Controversy No Stranger in Valley Town of Visalia : Setting: Local residents, who pride themselves on being innovative, aren’t surprised that their town produced the Norplant decision.

That Visalia would be a setting for a court decision that could end up as a landmark case before the U.S. Supreme Court isn’t that surprising to the people who live here. The town prides itself on being innovative, on being different from other Central San Joaquin Valley farming communities.

Visalia is about an hour’s drive north of Bakersfield and about an hour and a half away from the giant redwoods of Sequoia National Park. On a clear day, the snow-blanketed peaks of the Sierra give the town a picturesque backdrop. But because of growth and air pollution such days are increasingly rare.

The town of 75,000 people, which straddles California Highway 198, has a community college, two hospitals, an airport, convention center and an eight-story Radisson Hotel, completed last November. There are also three theaters where local thespians perform, a symphony, a Creative Center for the handicapped and a Cultural Arts Commission.

Although agriculture is the community’s economic lifeblood, Visalia is also an important regional retail center. The city has aggressively courted and been able to attract light industry and businesses in the service sector.

City officials are proud of Visalia’s small-town atmosphere, its sense of community and tidy appearance. However, many long-time residents fear that what makes Visalia unique is slipping away as newcomers arrive. The city is expected to more than double in population in the next 30 years.

Despite its changes, Visalia remains a basically conservative town. So when Superior Court Judge Howard Broadman ordered a birth-control device implanted in a woman convicted of beating two of her four children with a belt buckle and an electrical cord, he drew cheers from many of his fellow Visalians.

“Hooray for Judge Broadman,” one local resident wrote the Visalia Times-Delta, the town’s daily newspaper. “Women who abuse their children should be strongly discouraged from having more.” Another letter writer declared that Broadman should have ordered Darlene Johnson’s Fallopian tubes tied. Similar sentiments were echoed in dozens of conversations.

But Broadman also drew criticism from the American Civil Liberties Union and women’s rights groups. A local attorney took the judge to task in a letter to the editor for going overboard in his “creative sentencing.” The Times-Delta, which had supported the judge’s past attempts at innovative sentencing, editorialized that he had gone too far. The paper argued that the courts had no business deciding who should or should not have children.

The editorial appeared with an accompanying dissent from the two community members of the newspaper’s five-member editorial board, Jose B. Ochoa, a social welfare worker, and Elainea Scott, chief librarian for the Visalia Unified School District. They applauded Broadman for giving Johnson “a time out” from having children. Scott disagreed with Broadman on only one point: He should have left the means of birth control up to Johnson.

The town producing these diverging opinions is a mixture of haves and have-nots, even though farming and retail sales have made Visalia economically richer than most of its neighbors. At any one time, roughly 30% of Tulare County’s 300,200 residents are on welfare.

Because of the seasonal nature of agriculture, double-digit unemployment is the rule rather than the exception. Agencies that help the poor are almost always swamped. The poor are not especially visible but are evident in communities nearby, such as Goshen and Farmersville. Johnson, the subject of Broadman’s ruling, is a black high-school dropout, on welfare when she was arrested.

Visalia’s population is overwhelmingly white--nearly 77%; about 20% is Latino, 2% Asian and a little over 1% black. But, overall, 34% of Tulare County’s population is minority.

Lifestyles in Visalia are diverse. It’s not unusual to see a BMW parked next to a muddied pickup truck at a gourmet restaurant, or businessmen in suits rubbing elbows, in bars, with men wearing down vests, billed caps and cowboy boots.

Visalia was founded in 1852 by an eccentric frontiersman from Kentucky named Nathaniel Vise, who gave it its name. The town was the major stop between Tejon Pass and Stockton for the Butterfield Overland Stage. It later was a milling site for logs hauled down from the mountains. In 1879, Visalia Delta editor George Stewart launched the movement to save the giant sequoias and establish Sequoia National Park.

Visalians may squabble verbally over growth and other issues, but during the Civil War they were violently divided. Union soldiers sent to quell restive Southern sympathizers destroyed an anti-Union newspaper and fought with civilians in the town’s Saloon Row. A feud between rival newspaper editors in 1860, over the issues that led to the Civil War, ended with one editor being shot and killed by the other, who was then acquitted. The ruling: justifiable homicide.

Visalia is thus no stranger to controversy. In 1986, business owner Loren Lowdermilk announced that he would be named grand titan for the Ku Klux Klan in California and Visalia would become the KKK’s headquarters. That set off demonstrations of protest by large crowds of townspeople outside Lowdermilk’s auto-parts business. He keeps a low profile these days.

The protests four years ago drew media attention to Visalia, but nothing like the national and even international attention Broadman’s decision has received. Although his implant decision was controversial, it wasn’t the first time he handed down unusual sentences.

He once ordered a felon to wear a T-shirt proclaiming that he was on probation for theft. That sentence made Broadman the subject of a People magazine feature. Broadman also ordered an illiterate woman to learn to read. He ordered a man who tried to steal a boat on a trailer to sell his pickup truck at a county auction as punishment. Another man was required to donate his car to a shelter for battered women.

As a Visalia Municipal Court judge, Broadman stirred up controversy when he took out ads in the newspaper listing 6,000 people who owed the court fines. He also impounded the cars of people convicted of second-offense drunken driving.

Few doubt Broadman’s sincerity, seriousness or ability as a judge. Before his appointment, Broadman was highly sought after as a divorce attorney. He once got the highest alimony payment to a male ever given in the county. Gov. George Deukmejian appointed him to the Municipal Court in 1986, and then elevated him to the Superior Court in 1988.

Broadman, 40, who sports a neatly trimmed beard and is just over 5 feet tall, hinted at his judicial philosophy in 1986, when he said that as a judge “protection of the public is something that’s paramount in my mind.”

Although fellow Superior Court Judge Robert Van Auken disagrees with Broadman’s implant decision, he says conventional sentencing for child abuse doesn’t seem to be working. Van Auken says he has tried hundreds of child-abuse cases and sometimes has to take a recess after hearing the testimony.

“There was the man who took a Black-and-Decker drill to the back of the skull of a 5-month-old infant,” he recalls. Another parent pinned a child’s lips together with a safety pin because he kept crying.

Van Auken calls child abuse a serious problem that is getting worse. He fears the public’s attention will be focused on Broadman’s sentence instead of the crime committed.

As for Broadman, he feels he did what needed to be done and will let higher courts decide if he is right. Whatever the outcome, for many Visalians he will remain a hero.