Hoping Gender, Combative Style Set Her Apart

Kathleen Connell is not afraid to make enemies. And she has plenty of them.

When her election as California’s controller landed her on the state’s retirement boards, her first act was to expose the travel excesses of her fellow board members.

When state senators invited her to a friendly get-acquainted session at the Capitol, she set the tone for their relationship by upbraiding them for using taxpayers funds to pay for the coffee and sweet rolls.

When the state’s energy crisis erupted, she took on Gov. Gray Davis by threatening to reveal on a Web site the secret prices he was negotiating for electricity--a disclosure that Davis’ office insisted would have imperiled California’s efforts to bargain with utility companies.

Since becoming state controller in 1995, Connell has alienated some of the most powerful voices in the state Capitol. Forced into the role of an outsider, she can claim few strong allies in either party.

More than once that has made her the target of retaliation. She has been subjected to an attempt by a Democratic lawmaker to abolish her office, a move by Republicans to limit her authority and an effort by fellow retirement board members to restrict her fund-raising.

Now, as she fights for attention in the crowd of Los Angeles mayoral candidates, her behavior in Sacramento has helped make her the loner, one of the few major contestants in the race without a proven loyal core of support.

It’s a position that disturbs the combative Connell not at all.

“I am an outsider,” she admits, framing her record as an asset. “I am an independent voice for a better Los Angeles, and I think that voters are going to be supportive of my candidacy.”

A late arrival in the race--Connell launched her campaign a year or more after many of her top adversaries--she is relying on the formula that swept her into statewide office in 1994. She is banking that now, as then, her gender as well as her attitude will set her apart from the crowd.

Connell’s election victory in 1994 was startling. At the time, she had never before run for elective office, much less one that encompassed this massive state. She had zero name recognition, and her opponents were seasoned--if little-known--politicians.

She lent $2 million to her campaign, mounted a television advertising blitz and won overwhelmingly, one of the few Democratic victors in a year of Republican sweeps.

But as she tries to re-create the formula that propelled her to victory then, and again in 1998, Connell faces a dramatically altered landscape.

She is not the richest candidate in the race: Although her fund-raising has picked up lately, she still has less money in the bank than opponents James K. Hahn, Antonio Villaraigosa or Joel Wachs. Of all the major candidates, she has the weakest ties to Los Angeles’ constituencies, even though she has remained a resident during her six years as controller.

But she is the sole female among the major candidates, a difference she is trying to exploit, even if women are no longer an oddity on the political landscape.

She would, if elected, be the city’s first female mayor. At every stop she makes a pitch for women’s votes with references to her two sons, ages 9 and 10, and her role as a single mother. Her 11-year marriage to Robert Levenstein broke up in 1996.

“I used to be the only investment banker who carried a pacifier in her briefcase,” she says during a tour of the New Economic Center for Women.

At Fenton Avenue Charter School in Lakeview Terrace, she inspects computer-equipped classrooms while television news cameramen trail behind. Demonstrating an easy rapport with children, she leans over 9-year-old Ana Dubon as the student expertly works math problems on a bright pink Apple computer.

“You’ve got a job in the controller’s office. I think you’re better than some of my auditors,” she jokes as the young girl beams and the cameras whir.

“I think being a woman with my record . . . is an asset,” Connell says. “. . . I will be much more identifiable in the race, and I think that’s important in a crowded field.”

Connell’s dogged pursuit of political office is the last thing her family expected of her. By birthright, she should have settled on a career in finance, the world that attracted both of her parents. No one in her family had ever gone into politics. The middle child in a competitive Irish Catholic household, she grew up in Denver, where her stern father set high goals for his three children.

“When I was growing up, I was going to be the female equivalent of Perry Mason,” Connell says.

In college, law lost its luster. For a time the editorship of the school newspaper made journalism the lure. Then the family business--finance--beckoned. She wanted to go to graduate school to pursue it, but her father insisted that she needed practical work experience first.

Connell took a job in New York as a high school teacher of American studies and international relations. But after the paternal edict was carried out, she enrolled in a master’s program in urban and regional planning at the University of Pittsburgh. Her career veered sharply in a new direction when the course required her to work at the Pittsburgh housing court, which dealt with slumlords.

It opened up a world she had never seen and found shocking. “I learned about the impact of poverty on the community,” she recalls.

Connell was hooked on housing--an interest that would lead her to politics.

She considered the doctoral programs at several universities, and then visited UCLA. It was wintertime, when temperatures back East were dipping below freezing. California was balmy and sunny. “It was a seasonal decision,” she jokes.

But before Connell could finish her doctorate in urban planning, she was invited to be part of group that would make a presentation to the city’s new mayor, Tom Bradley.

The presentation, particularly Connell’s part, impressed Bradley. Several days later he offered the 28-year-old a job as his executive assistant for housing. Connell hesitated, saying she wasn’t interested in a government position. But Bradley persisted, and she gave in.

She later won a promotion to housing division director. Her first high-profile assignment was to administer the city’s new rent control law, a task that won her praise from both tenants and landlords.

Controversy While Housing Director

But her early successes would be clouded by controversy in her final years as housing director. The criticism contradicts the strong, hands-on image she would now like to project in the mayor’s race.

Fueling controversy was a critical audit by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and an internal financial report, both of which found that the housing division under Connell had poorly managed millions of dollars in federal funds and was slow to get new programs off the ground.

Newspaper stories at the time reported that community activists were so enraged by the housing division’s performance that they organized protests against the city’s request for more federal housing money.

“She was just totally preoccupied with the political and social side of her job,” recalled Steven McNichols, who worked for the Bradley administration. “She was a great idea person, [but] she overpromised and she underperformed.”

Connell downplays the criticism, insisting that when she left the job in 1982 to become an investment banker, she was “celebrated by both landlord and tenant activists.” Any delays in getting new housing units, she says, were the result of having to set up programs from scratch and needing time to develop standards and procedures.

David Perel, who served under Connell as a housing finance officer, says the criticism may have had as much to do with her style as her actual performance--a judgment still made of Connell.

“My view of Kathleen is that she got a lot of things done, but sometimes she had to break eggshells in doing it,” he says.

If controversy dogged Connell in her first foray into public life, it didn’t leave when she graduated to statewide elective office.

Her Cinderella victory made her the highest-ranking woman in state government and the first to head the controller’s office. Her new job did not have the high profile of a governor or attorney general, but it had some effective tools. The controller is the state’s chief check writer and on occasion can wield a heavy stick by refusing to pay a bill.

The power of the office is enhanced by an odd quirk in the law that requires the controller to sit on more than 50 boards and commissions, some of which are the most powerful in state government.

Connell’s style of management was a stark contrast to that of her predecessor, Gray Davis, whose interest in running for a higher post seemed to produce a reluctance to make waves. He attended few board and commission meetings, preferring to send a surrogate who often abstained on key issues. Connell, on the other hand, has been a constant presence on the major boards, not only voting on controversial matters but also creating some controversy of her own.

One of her first acts was to order a performance audit of the office under Davis. The findings, she said, revealed waste and legally questionable actions. Davis’ supporters insisted that she had skewed the results to besmirch a potential political rival.

Since then, the relationship between the two politicians has been chilly at best.

Although Connell’s conduct frequently sent tremors through the state bureaucracy, she has had notable triumphs. One was her exposure of fraud in California’s Medi-Cal system.

From 1996 to 1998, she submitted hundreds of audit reports to the attorney general’s office, detailing fraudulent billings to Medi-Cal, the state’s version of the federal medical poverty program. The FBI eventually stepped in and began making dozens of arrests. To date, federal agents have brought charges against 159 people for alleged fraud exceeding $76.1 million.

Connell is also credited with cleaning up the system of selecting probate referees, who help the courts evaluate estates. Again, it was an issue in which she took on her party’s highest-ranking representative: Davis.

When he was controller, Davis was criticized for giving the potentially lucrative jobs to personal friends and political allies, as well as to relatives of campaign contributors and other politicians. Probate referees, who are not state employees, are paid 0.1% of the value of the estates they appraise for the courts. Some have reported income as high as $100,000 a year.

Connell installed a tough new qualifying exam and set up an independent panel of lawyers and judges to evaluate the candidates.

Take-No-Prisoners Style Has Its Costs

Despite her reforms, Connell’s take-no-prisoners style has cost her popularity. Not the least of the reasons is a perception that she has not always played by the ethical standards that she imposes on others.

Her experience with the California Public Employees Retirement System board is a case in point. She opened her service by attacking other members for taking foreign junkets and attending social gatherings sponsored by interests that sought to do business with the system.

Although the board eventually adopted her proposal for new rules that curbed travel abuses--a reform considered long overdue by public interest advocates--it wasn’t long before Connell herself was making headlines for soliciting campaign contributions from the same interests.

An examination of her campaign reports between 1995 and 1997 showed that she collected more than $350,000 from those with business before CalPERS.

Her fellow board members pounced on the information, hurriedly adopting a new ethics policy that prohibited firms that did business or wished to do business with CalPERS from making political contributions to any of its board members. The policy would apply only to the elected officials on the board: the controller and state treasurer.

Allan Emkin, managing partner of Pension Consulting Alliance Inc., a real estate consultant to the board, testified in support of the policy. He said Connell had twice personally solicited campaign contributions from him while his contract was being negotiated.

“I felt uncomfortable that the solicitation came directly from Ms. Connell, a constitutional officer who is also a CalPERS board member and decision maker,” said Emkin, who declined the request for contributions. (His contract was approved.)

As Connell prepared to run for reelection in 1998, her campaign filed--and eventually won--a lawsuit challenging the new CalPERS ethics rule on the grounds that it had unfairly discriminated against her and the state treasurer.

Since then, she has reaped the benefits of the court action, collecting thousands of dollars for her state political accounts and her mayoral campaign from interests that do business with the retirement systems as well as other boards and commissions she sits on. She defends her fund-raising.

“I think we have a diverse base of support in the mayor’s race, and we are living by the rules of the ethics commission,” she says. “The vast majority of our contributors come from Los Angeles-based individuals and businesses.”

Although the state’s term-limit law prevents Connell from seeking reelection as controller, she still solicits donations to her controller campaign accounts. Last year she raised more than $700,000 from these and other interests.

Connell says she continues to raise money to help pay off the $2-million loan she made to her campaign from 1993 to 1995. (She is prohibited by law from using funds from her state campaign accounts to help finance her mayoral race.)

Her decision to enter the mayoral race came after months of speculation but still took many by surprise. It sprang, she says, from her deep interest in the city.

“It’s really very much going back to my roots,” she says. “I deeply love Los Angeles; it’s where I’m raising my kids. I think Los Angeles is a great city, and we’re not reaching our potential. Right now, I think Los Angeles is a city that is truly dysfunctional.”

As a mayoral candidate, Connell faces an unusual political challenge.

Normally, it is the local official’s difficult task to try to break through the political cacophony to forge a statewide victory. In Connell’s case, the dilemma is reversed. But she is hinging her campaign on the elements that have proved so helpful to her before: her gender and her ability to close the sale through a tough approach and television ads.

Just by virtue of her gender, Connell stands out in the many public gatherings required of the mayoral candidates. Against a blur of gray suits and blue shirts, she is a separate presence, with her eye-catching red hair, piercing blue eyes and penchant for dressing in striking pastels.

Evidence of the importance she assigns to appearance can be found in an unusual entry in her state political financial reports; last year’s showed expenditures of $3,362 from campaign funds to various salons, particularly the upscale Cristophe in Beverly Hills.

As she campaigns, her physical presence is bolstered by a strong, authoritative delivery. Her message rarely changes. She promotes herself as a no-nonsense leader with a breadth of experience in finance, a woman who has more than held her own in the cutthroat world of investment banking. Her background, she says frequently, is as an educator, a banker, an administrator and a mother--themes repeated in her new television ads.

Sharply Critical of Riordan’s Record

Tough-talking and quick to place blame for the city’s ills, she ladles criticism on the current mayor, Richard Riordan. She faults him for failing to ease congestion and build more affordable housing.

“Los Angeles used to be accused of being the 800-pound gorilla; now I think we’re anorexic,” she says.

Connell concedes that education is not the direct responsibility of the city, but as mayor she promises to push for 60 charter schools in the Los Angeles area. Her remedy for traffic congestion is the addition of 3,000 so-called smart buses, which would travel the east-west corridors and link up with fixed rail flowing along the city’s north-south spine.

But it is in her appearances with her five major opponents that Connell makes her strongest case. While others may dwell on generalities, Connell comes across as organized and thorough, offering specific ideas. She answers each question with a several-part response, and her decisive language often earns murmurs of admiration from the audience.

Speaking during a recent mayoral forum in a Mid-City church packed with senior citizens, Connell drew loud applause for her vehement answer to a question about how the city should use its share of the money received from tobacco companies in their settlement with government entities.

She was particularly angry about proposals that the city spend its settlement money on paying off suits brought against police officers implicated in the Rampart scandal.

“I lost my father to lung cancer,” she said, “and I’m outraged that the city would ever think of using this money to fund Rampart settlements. It was intended to go to health care and tobacco prevention.”

Connell said that under her administration, she would guarantee that half of the city’s $10-million annual settlement would go to tobacco prevention programs for youth, and the other half to health care programs.

At that forum, as always, she was the outsider, the independent reformer who risked the wrath of others to bring change.

“We have ruffled a few feathers,” she said. “. . . I think my record in Sacramento reflects a willingness to take a tough position against those who would waste taxpayer dollars.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Kathleen Connell

Born: June 30, 1947, in Denver.

Education: Hastings College in Nebraska, bachelor’s degree in political science, 1969; University of Pittsburgh, master’s degree in urban and regional planning, 1972; UCLA, doctorate in urban planning, 1987

Personal: Single mother of two sons, Adam, 10, and Garrett, 9. An 11-year marriage to developer Robert Levenstein ended in divorce.

Party: Democratic

Career: State controller, 1994 to present; president, Connell & Associates, financial consulting firm based in Culver City, 1985-94; director of financial services, Chemical Bank in New York, 1983-85; Los Angeles city housing division director, 1977-83; special assistant to Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, 1975-77.

Strategy: Using the same formula that won her the controller’s race, Connell is relying on support from women and a compelling appearance on television. TV spots portray her as a strong manager whose tough auditing exposed corruption in Medi-Cal. She tries to bolster her connections to Los Angeles by mentioning her tenure as housing director under Mayor Bradley.

About This Series

The Times today presents the last of six profiles of the major candidates for mayor. All of the profiles can be found at the Latimes.com Web site, https://https://latimes.com/mayor.