COLUMN ONE : Tending the Machinery of Politics : Tom Martin is a master mechanic among the field deputies who serve elected officials locally. 'They are the unsung heroes of making things happen in government,' one observer says.

By JEAN MERL

Sept. 10, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

At 8 o’clock on a Wednesday morning, Tom Martin is heading north through rush-hour traffic on Sepulveda Boulevard, his county-issued Ford Taurus laden with the accouterments of the day ahead.

On the back seat lie half a dozen commendations from his boss, Los Angeles County Supervisor Don Knabe, that Martin will deliver to various civic and business leaders, along with some photos marking recent ceremonial occasions. Stuffed into a sturdy canvas tote bag are marked-up agendas for the meetings he will attend this day--a session of the Small Craft Harbor Commission in Marina del Rey and a joint meeting of two county sanitation districts in Torrance.

Competing for space in the tote are letters from constituents and memos that Martin hand-writes in the parked car whenever he has a few minutes between engagements.

Covering the floor are weekly and daily newspapers that Martin will scour for items of note: an obituary worthy of a Board of Supervisors adjournment motion, news of a contentious zoning issue that he wants to make his boss aware of, efforts by a financially struggling small city to land a big retail development, and an editorial about how the county handled the sewage spill resulting from a landslide at a luxury golf course.

When he gets back to his field office at the county courthouse in Torrance about midafternoon, he will deal with those issues, along with a dozen or so telephone messages, e-mails from the Hall of Administration in downtown Los Angeles and the day’s mail.

“It’s just stuff, dumb stuff. I’m the king of trivia,” Martin said in the affable, typically self-deprecating manner that has served him well during almost 30 years on the front lines of government.

But Martin takes all this “stuff” very, very seriously. And well he should.

As a field deputy to an elected official in one of the large, complicated political districts typical in Greater Los Angeles, he is the first, and sometimes only, government contact for residents. He is part of an army of staffers--perhaps 300 or more at various levels of government throughout the region--who deal with the kind of nuts-and-bolts services issues that their policy-setting bosses rarely see firsthand.

Their daybooks and telephone logs provide glimpses into how government really works, at its most basic levels.

“Without a doubt, they are the unsung heroes of making things happen in government,” said H. Eric Schockman, associate professor of political science at USC. “They’re the glue that holds things together.”

Veteran political consultant Allan Hoffenblum says that “constituent services are so important. People don’t understand just how much ‘casework’ there really is to a political office, and it really doesn’t have much to do with [such policy issues as] the death penalty and abortion.

“Those policy debates are the job of the elected official, and a good field staff takes a tremendous burden off the elected official . . . in handling the casework.”

Those who stick with it learn to negotiate the bureaucracies and develop institutional memories that serve their elected bosses well. And if their bosses are limited by law to serving just a few years, as are state legislators and Los Angeles city officeholders, the deputies’ skills become even more important to a lawmaker trying to make his or her mark quickly and move on.

Quality of Life Issues

Martin, a lifelong Republican, is notable for his longevity in a high-burnout job. Most field deputies last two or three years. They might move on to another staff position, become consultants or run for office themselves.

His willingness to help staffers in other offices-- even those who work for Democrats--also sets him apart. Becki Ames, who heads the district office of freshman Assemblyman George Nakano (D-Torrance), said Martin’s “experience is a tremendous resource for us to draw on. In a way, he’s a throwback to the days when it was not all about stepping on and stepping up.”

The problems Martin and other field deputies handle are not usually the kind that make headlines.

“A lot of this stuff is not on the radar screen, but it tends to be about quality of life issues that are important to people,” he said.

He cites the phone call he received recently from a man who was unhappy with the low water pressure in the shower heads at Torrance Beach. (His call to the maintenance people at the Department of Beaches took care of the water pressure complaint quickly.) And the letter from a woman seeking better upkeep and an American flag at Burton Chase Park in county-owned Marina del Rey. (He passed along that complaint, but explained that the county was unlikely to foot the $20,000 cost of a flagpole because the park’s community building has a flag inside.)

Good field deputies know their way around the confusing, often-overlapping jurisdictions and agencies that make up government in Southern California. The effective ones are personable, patient and even-tempered, interested in people and skilled at problem solving. The bad ones can permanently turn off a voter by mishandling a call or ignoring a letter.

In a close election, a politician’s future can hinge on how well the field staff did its job.

Greg Nelson, longtime chief of staff to Los Angeles City Councilman Joel Wachs, says most council members now devote more than half of their professional staff allocations to field operations, knowing full well “they are the key to reelection.”

“What people care about most is what you have done for them, whether you put in that traffic signal so their children can get to school safely.”

It is ironic, and a shame, Nelson says, that in the city at least, the field deputy jobs, despite their recognized importance, tend to be among the lowest-paying and least prestigious of professional staff positions.

Most work long hours, often including evenings and weekends, and hold jobs without the Civil Service or union protections enjoyed by many government employees.

Few can match the credentials Martin brings to his $65,000-a-year job.

At 54, Thomas R. Martin has three decades of field experience under his belt. His roots go deepest in the South Bay, a string of middle-class, politically centrist cities that hug the shoreline or slice inland toward the Los Angeles Harbor area.

He has lived in Manhattan Beach since the age of 11, when his father, Gayle T. Martin, took the job of city manager there. Tom Martin attended Catholic schools, then earned a degree in political science from USC in 1967.

After a stint in the Navy, he joined Bristol Meyers as a management trainee. But in 1969, Robert G. Beverly, then a freshman Republican assemblyman from Manhattan Beach, asked Martin to work for him as an administrative assistant in his South Bay office. Martin stayed there--eschewing opportunities to move to Sacramento--until the legislator’s retirement from the state Senate in 1996.

Over the years, Martin attended hundreds of civic dinners, parades and awards banquets on behalf of Beverly and became adept at constituent services and trouble-shooting. He came to understand the unique histories, the political sensibilities and the multitudes of players in these small cities so well that some people joked that he was the legislator--or should have been.

Political consultant Hoffenblum, Beverly’s onetime chief of staff, credited Martin with helping Beverly win his last election despite a redistricting that stripped him of his beach cities base and added cities where the veteran legislative leader was unknown.

When Beverly retired in 1996, Knabe, newly elected supervisor, wasted no time in recruiting Martin, who had two other job prospects in government.

“He’s an absolutely perfect fit,” Knabe said. “He is well known and respected in the community. He’s efficient, but he’s also thoughtful, looks at the lay of the land before he jumps into something. He’s very prolific, always coming up with ideas and suggestions that fit my philosophy.”

Torrance Mayor Dee Hardison, who has dealt with many field staffers at all levels of government, said she can count on Martin to “give me a heads up on something that’s coming up on the supervisors’ agenda” and to know her community’s concerns. “On many issues, I know that if I can talk to Tom, I don’t need to talk to the supervisor.”

Knabe has seven field deputies stationed throughout the 26 cities and 2 million residents that make up his crescent-shaped 4th District, which swings down the coast from Marina del Rey through the Palos Verdes Peninsula and Long Beach, dips over to Santa Catalina Island, then heads inland through such cities as Downey, Lakewood, Cerritos, Norwalk, Whittier and Diamond Bar.

Knabe said he counts on these staffers “to be my eyes and ears out in the communities. With the size of the district, they are absolutely critical to the operation.

Knabe has seen the operation from the ground up. While still a city councilman in Cerritos, he went to work for his predecessor, then-Supervisor Deane Dana, as a field deputy in the South Bay, the post Martin now occupies. He moved up to chief of staff, then got Dana’s blessing to seek the seat when Dana retired in 1996.

In fact, staff work has launched many a political career. Harbor area Los Angeles City Councilman Rudy Svorinich Jr. was a local aide to Gerald Felando, then a Republican assemblyman from San Pedro. One of Svorinich’s new colleagues, Councilman Alex Padilla from the east San Fernando Valley, got his start as an aide to Democratic Assemblyman Tony Cardenas. Los Angeles Democratic Assemblymen Herb Wesson and Carl Washington are former aides to county Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke.

Martin, however, says he is content to be the perennial aide.

He ran for political office only once--and lost. He had been appointed to fill a vacancy on the board of the Beach Cities Health District, and when the term was up in 1996 decided to seek election to another. But he spent little time or money campaigning against a crowded field, including the health care professionals who prevailed.

“Looking back, I can’t say I miss it,” he said. “I’m not the guy with the vote, but I can still help make a difference in people’s lives.”

His office, a fishbowl tucked into the Torrance courthouse lobby, holds clues as to how he goes about it.

The shelves hold thick three-ring binders dedicated to each of the 10 communities in his territory. The binders contain newspaper clippings, memos about issues and pictures of civic leaders he has pasted onto business cards so he can remember their faces. He uses this material to write briefing papers for Knabe whenever he schedules a local appearance.

There is also a red binder that Martin calls his “fluff book.” It holds copies of scores of resolutions that provide him with boilerplate language for new honorees. He uses well-thumbed directories from half a dozen government agencies so he can provide a caller with a name and number. All the month’s correspondence, memos, board agendas and the like go into a folder, then a file cabinet. At the end of the year, he boxes them for storage.

On the wall is a framed copy of Knabe’s 1996 campaign brochure, listing his five-point plan for county government. Martin uses it as a guide for suggesting positions or issues the supervisor might want to champion. Stuck on the desktop are some of the truisms that shape his work philosophy: “Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.” “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.” “Your enemy today can be a good friend tomorrow.”

A Life on the Road

Martin spends only a small percentage of his time in the field office. Most of the time he is at meetings or community functions, many of which are held in the evenings or on weekends. Recently, Martin’s weekend and nighttime schedule included a barbecue in Lomita honoring county firefighters and sheriff’s deputies, a dinner in Redondo Beach to pay tribute to county lifeguards, and a session of a coalition of local cities studying the controversial proposed expansion of Los Angeles International Airport.

A field deputy’s schedule can be rough on family life, but Martin says he and his wife, Jeri, who runs her own tourism-related business, make the most of vacations and occasional weekends away. The couple’s children from previous marriages are grown and not living with them.

Unfailingly upbeat, Martin breezes into meetings and offices with a cheery “Greetings!” and often takes a moment to congratulate someone on a recent promotion or to inquire about a recently resolved problem before getting down to the business at hand.

And he uses humor to help him keep things in perspective when the dinner speeches drone on, or when a constituent gets mad after Martin explains why county animal control officers cannot clear a neighborhood sump of skunks.

“I had to explain to her that the skunks are a protected species, so we’re not allowed to disturb them. What we can do is tell her how to keep them from coming onto her property, but that’s not what she wanted to hear,” Martin recalls.

He shakes his head, chuckling a little at the memory of that phone call, then puts it in perspective:

“It’s just part of the job. And nobody drafted me.”