She Just Wants ‘a System That’s Incorruptible’

ORANGE — If there’s anyone who has done more to fight corruption in California politics than Shirley Grindle, it’s news to Shirley.

“I tell you, if we had more people doing what I do around the state, we’d have those bastards so afraid. We’d really clean this system up,” the Ralph Nader of Orange County confided recently, between pillorying one politician for taking too much money and another for cozying up to a developer.

The thing is, Shirley (everyone calls her Shirley) is probably right.

The straight-talking, one-woman political reform act is widely credited with achieving more to fight slime in government than any other individual in Orange County, and perhaps in California.

Along the way, Grindle has infuriated so many politicians, developers and lobbyists with her abrasive style and sometimes maddening obsession with detail that the powerful and the power seekers alike speak longingly of the day Grindle gives up the fight.

“She doesn’t care if Democrats win. She doesn’t care if Republicans win. She wants just one thing: a system that’s incorruptible, that doesn’t give one citizen more influence over government than another,” said Bob Stern, one of the authors of the campaign finance reform initiative Proposition 208.

“She’s probably doomed to never getting what she wants, but she’s come closer than any other single person in California.”

As Grindle would say, look at the record: In 1978, she wrote the first campaign finance reform law in Orange County, forcing supervisors to abstain from voting on matters affecting major contributors. She helped write the 1993 law barring county employees from accepting gifts from anyone doing business with the county. It is the strictest gift ban in California. That year, she also co-wrote a county policy preventing officials from lobbying the county for one year after leaving their jobs.

Grindle has not let up. She was an organizer of Proposition 208--even though she is still seething that Stern and others didn’t make changes she suggested. Even Stern acknowledges with some chagrin that Grindle’s suggestions would have made the legislation more airtight.

She is on the board of California Common Cause, though she has been known to call the reformers who make up that organization idealists who don’t know how to get things done.

*

And Grindle’s full-time, behind-the-scenes dedication to monitoring compliance with political reform laws on her home turf of Orange County has made her admired and feared.

No gadfly, Grindle stays quiet until she has something worthwhile to share. More often than not, she doesn’t call the press. Instead, she calls politicians she has the goods on with a warning: Clean up your act, or I’ll really get on your back. If they don’t, they are likely to see Grindle next across a speaker’s lectern at a public meeting, armed with contribution records and demanding explanations.

“She’s a watchdog nipping at our heels. She knows the source of my campaign contributions better than I do,” said county Supervisor William G. Steiner, who has more than once been the target of Grindle’s wrath.

“When Shirley Grindle calls, your heart skips a couple of beats. You wonder, ‘What did I do wrong now?’ ”

How did a Nebraska native, who has never held elective office and never wanted to, become the combination power broker, den mother and politician’s worst nightmare she is today, at 62?

“Knowledge,” Grindle said, chuckling. “Knowledge is power.”

Knowledge for Grindle starts in a guest room of her home in Orange, on thousands of 5-by-7-inch cards she keeps in a dozen file boxes. On each card is the name of a single campaign contributor and how much, each year since 1978, that person has given to top county officials.

It is the kind of work even the most dedicated political reformers wouldn’t attempt these days without a computer. But Grindle, a former aerospace engineer, shuns the things. She likes to organize her knowledge her own way. And her arcane system is one way of keeping it private.

Divorced, the mother of a 35-year-old son, Grindle says she, frankly, doesn’t have much else to do besides keep her eyes on politicians. Independently wealthy from a huge profit she amassed in a mobile home venture years ago, she hasn’t worked since 1981, when she decided to dedicate herself to being a watchdog full time.

Her house is paid off. She lives alone and makes stained-glass windows as a hobby. She goes to movies a lot. And she reads the public records others ignore.

“You can always count on her. If something’s coming up and it’s important, there’s Shirley. And papers start flying and faxes start beeping, and she’s yelling over the phone,” said Jean Askham, president of the League of Women Voters of Orange County.

“Boy, it’s incredible. She doesn’t go away. She goes quiet for a while, and then she crops up again.”

*

After 20 years fighting the same battles, Grindle’s enemies are everywhere. Some say privately she has overstepped her bounds, using the laws she helped create as pulpits to bully law-abiding contributors into complying with her interpretation of the law rather than its letter.

But ask them to speak for the record and most of them demur. A quote in the newspaper criticizing Grindle usually is not worth drawing her interest in your financial doings.

“I have an entire wing of my house dedicated to Shirley Grindle, because she has caused such havoc for some of my clients that I have been able to afford to build it,” said Dana Reed, a Costa Mesa lawyer who has often defended politicians against charges brought by the Orange County district attorney’s office at Grindle’s behest.

“She has no power of her own. Her power calls from her ability to motivate the press and to motivate prosecutors, and from the fact that she’s not afraid to call you. . . . When you’re on the receiving end of one of her diatribes, you really want to strangle her.”

These days, Grindle is making waves again, this time in Anaheim, where information she dug up on a flood of gambling interest money into a 1996 City Council race led to the filing of criminal charges against the group by the city attorney--and a flurry of countercharges against other politicians whom their foes said the city attorney was protecting.

“It’s a . . . mess,” Grindle said of the Anaheim political infighting touched off by her revelation that gambling interests working with lobbyist Steve Sheldon had pumped more than $40,000 into the race in its final weeks, more than what several other candidates spent combined.

The charges against Sheldon eventually were dropped after the city attorney ceded the case to a special prosecutor. Meanwhile, the prosecutor, Ravi Mehta, launched an investigation of minor campaign violations by other City Council members that Grindle and other political reform advocates decried as politically motivated.

On Tuesday, the City Council voted to fire Mehta and assign the investigation to another attorney.

Grindle, the activist who never seems to tire, says she’s, well, tired of the Anaheim fight.

It’s been 25 years since she was first astonished and dismayed, as a newly appointed county planning commissioner, to see the shady side of politics firsthand. And maybe, Grindle says, it’s nearing time to lock up her file boxes for good.

“I’m 62. Part of me wants to get rid of it. I’m fed up with it all,” Grindle says.

But then the phone rings. It’s a politician returning her call.

“I want to talk to you about this contribution business,” Grindle says, her back suddenly tense, her words shooting out like bullets as she takes the phone into another room.

“I’m surprised at you. This just stinks.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Shirley’s Successes

Here are the major campaign finance and political reform laws written, co-written or amended by Shirley Grindle, often called the Ralph Nader of Orange County:

* TINCUP (Time Is Now, Clean Up Politics), the first political reform law in county history, was written by Grindle in the late 1970s; it prohibits supervisors from voting on matters affecting major campaign contributors.

* An ordinance drafted by Grindle and the county counsel in 1993 prohibits county employees from receiving gifts from anyone who had done business with the county in the last 12 months.

* A 1993 ethics code, written in part by Grindle, bans officials and former employees from lobbying the county for one year after leaving their jobs.

Source: Times reports; Researched by ESTHER SCHRADER / Los Angeles Times