A Woman With ‘Guts’ Keeps Eye on Supervisors

The guts of Orange County campaign reform sit in a collection of six cardboard boxes, neatly stowed side by side in Shirley L. Grindle’s den.

Each box holds hundreds of 5-by-7 cards. Each card lists the name of a single campaign contributor and how much that person or organization has given to a county supervisor. Each contribution is dated. The cards are carefully typed, scrupulously double-checked.

Together, they represent the entire history of TINCUP, the 1978 campaign reform law whose moniker stands for Time Is Now, Clean Up Politics. The cards and the ordinance they chart are Grindle’s legacy to Orange County, and the blunt, gravel-voiced former county planning commissioner guards them with maternal fervor.

“It’s a labor of commitment,” said Grindle, 56, who has bludgeoned county supervisors with their TINCUP transgressions for more than a decade, in the process earning about equal doses of enmity and respect. “It was my baby. It was my idea, and I have a lot of pride.

“I also feel very responsible to the people who gave up five months of their lives to get TINCUP written,” she added. “We had 1,500 people who went out and got the signatures. I owe it to them to make sure that this thing has meaning.”

That ordinance required supervisors to abstain from any matter that involved their “major campaign contributors,’ then defined as anyone who gave more than $1,000 over a four-year period. The limit now stands at $1,944.

A Nebraska native raised in Long Beach, Grindle is temperamentally well equipped to wage the battle for integrity. She cherishes her independence and loves to speak her mind. She is also disarmingly precise: Visitors to her house in Orange are warned not to park their cars on her red-brick driveway if there’s any chance that oil will leak; misplacing one of her cards sends her into a frenzy.

Most important to her mission, Grindle has courage. In 12 years of off-and-on struggles over TINCUP, she has never been afraid to take on the powerful.

Rarely have they appreciated it, and she has won her share of detractors. Some say she has overstepped her bounds, using TINCUP as a pulpit to bully law-abiding contributors into complying with her interpretation of the ordinance rather than its letter.

But Grindle has a soft touch too. During one recent interview, she broke off a harangue against political action committees to show off a fuzzy toy bunny.

“Let me show you this,” she said, pulling the white bunny from its box. While its electric ears wiggled and it bounced up and down on Grindle’s kitchen counter, she confessed that it was a gift for her 8-month-old granddaughter, the only child of her only son.

The Grindle with a granddaughter and a toy bunny is not the one that members of the Board of Supervisors know best. They usually see Grindle across a speaker’s lectern, armed with contribution records and demanding explanations.

It is in that role--as TINCUP’s living interpreter--that Grindle has earned her critics. Many contend that she has no right to interpret the “spirit” or “intent” of TINCUP. Contributors, they say, should be bound only by what is actually in the law, not by what Grindle says is between the lines.

“There is no such thing as the ‘spirit’ of a bill or a law that limits speech,” complained Costa Mesa lawyer Dana Reed, a specialist in campaign law. “Shirley Grindle, I’m sure, wishes that she had written TINCUP differently, but the fact is she didn’t.”

Reed calls TINCUP an “abomination,” and many other lawyers agree that the ordinance is far from perfect. It is cumbersome to monitor and burdened by a series of escalating contribution limits. Its constitutionality has been questioned and challenged once in court.

TINCUP won that round in Orange County Superior Court, but many lawyers believe that if it was challenged in federal court, TINCUP would be thrown out. A similar ordinance in Santa Barbara was rejected by a federal judge last year.

Even though Grindle vigorously defends TINCUP’s constitutionality, she acknowledges that she wishes she and her fellow TINCUP drafters had done a few things differently. In particular, Grindle wishes that TINCUP dealt squarely with political action committees.

But she will brook no impertinence from Reed: She calls him “PAC-man,” a reference to his work as the treasurer for dozens of political action committees. And she accuses him of making a business out of looking for loopholes in the law.

Reed is not alone in criticizing Grindle, though few political players in the county are willing to do so publicly. In some cases, the frustration is expressed subtly.

“With at least some people, I think you could have a very informed and studied debate” about amending TINCUP, said Michael Stockstill, director of corporate affairs for the Irvine Co., a development firm that is also Orange County’s largest landholder. “But you know there’s no willingness to do that. See, I think that Shirley, well. . . .”

He trails off there, but the implication is that Grindle doesn’t trust developers and won’t negotiate even if the public might benefit from a little flexibility.

None of that appears to bother Grindle. Her mission is single-minded: to protect the ordinance she and her cohorts compelled the supervisors to accept.

In the process, she has also built a cadre of admirers. Deputy Dist. Atty. Kenneth Chinn, for instance, commends Grindle for the “invaluable function” she performs.

“She has done a tremendous public service by monitoring this ordinance,” he said. “If there wasn’t a Shirley Grindle doing it, it wouldn’t be getting done.”

Grindle agrees. And though she spends countless hours of unpaid work assembling information and documenting contributions, she wouldn’t have it any other way. The task of taking on the powerful is her calling, and was even before TINCUP became her vehicle for it.

On a wall behind Grindle’s television set hang the public service awards she has collected over her career. Common Cause has given her a couple; so have other citizens’ groups. She even has one or two that recognize her work as an engineer for the space program, which she spent her career working on after graduating with a degree in aeronautical engineering from UCLA--the only woman in a class of 800 men.

One is her prize award. It congratulates her on her 1973-76 service on the Orange County Planning Commission, and it ends with a quote: “There is a certain blend of courage, integrity, character and principle which has no satisfactory dictionary name but has been called different things at different times in different countries. Our American name for it is ‘guts.’ ”

Grindle loves to read that quote aloud.

“That,” she says, “is the highest compliment that can be paid to me.”