Brown, campaigning on frugality, used state plane

Jerry Brown, who is running for governor on a campaign of frugality, says he flies on a plane owned by the state only when absolutely necessary to carry out his duties as attorney general. But he has also used the Beechcraft King Air turboprop to travel to the luxurious Lodge at Pebble Beach, where a donor was being feted, and to attend events in cities serviced by commercial airlines.

A review of the plane’s flight log and Brown’s schedule shows that the attorney general has flown on the plane 10 times since taking office in 2007, often making multiple stops. He traveled common routes and sometimes squeezed in conferences that were politically beneficial.

In one case, Brown flew from Oakland to Stockton for a news conference. The 74-mile trip would have taken less than 90 minutes by car. No other public events were on his schedule that day.

Brown’s air travel has become a campaign issue because the Democratic candidate touts himself as a cheapskate so obsessed with saving money that he jettisoned the state’s private plane when he held the office of governor three decades ago, determining that it was an unnecessary luxury.

He has been critical of the travel of his Republican rival, former EBay chief Meg Whitman, noting that she jets around the state on costly private planes while he flies on Southwest Airlines to campaign events.

Christine Gasparac, a spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office, said department policy requires officials to use the least costly method of transportation, a rule that Brown instituted in 2007. Among the considerations for using the state plane are the cost of personnel hours lost in travel, per diem expenses, the urgency of the situation, driving time to the destination and layovers.

She said Brown often flies with members of his staff, which also affects the office’s cost estimates. She estimated fuel costs for the state plane at $300 an hour but said she could not immediately provide more detail on the cost of Brown’s trips.

“The trips that the attorney general took using the agency plane were very rare,” she said, noting that Brown has taken approximately 140 trips on commercial airlines since he took office.

The overwhelming majority of the 10 trips on the state plane were related to law enforcement, according to official records: meetings with staff and police officials, a speech to crime victims, a federal prosecutors’ roundtable, police funerals and gang “takedowns.” But at least two trips involved conferences with connections to political donors.

On April 19, 2007, Brown used the state plane to fly from Oakland to Monterey to attend a Pebble Beach dinner and reception sponsored by the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics, part of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. The guest of honor was Gerson Bakar, a San Francisco real estate developer who had donated $5,300 to Brown’s campaign for attorney general and would go on to donate $11,000 more to Brown’s campaign accounts.

Brown stayed overnight and spoke to the Fisher Center crowd the next morning, sharing his “thoughts on [his] plans for the next four-eight years,” according to his schedule. He then flew to Santa Monica to attend a meeting of the Commission on Judicial Appointments in Los Angeles.

On April 12, 2007, Brown flew from Santa Monica to Carlsbad, where he gave a speech at the La Costa Resort and Spa to the California Hospital Assn., whose political action committee had donated $6,600 to his campaign for attorney general and would later give an additional $25,900 to Brown’s campaign funds. The group also had donated $5,000 to Brown’s charter school, the Oakland Military Institute.

Gasparac said Brown’s office regulates parts of both the real estate and hospital industries, adding that he spoke in his official capacity on state land-use policy at the Fisher Center event and on hospital transfers with the California Hospital Assn.

Brown was unavailable Tuesday afternoon because he was “traveling on commercial airlines,” Gasparac said, declining to provide details on where he went. He flew Southwest, she said.

Some observers said the trips could hurt Brown’s standing with voters at a time when government spending is a political flashpoint.

“He can’t go around preaching frugality and leaving the perception that he is quite a bit less than frugal in his use of state aircraft, in his linking up with groups at luxurious venues,” said Sherry Bebitch Jaffe, a political scientist at USC. “There is nothing illegal about it and he didn’t choose the venues, but in today’s political environment you have to be more than sensitive to perception.”

michael.mishak@latimes.com