Brown Pledges Sessions in L.A. on Economy

Promising to be a better friend to business than Republicans have been, Democrat Kathleen Brown pledged Thursday that if she becomes governor in January she will convene her new Administration--and the state Legislature too, if possible--in Los Angeles to hammer out an economic recovery plan for Southern California.

“Within the first month of my Administration,” the Democratic gubernatorial nominee told San Fernando Valley business leaders, “I will summon my cabinet--not to Sacramento--but right here to Los Angeles, to focus the full attention and resources of the state on the basin’s economy.”

Brown said she would formally request that the full state Legislature convene an unprecedented session in Los Angeles to hold hearings on her program, which includes incentives to build a modern ground transportation manufacturing base in Southern California, to revive the aerospace industry and to speed construction of the Alameda Transportation Corridor serving the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

The campaign press spokesman for Gov. Pete Wilson, Brown’s foe in the Nov. 8 election, scoffed at the proposal as “showmanship.” But state Senate President Pro Tem Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward) embraced it.

“Los Angeles is the engine that drives the whole and it is essential that we get it more robust,” Lockyer said. “What’s been lacking is any imaginative executive leadership from the governor’s office.”

Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) was unavailable for comment Thursday, a day after the Legislature recessed for the year.

Speaker Brown held a two-day “economic summit” in Los Angeles early last year to discuss ways of making California more business-friendly. The conference led to passage of legislation designed to improve the state’s business climate.

The only time the entire Legislature has formally met outside Sacramento since it became the state capital in 1854 was in the 1950s, in the former capital of Benecia for a symbolic commemorative meeting, state Assembly Chief Clerk E. Dotson Wilson said.

Brown, the state treasurer, said her goal is to have her economic program, which she said would not require new taxes, passed into law within the first 100 days of her Administration.

Brown said that, like the late Republican President Richard Nixon going to China, she might be the leader who is able to pare and streamline the state bureaucracy and regulatory tangle in Sacramento.

Nixon startled the political world with an eight-day trip to China in February of 1972 to initiate normalization of relations with the Communist regime. Many felt that Nixon managed to pull it off in part because he and other Republicans had been the most vocal foes of Communism in China.

These days, Republicans commonly accuse Democrats of being anti-business by favoring higher taxes and more spending and by protecting a growing, entrenched bureaucracy. Republicans argue that they are the best friends of business and the ones most interested in cutting back on the bureaucracy and regulatory red tape.

But Brown said that in 1994 she is the one who can “bring to the table the spirit and ability to make things change,” although she indirectly blamed the Democrat-controlled Legislature, as well as Wilson, for failing to respond to the state’s economic problems.

Responding to a question about the state’s attitude toward business and resistance to change, Brown added, “What’s happened in California, frankly--12 years of Republican governors and legislative complacency--has been that California has become anti-business in its approach to all of these issues.”

Brown restated her frequent criticism of Wilson, saying that he tends to blame Congress or illegal immigration or the Legislature for California’s problems rather than doing something about them.

Brown said she would be the kind of leader who would “get in there and roll up your sleeves and get under the hood and do what Ross Perot said and ‘just fix it.’

“And that is the kind of governor that I intend to be,” Brown said in her address to about 125 people attending a meeting of the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn. at the Sportsmen’s Lodge in Studio City.

Perot, the blunt-talking billionaire businessman who ran as an independent for President against Republican George Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton in 1992, stressed a populist premise that government’s problems weren’t all that hard to fix, if someone just had the determination and political will to do it.

Wilson press aide Dan Schnur derided Brown’s proposal for Los Angeles cabinet and legislative sessions as “showmanship and political gamesmanship.”

Schnur said Wilson has spent nearly half his time as governor since 1991 in Southern California, adding, “It might be hard for her to believe, but even when we’re in Sacramento, we’re able to pay close attention to what is happening in Los Angeles.

“There is nothing substantive that Kathleen Brown has proposed so far in this campaign that we are not either in the process of doing, have already done or found a better way to do it,” Schnur said.

The Brown proposal fits with her campaign strategy that jobs and the economy remain the key issues in vote-rich Southern California. She presented regionally tailored economic proposals in Orange and Riverside counties the past two days and planned to do so today in Los Angeles, Bakersfield, Fresno and Modesto. The speeches were depicted by campaign aides as part of an early start on the traditional Labor Day kickoff of the fall election campaign and a shift away from the summer’s focus on crime.

Brown cited Wilson’s creation of the California Environmental Protection Agency (Cal/EPA) as an example of expanded bureaucracy under Republican administrative control the past 12 years.

“Cal/EPA has not helped us,” she added. “Cal/EPA has added a whole new layer without getting rid of all the others. In the coming weeks, I will be talking about how we can streamline this government, how we can cut bureaucratic waste, how we can consolidate, merge and eliminate programs.”

A Brown aide later said she is not proposing to abolish the state EPA.

Times staff writer Jerry Gillam in Sacramento contributed to this report.