Surveys Taken in Assembly Target Districts : GOP Decries Democrat Phone Campaign

A telephone boiler room operation financed at public expense was set up last year by Assembly Speaker Willie Brown’s top aide to make calls on behalf of four Democrats--including San Diego’s Lucy Killea--who are expected to face tough reelection battles this year.

Richard Ross, Brown’s chief of staff, confirmed that hired operators conducted telephone surveys between July and December about various legislative issues championed by Killea and three other Democratic Assembly members--Jean M. Duffy of Citrus Heights, Richard Katz of Sepulveda and Steve Clute of Riverside.

All except Duffy are planning to seek reelection, and all four represent districts where Republican strategists are planning major, well-financed efforts to win Assembly seats.

Payroll and expense records of the Assembly Rules Committee show that the project ran up nearly $27,000 in salaries and as yet-untotalled telephone costs estimated at $10,000.

It is against the law to use public funds for election campaign purposes. But the line separating legal communication with constituents on issues of public concern from illegal partisan activity is difficult to draw.

Legality of Operation

Assembly Republican leader Pat Nolan of Glendale said the telephone boiler room may have been legal “but it is certainly close to the line.”

“Whether it is technically legal or not, I don’t think the public will understand them having an operation like that for the districts where we have targeted the incumbents for defeat,” Nolan added.

But the Democratic lawmakers and party leaders defended the state-paid project as nothing more than a new and novel way of communicating with constituents.

“It is absolute nonsense,” Killea said, for anyone to suggest it was improper.

“The point must be made that the questions that were asked during those phone calls were dealing with legislative issues,” said Assembly Rules Committee Chairman Louis J. Papan (D-Millbrae). “ . . . If it was illegal, Mr. Nolan knows where to take it.”

Ross, who takes credit for the idea, said its intent was to drum up grass-roots support for “real populist” legislative issues in which the four lawmakers were involved. It was an experiment, he added, to see if using the telephone would be cheaper and more effective than mailings.

Ross admits it was no coincidence that he chose “targeted” districts--those where Republicans are planning major campaign efforts. But he insists the surveys were “legitimate state legislative business” and perfectly legal.

Papan said he approved the project when it began last summer, although he did not know at the time which districts would be surveyed. In retrospect, he said, he still would have approved the project if he had known the nonscientific surveys were being made in targeted districts of Democrats.

The question of whether the operation was political “just never came up,” Papan said, noting that Republicans would be free to do the same thing.

The project was conducted by the Office of Majority Services, a branch of the Speaker’s office with duties that include constituent communication and outreach for Democratic Assembly members. A similar Office of Minority Services has a staff of consultants that answers to Nolan and provides similar services for Assembly Republicans.

The project operated in a leased state office building, two blocks from the Capitol, that houses both staffs.

Assemblyman John R. Lewis (R-Orange), chairman of the GOP’s assembly campaign committee, has begun referring to the operation as “Telephone-Gate.”

Neither the attorney general nor the Fair Political Practices Commission has been asked so far to investigate whether political campaigning took place during the state-funded project, spokesmen said.

“I’m having my staff look into it,” Nolan said.

Hiring No Secret

Ross, a well-known Democratic political operative, headed the Office of Majority Services until last year, when he was appointed Brown’s chief of staff.

Because of high turnover, the boiler room project involved the hiring of a temporary staff of 55. No more than “a dozen to 15” of them were conducting the telephone surveys at any given time, Ross said.

Ross said that phone bank staffers, some of them high school and college students, were hired through classified ads placed in Sacramento newspapers.

“It wasn’t a big cloak and dagger operation,” he said.

He said names, addresses or anything else gathered as a result of the operation will not be added to computer data bases used for Democratic campaigns.

“It is a felony to do that,” Ross said. “I make that point over and over.”

Both Ross and some of the legislators involved said the telephone project showed good results.

The first survey, conducted for Clute, helped secure unanimous passage by the Assembly last week of Clute’s bill making “laundering” of illegal profits a crime.

Ross said the phone calls and follow-up communications garnered responses from 20,000 of Clute’s constituents, who wrote letters and postcards and made phone calls in support of the bill. The outpouring, he said, not only influenced legislators, but also forced both banking institutions and the American Civil Liberties Union to temper their opposition to the measure.

Clute said another survey helped to bring pressure that has forced relocation of a proposed toxic incineration plant that had been planned for his Riverside County district.

Katz credited the project for securing Assembly passage last month of his bill that would require that cargo sections of sand and gravel trucks be covered.

“This is a bill that has been defeated in the Legislature the past 10 years by powerful special interests,” Katz said. “The grass-roots support is the only reason the bill got through the Assembly this year . . . and it only passed by one vote.”

Killea said she had a role in formulating questions for the calls made on her behalf, which dealt with veterans’ issues.

The former San Diego councilwoman, who intends to run this year for a third term in the Assembly, said she was interested in seeing whether there is support locally for locating a state Veterans Affairs branch office in San Diego.

The survey was designed, she said, “to locate a pool of veterans” who might help pressure state officials on the issue.

“This is just part of my continuing effort to reach my constituents,” Killea said.

Killea said she does not feel particularly vulnerable, although Republicans have targeted her district and are prepared to make major expenditures to help former Assembly consultant Earl Cantos Jr., her likely Republican opponent.

Although her district, which has a 5,000-voter Democratic edge, is not a “safe district,” Killea noted she won 66% of the vote in her last election.