Johnston’s Baptism of Fire

Ventura County supervisors hired a new chief administrator and engaged in an ongoing labor dispute with deputies in 2001, while an energy crisis that threatened to overtake all other state business receded by the end of the year, only to be replaced by broader financial worries that promise to dominate Sacramento in the coming months.

In Ventura County, Johnny Johnston, 59, assumed the county’s top management post in March, charged with overseeing a $1.1-billion budget and a 7,200-member work force. Some questioned whether the former parks and maintenance director was up to the job.

But Johnston remained tough through a difficult budget cycle and months of labor strife that followed.

In July, the county’s largest union, representing 4,200 typists, librarians and accountants, walked off the job for a week over its demand for better pay and pension benefits. The union was eventually granted large pay hikes but not the retroactive retirement benefits it was seeking.

Better pension pay was also a central issue in tense negotiations between the county and sheriff’s deputies.

Johnston maintained the county could not afford the $100-million cost. The deputies’ union accused the county chief of using inflated figures and insisted there is enough surplus cash in the county’s retirement system to cover the cost.

Tensions neared the boiling point earlier this month when union leaders threatened to strike. Johnston and supervisors refused to back down.

After meeting with its members, the union announced that the deputies had decided against a strike. The union said it would pursue legal options to resolve issues, ensuring that the dispute will spill over into 2002.

In Los Angeles, the electorate spent much of 2001 replacing its leaders. All three citywide elected officials got their jobs in 2001, as did a majority of City Council members. City Council President John Ferraro, 76, the longest-serving member of the council, died. Alex Padilla, 28, the youngest member of the council took his place as president. A Democratic mayor replaced a Republican one.

In Sacramento, the challenges were more governmental than political, as state officials spent the first half of the year trying to keep the lights on and the second half trying to figure out how to pay for their earlier actions. Gov. Gray Davis’ year was dominated by the energy crisis, and he now faces the task of patching together a budget even as he attempts to win reelection against the eventual victor of a fight among three Republican contenders: Secretary of State Bill Jones, former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan and businessman Bill Simon Jr.

While governments across the state each faced their own local quandaries, some issues transcended locale. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and encroaching recession upended priorities throughout California along with the rest of the country. By December, public agencies throughout the state were wrestling with higher security costs even as they tried to adjust to declining revenues brought on by the sluggish economy.

The enormous effects of the looming budget crunch were barely imaginable just 12 months ago.

When the Los Angeles mayoral race picked up speed last January, the top six candidates spent most of the time trying to distinguish their positions on topics such as left-hand-turn signals, neighborhood councils and shortened workweeks for police officers.

“We all have the same vision,” businessman Steve Soboroff, the sole Republican in the race, joked at one congenial mayoral forum. “You dial 1-800-VISION, and you get the vision.”

By summer, with the race narrowed to City Atty. James K. Hahn and former California Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, the candidates were increasingly defined in negative terms. Hahn challenged Villaraigosa’s commitment to fighting crime and aired a commercial that interspersed images of his opponent and a crack pipe; Villaraigosa angrily accused Hahn of cynical politics and smear tactics and compared him to a notorious Los Angeles mayor of yore, Sam Yorty.

Hahn won with 54% of the vote, helped along by two bases of support not generally united: conservative whites and African Americans.

With Hahn’s election, Los Angeles had a Democratic mayor for the first time in eight years. Rocky Delgadillo, a former aide to outgoing Mayor Riordan, was elected city attorney and became the first Latino citywide official of modern times. And Laura Chick became the first woman to hold such a seat with her victory in the city controller’s race.

Completing the out-with-the-old, in-with-the-new turnover, seven new members joined the 15-member Los Angeles City Council during the year, with still another seat to be filled in March.

Today, more than half of the council is younger than 50, and a majority of its members have served less than a year.

Youth brought a new energy to City Hall, along with some gaffes.

In his first month as council leader, Padilla reshuffled committee assignments, giving the plum jobs to those who backed his presidency and denying the requests of the five members who voted against him--three of whom happened to be the council’s only African American members.

Padilla’s attempt at power-brokering backfired. The next week, hundreds of black community leaders packed City Council chambers to protest the decision. The new council president was forced to back down.

The far more seasoned Hahn eased into his new tasks more slowly. He expanded after-school programs and won approval for a compressed workweek for police officers, a much-debated campaign promise.

He also pushed for development of the city’s neighborhood council network, a promise of the 1999 charter reform effort that has been stymied by bureaucratic obstacles.

The coming year brings a broader political challenge to the mayor’s office--the continuing press by some residents in the San Fernando Valley and other areas of the city to break off from Los Angeles.

Hahn has staked his authority on the defeat of those efforts, and in the closing months of 2001 began to wage his counter-campaign.

Even as city officials were negotiating the terms of a proposed secession ballot measure that could be before voters as early as November 2002, Hahn formed a political action committee called L.A. United, enlisting some of the city’s sharpest political strategists to wage a political campaign to stop the breakup movement.

“I will not allow my city to be divided,” the mayor said.

The secession campaign, which includes efforts in San Pedro and Hollywood, is likely to unfold in the most uncertain of political times, with an electorate apprehensive about war, terrorism and the state and national economies.

In late November, Los Angeles’ administrative officer warned of a $180-million budget gap because of a drop in tax revenue and unanticipated costs, such as increased security after the terrorist attacks.

Even with the city’s reserve fund, Los Angeles could face an estimated $20.7-million deficit.

Similarly gloomy reports were issued across the state. Governments were forced to beef up even as taxes dropped hoped-for relief from Sacramento, but state lawmakers are confronted with the same conflict. As the year closed, they faced cutting $4 billion from the current budget while confronting a $12-billion deficit in the new budget that must, by law, be in place by July 1.

The gap is so big in part because the state spent much of 2001 buying electrical power and insisting it would pay for that effort by selling bonds.

Those bonds remain unsold, and without them, officials concede the budget squeeze in the coming year will be one of the tightest in recent times.

That would be just one residue of the power crisis of 2001, an issue that came to the fore just before the year began and overshadowed all other work by the government.

“For me, it was the year lost to energy--one-sixth of my legislative life lost to energy,” said Assemblyman Fred Keeley (D-Boulder Creek), who perhaps more than any other lawmaker became enmeshed in the issue. In the first year of his final Assembly term, Keeley spent dozens of nights engaged in detailed negotiations that droned on into the wee hours and dealt with arcane issues never before confronted by legislators.

Other issues were barely noticed in the power morass. Health care legislation was proposed, and stalled. Lawmakers granted significant new rights to domestic partners, including gay couples, and imposed new licensing restrictions on prospective handgun owners.

Even legislative reapportionment, which can make or break political careers, received merely passing notice.

The plan worked out by the state Senate and Assembly won easy approval.

For all involved, energy was the most complex policy issue they had ever faced. Independent power companies were charging utilities unheard-of sums for wholesale electricity.

The state was forced to get into the power business when major utilities exhausted their credit. And the term “rolling blackout” entered the general lexicon.

Davis spent most of the first four months of the year scrambling to keep the lights on--failing six times when blackouts hit--and trying to block an electricity rate hike, fearing a ratepayer revolt that would rival the property tax-slashing Proposition 13 of 1978.

By April, the state Public Utilities Commission stepped in and raised rates, prompting Davis to go on statewide television to announce that he too relented and would support a rate hike.

He had hoped that action would have eased financial pressure on the utilities.

But the following day, Pacific Gas & Electric, the century-old mammoth utility that is among the state’s biggest private employers, concluded that the rate hike came too late and was insufficient, and that state politicians were unable to solve its problem.

“The negotiations that we have been involved in since last November are going nowhere,” Robert Glynn, chairman of PG&E; Corp., said on the day PG&E; filed its bankruptcy petition.

Davis was furious: “I believe PG&E; has dishonored itself and has created undue alarm among 34 million residents.”

The governor ordered his aides to seal a deal to save Southern California Edison from the same fate. By the following week, Davis and Edison unveiled an agreement he insisted would rescue the company.

It fell through, however. Republicans refused to support it, as did Democrats in the state Senate. Once again, the Public Utilities Commission stepped in, working out a deal to save Edison from bankruptcy.

By the end of the year, rolling blackouts were a fading memory, and officials in Sacramento were awaiting, with dread, the next crisis--the governor’s budget proposal.

That document will be on lawmakers’ desks in the coming weeks, and they will debate it under the full glare of a gubernatorial campaign, a contest that promises to dominate California’s government and politics for most of 2002.

Earlier installments of this series are available at https://www.latimes.com/reflections2001