Term Limits Fail to Deter Insiders From Valley Races

Four of six Democratic candidates for the 39th Assembly District have done tours of duty in the political-government culture, three as aides to officeholders and a fourth as a former state assemblyman.

It’s enough to make some people wince.

“It’s like the Mafia,” said North Hollywood resident Richard Poirier, head of the Republican Party’s 39th Assembly District Committee. “You arrest a Mafia kingpin, but there’s always a bunch of lieutenants and underlings ready to take their place.”

What’s raising Poirier’s ire is a candidate lineup that spurs questions about the effectiveness of Proposition 140, the term limits measure that voters approved in 1990 to shake up Sacramento and usher in a new era of government rule by citizen-politicians.

Although electing citizen-politicians is the goal of term limits supporters like former Los Angeles County Supervisor Pete Schabarum, the measure does not preclude political veterans from running--and winning--election to state Assembly and Senate seats where incumbents in 1996 are being forced out by term limits.

Thus, despite the angry anti-government mood that produced Proposition 140 and that continues to animate voters, experienced government officials are running for five open state legislative seats in the Valley and boasting that their experience would be an asset, not a liability, in Sacramento.

In fact, at times the candidates for these seats look very familiar.

For example, state Assemblywoman Paula L. Boland (R-Granada Hills), her Assembly career capped by term limits, is running for an open Senate seat in the Glendale-Pasadena area. Meanwhile, former Assemblyman Tom McClintock, an enthusiastic term limits supporter, is coming out of retirement to run for Boland’s seat.

In the 39th Assembly District, Jim Keysor, who represented the same area in the 1970s as the local assemblyman, is a candidate for the seat being vacated by Richard Katz (D-Sylmar).

Under term limits, Assembly members can serve a maximum of six years or three two-year terms; senators can serve eight years or two four-year terms.

Larry Levine, a political strategist for the Democratic leadership in the Assembly, doubts that the goal of term limit idealists--to have a statehouse filled with citizen-politicians who do a brief stint of public service and then return home to live under the laws they have made--is realistic.

Reviewing a list of open Democratic Assembly seats up for grabs in 1996, Levine observed recently that many of the aspiring candidates are local government officeholders, aides to sitting lawmakers or, in a few instances, spouses or relatives of the state legislators.

Proposition 140’s “effect on the state Legislature won’t be so apparent because many of the people who are running for these seats [relatively high up in the political hierarchy] have already held some lower office,” even if it’s a part-time school board or city council post, Levine said. That seems only natural, he added.

Still, no one doubts that the term limits measure is upending Sacramento and the San Fernando Valley’s own delegation there. Because of the measure’s passage, the Valley in 1994 lost the services of former state Sen. David Roberti, although his place was taken by an incumbent, Sen. Herschel Rosenthal (D-Los Angeles).

Next year, the Valley will lose four veterans to term limits: state Sen. Newton R. Russell (R-Glendale), first elected to the Senate in 1974; Assemblywoman Barbara Friedman (D-North Hollywood), first elected in 1991; Boland, first elected in 1990; and Katz, first elected in 1980.

A fifth Valley-based state legislative seat, held by Assemblyman James E. Rogan (R-Glendale), is also being vacated by its incumbent. Rogan is running for the seat being left open by the retirement of U.S. Rep. Carlos J. Moorhead (R-Glendale).

The vacancies in these seats are what is making 1996 a particularly active season and giving voters a chance to say whether they are still moved by the spirit of term limits.

If that spirit is alive and well, voters should have little sympathy for candidates who are part of the established political-government culture, said Schabarum, who was the chief architect of the term limits measure.

“The premise behind Proposition 140 was to create opportunities for citizen-politicians to run, not a bunch of legislative staffers and like that,” Schabarum said. “I’d like to see people running who’ve gone through the test of being in business, being a professional person and a homeowner, an average citizen.”

Accusing one’s opponents of being career politicians is old hat. But with Proposition 140 as a backdrop, it may have new resonance.

In the 39th Assembly District, Democratic primary candidate Tony Cardenas, a Realtor, is already trying to capitalize on his apolitical background. “After a career as an engineer, I’m an independent businessman,” Cardenas says in his voter literature. “What I’m not is a career politician! We know the career politicians do not share our values. They only use our community.”

Is he the kind of citizen-politician envisioned as the ideal by term limits advocates? “I’ve seen government from the perspective of 95% of the voters--from the outside, looking in,” Cardenas said recently. “I’m taking a big pay cut [if elected], and people think it’s crazy for me to do this. But I want to serve.”

Nonsense, scoffs 39th District Democratic candidate Jim Dantona, who claims the major endorsement Cardenas won from the Latino Legislative Caucus--the organization of Latino state lawmakers in Sacramento--should make it apparent that Cardenas is no political newcomer. “He’s been anointed by a political machine,” said Dantona, who has a long record of working as a staffer to Sacramento elected officials.

But Dantona proudly carries his record of seven years as an aide to Roberti, two years as an aide to state Controller Gray Davis and one year on the staff of a Senate committee. “My credentials are absolutely an asset,” Dantona said. The 39th District, in the poorer East Valley, needs anti-crime and economic development help from Sacramento, Dantona says, and it won’t be available if the area’s lawmaker is a total novice.

“I know how to get things done in Sacramento,” Dantona said. “I understand the legislative process.” On the other hand, Dantona is quick to add that he also ran his own public relations and land-use consulting business from 1985 to 1992 before returning to government to work for Davis and the Senate.

Also running in the 39th Democratic primary are Valerie Salkin, an attorney who is a former aide to state Board of Equalization member Brad Sherman; Michael Del Rio, a banker who most recently was an aide to Rosenthal; Jose Galvan, a city librarian and Latino community activist; and Keysor, who, although a businessman, has run for office eight times and served in the state Assembly during the 1970s. In the GOP primary, the only candidate is Ollie McCaulley, an accountant and former police officer.

In the 38th Assembly District, GOP candidate Ross Hopkins, a public affairs consultant and former Lockheed employee, is also quick to claim that two of his GOP primary opponents--McClintock, the former assemblyman, and Scott Wilk, Boland’s chief of staff--are just the kind of candidates term limit proponents were trying to avoid.

“Scott [Wilk] has been a young legislative staff guy for years, and McClintock was an aide to [former state Sen. Ed] Davis and then he was in the state Assembly for 10 years,” Hopkins said. McClintock “only left the Assembly to run for Congress and then later he ran for state controller,” Hopkins said.

“The feedback I’m getting from voters is that they are looking for new faces, new blood,” Hopkins added.

But Wilk, for one, replied that he has had business experience (as an executive with the California Motor Car Dealers Assn. and his own vending machine company) and that voters want a candidate who is also government-savvy. “I highlight it as an asset,” Wilk said of his government experience.

In a Legislature with a lot of newcomers thanks to term limits, a person with government experience will be able to shine for the constituents, said Wilk, who has been endorsed by Boland, his boss. “There’ll be no learning curve for me. I’ll be up and running from the start.”

Previously, McClintock, a term limits supporter, has echoed those views, saying that what the Legislature needs now is the kind of experience that he brings to the table.

As a conservative, Wilk also said it would be hard to paint him as the kind of government official voters in the 38th District were trying to purge from the body politic when they voted for term limits.

Also running in the 38th District Republican primary are Steve Frank, a conservative activist and political consultant who has been endorsed by local state Sen. Cathie Wright (R-Simi Valley); Rob Larkin, an insurance agency owner and former president of the Ventura County Republican Party; Robert C. Hamlin, a retired sheriff’s deputy; and Peggy Freeman, former head of a day-care center.

Running in the 38th Democratic primary are Jon Lauritzen, a math teacher, and David Ross, a computer software engineer.

Meanwhile, in the Glendale-Pasadena area, GOP primary candidate Wilbert Smith, who is running for Russell’s 21st Senate District seat, is also trying to score points on the career-politician front. But his target, fellow Republican Boland, isn’t taking it lying down.

The term limits sentiment against politicians has “got to hurt Boland, certainly not help her,” said Smith, who, after leaving a career as a Bank of America executive a year ago, has been a creature of Sacramento officialdom as director of community relations for Gov. Pete Wilson. In 1994, Smith also ran for state superintendent of schools, coming in third in the race for the nonpartisan office.

But Boland, noting that she was elected to the Assembly in 1990 after two decades as a Realtor, said Proposition 140 was not really meant as a slap at representatives like herself, but at the entrenched, Democratic politicians.

“People were tired of Willie Brown and the systems that were destroying this state. That’s why they voted for Proposition 140,” she said. Besides, Boland added, she’s moved into a Glendale condominium so that she can run for Russell’s Senate seat because “I’m anxious to finish a lot of things I started for the public in the Assembly.

“I’m not enamored of Sacramento and politics,” she said.

Also running in this Republican primary are Robert “Bob” Oltman, owner of a warehouse storage business who ran in 1992 for the state Assembly, spending almost a quarter of a million dollars of his own money, and Sharon Beauchamp, a former longtime Glendale Board of Education member. The only Democrat in the race is Adam Schiff, a former federal prosecutor, who ran in 1991 for a downtown Los Angeles-based Assembly seat and in 1994 for the Assembly seat now held by Rogan.

Nonetheless, many Proposition 140 supporters think the measure is working.

“The jury’s still out on the final outcome, but we’re pleased with what we are seeing,” said Lewis Uhler, president of a conservative think tank and a sponsor of Proposition 140. “We’re seeing, on the margins, [candidates] who have more real-world experience getting into politics.

“It’s been very hard to recruit a business person to run” for office in the past, Uhler said. “Now it’s less so. They don’t feel like they have to devote their lives to the political enterprise to serve, to get into the state Legislature, to get key committee chairmanships in the Legislature--even become Assembly speaker and make a difference.”

Charles Price, a Chico State political science professor who has been monitoring the impact of Proposition 140, said it is his impression that fewer career politicians are getting elected to state legislative offices these days.

One finding of his review of the 1992 class of freshmen state legislators, Price said, was that the newcomers were older and were interrupting established private-sector careers to enter government.

“These were not young people looking for careers in government,” he said.