Green Says Health Not a Factor in Senate Retirement : Politics: State senator’s political base in 33rd District was diluted by reapportionment. His emphysema had caused speculation about his future.

State Sen. Cecil N. Green, who has decided not to seek reelection this year, said he will miss the give and take of legislative debates but that for him “it’s just time” to retire.

The Norwalk Democrat’s decision was prompted by the legislative reapportionment plan that the State Supreme Court approved last month. The plan carved up Green’s 33rd Senate District and left him without a political home.

Green, 67, said he considered whether to run for another Senate seat or a new Downey area Assembly seat. “I looked at the options and I chose the option of retirement and that’s it,” Green said last week during a short interview.

Green said his decision was not affected by his health. Green has emphysema, which came to light earlier this year when he began using an electric cart to move around the Capitol. At the time, one of his aides said the senator might not be up to the challenge of a major campaign this year, but last week Green said he is feeling fine and that the chronic lung condition was not a factor in his decision to retire.

Under the court’s reapportionment plan, Green’s district, which straddles the Los Angeles and Orange county lines, would be carved up and his home base of Norwalk placed in a heavily Latino district that stretches into the San Gabriel Valley. The district, which Green has served since 1987, had included Artesia, Bellflower, Cerritos, Downey, Hawaiian Gardens, Lakewood, Norwalk and Santa Fe Springs in Los Angeles County, as well as part of Orange County.

In discussing his years in Sacramento, Green said he is especially proud of sponsoring legislation to strengthen the state’s public employee retirement system. He has served as chairman of the Senate Public Employment and Retirement Committee.

“You win a few, you lose a few and you win enough to make it all worthwhile, and it’s a part of my life I’ll miss,” Green said.

But among his colleagues and legislative staff members, Green’s accomplishments during five years in the Legislature are overshadowed by the political importance of the high-profile special election victory that launched his legislative career. The 1987 election was necessary because former Sen. Paul Carpenter (D-Cypress) had won a seat on the State Board of Equalization while 18 months remained on his term.

Carpenter guided Green, a onetime muffler shop operator, into the race and he won the backing of the Democratic leadership, partly because he was viewed as a moderate who could win labor’s support in a district that was beginning to lean Republican. Although Green was a Norwalk city councilman and the city’s dominant political figure, he was regarded as an underdog because his opponent, Assemblyman Wayne Grisham (R-Norwalk), was better known throughout the district, partly because he had served in Congress.

To overcome Green’s lack of name identity, Democrats deployed hundreds of workers to target Green supporters and provide rides to get them to the polls on election day. It even featured what political consultants refer to as the “doughnut caper” in which the campaign spent $40,000 on more than 130,000 doughnuts given to voters on election day.

The gimmick worked this way: Everybody who voted was eligible on election day to go to one of seven doughnut shops and redeem their voter stub for a dozen doughnuts. The trick was that only voters identified in advance as pro-Green were told of the offer via letters and flyers left on doors on election day.

State Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles), whose leadership was threatened before the Green election, says Green’s come-from-behind campaign “strengthened my position here probably more than any other thing I can think of.”

Moreover, Roberti said that until Green’s victory, political consultants typically expected Republicans to win special elections because GOP voters were viewed as more likely to vote than Democrats. “We sort of tossed the conventional wisdom on its head,” Roberti said.

“His (Green’s) election was such an enormous accomplishment and switched the psychology around” on special elections around the state, Roberti said. “He’ll definitely be remembered for that, no doubt about it.”

Larry Morse, who served as a Green campaign aide, recalled that the feeling in Sacramento was that if Green had lost the race, Senate Democrats would have ousted Roberti as leader. Morse, now an aide to Sen. Milton Marks (D-San Francisco), noted that after Green’s triumph, the Senate Republican leader, Jim Nielsen of Woodland, was toppled from his leadership post.