After 20 Years, Antonovich and Mainstream in Sync

The speaker, one of the most powerful Republicans in Southern California, charmed his audience despite his lackluster delivery.

“The county’s current situation,” he began, addressing a gathering of business people, “reminds me of when the Mafia had a budgetary problem in Chicago. It was so severe, they had to lay off 2,000 judges.”

Laughter, ice broken, and Mike Antonovich was free to discuss his signature issues: fiscal responsibility (good), taxes (bad), and illegal immigration (very bad).

By all rights, this should be Antonovich’s time. At 55, he is bolstered by a power base stemming from four terms on the powerful Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, the conservative sweep in last November’s elections, and an anti-illegal-immigration movement that seems to have finally meshed with views he has espoused for 20 years.

He was a tax-hater before Proposition 13. An illegal-immigrant basher decades before Proposition 187. He had contempt for affirmative action long before the California Civil Rights Initiative. Until the past few years, few outside his solidly conservative constituency took the rather pedantic former schoolteacher seriously.

Today, Antonovich is having private meetings with House Speaker Newt Gingrich and is being quoted by conservative columnists statewide. Avidly courted to run for Congress, he officially declined last week, announcing instead that he will seek a fifth term as county supervisor next year and will consider a future run for the U.S. Senate.

But during the next several weeks, Antonovich faces some daunting tests, whose results could dampen his hopes for higher office--or even for reelection. He must choose between supporting raising taxes and as much as $1 billion in budget cuts, which could mean closing at least one hospital in his sprawling, north county district.

Next month, Antonovich will face the appeal of a civil suit in which he was found liable for conspiring to influence a judge on behalf of a campaign contributor. If he loses again, the county--and taxpayers--will be left to pay a $1.2-million fine on his behalf.

“Is it better to be in the mainstream?” he asked during a recent interview. “Yes. I just wished more people had listened before.”

Perhaps Antonovich’s most pressing concern is how he will explain his role on the board while county debt spiraled out of control. During Antonovich’s 15 years in office, the board mortgaged valuable county assets such as Marina del Rey property and its Downtown Los Angeles headquarters, the Hall of Administration, and approved lucrative pension packages for senior county officials, including themselves.

Antonovich not only voted in favor of the generous pensions but later resisted efforts by Supervisor Gloria Molina to scale them back.

He and fellow conservative Deane Dana are the only holdovers from the time when the board approved many of the plans, including the pensions, which alone will cost the county about $500 million. But because Dana has already announced his intention to retire next year, Antonovich will be the only remaining member from the board’s more liberal spending days to face voters.

Whether blame will follow him is an open question.

“He makes it sound like he hasn’t been a part of creating this crisis,” said State Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar), a frequent Antonovich critic. “You had Antonovich and Dana running this thing for a long time. . . . Is he showing the same kind of leadership now that he has for the past 15 years?”

But Victoria Herrington, a spokeswoman for the California Republican Party, maintains Antonovich will weather the fiscal storm. “Will the budget crisis affect him? Absolutely not. He has been an outstanding conservative.”

Indeed, many Republican analysts agreed that had Antonovich wanted the Republican nod for the 27th Congressional District seat where he lives, in Glendale, it was his for the taking.

“Burbank and Glendale are really his strongholds,” said Paul Clarke, a San Fernando Valley-based Republican political consultant.

Also, as the former state Republican Party chairman and a three-time state assemblyman, Antonovich is well-connected locally and nationally, and has a track record of being a formidable fund-raiser.

He has not had a strong challenger since at least 1988, in part because he consistently raises at least $1 million during campaigns. But he also makes it a point to regularly meet with citizens groups and to attend countless breakfasts, dinners, weddings and bar mitzvahs.

A tireless worker with a characteristically slow, measured way of speaking, Antonovich reads every letter he receives, and instructs his staff to answer every piece of mail--even the ones from prison inmates. Any time a constituent calls and asks for him, he gets on the phone.

A former high school social studies teacher for the Los Angeles Unified School District, Antonovich got his start in politics in 1969 as a member of the Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees. He quickly became known for railing against “leftist” teachings at local junior colleges before he was elected to the state assembly in 1972.

He garnered a reputation as a quick-tempered and deeply conservative man who spoke out loudly against taxes, school busing and abortion, and favored gun ownership and the death penalty. Never married, he espoused family values before the term became a conservative buzzword. He ran for lieutenant governor in 1978 and lost. Two years later, he was elected to the board, upsetting two-term incumbent Baxter Ward.

Part of Antonovich’s current strength is that he has changed little since the early ‘70s. However, though he holds the same political beliefs, he expresses them more quietly. The biggest difference, of course, is that many of the views that were once on the margins, including opposition to illegal immigration and affirmative action, are now popular.

“The whole political scene shifts as time goes on,” said Clarke, the political consultant. “Things that were on the fringe 20 years ago are mainstream now, and things mainstream 20 years ago are fringe now.”

On his desk, Antonovich has a plaque which he translates from the Latin as: “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”

He says he hasn’t. “I haven’t changed,” he said, “people have.”

He defends his record on the board, blaming the current fiscal crisis on the long-term financial drain of tolerating illegal immigrants and running vast health and welfare services that are required by the state and federal governments but not fully funded by them. Making matters worse, he said, is that the state has kept about $1 billion of county property taxes in recent years to balance its own budget.

“This is a state problem that all counties have,” he said about the county’s $1.2-billion deficit. “They will mandate a program, but won’t provide full funding for that program. . . . Then they use our funds to balance their budgets, and they still don’t eliminate the mandates.”

Two years ago, when the state Legislature asserted its right to keep a larger share of county property taxes, Antonovich sponsored an ordinance that sought to protect those funds from the state’s clutches. But the state Supreme Court found in favor of the state.

Currently, he said, he has the support of every single Republican in the state Legislature to support a ban on so-called unfunded mandates, but said he hasn’t been able to round up enough help from Democrats.

His favorite cause, though, has been to tighten the reins on illegal immigration, an issue that makes him appear to be something of a clairvoyant.

As far back as the mid-1970s, Antonovich was sponsoring anti-immigration bills that won little support, and giving speeches that were derided as alarmist.

“Twenty years ago,” he said, “they tried to say it was not a problem, that there weren’t many.”

Now, he said, there clearly are. “Los Angeles County,” he said, “can’t be the health maintenance organization to the world. The schools can’t be the schools for the world.”

Since the passage of Prop. 187, which would deny access to public schools and health care to illegal residents, Antonovich has suggested using the abandoned Mira Loma jail in his district as a detention site for deportees. He has convened a task force of county law enforcement officials to ensure that the local response would be coordinated. And in February, he submitted a 19-point plan to President Clinton on ways to stem illegal immigration.

His suggestions to the President include building an obstetrical facility near the border in Mexico to prevent pregnant woman from delivering their children here; increasing the size of the Border Patrol, and establishing a national toll-free phone line enabling employers to verify Social Security numbers.

Although the issue has won him points among many of his constituents, it has made others wary of his motives.

“It’s an issue that seems to be at the edge of his agenda,” said William Paparian, the current mayor of Pasadena, who ran against Antonovich in 1992. “He’s pandering to the mainstream in a troubled economic time.”

But noting Antonovich’s constant availability and low-key, friendly style, Paparian added: “There is nothing malicious about him. He tries to provide good basic government services to his constituents.”

Because of the budget crisis, however, even that reputation is at stake if the county approves the closure or significant downsizing of High Desert Hospital in Lancaster.

The 34-year-old county hospital is the third-largest employer in the Antelope Valley, and its closure would not play well in an area hard-hit by aerospace cutbacks and the downturn in housing prices. In all, the hospital employs about 800 people.

County health officials have proposed closing High Desert altogether to help cut their $655-million budget gap. In a compromise proposal, a special health task force has suggested eliminating all the hospital’s in-patient services and 40% of its outpatient services.

All summer long, Antelope Valley residents have been showing up at the board’s meeting room to make it clear that health care for 350,000 people would be at risk if the hospital is closed or scaled back. Although all the supervisors have been facing such concern during the budget deliberations, the High Desert supporters have been particularly angry and vocal.

The nearest public facility is at UCLA/Olive View Medical Center in Sylmar, also in Antonovich’s district, but an hour’s drive away. It, too, is in line for significant cuts.

“If he lets this hospital go,” one High Desert employee said during a protest last week, “people up here will die . . . and we won’t forget the guy who let that happen.”

Antonovich knows he can’t afford to be remembered as the man who “lost” High Desert, and has insisted that it be kept open despite the $35 million that would be saved by closing it.

Instead, he wants to launch a public-private venture with another hospital in the area so no one goes without care. Whether he gets support from other supervisors, however, is unclear, because four of the five board members have county hospitals that they are also fighting to keep open.

Still, Antonovich said he will not raise taxes to support county services, an issue on which he is sure to be pressured by other supervisors. But, he said, he will support a tippler’s tax on alcoholic beverages served in bars and restaurants and higher fees for amusement parks, hotel and motel rooms, as well as higher tipping fees at county garbage dumps.

On the other hand, he opposes a sales-tax increase or a countywide utility assessment. The difference, he said, is that the tippler’s tax and the others in the first category are taxes that people choose to pay, whereas the others are not.

Tax-watchers agree with his distinction.

“If he goes for a countywide sales tax or assessment tax, it would be a problem,” said Joel Fox, president of the Los Angeles-based Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn.

As in his Mafia joke, Antonovich also has a judge problem. Last year, he and the county lost a civil suit in which Antonovich was accused of trying to influence a judge on behalf of a campaign donor.

Antonovich maintained that he only called Superior Court Judge Eric Younger in the fall of 1988--when he was up for reelection--to give Los Angeles jeweler Krikor Suri a character reference for a lawsuit Suri was embroiled in with a former business associate named Avedis Kasparian.

But in his allegations against Antonovich and the county, Kasparian claimed he lost the dispute and $1.7 million because of Antonovich’s interference.

Campaign records show that Suri and his business partners had contributed $19,000 to Antonovich’s campaigns between 1985 and 1989, including a $3,000 check made out to his campaign four days before he spoke to Younger.

A jury found Antonovich liable for $1.2 million in damages, a sum that the county had agreed to pay before the trial began. Meanwhile, the district attorney’s office found that criminal charges were unwarranted and declined to prosecute.

In response to the civil suit, however, Katz authored a law requiring politicians themselves to pay for court costs and damages that result from illegal or unethical conduct.

Antonovich is well aware that if he loses his appeal--scheduled for an August hearing--and his constituents help foot the bill, it could be damaging. He says he regrets making the call, but still denies any improprieties.

“At no time did I think it was illegal, [but] it is better had I not done it,” he said. “It gives a bad impression.”