Speakership Helps Fill Allen’s Coffers to Record Level

Facing a recall threat, Assembly Speaker Doris Allen is enjoying one bonus that may help ease the angst: As the Assembly’s leader, she is seeing her campaign coffers swell with contributions from special interests.

Since the Republican lawmaker was elevated to the speakership June 5 on the shoulders of Assembly Democrats, Allen has raised nearly $60,000, according to the latest campaign finance reports.

With that added to the more than $115,000 that Allen raised as she made an unsuccessful run for a vacant state Senate seat earlier this year, the first six months of 1995 have been record-breaking for the Cypress Republican.

The $177,000 she collected was well above the $25,000 Allen garnered during the first six months of 1993 and the more than $70,000 she raised in the first half of 1994.

Even so, Allen’s receipts were dwarfed by campaign collections by her predecessor, Assemblyman Willie Brown (D-San Francisco), and the man she beat out for the Speaker’s post, Assembly GOP leader Jim Brulte (R-Rancho Cucamonga).

Brown, who made campaign fund raising an art form during his long tenure as Speaker, raised more than $1 million. Brulte received $670,000 during the first six months of 1995.

Allen even got beat out in the fund-raising department by one of her Orange County colleagues.

Assemblyman Curt Pringle (R-Garden Grove) got more than $200,000 in campaign contributions during the first half of the year. Pringle’s fund raising improved largely after he became chairman of the influential Assembly Appropriations Committee. When Allen became Speaker, she threw Pringle off the committee. The lawmaker has become one of the engines of the Allen recall movement, giving more than $10,000 to the effort.

But officials in the Allen camp said she has only begun.

“She has the ability to raise a lot more,” said Allan Hoffenblum, Allen’s campaign consultant. “She’s going to do what any elected official does. She’s going to go to people who are supportive of her and ask for money.”

After Allen grabbed the speakership with the help of the Democrats, Republicans accused her of being a traitor and launched the recall against her. So far, leaders of the recall movement have collected about half of the more than 25,000 signatures of voters in Allen’s district needed to qualify the effort for the ballot.

Much of Allen’s money came from employee unions and groups associated with health care. While serving earlier this year as chairwoman of the Assembly Health Committee, Allen collected contributions of $1,000 or more from political groups representing dentists, nurses, health facilities, ambulance firms, psychiatrists, psychologists and orthopedists.

Her largest contributor was the California State Council of Service Employees, which gave $13,000--most of it after she was elected Speaker. She also got $5,000 each from the California State Employees Assn. and the California Teachers Assn.