Valley Attorney’s Drive Steers Charter Reform Juggernaut

David Fleming, impeccable in a black tuxedo with broad satin lapels, is working the room.

Hands pumping, arms gesturing, he has the glow in his eyes of a true believer. On this night, with Mayor Richard Riordan at his side, he greets an industry titan, a top developer, a leading politician.

His cause--an unlikely spark for the fire in the belly that Fleming clearly feels--is charter reform. He has carried the idea from an eye-glazing exercise for policy wonks to a juggernaut that could shape the future of Los Angeles.

Strewn along the way are shattered relationships with some members of the City Council--bad feelings that have spilled into the mayor’s own dealings with the panel.

This is the part that the 62-year-old attorney is not used to. David Fleming is a titan in his own way, a self-made millionaire whose father sold vacuum cleaners in Davenport, Iowa. He is more accustomed to the respect and admiration of peers and politicians.

He is known mainly for impressive acts of philanthropy--he once gave $1 million to Valley Presbyterian Hospital--and tireless devotion to civic organizations like the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn. He is used to being considered, above all, loyal, trustworthy and honest.

“Dave Fleming,” said Riordan, a mayor who places a premium on loyalty, “is the man most likely to fall on a grenade for me.”

It is Fleming who political insiders credit with keeping the Riordan administration focused on pleasing the San Fernando Valley, where Fleming has lived since moving to California in 1956 to attend law school at UCLA.

In his community work and his political efforts, Fleming is driven by a deep emotional force from his Midwestern childhood. He remembers, he says, how the community pulled close during World War II, persevering through rationing and fear by working together.

This sense of unity, of shared responsibility, he says, is what charter reform would bring to Los Angeles.

His dream is a city run by neighborhood councils, where residents could have a say in what goes on around them. The City Council, he says, should be a larger legislative body, made up of representatives from the local agencies.

Such change, he says, is the only way to restore a sense of civic pride in L.A., a city that he believes is in a crisis as bad as any felt during the war or the Depression. Along the way, of course, Fleming and his allies believe, it would improve the business climate.

“The cynicism out there about government is incredible,” he said. “It’s going to kill democracy in this country. And this city is going to fly apart.”

Fleming has made some enemies along the way. His normal frankness, fine for a soft-spoken attorney buttonholing a colleague, reverberates too loudly in public forums. A few months ago, in a newspaper interview, he recommended that readers “check the facts” before believing what Councilman Richard Alarcon had to say. Councilwoman Laura Chick “drives the mayor up the wall,” he declared. He called Marvin Braude “unpredictable” and said the longtime Westside and Valley councilman has been in politics too long.

The council responded in kind, with some members privately griping that Fleming needs to watch out if he wants to be confirmed for a second term on the city’s Fire Commission.

“I think that some of the rhetoric he has employed has been more incendiary than has been warranted,” said Councilman Mike Feuer, who represents parts of the Westside and the Valley and once supported Fleming’s vision for reform.

“He has seriously constrained his relationships with many members of the council.”

It is odd, in a way, that a man so uniformly well-regarded as Fleming, who is always careful to keep up relationships with politicians and donates generously to the campaigns of many, should engender such hostility.

*

To understand it requires a look at Fleming himself--at his career and personal style, and at the politics of the Valley in the 1990s.

In 1956, World War II had been over for a decade, and Fleming had been accepted to law school at UCLA. He moved here with his parents, settling in the San Fernando Valley at a time when the Ventura Freeway ended at Lankershim Boulevard and there was little besides orchards and ranches dotting the dry but fertile land west of Sepulveda Boulevard.

The work ethic that would drive his later success was already in place. At 22, he had nine years of experience under his belt as a sports reporter and announcer, having worked since the age of 13 at the Davenport Daily Times and later at radio stations in Iowa and Chicago.

He was irrevocably molded, he says now, by life in Davenport during the war years and the Depression that preceded it.

His father--a staunch conservative who was 54 when Fleming was born--was a branch manager for the Electrolux Corp.

“During the war, they couldn’t make vacuum cleaners” because of rationing, Fleming said, “so they sold contracts door-to-door. People would put a few dollars down, and after the war they would get their vacuum cleaner.”

In Davenport, he said, folks huddled close, throwing themselves into the war effort with great fervor. Even a small child, he said, could feel the passion of it and the sense of responsibility.

“I’ll never forget the Second World War, because that was when this whole country pulled together,” Fleming said, more than 50 years later. “There was a sense of community, a sense of obligation that I’ve never seen since.”

The Valley in the late ‘50s was accessible and not terribly crowded--not too different from Davenport. And most of the folks moving in were, like himself, young adults looking for an affordable place to live and a feeling of community.

After law school, Fleming joined the small firm of White & Roberts in Van Nuys. He stayed there until 1992, when he joined the firm Latham & Watkins. He has been married twice and has two sons.

In 1967, he was named one of California’s five outstanding young men by the Junior Chamber of Commerce, or Jaycees. His friends were other young men on the way up.

He met Charles Manatt, whose law firm would later become an influential force in Democratic Party politics, in the Army Reserves. One day, Manatt told him that he and his new partner, Tom Phelps, had decided to move to Century City and “go big.”

“I decided to stay small,” Fleming recalled. “To be in a place where I could control things.”

Fleming was soon made a partner at White & Roberts, and while he kept his relationship with Manatt, an active Democrat who would one day chair the Democratic National Committee, he felt a pull toward the Republicans.

“The firm represented a lot of Republicans,” explained Fleming, who had founded the Young Democrats at UCLA law school. “So I kind of modified myself.”

The firm was deeply involved in Valley politics and government. Fleming found himself lobbying for the city of San Fernando after the 1971 Sylmar earthquake and representing the region’s fledgling industrial association, later to become VICA.

He took on much of the firm’s work with financial institutions, and over a decade and a half brought $2 billion in bonds to market as an attorney.

These early years brought the relationships that were to play out decades later in the arena of city politics.

In the early 1980s, through his friendship with Arco Chairman Lod Cook, he made the acquaintance of Richard Riordan, by then a successful lawyer with his own firm downtown.

By this time, Fleming, a Studio City resident, was deeply enmeshed in Valley causes. By the end of the decade he would chair the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn., as the old industrial association had become known. In 1991, he won the Fernando Award, the Valley’s most prestigious honor given for philanthropy and community involvement.

He made VICA a powerhouse, bringing such guests as Henry Kissinger to the formerly sleepy group’s meetings. And, starting in the Tom Bradley administration, he tried to get City Hall to notice the Valley.

“He’s a rainmaker,” VICA Director Bonnie Herman said. “He’s a very forceful, dynamic individual with lots of creative ideas.”

One of those ideas was charter reform.

In the beginning, nobody listened. Even his friend Riordan, who was elected mayor in 1993, turned him down, saying his advisors had told him the idea was too boring, that it would attract no support.

But Fleming pressed on, bringing to this effort the powerful focus he applies to all his endeavors. Then came Assemblywoman Paula Boland and the Valley secession movement.

Suddenly, charter reform looked like a way out. Give Valley residents a chance to remake the way the city works, Fleming argued, and maybe they won’t want to leave.

He enlisted Councilmen Mike Feuer and Marvin Braude in the cause, holding a news conference with them last spring to announce support for a plan to let the City Council appoint a charter reform commission, whose final recommendations would go before the voters.

*

But the council, locked in a test of wills with Riordan, indicated that it wanted a say in what, if anything, went before the voters.

Fleming suddenly pulled out of the deal with Feuer and Braude, saying he did not believe the council would let the voters be the final arbiters. He went back to Riordan, who quickly signed on.

The race was on. Voters will decide on Tuesday whether to set up an elected charter reform commission, an idea backed by Riordan and Fleming. Their well-financed plan, financed in part with $35,000 in donations from Fleming, has caught the attention of voters and could well pass.

Those on the City Council who oppose the plan see it as a power grab by Riordan and his supporters, who hope in part to give the mayor’s office more power through reform.

But they concede Fleming’s juggernaut will be hard to stop. To Dave Fleming, that’s as it should be.

“If we don’t get some meaningful reform, this city is going to break up,” Fleming said.

“I don’t care if the people who win are on the mayor’s slate or anybody else’s slate. I just want people with an open mind.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Profile of David Fleming

* BORN: Sept. 20, 1934

* HOMETOWN: Studio City

* EDUCATION: Augustana College, Iowa, B.A. 1956

* PROFESSION: Attorney

* HONORS: Philanthropist of the Year, National Assn. of Philanthropy, Southern California chapter, 1994; the Fernando Award, 1991