New Kid on the Bloc : Freshman Assemblywoman Bowen Balances Getting Ahead, Getting Along

Debra Bowen’s personal life has been shot to pieces. Even the cat feels left out.

As a new member of the state Assembly, she’s hardly home anymore, having swapped the comfortable house near the beach in Venice where her husband and cat reside for a Sacramento apartment decorated with cardboard-box tables and beach-towel tablecloths.

Her professional life has been a bit rocky too, because learning the ropes in the Capitol is an enormous undertaking. The legislative session for freshmen started in January with orientation meetings on policy and ethics, but nobody shared information as basic as the combination for the women’s restroom.

“I didn’t even know the proper way to use my key for voting,” Bowen said. “My seatmate, Richard Katz, had to tell me.”

As a freshman this year, however, Bowen at least has lots of company. The 27 new legislators constitute the largest contingent of first-termers in the Legislature’s 80-member lower house. As a group, they appear unusually determined to make a difference quickly, having been elected in a year of voter outrage toward government. And they are the first group to enter the Legislature knowing at the outset that they are subject to term limits; they have six years to get something done, then they must give up their seats.

Since taking office in January, Bowen’s life from Monday through Thursday has revolved around the State Capitol, with its committee hearings, floor sessions, constituent visits, receptions, political intrigues and coalition-building breakfasts, lunches and dinners.

Meetings with constituents get highest priority; everything else is up for grabs. Attending receptions is, after all, not what Bowen’s being paid to do. What she is paid to do (at $52,500 a year) is create legislation that, in theory, reflects the desires and needs of the California public--and particularly, the needs of her district.

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Close attention to home-district concerns is expected of freshmen legislators, but even within this group, Bowen is something of a special case. She needs to make friends quickly if she is to serve more than one two-year term. She is a Democrat, but her 53rd Assembly District, which stretches along the coast from Venice to the base of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, has definite Republican leanings. Last year, she drew a weak GOP opponent, but she’s not likely to be so lucky in 1994.

This session, Bowen is the author of about 25 bills, average for a freshman Assembly member. Most of them deal with her main areas of interest: the environment, housing, and conversion of defense industry jobs to other uses, all of which are big issues within her district. But despite the common wisdom that freshmen should stay away from anything controversial, she and first-term Republican Jan Goldsmith of San Diego have co-authored a bill on campaign finance reform.

The bill would put limits on campaign contributions to candidates and PACs, or political action committees, ban transfers of funds between candidates and committees in excess of contribution limits and ban virtually all off-year fund raising. It’s nothing particularly new; California voters approved similar provisions in two 1988 ballot measures, but one was overturned on constitutional grounds, and the other is still being challenged in court.

It is one of half a dozen campaign reform bills this year, none of which are assured of passage. As Bowen noted, campaign reform is always much more popular with voters than with elected officials.

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Indeed, the Bowen bill attacks the very heart of the Assembly leadership’s power. Democratic Speaker Willie Brown, as well as senior Republicans, his theoretical enemies, preside over a complicated campaign-finance system in which money is often transferred from well-heeled incumbents, who in many elections do not face serious opposition, to candidates in competitive races. And at the leaders’ request, innumerable special interest groups and PACs can weigh in with thousands of dollars of additional contributions in key races.

It is a system that Brown uses with great effect to reward, punish and put members in his debt. Bowen herself received a huge infusion of party and special interest money late in her campaign last fall; it is a safe bet that some of it came her way because Brown and others concluded that the 53rd District race had become winnable for her.

Bowen credits several factors with her willingness to take on an issue that is likely to bring her into conflict with Brown. This is her first time in public office, but public service has always been a high priority for her, she said. As a lawyer before she was elected, much of her work was for nonprofit organizations.

Bowen also has been influenced by the fact that she was 25 when her mother died in an automobile crash. “Her death gave me an understanding that life is unpredictable. You have to move ahead in spite of risks.”

Others say Bowen’s determination to move quickly is widely shared by freshman legislators, owing in large part to term limits.

“The shyness is gone,” said Evan Goldberg, one of Bowen’s legislative aides. “The cream has to rise to the top faster. The theme of the freshman class is ‘Let’s go. I’m here to do something, so let’s do it.’ ”

Fourth-term Assemblywoman Delaine Eastin (D-Fremont) agrees that the newcomers are geared for action, but says term limits may not be the sole reason.

“It’s the biggest freshman class ever, and its large proportion of women and minority members has changed the dynamic here,” she said. “It used to be that Rome was burning, and fiddling was the order of the day. But since the last election, there’s been a sea change. . . . Now no one feels like there is time to waste.”

Still, there are limits. The relentless budget crunch brought on by the recession is one of Sacramento’s fundamental realities. The gridlock that prevails when the governor’s office and the Legislature are controlled by opposite parties is another.

And Bowen is no fool. She’s keenly aware that the last person who took on Brown “is sitting in a broom closet on the sixth floor, and nobody cares.” So she tries to temper her eagerness to change the system with a recognition that a head-on confrontation with the leadership tends not to be the best way to achieve the goal.

“It’s scary,” she said. “Like walking out on ice and not knowing if it will hold you. There’s a fine line between being so far out there that nothing gets passed and taking a stand.”

Asked about Brown, she smiles and says little. The quickest way to get a rise from her staff is to suggest that Bowen is constrained in her decision making by two strong but opposite considerations: She is a member of the controlling party in an Assembly dominated by Brown, but also a representative of a Republican-leaning district where the Speaker is hardly popular.

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There is evidence that Brown looks on Bowen with favor. He assigned her one of the nicer offices available to freshmen. He also gave her the vice chairmanship of a committee, a post that carries a modest amount of clout and, more significant, the power to hire more staff.

Bowen, for her part, voted for Brown’s reelection as Speaker and fell into line recently on a recent vote against Gov. Pete Wilson’s choice for state schools superintendent, Republican Marian Bergeson.

Yet lobbyists and legislators say they do not count on her to toe the party line all the time. Dennis Zane, former mayor of Santa Monica and now executive director of the Coalition for Clean Air, said the GOP leanings of Bowen’s district make her vulnerable, and thus something of a wild card.

Bowen prefers it that way. One of the things she likes least about Sacramento, she said, is how partisan it is. “I just do what I want to do--what I believe to be right.”

At the same time, though, Bowen has become a diligent student of Capitol survival. She has built coalitions--with the other women in the Assembly, with the Los Angeles delegation and with fellow freshmen Assemblymen. She hired a savvy veteran political consultant, Steve Gray-Barkan, as her chief of staff and director of her home office in Torrance, and two experienced legislative aides to help guide her through the Byzantine ways of the Capitol. And several of her bills, including the one on campaign finance reform, are co-authored by Republicans.

Bowen also is trying to keep some distance from lobbyists. On her office door is a sign that says she accepts no gifts--and she has been known to send staff members running down the hall to return gifts as simple as a single flower. She sees lobbyists as an information resource, but is wary of them. “The scariest thing for freshmen,” she said, “is figuring out whom you can rely on, whose analysis you can trust, because you can’t do everything yourself.”

Still ahead for all the freshmen is the defining legislative experience: the marathon, end-of-session, slice-and-dice budget negotiation that comes every summer. But after five months on the job, Bowen is beginning to feel more comfortable in her new surroundings. This is in contrast to a beginning she calls overwhelming. Starting with the campaign last summer, she went into hyper-drive, and winning in November brought no respite.

“The day after I won the election,” she recalled, “clients from my law practice called and said, ‘Can we get that stuff that was on hold done now?’ So I spent the transition months cleaning up my practice, putting together an office up here and down in my district, finding an apartment, trying to make it livable, and doing all the things I didn’t have time for while I was running--the doctor, a haircut, that kind of thing.”

Bowen recalls a helpful conversation she had in the early days with Assemblywoman Marguerite Archie-Hudson (D-Los Angeles). The second-term assemblywoman offered these survival tips: Buy two pairs of black shoes and two of beige, keep a pair of each in Sacramento and Los Angeles, bring your winter wardrobe to Sacramento, leave your summer wardrobe at home, and split jewelry between the two places.

But the biggest struggle of all has been to find a balance between her personal and her public life. On the most simple level she misses the things that anonymity allows--wearing blue jeans, hanging out in shorts and a T-shirt, having dirty hair.

“People in my district recognize me,” she said. “About as casual as I get now are the upscale sweats I wear on the plane when I fly up north Sunday nights.”

Harder to deal with is the time away from her husband, friends and cat. Bowen keeps in touch with her husband, Bryan Gindoff, by running up phone bills “so high they’re ridiculous.”

Friends are an even tougher problem.

“I find it difficult to keep in touch,” she said. “There are just so many choices. Do I call a friend, write a constituent or go for a walk and get some exercise, take some time to clear my head?”

It isn’t any better in Los Angeles. Fridays are spent in her district office seeing constituents. Saturdays are usually filled with meetings and speeches. Sundays she tries, with mixed success, to keep free for family and friends. At 37, the subject of children comes up, but Bowen only shakes her head, shrugs, and says, “Who knows?”

Having been something of a workaholic before she got elected perhaps makes adjusting to this new life a little easier. Bowen says she is bothered less by the long hours than by the lack of spontaneity in her life. “My husband and I had both had our own businesses, so we could take time off in the middle of the week and work on the weekend if we liked.”

Accustomed to working for herself, Bowen still gets exasperated by occasional collisions with an unmovable bureaucracy.

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The entire Capitol staff, for example, is on the same computer system, but there seems to be no manual for it. She wishes she could find out why E-mail messages sometimes take days to reach their intended party. Because of accounting regulations, she was told a piece of office furniture could be replaced, but not repaired. It took six weeks for her chief of staff to get his business cards because, in addition to the forms she had to fill out, she also had to write a personal request. Of course, no one had informed of any of this.

For Bowen, who is vice chairwoman of the Consumer Protection, Government Efficiency and New Technologies Committee, fighting bureaucratic inefficiency is a personal crusade.

Yet she has no illusions about her ability to change the system. Laughing, she says, “I probably won’t try to revamp the government--this year.” Then she adds, “I’m tremendously frustrated sometimes. The ruts of the way things are done here are so deep, it takes tremendous effort just to get the wheels out of the ruts.”

A Day in the Life

On a recent day that her staff described as light, Assemblywoman Debra Bowen’s schedule looked like this:

Invitations

* 7:30 a.m.: Two breakfasts, one given by the California State Assn. of Public Administrators, Public Guardians and Public Conservators, the other by the California Aviation Business Assn.

* 1:30 p.m.: Demonstration of consumer products available for roach infestations given by the Chemical Specialties Manufacturers Assn. (This event is not as silly as it sounds--Bowen is a member of the committee that deals with toxic materials.)

* 1:45 p.m.: Meeting with the California Council for Adult Education.

* 3:30 p.m.: Presentation by California Business Roundtable.

* 5 to 7 p.m.: Fund-raising receptions for two Assembly colleagues and cocktail receptions by the California Firefighters Assn., California Thoroughbred Breeders Assn., California Manufacturers Assn. and California Optometric Assn.

Meetings (partial list)

* Office visit with an optometrist from Bowen’s district.

* Meeting of Democratic caucus.

* Briefing on state budget.

* Office visit with two lobbyists from Toyota to discuss pending legislation.

* Office visit with district members of California Business Roundtable.

* Meeting with state Corrections Department officials to discuss budget matters.