COVER STORY : Change Is in the Air : Influx of City Hall Newcomers Makes Long Beach Politics Tough to Predict--Which Is Just Fine With Council’s 1st Latino, Jenny Oropeza

For the past few weeks, city officials, pundits and amateur prognosticators around Long Beach City Hall have been engaging in an age-old ritual that marks an imminent change in government: trying to figure out which way the political wind is blowing.

With a new mayor and three new council members coming aboard next week--the largest influx of new blood at the top in 40 years--the Long Beach City Council figures to have not just a new cast of characters but a new collective personality. Depending on whom you talk to, there’s going to be a new bedrock majority of conservatives on the nine-member council, a 4-4 liberal-conservative split (with one council member or another being a swing vote) or a pattern of shifting alliances.

But there’s one thing that just about everybody seems to agree on. Jenny Oropeza, the newly elected councilwoman from District 1, the first Latino to sit on the council and a Bill Clinton delegate to the 1992 Democratic National Convention, will be firmly in the liberal camp.

Last week, Oropeza could hardly wait to brush away that label.

“I don’t think it’s fair to put people in slots,” she said testily.

Oropeza, 36, is an animated woman who seems to send out wisps of energy when she enters a room, like a locomotive coming into a station.

Since she won a runoff election last month, Oropeza has been sounding a lot more like a community-oriented pragmatist than a classic liberal. In fact, her first pronouncements as a soon-to-be-sworn-in councilwoman could have been pages from a conservative handbook.

Oropeza wants the city to be more business-friendly--offering big corporations juicy incentives to relocate in Long Beach, for example. She wants urban blight reduced in her downtown district. She wants more cops on the beat.

“I don’t put myself in any (voting) bloc,” she said. “I like to call myself a law-and-order person. It really depends on the issue as to where I fit on the liberal-conservative spectrum.”

From the sound of it, the new Long Beach City Council could be remarkably hard to figure. Oropeza, Councilmen-elect Mike Donelon and Jerry Shultz and Mayor-elect Beverly O’Neill--all of whom will be sworn in Tuesday--seem willing to confound expectations of them.

Shultz, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy who becomes part of a three-man “cop squad” on the council--joining Les Robbins, another deputy sheriff, and Douglas S. Drummond, a retired Long Beach police officer--says he feels comfortable with the conservative label that most observers place on him.

But he draws the line at supporting “privatization,” saving tax dollars by hiring companies to replace city departments, one of the rallying calls of fiscal conservatives in Southern California since the mid-1980s.

“There are a lot of negatives to it,” Shultz said. “You hire people for low wages who don’t necessarily have the professional expertise.”

Donelon warns that those who expect him to be part of a conservative juggernaut may be deeply disappointed. “I’m a political moderate,” he insists. “People have tried to cubbyhole me. More than anything, I find that offensive.”

A general contractor with distinctly pro-business proclivities, Donelon nevertheless won’t support efforts to cut social service programs in order to beef up public safety. “We can’t afford to cut youth programs or libraries to hire more cops,” he said. “I’ll always be a die-hard supporter of neighborhoods. That’s my first priority.”

And Mayor-elect O’Neill, a registered Democrat, talks with all the fervor of George Bush about making life easier for businesses and cutting back on crime.

Oropeza--who made history as the first Latino elected to the Long Beach Unified School District Board of Education--is just as determined as the rest to resist doctrinaire disputes. At least in the beginning.

But her task in serving her majority-Latino district may be the hardest facing any council member.

More than 60% of the families in her district speak a language other than English at home, and almost a third of the population lives below the poverty level. More than half of Oropeza’s constituents have not finished high school. Housing in District 1 is among the oldest, most crowded and dilapidated in the city, with 52% of it built before 1960.

Though the district includes the choice Pine Avenue restaurant and movie theater area, it also contains the lackluster Long Beach Plaza, a downtown shopping mall that, after two years, has yet to find a replacement for the vacant Buffum’s department store outlet at the mall’s southern end.

Ironically, Oropeza’s credentials as a Latina elected official may be of little political value in District 1. The district lines, encompassing a population that is 56% Latino, were drawn four years ago specifically to increase opportunities for Latino candidates. But according to a study commissioned by Oropeza, only about 10% of the registered voters are Latino.

In some ways, Oropeza’s ethnic background could be a liability, she says.

“It places an additional burden on me, not only to represent the district but to represent that perspective,” she said. “I think everybody’s going to be watching and evaluating me, especially in the early months. I know there are people who will be thinking not that I’m well-educated, articulate or intelligent, but that I’m Hispanic.”

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Still, Oropeza comes to the council with a satchel full of ideas--programs that she thinks will help her constituents--and a determination to help bring a new era of good will to the council.

She wants to prod the Parks, Recreation and Marine Department into building a long-discussed park on Golden Avenue, between Broadway and 6th Street, in her greenery-starved district. She has plans to liven up the shopping mall, providing greater access to Pine Avenue and its upscale diners.

She also backs efforts to attract more commercial passenger flights to Long Beach Airport, bringing jobs to her constituents. One study said that each daily commercial flight creates 92 jobs.

Critics of the council, traditionally dominated by white males, have called it a do-nothing body that has failed to meaningfully attack a host of urban woes or to respond to Long Beach’s increasingly diverse population.

“In the old City Council, it was people looking out for their own interests,” Oropeza said. “I hope there will be a more global, citywide perspective now.”

Sitting in the audience during a recent council meeting, Oropeza, in a red suit, provided a marked contrast to the gray-haired, middle-aged men in jackets and ties who have until now dominated the council.

But her origins are far from glamorous.

Born in Montebello, the oldest of the three children of Victor and Sharon Oropeza, Jenny Oropeza remembers the “rough spots” of being raised in a working-class family.

“It wasn’t Ozzie and Harriet at all,” she says now. “Luxuries? There were no luxuries.”

After her parents divorced when Jenny was 12, Sharon Oropeza and the three children moved to a tiny apartment, where all four shared a bedroom. “I slept in the same bed with my mother all through high school,” Jenny Oropeza said. “There just wasn’t room for another bed in the room.”

Her mother, an escrow agent, says she had few indications that her oldest daughter was headed toward a life of public service, except that Jenny and her younger sister, Lynne, had a flair for performance.

“They were forever putting on shows and charging the neighbors money to come and see them,” Sharon Oropeza said.

The councilwoman-elect remembers being fascinated as a fifth-grader with Robert F. Kennedy when he was running for president in 1968. “He came in a caravan through Montebello, and I did some leafletting for him. I felt as if I were contributing to a great man.”

Kennedy’s death a few weeks later was devastating, she said. “It was like somebody in the family died.”

The charismatic former U.S. attorney general is still one of her heroes, Oropeza said. “I read his books whenever I need inspiration,” she said. “He had a great heart, which so many leaders lack today. You have to be budget-wise and pragmatic, but you also need a great heart.”

But Oropeza wasn’t “bitten by the political bug” until she got to Cal State Long Beach in the late 1970s, she said.

As a business administration major, Oropeza said, she was “headed toward the corporate world, making the big bucks in some skyscraper in Downtown Los Angeles,” until she got involved in a movement to keep the state from raising tuition at the school.

She went on to get deeply involved in student government, becoming the first person to serve two terms as student body president, before graduating in 1981. She was also appointed by then-Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. to a one-year term as a student trustee on the Cal State University board.

While in college she married fellow student Tom Mullins, who now runs a freight-forwarding business in Long Beach.

After graduation, Oropeza became a volunteer in Democratic Party politics. She worked on Tom Bradley’s failed gubernatorial campaign in 1982 before landing a job as an aide to Assemblyman Charles M. Calderon (D-Montebello).

She worked with Calderon, now a state senator, for four years while immersing herself in Long Beach politics. She became a leader in a 1984 effort to have school board members elected as representatives of geographical districts rather than as at-large candidates.

Whereas at-large elections usually favor white candidates, district elections give ethnic enclaves a greater say in the outcome, Oropeza said. “In 100 years, there had never been a person of color on the board of education,” she said.

The district-election initiative got on the ballot that year, but it was defeated. In 1986, a similar measure was approved by the voters.

By then, Oropeza had hooked up with Carmen Ornela-Perez, chairman of the Long Beach Harbor Commission and Oropeza’s “adviser and role model.” Ornela-Perez, a former deputy to then-County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn and former vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee, soon had her youthful protege immersed in party committee assignments.

“She had tremendous tenacity,” Ornela-Perez said.

Oropeza served as a member of the site selection committee for the 1992 Democratic National Convention. She attended her party’s convention as a Michael Dukakis delegate in 1988.

Her first stab at running for office was in 1986, when she was part of a crowded field in the District 1 council election before it was redistricted to include more Latinos. Evan Anderson Braude eventually won the seat in a runoff. Oropeza came in fourth out of 14.

In 1988, with district representation finally in place, Oropeza was elected to the school board to a two-year term (staggered with other districts under the new system), representing a largely minority district in the western part of the city. She ran again, without opposition, in 1990. During six years on the board, she served two one-year terms as president.

The frequent rap against Oropeza, particularly among community organizations from her own district, is that she’s an “ivory-tower politician” who is using local elections as a springboard to higher office.

“Jenny’s on a career political path,” said Dianne McNinch, a veteran community activist whom Oropeza defeated in the runoff last month. “I fully expect that in four years, she’ll be running for the (state) Assembly or for Congress.”

Westside school groups chide Oropeza for failing to visit their schools while she was a school board member.

Karen Gonzalez, one of the people who spearheaded an award-winning drive last year to spruce up the Thomas A. Edison Elementary School on Maine Avenue, recalls the night her group was honored with a banquet by the Long Beach Chamber of Commerce.

“The principal and the superintendent were there,” said Gonzalez, who was personally awarded a key to the city. “Dianne McNinch was there. But our school board member (Oropeza) didn’t come. It changes my opinion of her.”

Oropeza accepts the criticism graciously. “The truth of the matter is that I didn’t spend as much time in the schools as some of my colleagues,” she said. “But I was more involved with some of the inside, nitty-gritty stuff.”

While some of her colleagues were visiting schools, Oropeza said, she was trying to establish programs to bring more bilingual teachers into the Long Beach schools and to provide support services for gay and lesbian students.

Nor does Oropeza apologize for being ambitious. “Somebody who’s not ambitious doesn’t really care about accomplishing a lot of things,” she said.

She notes that there are term limits in Long Beach, limiting a new council member’s length of service to eight years. “Right now, I’m planning on serving two terms,” she said, though she does not rule out running for higher office. “Never say never,” she said.

In the next year or so, the City Council must deal with major fiscal hurdles, daunting problems of street crime and a lethargic local economy. Despite the pronouncements of independence by various council members, it remains to be seen how this newly disparate group of men and women will assert itself on the issues.

“There’s a danger that the council could become more contentious than the one we had,” said local political consultant Jeff Adler.

The first order of business Tuesday, after the new members are sworn in, should be to select a new vice mayor. Knowledgeable observers will watch the vote as a possible harbinger of things to come.

“It’s a symbolic post, not really important at all,” Adler said. “But it will signify early on where the votes are.”

If Drummond, the ex-police officer from Belmont Shore who has expressed an interest in the job, gets the post, it could mean that the conservative majority is kicking in, Adler said. If Doris Topsy-Elvord, an African American councilwoman who is frequently cited as a potential swing vote, is chosen, it could signify more moderate forces at work, he said.

How will Oropeza vote? She’s not saying.