Deukmejian Assails Bradley for Hiring of Former Brown Staffers

Gov. George Deukmejian, hoping to tie the yoke of unpopular policies of ex-Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. around the neck of Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, said Friday that Bradley is surrounding himself with former Brown Administration officials.

“When I came into office in January of 1983, I was inheriting, in effect, a drifting ship in Sacramento, and many of the key people that are now close to Mayor Tom Bradley are individuals who were part of that administration,” Deukmejian said during a news conference in Los Angeles.

The only name Deukmejian specifically mentioned was that of Tom Houston, Bradley’s deputy mayor who was a Brown Administration official before the former governor appointed him head of the Fair Political Practices Commission.

But Bradley recently announced that Mary Nichols, who served in appointed jobs as chief of the state Air Resources Board and as Brown’s top environmental adviser, is heading up the mayor’s still unannounced gubernatorial campaign. Another Bradley political adviser is Tom Quinn, a former Brown campaign manager who headed Bradley’s reelection campaign last year and is expected to be named head of the mayor’s gubernatorial campaign committee. Mike Gage, a former state assemblyman who worked on Brown’s second presidential campaign, also played a key role in Bradley’s reelection campaign and recently helped organize a rafting trip down the Kern River for Bradley and political reporters.

Won in a Squeaker

The Republican governor said Bradley, a Democrat who lost to Deukmejian by less than 100,000 votes in the 1982 race for governor, was putting together a political team, and “it’s worth noting that they’re mostly all former Gov. Jerry Brown top aides.”

“I certainly don’t feel that the public is going to want to go back to having an administration in Sacramento that was similar to the one that existed during the eight years of Gov. Jerry Brown,” said Deukmejian, en route to Orange County where he later gave a speech to members of the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn.

In comments to reporters in Orange County, Deukmejian said he expected to make Brown an issue in a rematch against Bradley. So far, however, neither Deukmejian nor Bradley has formally announced their intention to run.

“It is fair to make the assumption that if Mayor Bradley were to be elected governor, I would assume most of those officials would follow him into that administration,” he said. He added, “We will discuss that, if need be, in the campaign.”

Houston, responding for Bradley, noted that his former boss in the State and Consumer Services Agency was Leonard Grimes, now second in command as assistant director of the Department of General Services in the Deukmejian Administration. (Houston also served in the Brown Administration as a top aide to then-Agriculture and Services Secretary Rose Elizabeth Bird, who Brown later appointed chief justice of the state Supreme Court.)

Strong Environmentalists

Houston said he was not particularly close to Brown, calling attention to his role as investigator of the so-called “computergate” incident involving the former governor’s use of his state staff and computers purchased with state funds to compile lists of campaign contributors.

The deputy mayor said the four former Brown aides close to Bradley shared backgrounds as strong environmentalists.

“We are bound together by one overriding constant: We’re strong environmentalists, and we believe the governor has become a disaster for the environment,” Houston said.

Deukmejian, in his speech to the 11,000-member Peace Officers Assn., struck a strong law and order theme, and his address was frequently interrupted by applause. The group, which endorsed Bradley for governor in 1982, presented Deukmejian with a wooden statue of actor John Wayne in cowboy attire. Deukmejian, like the late actor, is known by the nickname Duke, which was inscribed on the statue.

The governor received a standing ovation when he told several hundred corrections officers attending the convention at the Disneyland Hotel that although the death penalty had been given in more than 200 cases, “not one of those murderers has paid the ultimate price. I call on the California Supreme Court to implement the death penalty.”

Deukmejian also was interrupted by applause when he accused the city of Los Angeles of failing to carry its fair share of the burden in allowing a state prison to be built within the city limits.

‘No Help From City Hall’

“Thirty-eight percent of our state prison inmates come from Los Angeles. The law requires that we locate a state prison in Los Angeles, yet we have received no help from City Hall,” he said. Deukmejian has often accused Bradley of failing to provide leadership in the political fight to locate a prison at a favored site in downtown Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, Bradley held a City Hall press conference to reiterate his criticism of how Deukmejian has handled the prison problem.

“Not once did he or any of his Administration talk to any elected official in Los Angeles,” Bradley said. “That’s what we objected to. . . . I will have a proposal for him soon, one far cheaper than he has been willing to consider.

“The governor has failed, and now he is attempting to shift that burden,” Bradley added.

Bradley released a four-page “fact sheet” on Deukmejian’s “fiasco” prison construction program, which included statistics on overcrowding.