol compound.

Feinstein has endorsed the supervisors’ proposal for a state-local government commission that would be involved in the governor’s budget process. Naake noted that about $13 billion of the current $42-billion state general fund budget “finds its way to or through the counties, but we’re out of the process.”

Wilson has talked of creating a body similar to the federal Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations with a less-direct role than the supervisors’ proposal. But in a meeting with California county sheriffs last week, Wilson pledged, if elected, to meet with supervisors and other county representatives to review the existing structure of government.

“What we intend to do is make sense of what now makes no sense,” Wilson said. “It makes no sense for Butte County to be on the verge of bankruptcy, saved only by a one-time infusion of state funds. What makes sense is to reorder priorities and to say that county governments are to do those things that are most important. And the most important in my judgment is public safety.”

Benninghoven said the form of the bureaucratic structure is less important than the governor’s personal commitment to the concept. “The best relationship we ever had was way back with Pat Brown when cities and counties sat with the Cabinet at regular monthly Cabinet meetings,” he said, referring to the governorship of Edmund G. Brown, 1959-67. “That has never happened before--or since.”

The major problem facing counties is the growth of programs such as welfare and the courts. A constitutional mandate that the state pay for new or expanded services it requires of local government does not apply to such big-ticket programs. Naake said that 65% to 70% of all county income was spent on state services 20 years ago. Today, the figure has grown to 95% while county income has declined. This has put the squeeze on traditional county services such as law enforcement, libraries, parks and health care.

“It is just totally eroding our ability to deal with local demands and local services,” Naake said.

A 1972 state law incorporated into the state Constitution by the Gann spending-limit initiative of 1979 prohibits the Legislature from imposing new services from local government without also financing them. But the Legislature often skirts the requirement by declaring new laws exempt from the financing provision.

Both Wilson and Feinstein have promised to end this practice, with Wilson vowing to veto any bill that puts a new duty on local government without providing the needed money. Feinstein has said there is a need for “reliable funding for the mandates so that counties won’t have to divert money from sheriff patrols, fire protection and other vital day-to-day services to pay for them.”

Feinstein has not said just where the state would get the money. But in an appearance before county supervisors during the primary campaign, she said, “There can be much more discretion in deciding on what priorities should be addressed and what funds should be used.”

Wilson has said major savings can be achieved through cost controls in the provision of medical services to the poor and through preventive health care. And local government must be given more authority to set its own spending priorities, he said.

In spite of Proposition 13 restrictions, the cities have more authority to raise needed revenue than do the counties. Thus, the municipalities’ financial problems are not as severe. The major challenge facing cities in the 1990s is growth management, Benninghoven said. “That will require a very close and very sensitive new and more effective relationship between state and local government. That’s going to be tough.”

For the first time, the state will have to provide local government with long-range direction in the field of land-use planning, Benninghoven said, adding: “That’s where the state is going to be spending a lot of its policy-direction time. . . . I think both candidates frankly realize that.”