Assembly Novices Open Offices With Tight Budgets

SAN GABRIEL VALLEY —  The San Gabriel Valley’s five new Assembly members are beginning their terms with office budgets so tight they have to enlist volunteers to answer the phones.

But they are not complaining.

Operating on $175,000 a year--compared with a $200,000 budget for returning Assembly members--they have adopted personal frugality as a badge of honor at a time when voters seem to want government to do more with less.

“How can we ask other people to cut back if we aren’t willing to cut back ourselves?” asked Assemblywoman Diane Martinez (D-Rosemead), noting that she, like just about every other election winner in November, promised to limit government spending.

Martinez said she has been able to hire just two staff members in Sacramento and two in her district office in Alhambra, so she will have to turn to volunteers to do some of the work normally performed by paid staff.

Freshman Assemblyman Bill Hoge (R-Pasadena) also is soliciting volunteer help.

“I’m going to be depending on people to come in and help volunteer their time so we can take care of constituent concerns in the district in a timely manner,” he said. “There has already been a significant number of people who have come forward . . . so I think we’ll do fine.”

Hoge is planning to designate volunteers as liaisons to relay information to him from school boards and city councils in his district. He also plans to hold regular conference calls with school board presidents and mayors and vice mayors to solicit their views on issues in Sacramento.

Martinez and Hoge are among five newcomers whose election in a year of redistricting has drastically changed the makeup of the San Gabriel Valley’s Assembly delegation.

Longtime Assembly members Sally Tanner of Baldwin Park and Bill Lancaster of Covina retired. Assemblyman Xavier Becerra of Monterey Park moved up to Congress. Assemblymen Pat Nolan of Glendale, Jim Brulte of Rancho Cucamonga and Richard Polanco of Los Angeles were reapportioned out of the valley.

So the delegation’s new lineup includes just two returning Assembly members: Republicans Richard L. Mountjoy of Arcadia, who has been in office since 1978, and Paul V. Horcher of Diamond Bar, who was reelected to his second term.

Mountjoy, Horcher, Hoge, Martinez and former Rio Hondo College board member Hilda Solis of El Monte represent districts centered in the San Gabriel Valley. In addition, part of Pomona lies within the Inland Empire district of freshman Assemblyman Fred Aguiar (R-Chino) and part of South El Monte is in the district represented by new Assemblywoman Grace M. Napolitano (D-Norwalk).

The Assembly members were sworn in Dec. 7. Then the 27 newcomers in the 80-member lower house attended training sessions to acquaint themselves with rules of conduct and the legislative process. The Assembly will reconvene Jan. 4.

Mountjoy said the opening of the legislative session was a lesson in power politics, starting with the floor seating arrangements. Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) seated freshmen Democrats next to veteran Democrats to help them learn the ropes and then paired freshmen Republicans together so they would not have mentors at their side.

Then, Brown and other Assembly leaders decided that new members would have annual office budgets of $175,000, while returning members were allotted the same $200,000 budgets they had last year.

Mountjoy said the rationale for the disparity is that veteran legislators are locked into salaries that are paid to senior staff members, but that new lawmakers can hire their employees at lower pay.

The newly-adopted system is obviously unfair to newcomers, Mountjoy believes, saying he sees it as a ploy by Brown to extend his influence over freshmen Democrats by later doling out staff help from his own resources as an incentive for them to follow his leadership.

But Martinez said Brown has made no promises to the freshmen Democrats.

Nevertheless, Aguiar said that if Brown’s intention was to make an impression on the newcomers, it worked.

“I knew the Speaker was a powerful person,” Aguiar said, but “I had no idea he was that powerful.”

Aguiar said that, despite budget limitations, he plans to keep his Ontario office at 304 F St. open on Saturdays and also establish once-a-week office hours at the Civic Center in Chino Hills.

Martinez, whose father, Rep. Matthew G. Martinez (D-Monterey Park) preceded her in the Assembly, said the atmosphere in Sacramento today is far different from when her father took office in 1980. She recalled attending his swearing-in ceremony in the state Capitol with aides bustling around and his office already well staffed and equipped.

When she went to Sacramento for her own swearing-in, she said, she found the Assembly’s support staff scarce and overworked and her Capitol office had no equipment beyond two paper clips. In this spartan setting, she said, she and other freshmen were directed to a class on ethics where they were warned about the pitfalls of failing to report Christmas gifts valued at $10 or more.

Martinez said the public may still perceive Sacramento as the home of “fat-cat politicians,” but to her, it was “kind of like going in a convent.”

Already, the new lawmaker said, she has been warned that it will be futile to introduce any legislation that costs money, because the state is broke. Instead, the emphasis will be on finding ways to reduce spending.

“We’re going to be more auditors than anything,” she said.

Martinez ran for the Assembly with the hope of parlaying her experience on the Garvey School District board into a seat on the Assembly Education Committee so that she could have an impact on state education matters.

Committee assignments have yet to be made, but Martinez and others are jockeying for favorable appointments.

Solis is hoping her experience on a college board will put her in line for a seat on the committee on higher education. Hoge, an insurance broker, wants to be on the insurance committee to gain a voice on such matters as workers’ compensation reform and auto and health insurance.

Hoge already has introduced his first bill, a measure that would require workers claiming disability from mental stress to demonstrate that their job was the predominant cause of the stress in order to collect benefits. Workers presently can file claims if the job produced as little as 10% of their stress.

With nearly everyone agreed that the workers’ compensation system should be reformed, Hoge said lots of bills will be introduced on the subject. He said he wanted to submit his quickly because he had emphasized that issue in his campaign and he needed to learn the process to draft and submit legislation at the outset.

“We don’t have a long learning curve now that we have term limits,” Hoge said. “Every day that you serve, you need to put to as much use as you can.”

Both Hoge, a conservative Republican, and Solis, a mainstream Democrat, say they think this will be a more pragmatic, less partisan Legislature than usual because of term limits and the magnitude of the problems facing California.

“We’re not professional politicians,” Solis said, noting that the six-year limit on terms in the Assembly means that lengthy legislative careers so common in the past are now impossible.

In addition, she said, the increase in the number of women in the Assembly from 16 to 22 will create a different tone. In general, she said, women are “more concerned about solving the problems and less about egos.”

Hoge said he believes the new Legislature is “more business oriented . . . Many (of the newcomers) have had small businesses of their own, or have worked for businesses in key positions. And I think that will make a difference.”

Martinez seems less optimistic. She said she worries that the frugality in state government will make service in the Legislature unattractive so that the only people who run for office are those who are rich enough to be unconcerned about the compensation--$52,500 a year, plus $100 a day while the Assembly is in session.

And, she said, the lack of adequate support staff may hinder the Legislature’s ability to deal with complex problems.

The public is about to find out, she said, what happens when “government is running on a shoestring.”