Pressure Is on Politicians to Produce

“Our family slept in our cars last night; hold on a minute, we’re getting an aftershock.”

That’s how my uncommon telephone interview began Tuesday with Assemblywoman Paula Boland, whose Northridge home sits atop the earthquake epicenter. “Things started flying. My husband covered me over,” she said, her voice still shaky. “We searched for clothes and raced to my mother’s. She’s 81.”

Bowland is 54 and Monday was her birthday. She observed it by driving around her legislative district--where she grew up--and being stunned by the devastation. Her own two-story home sustained major structural damage. “Every time a tremor goes through, the fireplace moves further away from the wall,” she said.

The assemblywoman was afraid to spend the night in her house, so she and her mother slept in a car in the driveway. Her husband slept in another car with their granddaughter. Their daughter and son-in-law slept on the lawn.

“My family’s alive. What more can I want?” she said. “There are people here who have lost lives, people who have been totally displaced, who now have no income. Our attention has to be turned to them. They desperately need help.”

Boland is a conservative Republican who hates taxes. But a big chunk of any temporary state tax increase--on sales, gasoline--now being proposed by Democratic legislators for earthquake recovery would be spent in her district. So it would reason that she might support such a tax hike, especially since residents of her district paid higher sales taxes for 13 months to help the San Francisco Bay Area recover from its 1989 quake.

Wrong. And her position and attitude are illustrative of the challenges and hazards that Gov. Pete Wilson, President Clinton and California legislators in both Sacramento and Washington face in responding to the quake.

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“People are taxed to death,” Boland said instinctively. “We’ve got to start finding ways to conserve money and quit taxing people.”

But how do the freeways get repaired and other facilities rebuilt when state government already is strapped with a projected $4-billion deficit?

“The feds are going to have to come through for us,” she insisted. “They’ve taken our military bases and all those jobs. They’re going to have to start giving some things back to California. Far as I’m concerned, the President still owes us $1.1 billion for that illegal immigration (reimbursement). Let’s see if (Sen. Dianne) Feinstein and (Sen. Barbara) Boxer can do anything for us this time.

“I hear a lot of rhetoric. I want to see some action.”

Boland had just gone through a bit of terror and needed a good night’s sleep. But I suspect her attitude toward Washington is shared by millions of frustrated Californians. And if the Clinton Administration is seen by Southern Californians to be bungling the recovery--through bureaucratic snafus or stinginess--the President will pay the price in 1996 when he’ll probably need this state’s votes to win reelection.

At the same time, the earthquake has given Clinton an opportunity to ingratiate himself with California and prove he’s more than just a President who shows up for town halls and Hollywood haircuts. Clinton got off to a good start by immediately sending out two Cabinet secretaries and other top officials to help expedite the cleanup, then flying to Los Angeles himself Wednesday and saying the right things.

For example, the President reported that a highway engineer had told him “it’ll take about a year” to repair the Golden State Freeway. Clinton said he replied, “What do we have to do to fix it in less time?” That’s the kind of question voters want presidents and governors to ask.

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Wilson similarly is confronted by peril and opportunity. But unlike the President--who has problems around the globe--the governor faces a special burden of leadership as Sacramento responds to the earthquake. He has nothing on his desk of more importance--substantively or politically--than speeding the recovery of a region that contains nearly half the state’s electorate.

For one, Wilson will need to persuade the Paula Bolands of the Legislature to support a tax increase that seems inevitable. The public may be less difficult to convince. After the San Francisco quake, a Times poll found that most people were willing to pay a higher sales tax temporarily to help their fellow Californians.

But the Republican governor still hadn’t taken a position himself as of Wednesday. He was waiting to “find out the magnitude of the problem” and hear how much Washington will pay.

That seems a formula for prolonged gridlock--in the Capitol and on Los Angeles roadways.