MAN IN THE NEWS : GOP’s Jones a Fence-Mending Farmer

Bill Jones was racing for an elevator, heading to his first news conference as the Republican leader in the state Assembly. Suddenly, he realized that three members who were supposed to be with him had fallen behind.

“I don’t know how I’m going to hold 31 Republicans together if I can’t even keep four going in one direction,” Jones said as he searched for the stragglers.

Jones was only joking. But the comment cut painfully close to the truth for the strapping farmer from the Fresno area, who was elected Republican leader last week in the wake of a bruising budget battle that at times pitted Assembly Republicans against Gov. Pete Wilson, a fellow member of the GOP and leader of their party.

Before he was elected to the Legislature, Jones, 41, herded cattle on his family’s ranch west of Fresno. That was nothing compared to the job he has now as head of the most fractious caucus in the Legislature--31 individuals who form and re-form factions almost daily.

Elected by a bare majority of 16 votes, Jones is the fifth leader the Republicans have had since Democrat Willie Brown of San Francisco was first chosen Assembly Speaker in 1980. None has been able to permanently expand Republican strength in the Assembly in the face of Brown’s fund-raising and organizational prowess.

In fact, the Republicans of late have been better known for fighting among themselves than for battling the Democrats. Their last two leaders have come from the ranks of the “Proposition 13 babies”--a group of anti-tax conservatives swept into office after the 1978 passage of the trend-setting ballot initiative that slashed property taxes. These two leaders--Assemblymen Pat Nolan of Glendale and Ross Johnson of La Habra--continually fought off criticism that they excluded and ostracized those with whom they disagreed.

While Jones on most issues is every bit as conservative as Nolan and Johnson, he is more given to compromise than confrontation. Soft-spoken, he chooses his words carefully and rarely loses his temper. His wife, Maurine, says he has yelled at her once in 20 years--when she accidentally washed his wallet. Around the Capitol, he has a similar reputation; he may be polite to a fault.

“People like him,” said Assemblyman Phillip Isenberg (D-Sacramento). “They find his style very comfortable.”

That style, Jones said in an interview, is to try first to build consensus within his party so he can form a united front to battle the Democrats. Jones hews closely to a policy of never publicly discussing the foibles of others, so he will not criticize those who led the Assembly Republicans before him. But he does say he intends to run things differently.

Jones said he will stay out of contested Republican primaries--an acknowledgment that the involvement of previous leaders created a problem when Republican candidates they opposed won elections and came to Sacramento. He also pledges not to isolate or disparage those within the caucus who espouse a point of view different from his.

“Even when you have differences of opinion, you maintain a respect for individuals and their principles,” Jones said. “There’s a difference between disagreeing and being disagreeable.”

Jones probably will be a stronger supporter of Wilson’s moderate agenda, although he disagrees with him on a range of issues. He voted for the governor’s budget--one of only nine Assembly Republicans to do so--and for the taxes that balanced it. He did so, he said, out of loyalty to the governor.

If Jones has a major weakness, his colleagues say privately, it is that his career has been so focused on agricultural issues that he has little feel for the broader health, education and welfare matters that preoccupy the governor and Legislature.

Jones vows to make up for any shortcomings by relying on the strengths of others--a skill he says he learned well as a student body president at Cal State Fresno, at the height of the student unrest over civil rights and the Vietnam War.

Jones then was a conservative among many liberals, a supporter of a war that many students found morally abhorrent. Jones never served in the military--he was weeks away from officer training school for the Marine Corps Reserve when he was discharged because of a bad back. He says he believed that once the United States entered the conflict it should have stayed to get the job done.

Jones said he was able to set aside his differences with student presidents from other campuses and work with them to build a stronger statewide association to lobby the Legislature and governor on issues that student leaders could agree on.

“That’s really where I cut my teeth on controversy and the political process,” Jones said of his days in student government.

Despite his appreciation for consensus, Jones remains a conservative at heart. He comes from a family of conservative Republican farmers--his father helped develop state water policy under then-Gov. Ronald Reagan--and Jones was a full-time farmer and rancher before coming to the Legislature in 1982. Before the recent budget battle, his voting record gave no clue that he would be what the governor’s image-makers have come to call a “Wilson Republican.”

While the governor supports abortion rights, Jones opposes abortion except in cases of rape or incest or to save the life of the mother. Wilson has supported some forms of gun control, but Jones generally opposes it. Jones tried to block one of Wilson’s major policy initiatives--creation of a California Environmental Protection Agency--because it took regulation of pesticides out of the hands of the pro-farmer Department of Food and Agriculture.

Jones wants no one to mistake his support for Wilson’s budget plan as a sign of enthusiasm for higher taxes and bigger government. Rather, he said, it was a recognition of the obvious: Republicans lacked the votes to work their will. He has named as his top lieutenants two members who did not cast a single vote for Wilson’s budget or his tax plan and another lawmaker whose only concession to the governor was to vote for an increase in alcohol taxes.

“We delivered what was necessary for the governor,” Jones said of the caucus. “We’re not satisfied with that. We’re going to make sure we get a majority here so next time around when we go through this we can draw a Republican budget for a Republican governor, and hopefully that budget will be without increased taxes.”