Pringle Will Sell Brown’s Cadillacs and Drive Himself

Newly enshrined GOP Assembly Speaker Curt Pringle has a message for California taxpayers: Leave the driving--and the penny-pinching--to us.

While his Democratic predecessor, Willie Brown, always kept a fleet of tony, chauffeur-driven Cadillacs ready and waiting, Pringle vows to settle for a more humble set of wheels.

In a gesture reminiscent of former Gov. Jerry Brown’s insistence on driving a blue Plymouth Satellite rather than a limousine, the conservative Republican from Garden Grove pledged Thursday to sell Brown’s trio of Cadillacs--purchased with taxpayer dollars in 1994 at a cost of $111,000--and drive himself around Sacramento in a state-issued 1991 Dodge Spirit.

The new speaker and his conservative allies ballyhooed the used-car sale as a further attempt to dismantle the empire Brown established during nearly 15 years as one of the capital’s most powerful figures.

Pringle called the Cadillacs “three of the crown jewels of the imperial speakership” and vowed to use money raised from the sale of the cars to finance an ongoing Republican audit of Assembly operations during the Brown years.

“These Cadillacs represent the excesses of the past,” Pringle said. “The taxpayers of this state are looking for accountability, they’re looking for fiscal responsibility. With that in mind, these cars have to go.”

Sounding as if the next thing Republicans might uncover is a cache of Imelda Marcos’ shoes stashed in some Capitol closet, Pringle said the Cadillacs “are just the tip of the iceberg” of Democrat extravagance under Brown, who left the Legislature last month after being elected mayor of San Francisco.

The cars--stationed by Brown in Sacramento, San Francisco and Los Angeles--have a total of 115,000 miles between them and are now worth about $82,000 on the used-car market, Republicans said.

“I find it hypocritical that Willie Brown--who packaged himself as the champion of the poor--had not one, not two, but three Cadillacs,” said Assemblyman Jim Battin (R-Palm Desert). “This truly shows once and for all that Willie Brown was a limousine liberal.”

Brown did not respond to inquiries. But the former speaker, who once called himself “the Ayatollah of the Assembly,” was not alone in using chauffeured state cars. Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, for example, is ferried about in two Lincoln Towne Cars.

Democrats, meanwhile, were rolling their eyes at the whole spectacle.

They suggested Pringle and his allies created Thursday’s media event--one of Brown’s erstwhile Cadillac Concours was parked beside Pringle’s Dodge near the west steps of the Capitol for the benefit of TV cameras--to cover up for some bad press this week. Most notably, Democrats have accused the GOP of snooping in their computer files, comparing it to the Watergate break-in during the 1972 presidential campaign.

“It’s cheap media,” said Democratic Leader Richard Katz of Sylmar. “It’s being done for the press. They probably want to divert attention from their break-in of the computers.”