A Rapid, Sometimes Bumpy, Rise

Even on the extremely fast track paved by term limits, Antonio Villaraigosa’s race to power in Sacramento was lightning quick.

Only three years after arriving here as a rookie legislator, in his first elective office, Villaraigosa gathered enough support in the Assembly to push his popular colleague, Cruz Bustamante, out of the speakership months before he wanted to go.

Building allies in the Assembly as party whip and later as majority leader, and tirelessly campaigning for fellow Democrats across the state in the 1996 elections, Villaraigosa quickly captured the speaker’s job.

In the back-slapping, favor-trading environment of the Capitol, he turned his considerable skills as a bipartisan schmoozer into a record of constructive compromise--including marshaling a massive, $9.2-billion school bond issue in 1998 and a $2.1-billion parks bond issue in 1999.

Although he served only two years and three months as speaker, he benefited hugely from a booming economy, which buttressed him as he shepherded bills through to expand health care for poor families, establish peer review of teachers and impose bans on assault weapons, among others. The accomplishments form the bulwark of his campaign for mayor of Los Angeles against City Atty. James K. Hahn, which ends in the June 5 runoff.

Yet Villaraigosa’s inexperience also showed: A lackluster detail man by his own admission, he was forced by his weaknesses in the mechanics of policy to lean heavily on a strong staff as well as on intellectually gifted colleagues who didn’t always agree with him.

Some fellow Democrats accuse him of padding his resume by claiming credit for bills on which others had done most of the hard work. He suffered a bitter break with his longtime friend and successor as speaker, Bob Hertzberg (D-Sherman Oaks), that colored the last year of his term. Hertzberg is conspicuously absent from Villaraigosa’s list of endorsers.

In his relatively brief tenure at the top, Villaraigosa was blessed with good timing. There were none of the fiscal or natural disasters that circumscribed the actions of past state figures. Nor was he there long enough to be saddled with a continuing crisis.

Yet his tenure did change him. The liberal who arrived here in 1994 after being elected from Los Angeles’ ethnically mixed 45th Assembly District--fresh from tenures as a teachers union leader and president of the local ACLU chapter--emerged six years later with bouquets from conservative Republicans.

“In this environment,” said Capitol veteran Bill Leonard, a Republican assemblyman from San Bernardino, “anyone who can rise to leadership knows how to work a fast track--gaining allies, answering critics. The hit on Antonio, of course, was that he was this radical legislator from Los Angeles. He had to answer that because, in the Legislature, anything of substance is bipartisan. . . . Every possible coalition has to be in on the decision.”

Indeed, Republicans expected a firebrand and ended up with Mr. Congeniality. In a tribute given as term limits forced Villaraigosa from the Assembly last year, conservative Republican Roy Ashburn of Bakersfield talked about defending him at Rotary and Kiwanis club meetings.

“You can imagine my dilemma,” Ashburn said. “A guy from Bakersfield asked about the speaker and I would say, ‘Well, he’s a former ACLU [leader] from Los Angeles, but he’s a good guy.’ I had a lot of explaining to do.”

That was almost impossible to predict when Villaraigosa came to the Assembly in 1994. The lower house had been placed in the hands of the Republicans for the first time in more than two decades.

During the 1995-96 session, Villaraigosa had only modest success with the three dozen bills he wrote, mostly involving education, labor and health care issues. His attempt at a bill requiring trigger locks on firearms went down in flames. So did a bill to commute prison sentences for terminally ill prisoners.

His most notable success, achieved on a second attempt with the support of Orange County Republican leader Scott Baugh, was a bill permitting women to breast-feed their children in public.

Perhaps Villaraigosa’s biggest vote came when he joined in the now-infamous unanimous approval of the 1996 bill that helped deregulate electricity in California. (The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power was not required to deregulate.)

“Look,” said Villaraigosa, “every member of the state Legislature voted for deregulation. In hindsight, it was not a good vote. I had some concerns about the bill, but I knew that Los Angeles was protected because of its municipal utility, and that was a big factor in my mind.’

Democratic Landslide Helped

Borne by good relations with colleagues, Villaraigosa became speaker in January 1998. His security in the job was greatly enhanced in the 1998 general election, when a Democratic landslide added a record five seats to the party’s membership in the Assembly, giving it a powerful majority of 48 in the 80-member house.

Villaraigosa says he never gets enough credit for helping expand his party’s majority. Instead, he says, reporters focused on the loss of a “safe” Democratic seat in Oakland to Green Party candidate Audie Bock in a 1999 special election.

The new speaker also had an ally in the governor’s office. Even though Villaraigosa initially supported millionaire Al Checchi over Gray Davis in the 1998 governor’s race, he quickly forged a strong bond with Davis during the campaign.

“I’m hitching my wagon to his horse,” Villaraigosa told reporters. Davis has endorsed Villaraigosa for mayor.

Any speaker, particularly a Democrat, is inevitably compared to the legendary Willie Brown, who held the post for 14 years before term limits booted him to the San Francisco mayor’s office. By that yardstick, Villaraigosa had a mixed record.

Patsy Kurakawa, Villaraigosa’s policy director, said he was almost as successful at working over Assembly members as her old boss Brown. “The bottom line was that he was really good at getting votes,” Kurakawa recalled.

Brown, an early endorser of Villaraigosa for mayor, said:

“In the time period Antonio ran the place as speaker, the budget process moved smoothly, the membership responded appropriately and the output was what it was supposed to be. Fortunately for him, he didn’t have the energy crisis.”

But if Villaraigosa approached Brown’s hold on the membership, he lacked the former speaker’s sense of detail and instant grasp of policy. Part of the difference was experience--Brown’s three decades in the Assembly to Villaraigosa’s six years.

The experience gap showed, to Villaraigosa’s disadvantage, in the first of the 1998 Big Five budget meetings he attended. At the table were Gov. Pete Wilson (32 years in elected office), Senate President John Burton (28 years) and minority leaders Ross Johnson and Bill Leonard (20 years each)--a century’s experience in Sacramento, Washington and local office.

“I’d come in with this big, thick binder because I knew I had to be extra-prepared,” Villaraigosa recalled. “These guys had forgotten more than I had learned.”

In the early meetings, he remembered, Burton referred to him in front of the others as “the kid.” Villaraigosa never won the full respect of the irascible Burton, who remains skeptical about his qualifications for mayor. But Wilson and the other Republicans eventually warmed to him.

“The first meeting was awkward when he was the new kid in the room,” said Leonard, who then led the GOP senators. “Burton and Wilson were from the same generation and were singing old television commercials--a trivia kind of thing. By the next meeting [Villaraigosa] had some old TV commercial of his own to offer. He was a quick learner.”

Still, some members contend that the inexperience exacted a price.

“The Assembly didn’t do all that well that year in the Big Five meeting,” recalled one Democrat. “Given the experiential mismatch, he did OK. But the Senate and the governor mostly set the agenda on the budget while Antonio was there.”

Villaraigosa Always on the Move

Complicating Villaraigosa’s learning curve was a frenetic style, which often made it hard to get his attention on complicated issues. One former staffer jokingly described it as the “ADD [Attention Deficit Disorder] Antonio.” Another said she learned to keep contact with the speaker by holding onto his sleeve.

“You could brief Willie in the hallway on his way to the floor,” recalled one staff member who worked for both men. As for Villaraigosa, the staffer said, “I can’t tell you how many times I would turn my head and, when I looked back, he would be gone--poof!”

Villaraigosa admits that he is not keen on details, but says he makes up for it by hiring the best staff and identifying the best minds available.

“Anyone who says that I don’t have an attention to detail,” he said, “fails to take into account that I hired staff with that attention and I delegated to fill the gap. My job as speaker was the big picture.”

He cites as an example his “top accomplishment” as speaker--the 1998 school bond issue. He gives much of the credit to then-deputies Hertzberg and Tom Torlakson, a former Antioch schoolteacher.

The creative breakthrough in the bill came when Hertzberg and Torlakson linked school improvements to a cap on the “developer fees” that school districts charge home builders.

Villaraigosa quickly saw the potential and sold the compromise to Democrats. When it came time to negotiate with Republicans, Leonard recalled, Villaraigosa was there to close the deal.

Another example occurred in 1999 when the state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, mounted a full-court press for a bill that would allow it to sell hydroelectric power plants that provide the state with a critical 10,000 megawatts.

The power crisis was not yet evident, but Villaraigosa said he sensed that PG&E; was moving too fast. “It was toward the end of the legislative session,” he recalled. “I said it would be irresponsible to act now.”

He effectively killed the PG&E; push by assigning top lieutenant Fred Keeley (D-Boulder Creek) to the conference committee considering the measure. Assemblyman Keeley, who fiercely opposed the PG&E; effort, had sponsored an alternative bill calling for public ownership of the hydroelectric facilities.

Had the PG&E; push been successful, Keeley estimates now, the results would have been devastating and cost the state millions of dollars more when it began buying power for the crippled utilities earlier this year.

Overall, Villaraigosa got high marks for his selection of deputies. Besides Keeley, his other pro-tem was well-regarded Assemblywoman Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica). His key committee appointments included Hertzberg, in Rules, and Carole Migden of San Francisco in Appropriations.

“He had the confidence to surround himself with smart people who were not going to shy away from a fight. None of these people were sycophants,” recalled former Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar), who was majority leader when Villaraigosa served as whip.

State Sen. Don Perata (D-Alameda) said Villaraigosa would need an equally strong team to succeed at City Hall. A “very strong chief of staff” would free Villaraigosa to deal with the City Council, said Perata, who served with the candidate in the Assembly.

For all his efforts to translate personal charisma into political advantage, Villaraigosa has come under some virulent criticism, largely from Democrats in the highly fractious Latino Caucus who are loyal to state Sen. Richard Polanco of Los Angeles. Villaraigosa defeated Polanco’s candidate to reach the Assembly.

Polanco ally Martha Escutia, now a state senator from Whittier, accuses Villaraigosa of hijacking her 1997 bill to create the Healthy Families program, which provides medical coverage for children in low-income households.

Villaraigosa lists the Healthy Families legislation as one of his four key accomplishments in Sacramento, along with the school and parks bond measures and his participation in a 1999 assault weapons ban.

According to the legislative record, Escutia was the first in the 1997-98 session to offer a comprehensive bill on low-income health coverage for children. Moreover, the final bill that emerged, with Villaraigosa listed as a principal author, contained much of the same language as the Escutia bill but does not carry her name.

“All I know,” she said, “is that I was the first one to introduce the Healthy Families bill, but by the time [the final measure was drafted in committee] I was not a member, nor was I listed as an author. The lesson I learned is to be more vigilant about my work product.”

Added Polanco: “It’s like someone taking a test and putting your name on it. You don’t take someone’s work and put your name on it.”

Villaraigosa dismissed those claims, saying he had introduced similar “universal coverage for children” bills in previous sessions. One such bill in 1996 never made it out of the health committee but did have a line stating that all children under 18 “should be entitled to child health care.”

Amy Dominguez-Arms, vice president of Children Now, an Oakland-based children’s advocacy group that was a principal sponsor of the bill that finally passed, said Villaraigosa legitimately deserves most of the credit.

“We had already been talking to [Villaraigosa’s] staff when the Escutia bill was introduced,” she said. “We found him to be a very receptive author, and he certainly championed the bill throughout the legislative session.”

Villaraigosa also takes credit for successfully pushing the assault weapons ban. As Hahn has attacked him as being too soft on crime, the measure has become an important part of Villaraigosa’s public safety record.

“My role in the assault weapons ban was to get it out of the Assembly,” he said. “You guys wrote that it was going down. That was a time I pulled people into my office one at a time. They came to Jesus about how this was an important Democratic initiative that we had to get behind. We needed 41 votes and we got them.”

But the bill’s author Perata--while recognizing Villaraigosa’s help--said the legislation would have passed without the speaker’s intervention. Villaraigosa “jockeyed the bill in the Assembly, but jockeying should not be confused with passing it or writing it,” he said.

The highest-profile rift with Villaraigosa featured the unlikeliest of prospects, his longtime political ally and Sacramento roommate Hertzberg. Hertzberg, a hyperkinetic former bond attorney, replaced Villaraigosa as speaker in April 2000.

Part of the problem between the two friends was predictable: a transition in the abbreviated atmosphere of term limits. Hertzberg, who organized Villaraigosa’s 1994 campaign for Assembly before joining him there two years later, helped Villaraigosa nudge Bustamante from the speakership in 1998. But by the spring of 1999, Hertzberg was already gathering signatures and making his own move against Villaraigosa.

Villaraigosa wanted to remain as speaker through last summer’s Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, which he figured would give him a high-profile platform for the mayor’s race.

Articles already identifying Hertzberg as speaker-in-waiting had angered Villaraigosa, and there was a confrontation between Hertzberg and a Villaraigosa aide in March 1999 during the annual legislative leaders’ trip to Washington.

For several months after that, the two men rarely spoke, although they continued to live together in the home they shared in Sacramento.

The question of campaign money also fed the feud. Villaraigosa was a potent fund-raiser for the Democratic caucus, and as part of the transition returned $1.5 million to the Democratic leadership when he left power. But Villaraigosa also kept $1.3 million for his own campaign chest, putting it in an account to run for state Senate in 2002 should his mayoral campaign fail.

Bustamante had done the same thing, taking more than $1 million he had raised as speaker to finance his successful 1998 campaign for lieutenant governor. Villaraigosa had loudly criticized the Bustamante move, so most of his colleagues in the Democratic caucus expected him to leave the money behind. Villaraigosa defends the money transfer by saying, accurately, that he had already given more money back to Democrats than any previous speaker.

As for Hertzberg’s lack of endorsement, the speaker said: “I am working 24 hours, seven days a week on the energy crisis and other issues facing the state. So it is hard for me to get involved in the mayor’s race.”

Villaraigosa said he hopes Hertzberg will relent. “It’s been painful, more personally than politically,” Villaraigosa said.

This personal fallout aside, Villaraigosa’s legacy as speaker remains his ability to get along with most of Sacramento’s influential figures, building political bridges as he went.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Helping Hands in the Legislature From his six years in the California Assembly, including two years as speaker, Antonio Villaraigosa lists four bills as his greatest accomplishments. In each case, however, Democratic colleagues contend that at least some of the the heavy lifting was done by other lawmakers.

HEALTHY FAMILIES (AB 1126): This 1997 bill, passed when Villaraigosa was majority leader, brought 250,000 California children from working poor families into a health insurance program. But Whittier state Sen. Martha Escutia contends that Villaraigosa took her bill, filed earlier, and morphed it into his own.

SCHOOL BONDS (SB 50): Villaraigosa calls this 1998 Senate bill the “crown jewel” of his term as speaker. But it is named the Leroy F. Greene School Facilities Act after another education-minded former Democratic legislator from Sacramento. After two embarrassing earlier failures, Villaraigosa finally succeeded in getting the $9.2-billion bond bill out of the Assembly, largely because of a compromise brokered by fellow lawmakers in a marathon weekend of negotiations.

GUN CONTROL (SB 23): This landmark 1999 legislation banning the manufacture, import and sale of assault weapons tops Villaraigosa’s list in the crime and public safety category. Villaraigosa carried the bill on the Assembly floor, but it was mainly the result of a lifetime effort in in gun legislation by Alameda Democratic Sen. Don Perata. “It would have passed with or without Antonio,” Perata says.

PARKS BONDS (AB 18): This 1999 bill, the largest successful parks bond in U.S. history, was mainly the product of a long legislative effort by Boulder City Democratic Assemblyman Fred Keeley to improve state parks. But Villaraigosa added the urban element with funding for city parks and forcefully powered it through the Assembly. Now part of the statute requires that signs at park construction sites identify it as “Paid for by the Villaraigosa-Keeley Act.”