Budget Gridlock May Be an Obstacle in Katz’s Future

Aside from taking a massive pay cut, or no pay at all, what can Assemblyman Richard Katz do to keep his involvement in the state budget deadlock from hurting his mayoral campaign?

The salary reduction was suggested to me Tuesday morning by my friend Erwin Baker, who is irate over the 58-day Capitol fiasco. He thinks Gov. Pete Wilson and the legislators should give back their paychecks to show sympathy for all those who have been hurt by the state’s insolvency.

Baker, who used to report on government before he retired from The Times, knows this won’t happen. I do, too. So, as the old Las Vegas lounge comics used to say, seriously folks. . . . What about Katz?

The budget stalemate has complicated an already difficult challenge for Katz, who has yet to declare his candidacy in next year’s mayoral election.

“The quick answer is that it’s a millstone,” said one adviser, but the sort of millstone that won’t be a permanent part of Katz’s attire.

“It would have been better if it had not happened, if they had wrapped things up, if he had been part of a successful operation,” said another.

As one of Assembly Speaker Willie Brown’s top lieutenants, and as a senior member of the L.A. delegation, Katz, a Democrat, has been a major player in the budget negotiations, a role that has brought him more heat than praise.

As the Capitol gang became mired in its worst-ever budget mess, City Hall politicians discovered that Brown favored making up part of the $10.7-billion budget deficit by taking state aid away from L.A. and other cities.

When city lobbyists sounded the alarm, Chairman Zev Yaroslavsky of the council’s Finance Committee called a political friend, Los Angeles Assemblyman Terry Friedman, who began preparing a plan to help the city. While Friedman pushed a city-backed plan, Yaroslavsky and Deputy Mayor Mark Fabiani charged that Katz continued to support Brown’s anti-L.A. proposal.

Katz replied that he was always on the front lines for L.A. Whatever happened in the early stages, Katz and Friedman are now working together on pro-L.A. legislation. But the episode put Katz on the receiving end of several days of bad publicity.

The bad publicity came after years of hardly any publicity. Katz is better known in the Capitol than in his hometown. The Los Angeles television news crews that cover City Hall several days a week seldom make it north to Sacramento. As a result, L.A. residents have a dim picture of the Legislature.

That may explain Katz’s poor showing in a 500-person telephone poll taken for KCBS-TV Aug. 17-20 by Evans-McDonough Research Co. of Berkeley about the mayoral race.

My term “poor” is relative. Nobody got major league figures. The leaders, City Councilman Michael Woo, a declared candidate for mayor, and County Supervisor Gloria Molina, a possible candidate, led with just 16% each. Mayor Tom Bradley, who may or may not run, had a measly 13%. The undecided Yaroslavsky had only 12%, and Councilmen Nate Holden, Joel Wachs, businessman-attorney Richard Riordan, Councilwoman Joy Picus, and Katz all were in single digits. Katz’s single digit was 3%.

This week I talked to Katz about the poll, his campaign, and how he would distance himself from the state budget deadlock.

I didn’t bring up my friend Baker’s pay-cut proposal. Katz seemed to have enough trouble, stuck in the Capitol working on still another budget plan.

He observed that most of his mayoral opponents are connected to City Hall. And if you think the Capitol gang is bad, he argued, look at the gang at City Hall.

“I am not part of the quagmire at City Hall,” he said. “I am not part of the mess downtown. I can go down there and take a totally fresh look at the place.”

As evidence of that, he’ll talk about portions of his legislative record that have nothing to do with the budget mess. It includes financing new transit lines, reorganizing L.A.’s feuding transit agencies and requiring developers to pay for new roads and other facilities required for their subdivisions.

This is pretty heavy stuff. To package and sell it in the mayoral campaign, Katz recently made “a handshake agreement” with James Carville, the Democrats’ hot campaign manager who is shaping Gov. Bill Clinton’s race against President Bush.

Carville turned Clinton’s heavy policy pronouncements into understandable sound bites. If Katz can raise enough money to formalize Carville’s handshake into an employment agreement, the campaign manager may be able to do the same for the assemblyman. He may even persuade the voters that Katz never saw the state budget--or met Willie Brown.