Secession Bills Boost Boland’s Profile

For two decades she had pulled determinedly at the oars like a castaway in a lifeboat.

Then, in just a couple of swift maneuvers, Assemblywoman Paula Boland (R-Granada Hills) has risen to the crest of a wave that could reshape two of Southern California’s largest institutions--the city of Los Angeles and its school district.

First came her bill last summer, making it easier for communities such as the San Fernando Valley to break away from the mammoth Los Angeles Unified School District.

And Thursday, she stunned the Statehouse with a legislative sneak attack that won Assembly approval of a similar bill that would help San Fernando Valley voters form a city of their own.

With those moves, Boland, a 56-year-old Granada Hills real estate broker and family woman who won her Assembly seat in 1990, has emerged as one of the region’s most potent political figures.

She has advanced her agenda by sticking doggedly to the two breakaway notions, which share broad appeal in her northern Valley district.

“She’s kind of unstoppable, the unsinkable Paula Boland,” said Bob Scott, chairman of local issues for the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn.

Boland first embraced Valley separatism in the 1970s, when mandatory school busing had parents up in arms and a group of business leaders formed CIVICC, the Committee to Investigate an Independent Valley City/County.

The 1970s secession movement was quashed when the Legislature, at the urging of L.A. city officials, adopted an amendment to a bill giving the Los Angeles City Council the veto power over any secession.

Years later, when she went to Sacramento, Valley secession was at the top of her legislative list.

“I promised my constituents in 1990 I would do this,” she said.

She introduced the city secession bill three years ago, she said, but then withdrew it to concentrate on the school breakup measure.

“Kids needed to come first,” she said. “Every day I read the newspaper and saw another disaster that the L.A. Unified schools was creating, another controversy, another investigation.

“I read about AIDS classes without parents’ permission and the descriptions they gave, and nobody’s supervising it. I thought I better get these kids out of there as soon as possible.”

Boland’s run for office in 1990, occasioned by the retirement of Republican Assemblywoman Marian LaFollette, surprised political consultant Paul Clark, who first worked with Boland on the school busing fight in the 1970s.

Boland had opened her real estate office for anti-busing phone campaigns, and over the years, Clark and his wife, former U.S. Rep. Bobbi Fiedler, came to know her as someone who could be counted on to do some of the more tedious work associated with political campaigns.

Others describe her as a reliable ally more than as a power broker.

Colleagues have said Boland raised her profile from “backbencher” to leader in last year’s Assembly battle in which Republicans painfully dethroned Doris Allen, a Republican who accepted the house speakership in a deal with Democratic power broker Willie Brown.

The battle left Boland on poor terms with one of her former allies. Former GOP Assemblyman Paul Horcher, who was recalled as a result of the struggle, said Boland “never had more than a superficial understanding of any issue” and often seemed confused when Republicans met on pending legislation.

As a result, Horcher refuses to give Boland credit for the secession bill’s passage.

“I’m sure the Republicans were bullied to get her bills out,” Horcher said. “You can’t call it a victory. It’s a stacked deck. She’s is being rewarded for being a stooge all these years.”

Jay McBee, chairman of governmental affairs for the San Fernando Valley Assn. of Realtors, credited Boland with making the school district bill politically palatable to a range of key elected officials, from Mayor Richard Riordan to state Sen. Tom Hayden, whose support was crucial to the bill’s passage.

McBee described her alliance with Hayden as a “coming of age, because she ended up not going along partisan lines, but working with a fairly liberal Democrat to pursue that goal.”

Even as Boland relishes her secession victory in the Assembly, some of her allies are taking a cautious stance on the chances of the city actually separating.

“It doesn’t necessarily mean there is going to be a secession movement,” said Los Angeles City Councilman Hal Bernson, another veteran of the CIVICC movement of the 1970s. “It may change the way the City Council treats the Valley. That is basically what the Valley wants.”