Commercial Builders Erecting Organization From the Ground Up

Now that the home-building industry is a considerable political power, the people who build offices, shopping centers and factories want to take a page from its book.

Three years ago a group of these commercial developers walked out of the home builders’ powerful trade group in Orange County when the two groups didn’t see eye to eye on some issues.

By last year the new group, which calls itself the Commercial/Industrial Development Assn., had started a political-action committee for making contributions to politicians. Just recently, it hired a political consultant to track legislation affecting developers.

All this is old hat to the home builders, who’ve been doing these things for years in their group, the Building Industry Assn. of Orange County. The statewide parent organization keeps lobbyists in Sacramento and runs its own political-action fund. In Orange County the group has a full-time expert on the staff for lobbying local governments. The builders even have a war chest in Los Angeles for suing local governments.

With 1,200 members, the Orange County chapter collects enough dues to support a sizable staff. The BIA’s Southern California region--which stretches from Ventura County to Orange County and out to Riverside and San Bernardino counties--is the largest local chapter of the National Assn. of Home Builders. The NAHB, of course, is not only the parent organization but an influential Washington lobby as well.

The commercial developers’ group, on the other hand, has no national organization and only 500 members in Orange and Los Angeles counties. (It’s no surprise that the home builders would be an older, better organized group. In suburban Orange County the houses came before the malls, office towers and factories.)

CIDA, as it’s called, has only a small staff. That’s the main reason it farmed out the political work to Spinner-LaMar and Associates, the political consultant.

But political clout comes neither easily nor cheap, CIDA has found. After a year the funds for the group’s political action committee, or PAC, languish in the range of “the low four figures,” says former CIDA President Jeffrey B. Armour of Hopkins Development.

Armour describes ruefully a PAC fund-raiser the group held late last year: CIDA tried to get 75 members to contribute $250 each to spend an hour or so at a cocktail party with County Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez. Only five people pledged to come and the event was canceled.