Independent to End, Braude Leaves Office

For the first time in more than three decades, the Los Angeles City Council will convene today without its cranky and independent conscience--Marvin Braude.

“He’s always been a bit ahead of everybody else,” said former council colleague Zev Yaroslavsky, now chairman of the County Board of Supervisors. “He became the kind of person against whom you navigated your own ship. He controlled no votes. It was strictly the moral high ground or the intellectual high ground that he occupied,” Yaroslavsky said. “You really wanted to know where he stood. That was one of the key checkpoints I would go through to see if I was doing the right thing.”

The key to Braude’s longevity was embedded in his 1988 response to the council’s stinging 8-7 defeat of his beloved proposal to ban billboards.

“In 1982, I got four votes. Today, I got seven votes,” the professor-turned-politician said at the time. “That’s tremendous progress.”

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The billboard proposal, which Braude first introduced in 1970, is one of the few projects the 76-year-old lawmaker leaves unfinished as he departs City Hall after 32 years in office, joining the retired Ernani Bernardi as L.A.’s longest-serving council member.

But nearly every piece of landmark legislation Braude introduced took a similar stick-to-itiveness, as his council colleagues slowly grew into the Westside lawmaker’s ahead-of-his-time environmentalism and other philosophies.

In 1970, he vowed to keep Occidental Petroleum from drilling in Pacific Palisades; it was 18 years later--after the council and former Mayor Tom Bradley had thrice given Occidental the nod, and the courts had rejected attempts to stop the drilling--that citizens approved an initiative led by Braude and then-Councilman Yaroslavsky to protect the entire Los Angeles coastline from oil-drillers.

A former two-pack-a-day smoker, Braude suggested in 1973 that theaters, restaurants and bars be required to offer smoke-free zones. Two decades and a dozen council votes passed before Los Angeles became the nation’s largest city to ban smoking in all restaurants.

The avid bicyclist took his first ride in an electric car in 1977, when Jimmy Carter was president; last year, Braude got one of the first General Motors EV-1s when they came off the line.

“Marvin was never fearful of tilting at windmills. He knocked a lot of them down,” said Cindy Miscikowski, Braude’s longtime chief of staff. She was elected in June to represent his 11th District, which sprawls over the western portion of the Santa Monica Mountains and includes many of the city’s most affluent, best-educated and most politically powerful residents.

“He stood where he was for a long time, and the world caught up to him,” Miscikowski said. “He was this wonderful incrementalist. He could continue inching forward, and knew eventually he would prevail.”

Braude prevailed in bringing a bike path to Venice Beach, and in blocking a freeway from replacing Pacific Coast Highway. He prevailed in another initiative drive over big business, winning overwhelming support for a 1986 proposition that restricted development in 75% of the city, and stopped high-rises in Westwood and Encino.

He successfully fought landfills in the Santa Monica Mountains, where he and his two daughters love to hike, and helped preserve much of the area as a park. As a departing gift, his old foes at the county sanitation district even agreed to name the swath of parkland in his honor.

“He was somebody who, once he set his mind to do something, he just never gave up,” said Hal Bernson, who has sat next to Braude in the council horseshoe for the last 18 years. “He was sort of a loner. He would sit quietly, and then all of a sudden he’d get up and get into a very emotional tirade. Marvin believed very strongly in what he believed in.”

Beyond the long list of environmental accomplishments, Braude built a legacy as a fiscal conservative, the first in the city--and a pioneer nationally--to combine tightfistedness with social liberalism.

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As the longtime ruler of the council’s powerful Finance Committee, he opposed pay hikes for city employees--successfully staving off a fierce union attempt to oust him--and rejected proposals for a garbage collection fee, a city payroll tax and a property tax hike to balance the budget.

In 1979, he described his approach as based on one “very simple premise: You don’t levy additional taxes or fees unless you really need to.”

Later in his career, Braude landed at the helm of the Public Safety Committee during one of the most turbulent times in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department. He shepherded through the recommendations of the 1991 Christopher Commission, formed after the beating of black motorist Rodney King, and helped set in motion the largest expansion of the police force in the city’s history.

But, through it all, Braude steadfastly refused to become part of the club that is the council. He often made more enemies than friends by criticizing his colleagues for taking junkets and hiking their own salaries, and by voting against items like former Councilman Louis Nowell’s $110,000 remodeling of his office. (Braude eventually inherited the vast, wood-paneled suite, benefiting from the largess despite his vote.)

“I’m not a backslapper,” he told a Times interviewer in 1983. “I don’t go out of my way to say nice things about people I don’t really feel.”

Council President John Ferraro, the panel’s premier peacemaker, summed it up in 1987.

“There was a tendency to gang up on Marvin because he was so dogmatic,” said Ferraro, who joined the council one year after Braude. “Politics is the art of compromise, and that doesn’t fit for Marvin.”

Braude sat quietly at his desk during council meetings, while other members huddled telling jokes. In City Hall corridors, he barreled along head down, and often failed to offer a greeting or a handshake. A health nut who ate fruit and bran muffins while his colleagues scarfed potato chips and Oreos, he has been known to bring his own dinner in Tupperware containers to civic banquets.

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Born in Chicago, the son of a Lithuanian immigrant jeweler and a stenographer, Braude became an environmentalist while taking walks in the woods as a boy and strolling on the beach with dates in his teen years. His tendency to lecture stems from his years of teaching politics and economics at the University of Chicago; his personal fortune, which he says allowed him to enter politics and stay in public service so long, grew out of the venture capital firm he started there.

But in Yosemite National Park on their honeymoon, Braude and his psychiatrist wife, Marjorie, fell in love with California. They moved west in 1950.

“When we came to Los Angeles, there was housing all over the place and it was all very inexpensive,” he said in a recent interview, recalling the couple’s two-bedroom, two-bath walk-up on Gretna Green Way. “It had a deck in the back, and a deck in the front. My God, it was paradise, and it was $150 a month.”

Soon, the Braudes bought a home in Brentwood’s Crestwood Hills. Before investing, Marvin made Marjorie promise to stay there five years; they still live there. He joined the homeowners association and became its president. Then, in a catalytic move, he decided there should be a park in the Santa Monica Mountains, and formed a nonprofit organization to fight for the space.

“What’s the quality of our city--without open space--going to be like 25 years from now?” he asked as he collected signatures for a petition supporting the purchase of 25,000 acres of mountain parkland with a price tag of $20 million.

The fight for the park propelled him into politics. It was 1965 when the professor emerged from a field of three challengers and beat incumbent Councilman Karl Rundberg. Braude was 44.

Los Angeles had 2.7 million residents then, 180,880 per council district. Today, each member represents 242,540 people. The city’s budget was $319 million. Now it is $4 billion.

A ticket to Braude’s first fund-raiser was $12.50. The whole campaign cost $58,291; Miscikowski spent 10 times that amount in this year’s race.

“I always had a long-term perspective, that was my philosophy,” Braude said earlier this month as he took a break from packing decades of work into cartons. “We’re such a rich city. We have so many resources here. You’ve got 3.5 million people. One way or another, they’re going to make it go.”

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With a face and demeanor resembling Woody Allen’s, Braude was notorious for his plaid polyester suits, most ordered from the Sears Roebuck catalog despite his ample bank account.

His absent-mindedness has increased with the years. Sitting in for the president one day, Braude angrily tapped against the microphone, frustrated that it was turned off. Except he was tapping--and trying to speak into--a lamp.

Once, when he was supposed to be chairing a meeting, he sat instead in the clerk’s chair, and wondered where the president’s paperwork had gone.

Last year, he accidentally drove off with colleague Mike Feuer’s city car. Feuer’s had a baby’s car seat in the back; Braude’s had a bike.

“We have identical cars [1995 Ford Tauruses]. I was flattered that he chose one exactly like mine,” Braude said after the mix-up. “I looked in the back, and there was the baby carriage. I knew that wasn’t my bicycle. It reflected the difference in our life cycles.”

Braude always remained a detail man, happier poring over a thick environmental impact report or employee contract than making political speeches. He hates fund-raising.

Gerald Silver, a homeowner-activist in Encino, recalled encountering Braude sitting alone in the City Hall cafeteria after a hearing on a planning matter. Silver said he asked Braude if he wanted company; the councilman, never the politician, said he’d rather dine alone.

Despite his lack of personal popularity, in City Hall and in his community, Braude nevertheless survived easily. He was unopposed in four of his eight council campaigns, and had no serious challenges in any of the races for reelection. But then Miscikowski announced she wanted to replace her former boss, whether or not he agreed to step aside.

Last fall, Braude bowed out. He endorsed Miscikowski, and after a tough challenge from San Fernando Valley activist Georgia Mercer, she came out on top in June. The 11th District also elected another former Braude aide, Rob Glushon, to serve on the commission rewriting the city’s charter.

Braude said recently that he plans to teach at one of Los Angeles’ major universities upon retirement. He will also work on his causes, of course, and continue to go on long bike rides with Marjorie--cruising at sunset down the Venice bike path he built, dining at La Playa, a Mexican restaurant in Redondo Beach, then pedaling back by moonlight.

“The thing I feel most proud of is that I was able to give up the power,” Braude said in the recent interview.

“It was always my hope that she [Miscikowski] would succeed me,” he said. And if he had stayed in the race for one more lap?

“I think I would have won,” he said with a smile. “Big.”