Bumper Crop of Clout

SACRAMENTO —  George Soares learned to be a salesman peddling pesticides to farmers in the Central Valley.

He pitched his own credibility, not the products. “I never really felt like I was selling anything,” he said of his first job. “I was just talking to friends about the needs they had, the problems and the solutions.”

Three decades later, Soares’ world still revolves around salesmanship, farmers and pesticides, but he’s marketing a more precious commodity: influence.

Soares is a lobbyist, and over the last quarter-century he has left his imprint on hundreds of bills killed and amended, regulations reworded, boards empowered, appointees selected, and myriad deals vital to those who produce and sell food, a $27.5- billion-a-year industry in California.

Lobbyists are so powerful and indispensable to the working of California government that they’re known in Sacramento as the Third House, in deference to their role in writing, sponsoring and corralling coalitions to pass legislation.

As term limits have transformed the Capitol into a world in which the staff turns over frequently and freshman lawmakers arrive in droves each year, already raising money for their next race, legislators have come to rely heavily on the institutional expertise and campaign fundraising prowess of lobbyists.

Soares has taken full advantage, building his legal/lobbying practice into the dominant force in the realm of agriculture.

Last year, he delayed the state budget as he fought to cap fees paid by chemical companies that are used to regulate pesticides. Two years earlier, he brokered a deal that made farm equipment exempt from the state sales tax. He has engineered the creation of 20 state commissions to govern commodities from avocados to walnuts -- powerful groups that collect dues from all growers, fund advertising campaigns and underwrite research that helps determine the shape, size and quantity of fruit and vegetables sold throughout the state.

Friends call him altruistic, passionate about farming (doting on cows he calls “my girls”), unfailingly courteous to governors and secretaries alike, the kind of down-to-earth colleague who takes time out to encourage a friend’s teenage son to attend college. Competitors and adversaries call him aggressive, egotistical, a businessman masquerading as a farmer, a lobbyist who uses farm interests to front for chemical companies. Yet there’s consensus on certain attributes: smart, shrewd, knowledgeable, sophisticated.

“He looks so far ahead and also has institutional knowledge,” said Charlie Hoppin, president of the Rice Industry Assn., one of Soares’ clients. “He’s just a master.”

Soares built his law firm on clients who make their living from agriculture but whose economic interests collide as often as they’re in concert: farmers and chemical companies, pesticide salesmen and crop dusters, farm equipment dealers and grocers. He preaches a pragmatic message: Strength in numbers. Find common ground. Pick your fights.

“It is remarkable at times he doesn’t have a conflict,” said Merlin Fagan, who retired in 1998 after more than 20 years lobbying for the Farm Bureau. “He seems to be able to weather issues that normally would divide his constituency. That tests his considerable ability to be a mediator.”

Just as he learned to do selling pesticides, Soares relies on his credibility and the relationships he cultivates to sell solutions that work for his clients as well as state officials.

“There’s the element of trust,” said Assemblywoman Barbara Matthews (D-Tracy), who chairs the Agriculture Committee.

To some competitors, Soares compromises farmers by persuading them to form strategic alliances, whether with chemical companies or urban Democrats such as former Gov. Gray Davis and state Sen. Gil Cedillo (D-Los Angeles).

Many farmers would blanch at the thought of attending a Cedillo fundraiser featuring Jesse Jackson. Soares is proud that Hoppin and Earl Williams, president of the California Cotton Ginners and Growers Assns., attended the 2002 gala at the Biltmore Hotel. Soares made sure that they sat in the front row. And had their picture taken with Jackson.

“We were sort of the star attraction,” Williams said.

It helped cement an important relationship. “They’re very good people,” Cedillo said. “I might be with them five times out of 100, but they appreciate it. We trust each other.”

Soares, 60, is always thinking about the future, recalibrating techniques in response to the demands of an increasingly urban state, where farmland has disappeared at the rate of almost 49,000 acres a year since California began keeping track in 1984. Part firebrand, part traditionalist -- he uses only pencils and won’t read e-mails unless they’re printed out and delivered to him on paper -- Soares makes no apologies for tactics he argues are vital in the 21st century.

“This is a state of mostly urban people with very little understanding of what we do. That’s not a good situation for agriculture,” he said. Farmers must jettison romantic notions, he said.

He knows this firsthand. He commutes on weekends from Sacramento to his 1,000-head dairy in Hanford, his wife and office manager driving so he can work in the car. “If you don’t treat it as a business, you won’t have it as a way of life,” he said.

*

As a child, Soares was always running for something, his mother said, as much to see if he could win as anything else. “He works at being a winner, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” Stella Soares said.

He was born in the tiny San Luis Obispo County town of Harmony. Dairy farmers with cows but no land, the Soares family was always moving, settling finally in the Central Valley among many other Portuguese from the Azores.

In large ways and small, he has maintained close ties to the area, marrying Gloria, a Hanford High School classmate he met again 20 years later at the county fair, running the Log Haven Dairy, emceeing the Kings County dairy princess contest. His mother lives in Visalia, close enough to have on hand his favorite childhood dishes for drop-by visits: potato salad without onions, divinity fudge and custard, a dairy farmer’s staple.

Soares was active in Future Farmers of America, majored in agriculture at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and was student body president in his senior year. In 1974, he endowed an annual award there in his parents’ name. “I want to be around to enjoy what little good I can do,” he said, wondering why so many people wait to set up legacies in their wills.

Soares attended law school at night while taking over his college roommate’s job as consultant to the Assembly Agriculture Committee. There he drafted a law that established the Avocado Commission, which became his firm’s first client in 1979.

The commission’s success in popularizing avocados spurred other groups to seek the same arrangement, so they hired Soares to draft legislation. “The net effect was that we created our own client base by creating these legal entities,” Soares said when profiled by his law school. “Once formed, these groups retained us to be their governmental advocate and also their legal counsel. It worked out well.”

His lobbying practice has grown from four clients in 1979 paying $25,000 total to more than 40 today (including the original four) paying close to 10 times that amount every three months. Soares manages a 50-person law firm, Kahn Soares and Conway, with eight partners and four registered lobbyists.

Navigating the post-term-limits world has offered Soares wide-ranging opportunities to expand his influence.

A Capitol once filled with legislator-farmers is now populated by inexperienced legislators and staff, with resources limited by a legislative budget also capped in the term-limits initiative.

Mike Briggs represented the two largest agricultural counties in the state, Fresno and Tulare, in the Assembly from 1999 to 2002, but relied on Soares for advice whenever an issue arose about agriculture. “He was the most credible person I met,” said Briggs, a Republican.

Legislators today have less time to get to know interest groups, yet often vote based on how key constituencies will react. Soares offers one-stop shopping.

“If there’s an issue, well, let’s call George and he’ll raise the issue and get back to us,” said Matthews, the Agriculture Committee chairwoman. “Imagine how much more difficult it would be if we had to call 14 groups.”

Soares is a source of cash as well as advice. Like most lobbyists, Soares advises clients on contributions, but he and a core group also have devised strategies to stand out amid the dozens of fundraisers often held in a single week.

Several years ago, they launched “The Breakfast Club,” inviting key politicians to intimate 7:30 a.m. fundraisers. The price of admission: $750 when the guest speaker is an Assembly member; $1,000 for a senator. The 20 members of the club, including some who are not Soares’ clients, take turns inviting guests, who range from conservative Republicans to liberal Democrats.

“We have wonderful friends in both parties and we’re happy about that,” said Soares, who is not a member of either party. “We think it’s dangerous to be typecast.”

Under his guidance, Soares’ clients recently formed a joint independent expenditure committee after watching unions and trial lawyers use the technique successfully for last-minute infusions of cash in a key race. The committee reported more than $81,000 as of August that it will spend on elections this fall.

The election churn also has weakened the leadership in the Legislature, and lobbyists have increasingly become the deal-makers who sponsor bills, write them and put together strategic coalitions.

When the Legislature could not muster the two-thirds majority necessary to pass the budget in 2001, then-Gov. Davis reached out to Soares, who was pushing a plan to remove the state sales tax on farm equipment. The idea originated with his clients who sell the equipment and were losing sales to out-of-state dealers. Soares sold it as a popular tax break for farmers, ultimately worth $50 million to $100 million a year. Democrats needed four Republican votes to pass the budget in the Assembly, and the tractor tax package provided enough incentive for them to defy their party leaders.

“I will always think fondly of George,” Davis said. “At a time when no solution was in sight, he came on the horizon.”

Although other agriculture lobbyists grumble that Soares took too much credit, the success solidified his reputation among his clients, the band he dubs “street fighters” for their willingness to show up in person when strategically needed.

“He’s there when some others are sleeping,” said Williams, the cotton association president, who camped out with Soares during the tractor-tax nights.

The coalition has scored other successes by hashing out differences at bimonthly meetings of the Presidents Council, chief executives of Soares’ clients. Facing big proposed budget cuts in many agricultural programs this spring, they decided funding for the UC Cooperative Extension program was a low priority, over the objections of some who rely heavily on the service. Asked for a recommendation by the Schwarzenegger administration on who should head the Department of Pesticide Regulation, it took two meetings and a conference call to unite behind Mary-Ann Warmerdam, who was appointed last week. (Her husband is president of the nursery association, one of Soares’ clients.)

“You have to understand that you’re not going to win them all,” said Joel Nelson, president of Citrus Mutual, Soares’ client since 1982. “It’s kind of like a marriage; you just make it work.”

The forum also is a way for Soares to avoid conflicts among his clients’ inherently competing agendas. He represents strawberry farmers and also manufacturers of metam sodium, a pesticide some strawberry growers don’t particularly like. He lobbies for avocado farmers who want to block imports that contain invading pests, and for the chemical retailers who view each new pest as a business opportunity. He advises rice farmers who dread genetically modified rice, while the firm does other legal work for companies experimenting with such plantings.

Soares said he bows out on rare occasions when he cannot guide his clients to common ground, such as a disagreement between farmers and grocers over whether to label food with the country of origin. “I’m not naive,” he said. “There are times one has one opinion, one has another.” More is accomplished, he said, by searching for common ground than by dwelling on divisions.

“Too often, people aren’t listening. As a result, conflicts sometimes just go on and on,” he said. “I approach this business as: There are no 100% deals.”

*

Outside the California State Fair grandstands, Soares is taking notes on livestock about to be auctioned off at the annual “Sale of Champions” when he spots the familiar dark-blue Future Farmers of America jacket emblazoned with Hanford in gold letters. Minutes later, Soares is congratulating Teema Desilva and admiring the 18-year-old’s championship Yorkshire pig, another winner from the lobbyist’s hometown.

Each year, Soares puts together a group of friends, clients and colleagues who bid on the prize-winning animals raised by youths throughout California. In pressed Wranglers and ropers boots, Soares sits on this late August night with Hoppin, a big, gregarious rice and melon grower, and Jim Wells, once the director of the state agency that regulates pesticides, now a consultant whose business is co-owned by Soares’ firm.

At the end of the night, Desilva goes home with $1,000; his pig and three other animals are destined for the barbecue Soares and his partners plan to throw for the Future Farmers of America who volunteered at the fair.

The grandstands are as much Soares’ milieu as the office, where, two hours earlier, in suit and tie, he was mobilizing a last-minute effort to derail a bill to fund medical care for farm workers poisoned by pesticides drifting off fields.

Soares had been involved in negotiations for months, since state Sen. Dean Florez (D-Shafter) first reached out. The lobbyist said his clients were prepared to support some provisions, including a fund to pay for medical care. Florez agreed to the changes.

In June, Florez’s bill sailed through Assembly committees. In August, it cleared the last committee, over objections from Soares’ partner, Louie Brown.

Soares said it wasn’t what he had agreed to; it increased the state’s ability to impose penalties and might require farmers to obtain costly insurance. Before heading to the auction at the state fair, he drafted a memo outlining objections, readying arguments to ask the governor for a veto even as he worked to kill the measure on the Assembly floor.

“I thought we had a good-faith agreement,” Florez said. “To oppose the bill in the last 48 hours of session seems disingenuous.” Soares drafted revisions; Florez accepted some but rejected others.

In the closing hours of the legislative session, the bill passed the Assembly with 43 votes, just two more than necessary.

“We made a bad bill better, but it’s still a bad bill,” Soares said. He shifted to making the case for a veto, raising the specter of increased insurance costs, pointing out the narrowness of the vote and bipartisan opposition, and suggesting that the governor could address the underlying problem by executive order.

“I learned long ago in this business that you work all fronts simultaneously,” he said. “In chess, there’s two people. In the kind of game I play, it’s four people or six people sitting around the board. You have all these moving pieces at the same time. If you’ve just focused on one piece, you may be losing the game somewhere else.”