Posted on 09/01/2003 10:34:04 AM PDT by NormsRevenge
SACRAMENTO -- What are we going to do about Dean Florez?
That's the question fellow legislators in both parties are asking as they shake their heads over the latest set of unorthodox tactics the maverick state senator used to blast away a political roadblock threatening to stymie one of his bills.
Florez, D-Shafter, inveigled Democratic members of the Assembly Appropriations Committee to vote for his big anti-smog bill even though he infuriated them in the process by publicly attacking a charming young Latina assemblywoman who also represents Kern County.
It wasn't the first time Florez has gotten things done by ignoring the traditional political strategy of going along to get along.
He hadn't been in office more than a few months in 1999 when he rattled the Bakersfield political establishment by blocking money for the popular Kern River Freeway project until planners agreed to protect a groundwater storage facility important to farmers.
While that involved a local flap, he left the whole state gasping last year when he skewered Democratic Gov. Gray Davis' administration in hearings on its mishandling of a computer software purchase contract.
"I've always got a battle," Florez said in an interview. "That's my style."
But the story of how he got the smog bill through the Assembly Appropriations Committee marks a new high in the Florez record of bulldozer politics -- or a new low, depending on whom you ask.
It has plots and subplots like a Russian novel.
It wasn't always easy getting the highly controversial bill through the state Senate. For the first time in history, it will require farmers and dairy operators to shoulder part of the burden of reducing pollution-causing emissions. That sends shivers down their spines, given the complaints they hear from other industries.
But Florez said he always expected smooth sailing for it in the Assembly money committee. It is dominated by Democrats, most of whom are urban liberals who never met an environmental bill they didn't like.
But a couple of days before the scheduled Aug. 20 hearing, he said he was warned that the bill might be in trouble. That meant that there was unexpected opposition among Democrats, since the minority Republicans are automatic no votes on such a bill.
To Capitol insiders that had all the earmarks of a last-minute behind-the-scenes power play by somebody who wants to scuttle or gut the bill for personal or political reasons. Those reasons may or may not have anything to do with the policy in the bill.
When confronted with that situation, the traditional response is for the author to quietly approach committee members -- or whoever's running the power play -- to see what's bothering them or try to work out a compromise. That may or may not be successful, depending on the influence or the feeling behind the play.
Florez quickly concluded that it was an effort by top Democrats to sidetrack the bill. They wanted toprotect Assemblywoman Nicole Parra, D-Hanford, from having to vote on a controversial issue. She will have a tough re-election battle next year and she doesn't need to make enemies among either farmers or environmentalists.
The leader of the opposition among Assembly Democrats, Leland Yee of San Francisco, said he objected on policy grounds, but he told the Los Angeles Times that at least one colleague mentioned protecting Parra as the reason for his opposition.
Florez knew he was at a disadvantage if he tried to penetrate the circle of Assembly insiders surrounding Parra. He has few friends there.
His response was unique in the memory of many Sacramento veterans.
In the news media, he fired an angry blast at what he called a sneaky maneuver that disregarded the health problems of children in the valley to protect Parra politically.
It wasn't his first public jab at Parra, either. But for the first time, it exposed the entire Legislature to the ugly feud between Florez and Nicole Parra and her father, Kern County Supervisor Pete Parra.
The depth of bad feeling stunned most fellow lawmakers.
"There's a real war there," marveled Republican Assemblyman Richard Mountjoy, who got caught up in another Florez vs. Parra issue. That involved Florez's request for an audit of the way the county tobacco-tax commission -- headed by Pete Parra -- is handling its money.
Mountjoy initially agreed to a request from Parra to vote against the audit. But after a hallway conversation with Florez, after which a reporter heard Mountjoy say, "She lied to me," he switched and voted with Florez for the audit.
Mountjoy said Parra told him the audit was part of a political vendetta by Florez against her father and was unnecessary, Florez told The Californian.
Revealing details of such a conversation is a breach of political etiquette and it had a predictable effect.
Florez lost another friend.
"I think it was very vindictive of Dean Florez," Mountjoy said. "When I have a conversation with another legislator like that, it stays between him and me."
Although it cemented Florez's reputation for running roughshod over people's feelings, it accomplished his goal of getting it on the record that Nicole Parra had personally lobbied audit committee members to protect her father from a potentially embarrassing audit.
The Florez-Parra feud has overshadowed Kern County politics almost from the moment Florez was elected to the Assembly in 1998.
Its origin has been a bit of mystery, but Florez is now telling people, including reporters, that it began shortly after he first took office in 1999.
His version is that Nicole Parra verbally attacked him after he publicly criticized Ed Velasquez, who was then the embattled director of the Kern County Economic Opportunity Corp.
Velasquez eventually resigned under fire for collecting compensatory time-off pay in addition to his salary for work over 40 hours a week, although he was strongly supported by Pete Parra.
Neither Nicole nor Pete Parra responded to requests for comment for this article.
She is under heavy pressure from the Assembly Speaker's office not to respond to attacks or other comments from Florez, apparently in hopes that will allow the sparring to die down.
She finds that difficult, however.
She couldn't resist telling a Fresno Bee reporter that "Mr. Florez seems to think that attacking me will clean up the air in the Central Valley. I don't think that's right."
Whatever the origin of the feud, Florez and Pete Parra regularly sparred in public. Florez supported Jim Crettol against Nicole Parra in the Democratic Assembly primary election last year.
In Sacramento, the result of Florez's outburst was to expose the opposition to his bill and force critics to sit down in public and negotiate their points of difference. The negotiations did not produce an agreement with agriculture, but it eliminated the argument that Florez was obstinate. It also made it much more difficult for the environmentalists on the committee to vote against the bill.
None of them did and the bill passed the committee easily on Friday.
Another subplot is the question of why Florez is carrying not just one major environmental bill, but a whole package of measures to crack down on air pollution from farm and dairy operations, the biggest industry in his district.
For four years in the Assembly, Florez stood out as perhaps the most conservative Democrat in Sacramento. He drove fellow Democrats and legislative leaders crazy with his opposition to environmental and gay rights legislation and his support for business-friendly laws.
It all came to a head last July when Florez left the Assembly floor and flew home just before a crucial vote on the signature environmental bill of the session. That was the measure by Assemblywoman Fran Pavley, D-Agoura Hills, to curb greenhouse gas emissions from SUVs.
Assembly Speaker Herb Wesson immediately fired Florez as chairman and member of the legislative audit committee, which had just completed the headline-grabbing investigation of the Oracle software scandal.
Although Wesson said the reason for the firing was Florez's break with party ranks on the Pavley bill, most people believed the Oracle hearings, with day after day of embarrassing revelations for the governor, was the real reason. For one thing, Florez's vote wasn't necessary for the Pavley bill. It passed without him.
Now, Florez is not only sponsoring a package of environmental bills opposed by agriculture, he also has been publicly beating up on the No. 1 industry in his district with almost daily criticism of their efforts to water down the measure.
How can he afford to do that politically, when he may have to seek re-election in 2006?
Florez says he's not worried because he has carried a great deal of political water for the agriculture industry in the last four years.
"I have a big bank account with agriculture," he said. "There comes a time when you have to withdraw something from the bank account in order to accomplish something."
Others in Sacramento have another theory: Florez makes no secret of the fact that he wants to run for state Treasurer at some point in the future and probably higher statewide offices later.
But he is likely to have a tough time winning a Democratic primary because of his previous votes against environmental bills, gay rights bills and his attacks on Davis in the Oracle hearing, they say.
Florez needs to polish his credential with the left-of-center elements in the Democratic party if he wants to stand a chance in a statewide primary.
Florez doesn't deny that's a factor, but he insists that his main goal is to clean up the air in the Central Valley.
The farm-pollution bills also have another key ingredient of a Florez crusade: newspaper support. The epidemic of smog-related asthma was the subject of a major report in the Fresno Bee last year.
No one in Sacramento jumps on a big newspaper headline like Dean Florez, and he makes no apology for that.
"My style is to do things in the press and use that to get my message out," he said. He said it's the best way to let voters know what he's working on and it insures follow-up coverage by the media.
In fact, that was behind his angry outbursts to reporters over the committee's handling of the smog bill.
When something like that happens, Florez said he's not one to take it lying down.
"I'll expose them with the hot light of the press," he said.
That's against the rules of political etiquette, but it works for Florez, one reason why they still haven't figured out what to do about Dean Florez.
Yee said he has a theory.
"I think the way to deal with Dean Florez is to confront him and don't backdown," Yee said.
But that didn't work either.
Florez got his bill through the committee.
Cough! Bullsh-t! He was going to vote yes on the "civil unions" bill until some Hispanics in his district threatened him with defeat. There are only three kinds of Democrats in California: liberal, more liberal, and Shiite liberal.
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