Schwarzenegger Brings New Buzz to the Capital

Ever since Arnold Schwarzenegger made top of the heap in this laid-back government city, European tour operators have suddenly begun calling about “sightseeing” packages for busloads of fans from Britain and Germany. Out-of-town TV stations are suddenly interested in opening Capitol bureaus. Municipal bean counters are suddenly concerned about the cost of ancillary crowd control for their new VIP.

In the fancier neighborhoods, Arnold-worthy homes -- with Arnold-size price tags -- are suddenly the source of proud buzz and not-in-my-backyard furor. Limousine companies are bolstering their fleets, despite claims that the swearing-in will be low key.

The other day, Randy Paragary, who owns 10 local restaurants, recited -- down to the last side dish -- what Schwarzenegger had ordered the last time he entered Paragary’s Esquire Grill -- weeks ago now. Eerily, it was the same meal that outgoing Gov. Gray Davis regularly ordered up to his desk at lunchtime. (Salmon, but Schwarzenegger “passed on the potatoes -- he’s a healthy guy.”)

Big shots come and big shots go here, but there are stars and then there are stars. As the clock ticks toward a political transition unprecedented in history and wattage, this leafy bastion of bureaucracy and agriculture is buzzing like Bel-Air before the Oscars -- never mind that Schwarzenegger described it on CNN’s “Larry King Live” as (ouch!) a “quaint little town.”

“There is an energy that we haven’t seen in a long, long time,” said Steve Hammond, president and chief executive of the Sacramento Convention and Visitors Bureau, which has launched a search for an Arnold impersonator to wander around intoning, “I ahm gooing to Sahk-ra-mento!” at an upcoming London tourism show.

Not that the energy is all positive. Though the Sacramento region tilts conservative Republican, the city itself tends toward pro-labor Democrats. “Those of us who laughed at Jesse Ventura in Minnesota are now stuck with it ourselves,” said Karolyn Simon, a 62-year-old Democrat and former neighbor of Ronald Reagan during Reagan’s tenure as governor.

When one of her neighbors in the stately “Fabulous Forties” district publicly offered to sell his Normandy-style house to Schwarzenegger for a little less than $3 million -- about twice the average price for homes on that block -- fliers began circulating, demanding that there be “No Governor’s Mansion in East Sacramento.”

But for most, the new administration represents not only new business and a fresh shot at political detente, but a super-sized spotlight that might -- at long last -- shine a little on this least-celebrated of California destinations.

“You just can’t buy this kind of attention,” said Jerry Westenhaver, general manager of the Hyatt Regency Sacramento, a nonunion hotel that, for years now, has been shunned by many in the pro-labor Davis administration. “Wherever he goes, he draws crowds.”

Sacramento’s close-up has been a long time coming. Though the state capital is the hub of a metropolitan area encompassing close to 2 million people, modern Californians have tended to view it as a backwater between San Francisco and the ski slopes of the Sierra Nevada -- a dusty, farm-y pit stop on the way to someplace else.

It is “The Big Easy Chair.” It is “Sack-tomato.” It is “Just a bladder from Tahoe,” as one reader suggested in 1995 when a Sacramento Bee columnist solicited ideas for a city slogan. Other suggestions included “Very little inbreeding,” “Think of it this way -- you could be in Stockton” and “Not too far to go now.”

Marketing campaigns have had but modest effects. When the word “international” was inserted into the name of the airport some years ago, one local politician worried that people would mock it as hyperbole, considering Sacramento’s near-total lack of nonstop international flights. (He was right.)

No matter that it has the Sacramento Kings, Old California pedigrees, tree-lined streets, four actual seasons, a low cost of living and a style that is so unpretentious that visitors routinely describe it as “Midwestern.”

“Sacramento in the past has had somewhat of an inferiority complex,” said Michael Ault, executive director of the Downtown Sacramento Partnership, which represents 800 property owners and businesses in the city’s central business district.

“But I think, well, I think this governor is going to bring us a celebrity cachet.”

So do the city’s tourism boosters. Fifteen million visitors a year visit Sacramento, injecting about $1.4 billion into the local economy, but the numbers pale next to those of, say, San Francisco, where the same number of visitors, roughly, spends about four times as much money, or Los Angeles, where nearly 25 million tourists spend about $13.6 billion a year.

For years, the local visitors bureau tried to persuade international tour operators to include the city as an overnight destination in their California packages, but “to them it was just a day trip out of San Francisco on the way to Yosemite,” said J.T. Thompson, director of tourism for the bureau.

Then came Schwarzenegger. Media representatives from around the world converged on California, just in time to see the Terminator on TV, broom in hand, talking about “cleaning up” this city that many had never been to.

Suddenly, Sacramento was turning up on CNN, on “Entertainment Tonight,” in foreign tabloids. A Washington Post reporter spent a day with the mayor, who made him notice the many trees and the zoo and the flagship Tower Records store, and dragged him to a wine-and-tapas fund-raiser for an emergency housing shelter.

“There’s a certain Tulsaness, a Raleigh-Durhamness, an Albuquerqueness,” the guy from the Post wrote, noting that people kept urging him to visit the railroad museum.

Others were more blunt.

“Are you looking forward to Sacramento?” Larry King asked Schwarzenegger during the campaign. “Not your kind of town, is it?”

“No, absolutely -- you know, it’s a funny thing,” the then-candidate said with a laugh, stammering a little. “People sometimes come up to me and say, ‘Can you imagine you, Arnold, going from Hollywood to Sacramento?’ I say, ‘You know something, I love Sacramento.’ I think the whole, the huge, beautiful -- that they have, the trees, that the buildings, the historic buildings and all this stuff -- it’s a beautiful quaint little town.”

Replied King: “What does Maria think?”

Locals -- less fresh from the turnip truck than the out-of-towners might have it -- got the subtext. “The tone was basically: ‘Surprise -- Sacramento is not quite as much of a hellhole as you think,’ ” said Sam Delson, an aide to Democratic Assemblyman Darrell Steinberg, who represents the city and expects Schwarzenegger’s “aura thing,” as he calls it, to wear off eventually.

Still, as the public relations folks say, they all spelled the name right. The Post story even mentioned palm trees.

And the cameras kept coming, even after Schwarzenegger’s aides let it be known that, if he were elected, he probably wouldn’t move to Sacramento, but rather would commute by private jet from Brentwood to the governor’s office. (At least one member of the governor-elect’s camp speculated that he might just live at a hotel while he was in town, at least in the short term, and a Democratic operative said his political opponents were “laying bets that he won’t spend a single night here.”)

“We had, like, 35 media trucks parked out in front of the hotel during the election,” said the Hyatt Regency’s Westenhaver, “and CNN and Fox broadcasting live.”

Now, with more than half a dozen TV stations in Los Angeles, San Francisco and elsewhere mulling the economics of Capitol bureaus -- a presence that disappeared with the halcyon news days of the Jerry Brown “Governor Moonbeam” administration -- city officials believe the city’s profile will continue to rise.

The calls from tour operators began “like 48 hours after the election,” said Hammond of the visitors bureau. “It was, ‘Gosh, we’re here in London and everybody’s talking about Arnold,’ and ‘We’d like to expand the trips we have to create something in Sacramento, because we really think we can sell it now.’ ”

Thompson said he expected a “substantial” boost in the 400,000 or so Capitol tours that are taken each year -- mostly by senior citizens, and fourth-graders as part of their mandated state government unit -- even though past governors have rarely come out of their offices to rub elbows with passing tour groups.

“I’ve been in the Capitol once a month for the past two years and I never once saw Gray Davis,” the tourism director said. “But who knows? With Arnold being the way he is, I wouldn’t put it past him to walk outside and start talking to people. He certainly likes publicity.”

And tourists who come for a glimpse of the Governator, merchants say, might just stay for the restaurants or the shopping or even that railroad museum.

“This is going to be a plus. A real plus,” said Ross Relles, the local businessman who so roiled his “Fabulous Forties” neighbors by telling a Bee columnist in August that Schwarzenegger should buy his house.

Nonetheless, noted Chuck Dalldorf, chief of staff to Sacramento Mayor Heather Fargo, “you get the good and the bad.” Though the governor’s security is paid for by the state and handled by the California Highway Patrol, for example, the costs of crowd control and cleanup that attend any visiting luminary inevitably spill over into the municipal budget. And the city has never dealt, on a constant basis, with a star like this incoming governor.

Nor, sighed Dalldorf, has Sacramento ever looked forward to so many long years’ worth of the unofficial mantra that callers can’t resist repeating over and over -- and over -- on his voicemail.

“Sorry I missed you,” the city employee wearily repeated. “Ah’lll be bahck.”