Baugh’s Old Campaign Foe: Spoiler Charges

For Assemblyman Scott R. Baugh, election campaigns and criminal proceedings go together like New Year’s Eve and a hangover.

It was on the eve of his election in 1995 that prosecutors targeted him in a criminal investigation. They wanted to know whether Baugh helped recruit a spoiler Democrat, who was put on the ballot with falsified documents to help Baugh beat a better-known Democratic candidate.

Just four days before the primary in 1996, Baugh was indicted on charges he lied on his campaign finance reports in the previous election. Prosecutors said he perjured himself to conceal a $1,000 contribution from, and his friendship with, the Democratic spoiler, Laurie Campbell.

This year, it’s more of the same: Baugh will go before voters June 2 in the 67th Assembly District primary and six days later will be in court for a hearing in his felony case.

With the allegations of political tricks some call “Baughgate” still swirling about him, the energetic legislator maintains his innocence and tells voters to judge him by his record as a lawmaker. Baugh (R-Huntington Beach) says the criminal case against him is about reporting errors that were the fault of his campaign treasurer. He reminds audiences that he has been convicted of nothing and says he played no role in recruiting Campbell.

“I assume everyone in this room subscribes to the view that you are innocent till proven guilty,” he said at a candidates forum in Irvine last month.

Obviously, many do.

Baugh has won two elections since four GOP activists, including two Baugh campaign aides, were exposed for falsifying Campbell’s nomination papers to get her on the ballot during the crucial 1995 special election to recall and replace GOP Assemblywoman Doris Allen.

Regardless, his current GOP opponents won’t let it die. That’s not surprising, since two of them--Haydee Velazquez Tillotson and Allen--were on the ballot in the 1995 election.

Tillotson, 59, a local developer and multimillionaire, calls Baugh “a man with a cloud over his head.”

“Keeping your word is the No. 1 priority,” says Allen, 61, who incurred the GOP’s wrath for making a deal with the Assembly’s Democrats to get herself elected speaker. “If you have been lied to by an individual . . . God help us all when you get to Sacramento.”

Also running in the race as Republicans are Fountain Valley Councilman Chuck Conlosh, 33; Seal Beach Mayor Marilyn Bruce Hastings, 69; and Felix Rocha Jr., 53, vice president of the Orange County Board of Education.

The 67th Assembly District includes all of Huntington Beach, Seal Beach and Cypress, most of Fountain Valley and parts of seven other cities.

A Democrat, Rima Nashashibi, and a Libertarian, Autumne Brown, are running unopposed. Democrat Marie Fennel will appear on the ballot, but she has dropped out.

While all of Baugh’s opponents question his honesty, none has attacked his legislative record.

Democrats and Republicans alike in the Assembly praise him as hard-working and bright and call him an effective lawmaker. Some Democrats are quick to point out that Baugh, unlike many of Orange County’s other legislators, does not let ideology keep him from working with members of the other party.

Baugh is “well regarded, likable, and his word is good. He is intelligent and soft-spoken,” said Assemblywoman Carole Migden (D-San Francisco), one of the chamber’s most liberal members.

Migden and Baugh have paired up to craft an HMO reform measure that would allow patients to appeal HMO denials of medical procedures costing more than $1,000 to an independent doctor, whose decision is binding. It was approved unanimously last month by the Health Committee, of which Baugh is vice chairman.

Baugh had eight of the 18 bills he introduced signed into law in 1997, a higher percentage than any of his Orange County colleagues. Among the bills was a populist law that allows new-car owners to avoid smog tests for the first five years--saving Californians $350 million in fees--and special purpose legislation that allotted most of the cost of retrofitting the Bay Bridge and the Vincent Thomas Bridge to Northern California, saving Southern California taxpayers $100 million.

Baugh got a rating of 0 from the AFL-CIO and the League of Conservation Voters, while scoring 100 with the Chamber of Commerce and getting an A from the gun owners lobby. He’s against abortion and supports both Proposition 226, which would limit union spending in political campaigns, and Proposition 227, which would dismantle bilingual education programs. He supports school vouchers and voted to support a change in state labor regulations that allows employers to pay overtime after 40 hours of work in a week rather than after 8 hours of work in a day.

Despite his indictment in 1996, he won the primary that year with 49.7% of the vote against two challengers who split the opposition. This time, the anybody-but-Baugh votes will be split five ways.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if collectively they got more than him,” said Allen Hoffenblum, who writes the Target Book, which tracks legislative races statewide. “But it would take someone spending a couple of hundred thousand dollars for him not to be the top vote-getter. His problem is with the D.A., not with the voters.”

Tillotson has spent that much and more in losing races, dipping into a personal fortune to spend about $490,000 on a failed run for supervisor in 1994, and about $190,000 to succeed Allen and defeat Baugh in 1995. She refuses to say how much she will spend in this election, but she has a full-time manager and is using phone banks and mailers to reach voters.

Baugh leads the pack in contributions, according to the latest campaign finance report, spending about $33,000 as of March 17 and having $7,106 in cash on hand.

Tillotson, a planning commissioner in Huntington Beach, said her top issues are tax relief and improving education. She said she is “shocked” that top state government officers, including legislators, received a 26% pay increase while her city hasn’t been able to raise police salaries for several years.

Tillotson, who was born in Cuba, is against abortion and gun control and supports Propositions 226 and 227, school vouchers and the 40-hour flexible week.

In contrast to Tillotson, Hastings is running on a meager budget and relying on her reputation from eight years as a city councilwoman. She is sending no mailers, seeking no endorsements and distributing fliers herself.

“Honesty and integrity are the key issues,” she said. “I have never been recalled. I don’t have a court date. I have an impeccable record. I am a person of character.”

Hastings supports 226, 227 and the 40-hour flexible workweek. She would support a three-year state experiment with school vouchers, after which the program would be assessed. She opposes gun control and is personally against abortion but would permit it during the first trimester. “It cannot be done for convenience or birth control,” she said.

Allen, who served the district for 12 years in the Assembly, is running on her record as a legislator and five years as a Huntington Beach Union High School District trustee. The highlights of her career include rewriting the California Environmental Quality Act in 1993 to make it more business friendly and winning adoption in 1990 of Proposition 132, which barred gill-net fishing in California’s coastal waters.

“That is my legacy,” she said of the ban, which won her an international environmental award.

Still smarting from the recall, Allen attacks Republican leaders for not accepting her “bipartisan approach” to running the Assembly. She says if state GOP leaders had selected more moderate candidates, they wouldn’t have seen so many defeated in 1996.

Allen, who had surgery for cancer a year ago, said she wants to be reelected “to get a bond bill passed to fix the schools for the kids” and to go after the HMOs. She was an early critic of the health plans. “I don’t have time for revenge,” she said.

She opposes 226 and 227, saying that immigrant students should get bilingual instruction for more than a year before being put in English-only classes. Allen is against gun control and abortion rights. She has taken no position on the eight-hour day, and she would favor a voucher program that made it possible for poor kids to go to private schools and not just give public money to wealthy folks.

Conlosh, a police officer in Huntington Beach, said the key issue is that “people are tired of the same old thing. They just want an honest, ordinary person to represent them.”

He is campaigning primarily by walking precincts and going to public events, a tactic that paid off two years ago when he was the surprise winner in the council race. “I found a good, powerful tool. If you have no money, you put on a good pair of walking shoes and go out walking.”

Conlosh favors Proposition 227 but opposes 226, saying it “throws politics out of balance.” He is against gun control and abortion rights. Conlosh supports the eight-hour day and school vouchers.

Rocha, a retired INS agent, called public safety and incarceration of criminals the biggest issues in the campaign. He called for using existing jails for hard-core criminals and placing others in privatized facilities. “People who can pay for their own incarceration should pay for it.”

Rocha has no funds and is campaigning on his own. He is against Propositions 226 and 227. He is opposed to abortion rights and would ban assault weapons with large ammunition clips. He supports the flexible 40-hour week and would support school vouchers “if they require the same standards in public and private schools and require private schools to take all that come to the door.”