A Political Enigma Bows Out in Familiar Fashion : Politics: In one of her last Long Beach City Council votes, Jan Hall played the tough guy, typical of what people love and hate about her.

In one of her last controversial votes, Councilwoman Jan Hall scanned the crowd of irate boat owners filling the council chambers last month and coolly let them know that she was not on their side.

“I believe every element in our community is going to have to be hurt a bit because of the financial situation the city is in, and I don’t think the marina should be any different,” she said in explaining her support for marina fee increases they vehemently oppose.

Her tough-guy, don’t-fool-with-me demeanor was typical of what people love and hate about Hall, who this month left the council to devote her energies to a private consulting job after three terms representing the affluent and ever-contentious 3rd District.

“Jan is a very absolute person,” said Pam Briley, a realtor and political supporter of Hall’s. “She’s not wishy-washy and mealy-mouthed. She won’t walk away from you, leaving you with the impression that she agrees with you if she doesn’t.”

Nel Meckna, who has been a friend of Hall’s since their days in the PTA decades ago, said: “I think she has the guts to (take a stand), and a lot of people don’t like that. They want her to say, ‘Yes, we’ll do it that way,’ and that’s not the answer they get.”

Bright, hard-working and complex, Hall throughout her 12-year City Council career stirred strong and conflicting emotions in those who dealt with her. Politically, she can be an enigma. In many ways a conservative Republican, she is nonetheless an ardent advocate of abortion rights and has been a key “yes” vote on local gay-related issues.

“There are no neutrals when it comes to Jan Hall,” Briley noted with a chuckle. “The only neutrals are the people who have never heard of her.”

Easily one of the most intelligent and articulate members of the City Council during her tenure, Hall, 47, is lauded by friends as a warm person and gutsy politician with an impressive grasp of issues and an amazing ability to recall facts and figures.

Her detractors describe her as intolerant and snide, and complain that she was wedded to the many homeowner groups who wield power in her district and was also too politically ambitious for the district’s good.

“Jan is absolutely wonderful in front of people,” said John Blowitz who, as owner and publisher of two community weeklies, has long been at odds with Hall. “She’s knowledgeable. She’s glib. She’s folksy. . . . (But) behind the scenes, she really stomps on people, and she treats them very aggressively.”

Blowitz will butt heads with her no more. After three terms representing what is arguably the prickliest council district in the city, Hall decided she had had enough. She took a private consulting job last winter, announced that she would not be a candidate for another council term and made a controversial exit from the regional transit board, on which she had served for nearly nine years. Last week her successor, Doug Drummond, took her place on the council.

When it comes to her future, she rules out nothing. “I don’t know what is going to happen in my life,” said Hall, whose world has long extended beyond the boundaries of her shoreline district.

She was until January a board member of the Southern California Rapid Transit District, the state Commission on the Status of Women, recently made an unsuccessful bid for the Republican nomination in the 58th Assembly District and in 1988 sought the new full-time mayor’s position.

For all her political ambitions, Hall devoted her council time to district matters, largely forsaking broader social or citywide issues. She lists as her achievements such projects as a new fire station, money for local parks and a rebuilt boardwalk on the Long Beach Peninsula.

“I don’t think there is a philosophical approach to local government,” said Hall, who recently talked about her council tenure at her kitchen table, a cordless telephone and cigarettes by her side. “It’s very real. If your trash isn’t picked up, it’s not philosophical.”

There was no shortage of things to attend to in her district, which simmers with politically active groups harboring strong and often-divisive opinions on land-use and neighborhood issues.

She said she received five death threats during her council career, once opened her front door to find 320 pounds of bagged manure stacked on her porch and routinely heard her garbage cans strewn across the road in the middle of the night by people venting anger at some decision.

“My son used to wake up and say, ‘What did you do today?,’ ” said Hall, who has reared four children with her husband, insurance broker Jack Hall, whom she left college to marry.

One of just a handful of women to serve on the City Council, Hall was for her last term the lone woman on the council, which again became an all-male club with her departure.

“I think there’s a real reality that I can’t go to the men’s room,” Hall mused. “I used to tease them. They’d come out (of the bathroom) and say, ‘Great idea,’ and I didn’t know what the idea was.

“I think I was always a threat. I should be home, cooking dinner, which I always did--and they never had to.”

Councilman Wallace Edgerton, a frequent ally of Hall’s, said: “Jan is a tough fighter. But I still think there’s a certain handicap for a lone woman among eight men who are aggressive. . . . I think there’s still a subconscious unwillingness on the part of many males to accept a woman as an equal.”

To counter her exclusion from the male network, Hall said she “worked twice as hard,” arming herself with information she culled from documents and city staff members.

“She worked closer with the city staff than probably any other council member, including the mayor,” said Irene Day, a former aide of Hall’s, who remembered her former boss as a voracious reader and a productive worker.

“She wanted very much to sit down, get to the bottom of it . . . and move onto other business,” Day said.

Virtually everyone who has worked at any length with Hall has an anecdote about her ability to absorb and retain facts, however minute.

“She had a phenomenal grasp on even the smallest detail,” said Stanley Green, a community activist in Belmont Heights. “People could bring up a muddy spot on a bike path and she would know the history of how the bike trail came into existence and . . . the bureaucratic background of what department should and should not deal with it.”

Years ago, when Hall was president of a PTA and Meckna was the secretary, a typist lost the group’s minutes for the whole year. “I called her and told her,” Meckna recalled. “She said, ‘No problem,’ and she sat right down and we went over the whole year. She was able to recap all that.”

Perhaps the strongest criticism of Hall is voiced by businessmen in her district, who said she ignored their concerns because many of them do not live there.

“If it was a difference between a business person and a person who voted, it always went to the person who voted,” one business owner grumbled. “She went with the people who walked the streets with her, . . . whoever does the most for Jan. . . . That’s what’s going to happen.”

Hall angrily dismissed the business complaints: “I think that’s the great lie. . . . I worked with them like crazy and put in hours that no one should have to put in if you’re only going to go with the homeowners.”

Despite her conservatism, Hall won the grudging gratitude of a local gay Democratic club. “We could never endorse Jan Hall, because she would never come out and openly support issues that were important to our community,” said David Newell of Long Beach’s Lambda Democratic Club.

“On the other hand, there were at least two occasions when she was the key fifth vote, and we would have lost it without her,” Newell added, referring to council votes on the local lesbian and gay pride festival and an anti-discrimination ordinance.

She was attacked for her abortion-rights stance during the Assembly race and sparred repeatedly with anti-abortionists. “When they are willing to curtail the ability to have a vasectomy, then maybe we can talk,” retorted Hall, who is rarely at a loss for a comeback.

At a political forum last spring, she looked incredulous when an anti-abortion activist challenged her support for government money for abortions by asking her whether that meant women had a right to publicly funded face lifts.

Hall, fixing an icy stare on her inquisitor, told him that his analogy was absurd and that he clearly had no idea what it was like to be pregnant.

“I’ve been pregnant 10 times,” she said pointedly. She later explained that she has suffered six miscarriages.

She also encountered controversy on the transit board, where she won the respect of colleagues for steering the agency through a series of scandals while president of the board. But relations soured when she resigned from the board to take the consulting job, which calls for her to lobby on behalf of the RTD in Sacramento.

Her jump from the board to a lucrative job representing the agency stirred public criticism; the board canceled the lobbying contract.

Hall remains with the consulting firm, which primarily helps developers obtain government permits for projects.

Hall has told friends that she is happy to turn her energies to the private sector. As for her public life, she said: “I fought for what I thought was right, and if that made people angry, you know what? I don’t feel bad.”