Crunched!

Photo by Gustavo ArellanoIn the mid 1990s, still in his 30s, boyish, bespectacled Curt Pringle was elected speaker of the state Assembly, was chairman of several key committees, collected more money from the powerful tobacco lobby than anyone in the state Legislature except Willie Brown and was named California Journal's most influential Assembly member. When he declared his intention to run for local government, observers wondered whether a man of such prodigious political skill could ever settle for a title so mundane as “Anaheim mayor.” Instead, since becoming mayor almost two years ago, Pringle, now 44, has transformed Anaheim City Hall into a miniature version of the state Assembly over which he once presided, replete with political intrigue, backstabbing and Machiavellian calculation.

Consider Pringle's handling of just one obscure issue: the proposal to save the county's failing San Joaquin Hills toll road by merging it with the profitable Foothill toll road.

On May 11, Pringle placed on his City Council's agenda a motion to replace Councilman Bob Hernández as Anaheim's representative on the Transportation Corridor Agencies (TCA) board. Hernández opposes the merger, in part because the deal will send an ungodly $200 million to Wall Street in the form of miscellaneous brokerage fees. Pringle supports the merger and wanted Hernández out.

Pringle had already scored a victory against Hernández in that same meeting when the council passed 3-1 a non-binding resolution recommending that Hernández support the TCA consolidation. Hernández cast the sole nay vote; there was one absentee: Curt Pringle.

Like many part-time elected city officials, Pringle has a day job—his is running his own government-lobbying firm, Irvine-based Curt Pringle N Associates (CP). As recently as last July, CP maintained a contract with J.P. Morgan, a key backer of the proposed toll-way consolidation. Because California conflict-of-interest regulations prohibit politicians from voting on matters involving former business partners for a year after the end of a relationship, Pringle recused himself from voting on Anaheim's non-binding resolution. That didn't stop him later that night from asking fellow council members to relieve Hernández of his TCA duties. They refused.

Perhaps illustrating one difference between Sacramento and Anaheim—more rats in the former, more mice in the latter—Pringle's effort to elbow aside Hernández backfired. Previously undecided TCA commissioners—such as Rancho Santa Margarita City Councilman Jim Thor and Orange County Supervisor Tom Wilson—said Pringle's dark-alley mugging prompted them to join Hernández in opposing the toll-way merger on May 13, when the TCA board considered the matter. The TCA directors instead decided to pursue a separate proposal by Supervisor Bill Campbell that would have the Foothill-Eastern toll road lend money to the San Joaquin Hills toll road.

This isn't the first time Pringle (who refused to return several phone calls for this story) maneuvered politically to help toll-road owners. While an assemblyman, Pringle and other Orange County Republican Assembly members in 1989 worked to secure state financing for county toll roads that developers had promised would be privately financed. That effort proved so acrimonious that one Carson-area Assembly member told the Los Angeles Timesat the time that “a lot of people are recognizing that people like me, areas like mine, we're getting screwed over [by Orange County].” In 1995, Pringle sponsored and helped pass a bill that made it easier for toll roads to collect fines by allowing the DMV to withhold the vehicle registration of toll-skipping drivers. That, we guess, is the limit of limited government so far as the conservative Pringle is concerned.

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