Marvin Braude Is One of a Kind

Today, the remarkable political career of Marvin Braude draws to a close. His 32-year tenure as a member of the Los Angeles City Council has been noteworthy for its breadth and depth of accomplishment. He has been a leader of great integrity and uncompromising principle in a political era too often lacking in either.

I served with Braude for 19 1/2 years on the City Council. Our close collaboration on two major initiatives--to control real estate development and to stop coastal oil drilling in our city--remains one of the most fulfilling experiences of my own public service career. Though we teamed up in 1986 to write Proposition U, which slashed L.A.’s commercial development in half, Braude had laid the groundwork for responsible and balanced development years earlier. Our successful battle in 1988 to stop an insidious oil drilling scheme on the coast next to Pacific Palisades would have been impossible without his longstanding and often lonely crusade.

Braude is sui generis, one of a kind. He often seemed almost eager to flout the conventional wisdom and boldly go where no L.A. city politician had gone before. He distinguished himself from the pack by being consistently ahead of his time, embracing issues before they became popular and educating the rest of us in the wisdom of his position.

His career is living testimony to the fact that one need not be a president, a governor or a mayor to have a monumental impact on the lives of the people he serves. Consider the highlights of the Braude legacy:

* Fiscal responsibility. Braude, who arrived at City Hall in 1965 as a liberal Democrat, nevertheless believed that government had to spend within its means or jeopardize its ability to provide vital services. Long before Gov. Jerry Brown ushered in the “era of limits� and Howard Jarvis led his taxpayers revolt, Braude led the city in prudent financial management.

* Nonsmokers’ rights. Braude became one of the first political figures to take on the tobacco industry. His trail-blazing legislative efforts to ban smoking in restaurants and other public places are now the norm throughout California, and “Big Tobacco,� which fought Braude every step of the way, is on the run across the nation.

* Santa Monica Mountains preservation. Before he was elected to office, Braude founded the Friends of the Santa Monica Mountains and subsequently devoted much of his political career to protecting these areas from exploitation. In the go-go era of rapacious development, which spawned some of the most grotesque hillside developments that scar our landscape, he called for setting aside wilderness areas in the city’s heartland. Thanks in part to his efforts, we now have the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.

* Coastal protection. Braude led the fight for public access to our beaches. A strong advocate of the 1972 Coastal Zone Conservation Act, he insisted that the public had an ownership interest in, and a right to enjoy, this state’s most precious natural resource, the Pacific Coast.

* Air quality. Braude demanded tougher pollution standards that imposed a responsibility on industry and government to clean up our poisoned air. First as a councilman and later as a member of the South Coast Air Quality Management District, he has been the leading advocate for car-pooling, bicycling and electric car technologies. Today, our air is the cleanest it’s been since World War II.

* LAPD reforms. As chair of the City Council’s Police Committee, Braude became the council’s most tenacious leader in implementing the landmark Christopher Commission reforms spurred by the Rodney King beating. These reforms will serve to protect the public and the LAPD against law enforcement excesses tolerated for too long, and to promote better police-community relations. Unlike many politicians, Braude knew that one could advance the cause of law enforcement while protecting individual civil liberties.

* Ethics in government. Braude was advocate and author of some of L.A.’s landmark campaign finance reform and ethics laws, but his most lasting contribution to governmental ethics will be his own conduct. On the most controversial decisions, he simply called them as he saw them. No whiff of scandal, allegation of favoritism or hypocrisy ever attached to his name.

Braude pushed the policy envelope as far as he could, steering by his own lights, indifferent to polls and pundits. As long as our coastline is blue, our mountains green and our air clean, Los Angeles will have Marvin Braude to thank.