Words and Deeds, Janice Keating

Janice Keating
R ep u blican for State Ass e mb l y
Words and
Deeds
The only Republican Whose
Words Match Her Deeds
Ta b l e o f C o n t e n t s
Forward–1
Decide for yourself
Chapter One–5
Raised to value faith, family and the broader interests of others
A great life for a kid
Everything happened around our church
Being teenagers, but Christian teenagers
Taking the initiative
Chapter Two–15
Building a family and a small business
Proud to be a ‘soccer mom’
Chapter Three–19
I came to public office to solve problems
Refusing to ask permission to run for office
Money is a good place to start
When privatization makes sense
Demanding a live body in every city job
Creating basic change in budget and fiscal practices
Saving the taxpayers $32 million
Throwing the developer out the door
Chapter Four–33
Making government business friendly
Finding the building that didn’t exist
Cutting through the muck to get things done
Chapter Five–45
Battling ineffective, wasteful regulations that
kill jobs and strangle the economy
Paying the price in high unemployment and lost jobs
Taking, and wasting, money from job creators and taxpayers is wrong
Chapter Six–51
Community does more than government
Getting down to work
Turning in tears to the mayor and fire chief
Conclusion–59
A Republican who get things done
F o rwa r d
Decide for yourself
My children sometimes say you have to walk the walk as well

as talk the talk.
There’s a big field of candidates running for state Assembly this
year. We are all registered Republicans. We all say we’re conservative.
We all try to talk like we started the Tea Party movement. We have
signs up all over the foothills, the valley and beyond.
On the campaign trail, I noticed we all sound an awful lot alike
on the issues. So we can all talk a pretty good game. But which of us
has matched our words with our deeds?
The race started late when Assemblyman Tom Berryhill an-
nounced just a few months ago he would run for state Senate. I figured
there was no way I could knock on your door and everyone else’s as I
did in my two campaigns for Modesto City Council--although I have
been knocking on as many as I can.
My good friend and supporter in this campaign, Mayor Jim
Ridenour, wrote a book in his first race for mayor. Reading Jim’s book,
I was amazed how well I got to know him by learning about his experi-
ences in life and some of the goals he had for Modesto.
So I wrote this book so you can get to know me a little better
when it’s convenient for you to read it. I hope you learn more about
me than the few words you receive from candidates in traditional elec-
tion mailers or ads, although you’ll get some of them from me too.
I also wrote this book to lay out my case as the conservative Re-
publican running for Assembly who also has a real record of getting
things done. Yes, I talk, but I also walk.
1
Wo r d s a n d D e e d s
I invite you to read the book and decide for yourself which can-
didate has matched words with deeds.
Conservative Republicans believe in family values, hard work and the
value of each individual life.
I was raised in a big Christian family to value faith, family and
life. My husband, Tim, was too. He and I have worked hard to preserve
those values for ourselves and our children despite the many unsavory
and corrosive aspects of modern society.
Conservative Republicans value people who succeed in the private sector
through individual initiative over those who solely make their careers in
politics and by working for government.
With my high school sweetheart, Tim, I began building a fam-
ily and a business as a twenty-something-year old in Modesto. For 19
years, I’ve run my own tax preparation and accounting business while
taking care of a husband and raising two great kids.
Conservative Republicans, at least the ones I know, don’t like self-
appointed social or political elites dictating who gets to serve in
public office.
I didn’t ask permission to run for City Council from all the “right
people” and political bigwigs in Modesto. I challenged a longtime
incumbent council member with an upstart grass-roots campaign. He
criticized me for being a “soccer mom” who only cared about balanc-
ing government budgets. A Tea Partier ahead of her time? You read
and decide. I was elected with 61 percent of the vote, still the record
for the most votes collected by any council candidate in Modesto city
history in a contested race.
Conservative Republicans are for truly balancing budgets with cuts and
not gimmicks, and for making government fiscally accountable.
As a Modesto council member, I fundamentally reformed how
the city of Modesto handled its budgets and fiscal affairs. Those changes
continue to this day. By the time I left office in late 2009, we had pains-
takingly taken Modesto city expenditures back to what they had been
in 2002, when I was first elected. Ironically, similar pledges to reduce
state spending are being heard in the Republican primary for governor.
2
Janice Keating for State Assembly
Conservative Republicans believe in eliminating government fraud

and waste, and letting the private sector take over public services where
practical and economical.
I demanded city administrators produce a live body for every
city job, saving $3 million to $4 million a year by eliminating a slush
fund formed by creating and funding but never hiring or filling
municipal jobs.
I helped save the taxpayers $32 million by ensuring the un-
funded infrastructure and park fees needed to complete a giant
development project came from the private development instead of
being foisted onto city taxpayers who were on the verge of having to
bail out private builders.
I pushed to privatize city services when the private sector could
do a better and more cost-effective job than the government, including
saving more than $1 million a year by privatizing park maintenance.
Conservative Republicans believe in business- and customer-friendly
government.
As chair of the City Council Economic Development Com-
mittee, I worked hard to push a $500 million state-of-the-art, energy
efficient and green Kaiser hospital/medical complex through the
bureaucratic maze of City Hall and Caltrans. It now offers alternative
quality medical care to the entire region’s residents plus an economic
boon for the city.
I initiated a quality-assurance practice common among busi-
nesses with many customers by sending surveys to citizens served by
city departments requesting feedback on their experiences and sug-
gestions for improvement.
Conservative Republicans are against burdensome laws, rules and regu-
lations that strangle business and impede California’s economic recovery.
I became a leading advocate for suspension or postponement
of the regulations implementing AB 32, the state’s draconian 2006
global warming law that likely won’t affect global warming and is not
based on real science, research and testing. The regulations’ price tag
of hundreds of billions of dollars forced on businesses and consumers
is being paid by hard-working Californians suffering unnecessary high
3
unemployment (20.1 percent in Stanislaus County), needlessly high

energy and food bills, and lack of economic and job growth that are
so badly needed now. I testified before state air board members, trying
to convince them of the devastating effects of this unsound law and
its regulations on our jobs and economy before it became politically
popular in Republican circles.
Conservative Republicans believe that the community and private sector
rather than the government are better equipped and more appropriate
to respond to those most in need in our society.
Advocates complained before Thanksgiving 2003 that local
government was ignoring the homeless. I told them not to solely rely
on a government solution and promised to locate, build and find an
operator that winter for Modesto’s first emergency shelter for chroni-
cally homeless single adults, all through private donations of materials
and labor. By organizing a herculean effort using hundreds of dedicated
volunteers, the shelter opened on January 12, 2004.
“Politicians, it is widely believed, do little out of altruism,” the
Modesto Bee editorialized on Christmas Day 2003. “For every good
deed, political payback is required. It’s hard to see that in Keating’s
commitment” to building the homeless shelter.
4
Chapter One
Raised to value faith, family and

the broader interests of others
The great Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw once wrote,

“Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody
to this country and to mankind is to bring up a family.”
I learned that lesson growing up as a young girl of Irish descent,
one of five children from a large extended family in a small Massachu-
setts town. We were raised to value faith, family, independence and
respect for others. We also learned to focus broadly on the concerns
and interests of other people and the entire community instead of just
thinking of our own narrow desires. Those values still shape what I want
now for my own family and community. They are also why I served on
the Modesto City Council for two terms and why I’m running for the
state Assembly. But before you think I take things too seriously, let me
confess those were conclusions I reached as an adult after reflecting
on the gifts my family gave me. Growing up, I had a ball.
Life for me began in 1966, in South Weymouth, Massachusetts,
a coastal town of maybe 20,000 residents about 18 miles south of
Boston. Like most small East Coast communities, it was focused on a
town square with a rotary, or traffic circle, like a big wagon wheel with
sprockets shooting out from it. The rotary led to the library, hospital,
fire station, dry-cleaner, pizza joint--all the services and retail outlets
you needed. The sprockets also branched out into neighborhoods.
One of those neighborhoods was where my dad, Norman
Boucher, settled us into a large two-story gray house with weathered
shingles on Pond Street. It was set on what we called a flag lot, about
three quarters of an acre, with a long driveway leading back from the
5
street and curving around to a steep hill to a barn in the back we used
for parking cars.
My father was a certified public accountant and later chief
financial officer for DiMare Corporation, the large fresh produce
distributor. My father’s first accounting job was at DiMare’s produce
center at Chelsea Marketplace in Boston. He worked his way up the
company before getting promoted to be CFO of DiMare California,
which is when we moved to Modesto.
My mother, Patricia Conway, was a secretary until age 19,
when my mom married my dad. Then she began a long career as a
housewife. Father Theodore Hesburgh, the former president of Notre
Dame University, once said, “The most important thing a father can
do for his children is to love their mother.” I witnessed the truth of
that wisdom from watching my parents. My husband, Tim, and I try
to teach it to our children.
A great life for a kid

There were four of us sisters and one brother. I fell second from
the youngest, but was always considered the baby. My younger brother
came along 12 years after me.
Growing up in rural Massachusetts was very different than Cali-
fornia’s Central Valley. We were called townies, people who grew up
all our lives in town. We all knew each other. We were all friends. If
you weren’t a townie, you’d have to put your time in working your way
into the group. Everything we needed was very close. And it seemed
like everything in life was very much taken up by outside activities. In
winter, when there would be three or four feet of snow on the ground
much of the time, we’d make snow angels--laying down on the snow
and moving our arms and legs up and down until we created angel
wings in the powder. Or we built forts in the snow, carving them out in
the front lawn while my three older sisters had to shovel the driveway.
They’d bitterly complain I was excused from such chores because my
dad insisted I was too young.
In warmer weather, us kids would all ride bikes into the woods.
That’s what we called the random stands of trees, often set amid rock
formations of granite, that dotted the landscape. South Weymouth was
6
part of the South Shore. So there was an ocean nearby, where we’d also
take our bikes. I remember going to Wassagusette Beach. It wasn’t like
the beautiful beaches with pristine sand and warm water on the West
Coast. Wassagusette was an East Coast version of the shore, a rocky
stretch with cold Atlantic Ocean water, even in spring and summer.
We’d still swim in it, as kids will do, always careful to avoid stepping
on and getting stung by jellyfish.
I remember before going to Cape Cod to spend the summer, my
mother took us for swimming lessons. We had to advance through dif- f
ferent levels of qualifications before making the lifeguard certification.
I moved up until just below lifeguard; it was called swimmer level.
To get there I had to swim out into the water where my feet couldn’t
touch the bottom and do 30 “bobs.” That’s when you go up and down,
dropping your head into the water and then coming up and taking a
breath--and repeating it 30 times until you qualified. At first I freaked
out about doing the bobs. But I went out and practiced and practiced
until telling myself, “I’m just going to go out and do it.” And I did. I
was about 10 years old.
The rest of summer was spent on the Cape. My parents had a
cottage in Cederville, a tiny hamlet one exit before Buzzard’s Bay
outside Cape Cod. It was just two bedrooms and one bath near Great
Herring Pond, which reminded me of the body of water in the movie
“On Golden Pond” with Henry Fonda and Katherine Hepburn. Every
year when school was out, my mother would pack us up with whatever
we needed into the car and haul us over to the Cape where we spent
the whole summer, mostly in the water.
My father had a special sailboat built entirely of wood called a
Beetle Cat. My dad swore by it. It was a complicated little craft with
lots of lines and jibs. You had to be careful to watch out for the swing-
ing boom when changing directions; it would come across the boat
all of a sudden. We’d have to hit the deck to avoid getting smacked.
Many a person fell overboard avoiding that boom.
But sailing also required paying careful attention to the wind and
weather. You’d have to be cautious when charting a course. You could
go out with the wind to where you were headed, but then you would
have to tack back, going back and forth against the wind. Going out
7
too far in one direction could make it hard tacking back. Then you
could end up getting stuck somewhere. So sailing taught you valuable
lessons about forward planning, paying attention to nature and making
the right calculations. Still, even though you had to watch out for all
the ropes and lines and booms, it was quiet and peaceful work. There
was some physical exertion, but sometimes you’d just be sailing along,
listening only to the sound of the boat cutting through the water.
There were lots of motorboats too, and we had home-made rafts.
Every little neighborhood in every coastal town had access down to
coves or inlets leading to the ocean. And each one had rafts. They
were basically old empty oil barrels attached underneath a wooden
structure, like an upside down shadow box. They were something par-
ents built for kids. Some were really cool, rigged with slides or diving
boards. They were also decorated. You could tell where you were by
the rafts spotted at coves or beaches. There were sometimes running
arguments among residents over the color of different families’ rafts.
Ours was painted a kind of Pepto-Bismol pink. Some neighbors thought
it wasn’t classy enough, but my dad and his buddies always won out.
I remember taking a canoe up and down small channels running
off our pond. We would harvest wild blackberries along the shore.
We’d crawl through the brambles with our buckets, picking as many
berries as we could carry. Then we’d paddle back, eating blackberries
on the return trip.
My dad made a big round piece of plywood into a yellow Smiley
Face with black eyes and lips. When we first arrived for summer at the
cottage, he took out the Smiley Face and placed it on the right side
of the cottage, facing the gravel and rock street. This announced that
our family had arrived for the summer. First thing, I visited everyone
who lived there, those who resided year round and the ones who just
arrived like us for the summer, to say hello and reconnect with friends.
My dad’s brother, Jimmy, had five children. My dad’s sister, Bev-
erly, had five children. My mother’s brother, Jimmy, had five children.
That’s 19 of us first cousins. We all grew up within ten minutes’ drive
of one another in a place that would be like driving from Modesto to
Ceres. We were all about the same age. When we went to the Cape
and my cousins showed up, we’d pitch a gigantic tent in the front yard.
8
My siblings and I would give our aunts and uncles our bedroom. Then
all of us kids slept in the tent.
There were also plenty of other kids who weren’t relatives around.
The adults also knew one another. Every evening we’d walk
across from our cottage to what was a drainage basin in winter. But
in summer it turned into a very deep and long grassy area that served
as a gathering place for the neighborhood. The children would catch
fireflies, play hide-and-seek or play spoons, a game where you took two
spoons back-to-back with your finger in-between and then tapped them
like a symbol. The adults sat around and played the guitar or talked.
One day during summer everyone would turn out for a mini-
festival. There were sack, or three-legged, races and clam-and-lobster
bakes. We’d throw water balloons and do eggs-on-a-spoon races, car-
rying eggs on spoons as we ran. We’d usually end up with egg all over
ourselves.
It was a great life for a kid.
Everything happened around our church

There was summertime life and school-year life. Back at South
Weymouth, we played all the sports I loved, like baseball and bas-
ketball, through the Catholic Youth Organization, or CYO, league.
During winter we’d all roller skate together in indoor rinks because
you had to have something to do inside. We all tried our hand at
hockey. There was a small body of water across the street from my
Aunt Beverly’s house where we all went ice skating.
We also attended mass every Sunday at St. Francis Xavier Catho-
lic Church, our home parish. I still remember Father Donnely. The
family went to church together, either at St. Francis or at St. Bridget’s
parish in Abington if we were visiting Aunt Bev and Uncle Ed.
Growing up all the kids went to Catholic Christine Doctrine,
CCD, what they now call School of Faith in California. It happened
after school, from 4 to 5:30 p.m. or so one day a week. Depending
on the sacrament level we were at you would either attend CCD in
a classroom at the parish or as we got older we’d go with our peers
to study in one of the student’s homes where a parent was teaching
the class. You’d learn about what it means to accept and receive the
9
sacraments and about communion, how sacred it is and how, why

and under what circumstances you can receive it. You’d prepare to
receive the sacrament of confirmation and about what it means to be
an adult in the church, your responsibility to be true to the faith, to
understand the teachings of the church, to be responsible to other
people and how to live a good, healthy and more fulfilling spiritual
life as a servant of Christ. I was eventually confirmed, at age 14, after
we moved to California.
Everything happened around our church. CYO, the youth sports
league, would also take place at the local public school because we
needed more room. But CYO was integrated into the fabric of every-
one’s lives. Even though it was the Catholic Youth Organization, CYO
was open to everyone. In some cases it was the only athletic activity
around before high school So anyone, including non-Catholics, was
welcomed.
When you got close to 20 cousins and innumerable friends in-
teracting with each other, sharing pretty much the same life growing
up through CYO and the church, you couldn’t really get away from
them. When there were conflicts, sometimes you had to learn to keep
your mouth shut or figure out how to get along--and move on. There
was no stomping off and slamming the door. We all lived in the same
tent during the summer or closely around each other through the
rest of the year.
Some of us weren’t that popular with the crowd at school or didn’t
excel in our studies or had other difficulties. That didn’t matter for
the most part. There was a comfort level, especially among us cousins
who grew up almost as siblings. At the end of the day, little arguments
or problems didn’t count for much.
You learned certain values growing up in a close family that sup-
ported and loved each other: Giving and taking. Sometimes taking
a stand just because it’s the right and principled thing to do even if
it meant going against what’s trendy. We definitely learned we don’t
like to be pushed around. Or that you had to make a point clearly,
directly and with some force on occasion, especially if it was contrary
to the group think at the moment--hoping that everyone wouldn’t
chime in with their opinions all at once. You learned to respect others’
10
opinions and understand their positions even if they didn’t necessarily

match your own. I knew I couldn’t change every person’s mind on
every issue, but I could recognize that he or she had a viewpoint and
it should be respected.
How to interact with people was a great lesson from being part
of a big family and an extended family of friends. I couldn’t always be
right. Sometimes I had to admit I was wrong. I learned early on that
if I didn’t listen to what someone else was saying, whether I agreed or
disagreed, I couldn’t understand the differences of opinion to know
whether I was correct or not. That’s what I mean about recognizing a
broad agenda and not just narrowly focusing on my own.
Those were valuable lessons I still apply in public life today. I try
to understand where everyone is coming from on an issue. Although
you often can’t come to a decision that makes everyone happy, you
can at least attempt to weave the concerns of a majority of people into
a solution that brings most people together instead of seeing everyone
divide into separate camps that never agree about anything. There is a
genuine need for more civility and mutual respect in public discourse
today by everyone, regardless of political party or belief.
Civility is good. But there would also come a time when my ex-
perience told me you just had to put your foot down and stick to your
guns, even against the majority opinion, because it was the right thing
to do based on everything you took into consideration about an issue.
Being teenagers, but Christian teenagers

I was 12 when my dad took a promotion with DiMare and moved
the family west to Modesto. There were now five Boucher children;
my younger brother, Timothy, we called him Timmy, came along in
1978, the year we moved. We arrived at Modesto airport on a plane
from San Francisco, my mother, father, sisters and brother, and my
dad’s elderly father who came to live with us. We piled ourselves and
our luggage in big Grand Cherokees and drove down Mitchell Road in
Modesto. It was a windy day and tumbleweeds were blowing across the
highway. For us older girls it was hysterical because our dad promised
we were not moving to the Wild Wild West.
In Massachusetts, we had attended public school because the
11
church institutions, like the parish and sports league, were so strong.
Now, in California, we went to Catholic school. Adjusting was hard
for me at the beginning. First, I spoke with a funny, pronounced New
England accent. I worked hard at talking like every other Californian,
with as little accent as possible.
The other difference was the academic rigor of going to Catholic
school after attending public school. Sister Agnes was one of my teach-
ers at St. Stanislaus school, covering grades K through eight. We had
a lot of homework. The nuns made us diagram sentences and speak
proper English. There were a lot of reading and writing assignments.
And there were uniforms: tucked in Polo shirts and skirt length checks
to make sure the skirt was below the knee line.
I learned no matter how unpleasant academic studies could be
and how much you resisted doing the work, you just had to hunker
down and do it. I never appreciated it at the time why we had to learn
how to diagram sentences. But now I can clearly and effectively express
myself in writing, which is a skill often lacking in people who graduate
from public school, and even sometimes from college.
Religion class at St. Stanislaus school was also different. I’d
never sat through a 40-minute religion class five days a week in South
Weymouth. But I received a much deeper understanding of the stories
and lessons of the Parables, the saints and the Gospels.
I loved sports in Modesto, where PE at school revolved around
changing seasonal sports. I was introduced to volleyball and soccer.
Playing soccer, which I did well, was a way to fit in like anyone else.
Central Catholic High School followed St. Stanislaus school.
High school was fun. It brought together a diverse range of people
from many backgrounds, Catholic and non-Catholic and well as many
ethnic backgrounds I had not encountered in Massachusetts. There
were Anglo kids like me plus Latinos, African Americans and students
from India. I made friends with all of them. We all played sports, went
to football games and hung out. Central Catholic was a relatively small
school, about 350 students on the entire campus.
We had a top notch boys football program, one of the best in the
Trans Valley League. As a freshman and sophomore on Friday and Sat-
urday nights during football games, after my classmates played junior
12
varsity, we’d all stick around for the varsity contests, hanging out at the
stadium by the snack shack, walking around the track and sometimes
catching a play on the field. We were being teenagers, but Christian
teenagers. There were none of the problems too common today such
as alcohol, drugs and gangs. It was a good place to be an adolescent.
Taking the initiative

Most people resist change. I don’t know if my dad figured it out
on his own, but because he ripped me from what I was used to doing
on the East Coast and put me into this small school environment, I
felt comfortable getting to know new friends and discovering a chal-
lenging but safe niche, which for me at the time was all about sports.
But not entirely.
My father was a cheapskate, or so I thought at the time. I was
never satisfied with the pittance my dad gave my sisters and I or what
my mother managed to save for the girls from left-over grocery money.
He told my mother as I began Catholic Central, “Here’s $100. Get
her what she needs for the next four years of high school.” That would
barely buy a pair of shoes, in addition to the fact teenagers tend to grow
a little over four years.
Once in California, I immediately sought out odd jobs. I mowed
lawns, trimmed bushes, cleaned gutters and washed cars. I got so close
to some of the neighbors who gave me jobs that we’d have Sunday
dinner together and they became like a whole other family to me.
The ultimate achievement was when I decided to go for the gold
and get a paper route delivering the Modesto Bee. I’m not a morning
person, but I would get up around 5 a.m. to gather the bundles of
newspapers, often insert special ads or sections, fold and band them,
and put them in a plastic bag if it was raining. On my first day as a
papergirl, when I loaded all the newspapers into large pouches on the
front, back and sides of my bike, I promptly fell over onto the street
from the sheer weight of 150 papers. Observing my plight, my cousins
laughed so hard they were crying. That made me mad and more de-
termined than ever to do the job. My mother thought the paper route
was a bad idea, which motivated me even more. My dad never said
much about it. He was happy to see me take the initiative. All told, it
13
took me about two hours, until roughly 7 a.m., to finish the deliveries.
I’d use my earnings to buy clothes and sports equipment, take
my friends to the movies and go on trips to the mall on the bus.
14
C h a p t e r Tw o
Building a family and a small business
Central Catholic High School was where I met my future hus-

band, Tim Keating. I was a sophomore. He was a senior. He moved
to California not long after I did from New York. His mother took her
five children west in 1980, when she remarried 12 years after her first
husband, a major in the U.S. Marines, was killed in Vietnam. We met
because Tim’s brother, Stephen, was in my class. We all carpooled
together since Central Catholic was 13 miles from where our families
lived close to each other in east Modesto.
Tim and Stephen would sit in the front seat. Both boys were
super quiet. They’d never say a word driving to and from school. I’d
be in the back seat, talking away nonstop. “Do you guys ever speak?”
I’d ask. “Do you ever have anything to say? I’m just back here talking
to myself.” I thought they were just boring.
Then one day I got a phone call at home from a guy who said
his name was Tim. “Tim who?” I asked. “Oh---” and then I realized
it was my Tim, my silent driver whose voice I rarely heard. He was
calling to ask me out on a date. “As long as you promise to talk,” I
replied. We’ve been together ever since.
After high school graduation, he went off to the University of
Portland, where Tim earned a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering.
I graduated two years later from Central Catholic. My very first sum-
mer job was as a scale girl at DiMare in Newman, where I weighed
trucks hauling just-picked fresh market green tomatoes bound for the
supermarkets. I’d weigh the trucks coming from the fields, deducting
the “tare” weight, the known weight of the truck, so the grower would
15
get proper credit for the gross product. Then the produce would go
into the plant to be sorted, boxed and loaded onto trucks and trains
heading for market.
Tim was also working that summer at DiMare on a break from
college, driving a fork lift in a one-time pepper shed. He moved pallets
of boxes into which the tomatoes were packaged for shipment. We
had been going together for two years.
I went off to college too, at the University of California, Santa
Cruz, majoring in chemistry for three years. By then, Tim was working
full time in Modesto for a mechanical contractor. Once he decided
to marry me, I decided at age 22 that I was more interested in spend-
ing time with Tim and starting a life and a family together than I was
being away at school in Santa Cruz.
Proud to be a ‘soccer mom’

We were married in 1988. Our son, Colin, was born the next
year. That was followed by the purchase of our first house in Modesto,
a small wood-frame, two-bedroom, one-bath home.
I worked at Gottschalks department store in Modesto as a sales-
person in the shoe department. The job gave me flexible hours so I
could be at home with our young son during the day and go to work
in the early evening when my husband would be home with Colin.
After a year, I worked handling accounts payable for a truss construc-
tion company and then moved to do accounts payable and receivable
for Hoagland’s Transport, a trucking firm also in Modesto, where I
stayed for about five years until becoming pregnant with our daughter,
Meghan, in 1994.
While pregnant, I began my own tax preparation business, origi-
nally to earn a little extra money. It’s funny. I’d have sworn I would
never end up doing what my dad did professionally--accounting and
financial management--because I thought he was too tight with his
pennies. But upon reflection, he put a great roof over our heads, put
all of us through school and always had food on the table and gas in
the car. Now that I’m older, I appreciate the fact we never had to worry
about anything because he was disciplined, stable and hard working.
Not bad traits. They are much the same principles my husband and I try
16
to offer our children. Now Tim is general manager and a shareholder

at Motorguard Corporation, a manufacturing company in Manteca.
When our daughter was three, Tim and I worked out a plan
whereby I would stay home to care for the kids and focus on the tax
preparation and accounting business. I also handled accounting for
two small local walnut ranches. I’ve been running that small business
now for 19 years.
When you grow up in a family of seven, there’s never a shortage
of petty arguments over who should do what and have what, and who
needs it. Early on, I learned that life sometimes comes with having to
make sacrifices. My parents sacrificed to make sure all five kids were
healthy, well taken care of, well-educated and felt loved. In the same
regard, Tim and I made a lot of sacrifices so I could stay home, be my
kids’ mom and put them both through parochial or Christian schools.
School became a second job for me. All the years I’ve spent
raising our children it always seemed that any job having to do with
the schools my kids attended fell to me. Other parents and kids either
felt I was best suited for the job or no other parent had the time or
interest. So I coached soccer. I coached baseball. I volunteered as the
“helper” in the grammar school lunch room, going to school every
day to serve hot lunches because the lady running the cafeteria didn’t
have anyone else.
We felt my son’s school didn’t have a broad enough math pro-
gram. So one year when my son was in fifth grade my dad and I tutored
students in advanced math. The school finally caught on and offered
higher levels of math instruction on its own.
I organized a forum when the school voucher initiative, Proposi-
tion 38, was on the statewide ballot in 1998. It would have allowed
children in poor performing public schools to take a dollar amount
from their school district and apply it towards tuition at a private or
parochial school. Both pro and con speakers presented their views and
the audience, which included about 100 people at the St. Stanislaus
school gym, got to ask questions. The measure failed at the polls.
I’ve played tennis since coming to California. Now my daughter
plays on the school tennis team. The coach had to handle 20 players
for a long time by himself. He asked me to help out last year. This
17
year I’m serving as assistant coach.

At age 12, I began playing organized soccer through the Modesto
Youth Soccer League. While in high school I refereed to earn money.
When my kids came of age, I coached them. The league always had
me on the list to call for coaching chores, which happened a lot. I
was proud to claim the title, “soccer mom.” Our daughter, Meghan,
just finished playing in the league last year.
When the family moved into our second home in 1994, a neigh-
bor who had been neighborhood watch block coordinator moved
away. The other neighbors voted me as her replacement. I organize
the local “National Night Out” every year on the first Tuesday in
August. Neighbors turn out, meet and get to know one another so if a
crime occurs or a stranger is seen in the neighborhood, they report it
to authorities or alert other neighbors. I’ve been doing that since 1994.
In 2004, I dropped competitive soccer from my leisure sports
and picked up women’s inter-club tennis, where athletic clubs stage
multiple-division competitions. We put together a brand new team and
I was “volunteered” as team captain by the other ladies and coordinated
with the tennis league.
Whenever anyone in the family and, it seems, my sphere of
friends and acquaintances confront a challenge or problem or have
a question they can’t answer, they call me. I usually figure out an
answer and respond.
Meantime, my husband and I hope the values we’ve tried to
impart have rubbed off on our kids. Colin, who is now 21 and has
worked in one way or another since he was 14, graduated from Downey
High School, a public school in Modesto, attended Modesto Junior
College and is now preparing to enter the U.S. Air Force. Meghan,
16, is a sophomore at Modesto Christian High School, a golfer, a great
tennis player and a straight A student.
18
C h a p t e r Th r e e
I came to public office to solve problems
By 2002, my kids were ages seven and 12. I wanted to be with

them during their formative years. But by now they were spending
most of the day at school and in after-school activities that I often
helped out with.
My introduction to public life started when my husband and I
were flipping through the television channels at home and happened
on the government channel broadcasting a meeting of the Modesto
City Council. The council was holding a hearing to consider adoption
of its annual budget. Two council members suddenly began making
changes to the budget that had not been part of the public discussion
before the vote. I looked to Tim and said the changes they were pro-
posing had never been debated or commented on by the public prior
to the motions to adopt them.
These elected officials were playing fast and lose with the taxpay-
ers’ money without much consideration of the public’s input, in my
opinion. I felt like here we were working hard and making personal
sacrifices to raise a family and contribute to our community while our
tax dollars were being thrown around at random on things I might or
might not consider important. But then, my fellow citizens and I had
never had the chance to voice our opinions.
So I attended a meeting of the council Finance Committee at
City Hall. I was the only member of the pubic at the hearing, which
was held with the council members sitting around a table in a confer-
ence room. That showed you how many members of the pubic paid
attention to what was going on. At one point during the hearing, all
19
the committee members and city staff literally looked at me and asked,
“What does the public have to say?”
“I have a number of things to say,” I announced. There was a
budget item entitled “Other” that amounted to somewhere in the
neighborhood of $750,000, but with no indication about what it was
going to be spent on. “What is this ‘Other’?” I asked.
The city staff cautiously offered that it was merely a line item
that captured “pass through” dollars housed, in this case, in the city
Parks and Recreation Department. Essentially, they said, “there’s
money we get for other people so we stick it in this department and
then give it to them later.”
“If that’s the case, then why doesn’t the item explain that?” I asked.
“We’ve always done it this way,” the staff answered.
That’s when I decided to run for office. We had to stop doing
things that way. Our budgets are complicated and convoluted, un-
necessarily so, I thought, and it took every once of concentration and
a tremendous amount of time to track how all the budget documents
were connected, how the public’s money was being spent and whether
it was being spent wisely and properly.
Refusing to ask permission to run for office

Today, council members are elected by individual district. Back
then, members were elected at large. Candidates had to choose a
specific seat, called a chair, in which to run. Sometimes the chairs
were open seats. I choose to run against the incumbent in Chair Two.
He was an older gentleman, a lifelong city resident with close
connections in the Modesto political establishment. Unseating a
longtime incumbent is not easy; such upstart campaigns are rarely
successful. At first, he probably wasn’t very concerned about being
challenged by an unknown. But I turned out to be a bit of a surprise.
As much as I knew about volunteering in the school and com-
munity, I knew almost nothing about politics. I certainly didn’t know
about the tradition that candidates just starting out were supposed to
ask permission to run from all the “right people.” Modesto, like a lot
of cities, has a self-appointed elite of civic, social and business figures
who consider themselves the gatekeepers to public office. They have
20
sought to control the candidates who seriously offer themselves for

election. It was kind of a “good ol’ boys” network in which there were
very few women running for or winning office.
I didn’t ask permission from anyone. I decided I was going to run
anyway. But I didn’t really know what to do. I burst onto the political
scene with a campaign built around the theme, “A New Energy.”
From what I observed on the government channel or at City Hall, I
didn’t see a lot in the way of energy, old or new, on the council. It was
the same thing with insight or thoughtfulness. So I offered myself as
an alternative, a young, more vibrant and, I hoped, intelligent choice.
I also didn’t realize how much work it takes to run, and win,
a campaign. Maybe I was too naive to care. I just wanted to make a
difference.
My husband and I printed modest-looking informational pieces
on our home computer with my picture and positions on issues: Truly
balancing the budget, bringing financial accountability to local gov-
ernment and returning an attitude of customer service to city services.
I won zero support, no endorsements, from anyone who mattered
in the city establishment. At first, I raised all of my own campaign
contributions in increments of $99 or less because everyone was too
scared to give $100 or more because that would be reported on cam-
paign disclosure forms and they were afraid of giving money against an
incumbent. One day a $500 check showed up in my campaign post
office mailbox from an old friend from high school who discovered
my campaign web site. I danced down the steps of the post office all
the way to the bank to deposit his check. I felt I was on my way.
A lot of time was spent walking door to door, talking with voters
one at a time. I went on local talk radio, taking any and every interview
I could get.
I attended all candidate debates and forums. I begged whoever I
could find to hold fundraisers and meet-and-greet events with voters,
mostly in people’s living rooms. Altogether, I bet I personally talked
with more than 5,000 voters.
My opponent commented in a Modesto Bee news story that I
should be dismissed as a legitimate candidate because “Janice Keating
is nothing more than a soccer mom with a very narrow focus. All she
21
wants to do is balance every budget.” In one fell swoop, my opponent

insulted mothers and derided the idea that governments should bal-
ance their budgets. I sent the incumbent council member’s political
consultant a nice note with a bunch of flowers. Then I distributed his
quote as far and wide as I possibly could.
Under city election rules, a run-off election has to be held if
no candidate receives more than 50 percent plus one of the vote. So
I went into a run-off with the incumbent, but starting from second
place in a five-way race.
The run-off campaign was eight weeks long. It was fast and furi-
ous. I had spent all the money I cobbled together in the first round.
Now I tried to raise more money, at $99 a pop, for the second round.
Many of my nervous supporters were still petrified to give more. I put
together enough to send out another piece of mail and continued walk-
ing, starting right before Christmas. Then the county clerk announced
a computer malfunction resulted in some voters receiving more than
one ballot, so the election was postponed until March.
That meant my run-off was held together with the regular state-
wide primary election, in which I would be competing for attention
with candidates for governor and Congress among a much larger pool
of voters than normally turn out for an off-year municipal election. I
had to raise money all over again and keep the grass-roots campaign
going.
Against these odds, I beat the incumbent with 61 percent of vote
and, I believe, still hold the record for gathering the most votes of any
council candidate in Modesto city history in a two-person contest.
Money is a good place to start

I was sworn in on March 24. My opponent was right about one
thing: Budget accountability isn’t everything, but money is a good
place to start.
I looked at the finite amount of government resources and the
competing demands for services that can be funded from them. I was
convinced we needed to go through a basic prioritization of what’s
most important from a more programmatic viewpoint--examining
each public program or service one at a time. Before, the city would
22
make cuts in a program without understanding whether those reduc-

tions would allow the program to continue. For instance, it may take
three people to operate a graffiti abatement unit. If we cut out two of
them to save money, we have one person left who probably can’t do
the job by himself. But if the budget leaves in the money to purchase
the supplies, we’re spending the money but leaving the program un-
able to function. That’s funding that could be allocated for something
higher up the priority list, if we determine graffiti abatement doesn’t
make the grade.
The budget for the city of Modesto was not organized to consider
such things when I took office. There were just miscellaneous line
items of expenses that were not related to each other. There was no
information from which policy makers could make rational decisions
about how to save money but still preserve essential services. We had
no idea of the true effects of budget cuts on a department in terms of
the ability to perform its functions.
It became obvious that across-the-board cuts weren’t accomplish-
ing anything. Departments were receiving money for functions they
could no longer perform because of cuts that had not been properly
analyzed.
As a council member, I required city staff to demonstrate what
proposed cuts would to do programs and services, and whether they
could still be sustained after the reductions. That eventually morphed
into the staff being forced to prepare and present budgets to the City
Council as they do today. Now, related functions are listed in tandem
with one another. When staff makes presentations to the council on
cuts based on the city’s projected revenue picture, city officials have to
tell council members which programs they recommend for reduction
or elimination. That is a much more useful methodology that also
takes into account the priorities set by the council based on knowing
what the citizens desire.
A prime example of a luxury that could no longer be paid for
out of the city general fund was the pruned refuge program. Modesto
has lush trees and landscaping. City employees drove neighborhoods
streets in front loaders, tractor-like vehicles that scooped up the tree
and bush trimmings residents placed on the streets because they
23
couldn’t fit them in their green recycling cans. The front loaders then
deposited the trimmings in accompanying trucks. The trimmings were
taken to the city composting facility. It was a nice service, a conve-
nience for residents who would otherwise have to load the trimmings
in trucks and haul them to the dump or pay to do so, or cut them up
into smaller pieces and fit them as best as possible in the green cans
on a weekly basis. But in perilous economic times, when key public
safety services were threatened, the pruned refuge program was not a
matter of life and death.
The problem became two-fold. City officials suggested the pro-
gram be privatized through contracted garbage haulers that already
handle trash pick-up. But the cost of doing that was going to be nearly
seven times greater than having city employees do it. There was an-
other complication: The state required cities to reduce their waste
stream by 50 percent; we had to divert 50 percent of our waste away
from land fills. The composting facility was a major tool in complying
with that demand. If we eliminated the tree trimming pick-up service,
we would fall short of meeting the state mandate. This was one case
where privatizing, which I believe is often a logical alternative, just
wouldn’t work.
But the citizens didn’t want to lose a service most saw as valuable.
More emails and phone calls came into council members and we saw
more participation at council meetings on this issue than practically
any other. So we resolved the problem. We incorporated the service
as a function of the composting facility operations.
When privatization makes sense

I did push to privatize another city service based on my program-
matic approach to government that succeeded in 2006. Modesto’s large
urban forest includes hundreds of parks, some neighborhood and oth-
ers regional. During presentation of the budget, we realized because
of previous cuts there were only six or seven employees left to handle
landscape maintenance and maintain cleanliness in park rest rooms.
These functions amounted to a multimillion dollar expenditure. The
remaining six or seven staff members were woefully inadequate to
properly use the allocated money. Our parks, a source of pride to the
24
community, were looking worse for the wear. The council appropriated
the money but there were not enough staff to spend it right.
Going through the budget, I suggested we begin looking at city
services that could be better handled through the private sector. I
identified the parks as the most glaring example of a small number of
staff struggling to operate with a large expenditure. I discovered when
the city Parks and Recreation Department was required to make cuts in
its budget, it started with the so-called low-hanging fruit. Department
administrators would first eliminate the jobs of part time, lower-paid
workers who didn’t have seniority or benefits. But many of these em-
ployees were the ones who enabled the department to properly carry
out its job. That left only the full time, higher-paid, full-benefit workers.
Yet there weren’t enough of them left to do the work.
It became patently obvious there was a better way. I suggested
city staff put together a request for proposal to maintain the parks and
put it out for bids from qualified landscape maintenance specialists
in the private sector. Several proposals came in. City employees who
were performing the service could also submit a proposal to see if they
could compete with the private sector. This allowed us to benefit from
the free enterprise system through a competitive process, but let the
employees who had done the work develop their own ideas for doing
things better or more efficiently.
A bid that came in from a large reputable company in our area
would, if accepted, save the city more than $1 million a year in park
maintenance costs. The proposal from the employee group relied heav-
ily on using inmate labor contracted from the county honor farm. A
private firm wouldn’t be allowed the same opportunity to access what
amounted to free labor from prisoners. If the savings from relying on
prisoner labor was taken out of the employee-submitted proposal, the
workers’ plan came in at a much higher cost.
After interviews and scoring different aspects of each proposal,
the private contractor won out. At the council hearing to accept the
city staff’s proposal to award the contract to the private company, the
employee group loudly complained they weren’t treated fairly. But
the price difference was glaring, especially when prisoner labor was
removed.
25
In general, the private sector is reluctant to bid against the public

sector because private businesses feel they are at an unfair disadvan-
tage. Private firms have higher imbedded costs, such as overhead and
insurance, than the government. Officials from the private landscaping
contractor sat in the audience during the City Hall hearing, listening
to employee unions bitterly protesting about allegedly being treated
unfairly. This was different than the city’s formal evaluation process
where all issues and proposals were objectively examined and evaluated.
I thought such treatment by the unions was rude and unfair. I
spoke up and apologized to the owner of the company for being been
treated this way and thanked him for submitting his bid. I urged wit-
nesses to get back to the issue at hand, which was the incredible cost
savings for the taxpayers of the private company proposal.
Following much rancor and hostility from the public employee
union, the private firm got the contract. It has been handling the work,
keeping up the parks, since 2006. Just two months after taking over,
you could see the improvements. The dead patches of grass were now
green because sprinklers were being repaired. The lawns were being
mowed on a weekly basis. The landscaping was being consistently
trimmed. The bathrooms were clean. The garbage cans were emptied.
All these things had been neglected. To the day I left office, City Hall
continued to receive calls, letters and emails complimenting the city
on how much the parks have improved. I imagine they still do.
Remember that this was before the full effects of the recession hit,
decimating local government budgets. Recently, many have thanked
me for the $1 million we saved back then and more since that time.
By the way, a number of the city workers who used to work in
the parks were transferred to other departments for existing jobs that
suited them. We didn’t create new make-work positions, but thought
it was fair to allow transfers to vacant positions for which they were
qualified without sacrificing savings to the taxpayers.
Balancing the budget for the state of California is not very dif- f
ferent. We have to closely examine everything state employees do and
analyze whether or not it makes sense for the government or the private
sector to perform a given service or whether government needs to do
the job at all. I’m sure we can find more than a few overpaid positions
26
that are useless or out of date. Then decisions must be made on a case
by case basis to save tax dollars and get state spending under control
without losing the quality core functions of government.
Privatization is a viable and rational alternative that should be
explored. When government expenditures exceed revenues, you have
to look for programmatic changes that make it possible to save money
without harming basic services such as police, fire and infrastructure
maintenance. Figuring out how to perform services that rank high
on the public’s priority list when there isn’t adequate funding means
seeing whether the private sector can do those services in a more
economical way.
Before I led the Modesto City Council through this exercise,
we would see a budget proposal from a city department with the
number of employees of the department in one place and the total
cost of the program they ran or the services they performed in another
place. There was no correlation between the two. So we had a $6 mil-
lion budget to inadequately run a service performed by a handful of
employees. After the changes I championed, we could see the total
budget for the program, the employees associated with carrying it out
and the cost of supplies versus the cost of labor. That made for wiser
and more effective decisions.
Demanding a live body in every city job

My view of the world was that for a budget to be truly balanced a
department had to request exactly what it needed to fill actual positions
and fund actual programs. Every program had a cost that was broken
up into small components of expenses that equaled the program,
including employees.
I learned many departments were submitting allocations for em-
ployee positions but not filling all of them. If a department submitted
a budget for 60 employees but only employed 45 workers, there was
money left over from the 15 unfilled positions that wasn’t attached
to live bodies. These funds amounted to a slush fund for department
administrators to do with as they liked, without any scrutiny from the
City Council or the public. So even as we were implementing cuts
in city programs, officials had extra money in their budgets through
27
empty positions they could put into favored programs or activities we

were sometimes recommending for reduction or elimination.
As a council member, I wasn’t interested in micro-managing any
department. That wasn’t my job. My job was to use the information
from the staff to decide what needed to be done to set public policy
and balance department budgets. At the end of the day, it often wasn’t
real information because many departments were overfunded due to
these unfilled “ghost” positions.
So the council implemented a new policy I recommended to
eliminate unfilled positions from department budgets. If a position
didn’t have a body in it, it received no city funding. If a position
needed to be created in the future, it had to come before the council
for evaluation and approval. We recognized there might be a need for
some unfilled slots. Then department officials had to demonstrate to
us why these jobs needed to be kept open and for how long.
Getting rid of these unfilled positions eliminated a “float” or
slush fund for department administrators and saved $3 million to $4
million a year. Not only did we save a considerable amount of money
in difficult financial times, but we also imposed much greater account-
ability on city administrators and staff.
I need to credit my colleague, Councilman Will O’Bryant, my
partner in crime when it came to watch-dogging city finances. We
arrived on the council at the same time. Will is a Democrat, but an
older-style Democrat who shared my very conservative philosophy
about budget and fiscal accountability. That gave both of us greater
credibility. He and I did our homework and shared our insights.
Our partnership on this and other matters showed the importance
of working together for solutions to common problems. I hope to be
able to also find common purpose on fiscal accountability with both
my Democratic and Republican colleagues in the state Assembly,
although I’m not confident I will find many Will O’Bryant Democrats
in Sacramento.
Creating basic change in budget and fiscal practices

When I arrived on the council in 2002 and served on the Fi-
nance Committee, we came across a budget line item in the Parks and
28
Recreation Department section called “Culture.” It was for around

$250,000 or $300,000. I asked staff what this was for. The answer was
that the city of Modesto carves out that money and hands it over in
the form of grants to fund activities and events for cultural groups
throughout the city.
For me, this was an example of transferring wealth from one
group of people, the taxpayers, and selectively handing it over to
politically-connected organizations that are better funded with private
donations. My first act as a newly-elected council member was cutting
that amount in half. Today it doesn’t exist at all.
Many of those private cultural organizations did good work. But
they weren’t any different than other non-profit groups that don’t rely
on city funding. And if it came down to backing specific projects that
benefited these group’s members or supporting activities that offered
a broad-based citywide benefit such as battling criminal gangs, the
choice was clear to me.
Within a year of taking office I was named chair of the council’s
Finance Committee. After Will O’Bryant and I dusted things up so
much when we first became council members, maybe my colleagues
recognized my financial experience as a small business person fit nicely
into identifying solutions and reforms for the city budget.
During my two years chairing the Finance Committee and the
eight years of my overall service on the council, together with col-
leagues such as Will O’Bryant we fundamentally changed the way
the city of Modesto handled its budgetary and fiscal affairs. Those
changes endure to this day.
Like all municipalities, Modesto confronts serious fiscal problems
from the recession. In the last three years before I left the council at
the end of 2009, we required city staff to take the deficits in the bud-
get and come up with proposed programmatic cuts according to a set
of priorities. Staff would come to us to recommend and defend why
this program with these costs and components should be preserved
whereas a different program with these costs and components should
be reduced or eliminated. When the information was presented in
this way, council members could make informed choices based on
input from citizens.
29
Without these changes and other fiscal reforms we initiated, the

budget and fiscal challenges facing Modesto would be much worse today.
By the time Will and I left office in late 2009, the council had
painstakingly taken expenditures by the city of Modesto back to the
levels that existed in 2002, when we first took office. We didn’t ac-
complish those kinds of savings by eliminating paper clips and rubber
bands, and with fake budget gimmicks. They came from cutting the
city work force while keeping vital city services.
Ironically, a centerpiece of Republican Meg Whitman’s candi-
dacy for governor is using budget and fiscal reforms to take the number
of state employees back to the level that existed around 2003, which
is almost identical to what I was actually able to help achieve on the
Modesto City Council.
Saving the taxpayers $32 million

Months after taking office, I was embroiled in a massive long-
planned development called Village One that was threatened in
mid-course by an insufficient fee structure. That means there were
inadequate fees to provide for amenities and infrastructure such as
sewer, water, parks, roads, street lights and landscaping of medians.
Because of misguided government-led planning, the Village One
project fees were woefully insufficient to handle actual costs.
We realized unless something was done, the project would turn
into a financial disaster for both the new residents in Village One and
the city and its existing taxpayers, who could end up having to pick
up the costs themselves. The total shortfall for which the taxpayers
could have been responsible totaled $32 million, money we didn’t
have and didn’t plan on having because, like all new developments,
Village One was supposed to be self-supporting.
It was a volatile issue. Some public officials wished to cynically
score political points by targeting developers, obscuring the real prob-
lem. I came to public office to solve problems, not to scapegoat people.
The city’s duty is to guarantee an adequate fee structure to cover costs
of capital improvements and other expenses of new growth. The staff
and previous council members failed to do that.
A blue ribbon citizens task force came together representing
30
stakeholders such as the county taxpayers association, Chamber of

Commerce, Village One homeowners, environmentalists, the build-
ing industry and the banking industry. I did my best to pitch in as a
new council member, trying to defuse the situation and bring it to
a conclusion by dispassionately assessing the facts, getting accurate
infrastructure costs and developing possible solutions.
The blue ribbon task force met frequently, receiving needed
information from relevant city staff, the city manager and city attorney.
Financial shortfalls for needed facilities and services were pinpointed.
Options were explored. A number of council members, myself
included, attended many of the meetings. One of my colleagues,
Councilman Denny Jackman, and other task force members did a
terrific job, supplying reasons for the massive shortfall and excellent
recommendations. They discovered $9 million in revenue overlooked
by professional experts and staff that helped close the gap.
The city undertook an audit and developed alternatives in pro-
posed new finance plans. What impressed me was that the private
sector drove the public sector to common sense and problem solving.
By the time I left the council, the shortfall was covered and the last
major roadway financed by solutions developed during my first years
in office was finished. Village One is one of Modesto’s most beautiful
communities and looks better each year as the landscaping matures.
Throwing the developer out the door

Another challenge was the “mud pit.” In 2005, among city re-
quirements for neighborhood infrastructure in Modesto was a dual- use
standard we were starting to implement for drainage or catch basins
that collect water, including runoff from landscaping. The new stan-
dards mandated internal piping so water could leech slowly into the
ground instead of just sitting there. The dual use came because the
majority of the basins could double as park and recreation land when
they weren’t occupied by water. Then the basins become a grassy space,
reminding me of the drainage basin near our summer cottage on Cape
Cod that served as a neighborhood gathering place when I was a kid.
It began with proposed changes by a developer to a partially
completed subdivision. Three of its four phases were built. The fourth
31
phase was slated for completion. Every city or county is required by

state law to provide housing for people from different income levels.
Master-planned developments such as this one are key tools in com-
plying with the state mandate. The requirement in this project for
multi-family housing had been pushed back to the fourth and last
phase. The developer also reserved the requirement under the city’s
standard for building dual-use drainage basins for the fourth phase.
When the application for the fourth phase came before the City
Council, the developer argued the remaining parcel was too small to
fit in both the affordable, multi-family housing and the dual-use basin.
So in order to find space for the basin, he proposed placing a huge
hole in the ground in the middle of all four phases of the subdivision
that I nicknamed the mud pit. It would have been a useless eyesore
that detracted from the quality of life of everybody in the development.
To make matters worse, the developer, to save space, also proposed
making the roads narrower than normal for a subdivision and creating
no green space in the entire 20-acre fourth phase.
“Why should we we settle for a mud pit and no parks in the
whole fourth phase?” I asked. The developer said there was only room
to build a three-acre basin instead of the nine-acre basin that was the
minimum amount needed for him to receive credit from the city for
park space. I encouraged the city to find a way to allow an exception
to the size requirement of a dual-use basin so the developer could get
his credit and build a decent-looking and functional basin that offered
residents green space. We told the developer to work with his architect
to come up with designs that would allow for dual use.
After much exhaustive work between the staff and the developer,
resolution was reached. The developer came up with a new set of
drawings that included the dual-use basin plus paseos, small strips
of green space interspersed throughout the subdivision. It was all
because we threw the developer out the door the first time and asked
for substantial changes of both the builder and city staff from what
had originally been approved.
32
Chapter Four
Making government business friendly
One of my goals on the City Council was bringing a customer

service mindset to local government and making Modesto more user-
friendly to both businesses and citizens.
As chair of the Economic Development Committee I could
introduce items for discussion and implementation by the entire coun-
cil. Sometimes city staff was less than excited about them. I noticed
during my eight years in office that consideration of new or different
ideas or citizen feedback usually occurred within the insular world
of local government, among the administrators and city employees of
the affected departments.
In 2009, I was speaking with a citizen who headed a large business
that had a lot of interaction with its customers. He told me every time
a customer was served by one of his employees, he sent a letter to the
customer expressing thanks for the business, supplying all his contact
information and urging the customer to reach him at any time. That
letter produced zero responses. Customers were happy the business
owner cared enough to send the letter.
After customers were finished being served, the business owner
sent them a second letter together with a survey. Among the questions
on the survey: How are we doing? What are we doing right? Any im-
provements we should make? Did you encounter specific problems
related to our service to you?
There was good feedback to the second letter. The business
identified areas where it could improve and implemented them. The
enterprise was constantly evolving to satisfy its customers.
33
By contrast, if a city department ever reached out to ask customers

how city staff was doing, most customers who depended on the staff for
their livelihoods would be reluctant to honestly respond. The public
that interacted with staff knew the staff took it personally if complaints
or suggestions for improvement were advanced. If there was corre-
spondence from unhappy customers, say a contractor submitting an
application at the development counter, the complaint would go to
the person responsible for the problem. Not much feedback reached
the City Council. At least we rarely heard about it.
But being out in the public, mixing with citizens all the time, I
constantly heard plenty about what was wrong with just about every
department. It drove me crazy.
I sat down at my computer and typed up a letter that could be
sent to everyone who turned for help to city departments. “Thank you
for doing business with the city of Modesto,” it started out. “We’re so
happy we can serve you. I have the utmost faith in our city employees.
They are qualified and competent. But should you ever have any issues
or problems, please know that here is my phone number and email
address. You may contact me at any time if I can be of assistance.”
The letter would come from the director or top administrator of each
department dealing directly with the public.
I found a great feature in Microsoft Word that placed the word
“DRAFT” in big bold letters across the top and submitted the letter
along with a proposed survey asking about the citizen’s experience as
a customer of the city, what he or she liked or disliked about the expe-
rience and whether or not there were parts of the process that could
use improvement. It also asked if the person would return to the city
for future business. Instead of going to the affected department, the
survey would be delivered straight to the city manager, who could act
as a check and balance concerning departments he probably didn’t
have much daily contact with. The survey would give him a snapshot
about what was going on and illuminate problems and recommenda-
tions to change what was wrong. I put the draft letter and survey onto
the Economic Development Committee agenda to be discussed at
the next meeting.
My committee members didn’t have a problem with them. But
34
they elicited a chilling reaction from the staff. The director of the Com-
munity and Economic Development Department told me employees
were not happy with my idea; they felt as if they were being picked on.
“No one is picking on anyone,” I said. “This is standard practice
in any business with high interaction with the public and no one has
any higher public interaction than a city government whose purpose
is to serve the public.” In addition, if we started acting like we wanted
to know how we can improve and give people better experiences, then
we could actually have more people come through the doors. It could
result in additional economic development in the city. If you have a
reputation as a bad place to do business or where it is difficult to get
your business done, people will go elsewhere if given a choice. All
we wanted to do with the letter and survey was to give the impression
that Modesto was open for business and that the city was business
friendly, I emphasized.
The Community and Economic Department director and city
manager inserted some slight changes, making it more pertinent to
the department and what they were interested in tracking. We decided
to use this department as a test case.
The letter was sent out along with the survey as a matter of daily
procedure. All the employees are still there. So is the city manager. No
one lost his or her job. Surprisingly, most of the feedback was positive.
They also received ideas and suggestions for improvements. Some have
been adopted. The survey has become a useful tool in improving city
government. Now the city manager is working on having it applied
to all city departments.
Finding the building that didn’t exist

As vice chair of the council’s Audit Committee, I helped oversee
city employees’ travel expenses, reviewed outside auditors’ reports on
the financial health of the city and tested financial information for
consistency and accuracy. We oversaw small and large independent
audits targeting particular functions of city government. It was all
mundane but very important work because we discovered some very
big problems.
By 2004 and 2005, when we were experiencing minor shortfalls
35
in revenues, nothing like today, we were reviewing travel reports for

the departments. There were rumblings that some high-level city of- f
ficials were rarely seen at their desks in City Hall. Since departments
were being asked to cut budgets, it affected lower-level employees.
Some observed, “Why should I have to take a cut when my boss is
never here?”
Looking at travel records for two officials, we realized when
we factored in holidays and vacations they were only spending two
months of the year on their jobs at City Hall. And their jobs weren’t
to be out traveling.
So we implemented standards and restrictions on employee
travel. This saved money at a time when revenues were beginning to
decline. It also guaranteed that city staff, especially those at the top,
were at their jobs doing the work we expected them to do. They traveled
only if it was absolutely necessary for the performance of their duties.
We ultimately reduced travel by more than 75 percent.
At the same time the City Council was asking for cuts in de-
partments during 2005, an even more disturbing tip came into me as
Audit Committee vice chair from a city employee. I got a phone call
at home from a Public Works Department worker. He reported being
told by administrators to cut portions of his budget. But part of his
department funding had already been secretly used to build a project
without council approval, he said.
The alleged project was a metal building on a concrete slab by
the city’s secondary water treatment plant that was used to house a large
piece of equipment for the city’s composting facility. If true, this meant
a capital improvement was built that wasn’t part of the City Council-
approved budget. The way it was supposed to work was department
heads took suggestions from employees and make recommendations
on what they wanted to spend to the city Finance Department, which
put together the budget. Based on employee input, this metal build-
ing was taken off the list to go to the council because other projects
were more urgent.
The whistleblower said it was easy to get around the rules be-
cause if you spent $49,500 or less, you didn’t need the city manager’s
approval. So the Public Works Department deputy director who
36
wanted the metal building had been taking money out of various line
expenditures from his budget in $49,500 chunks to pay for a building
no one ever approved.
The structure was out on Jennings Road, the tipster said. The
only thing they hadn’t found money to pay for were the doors. So the
employee told me the building was easy to spot. “Janice, it’s the one
without doors.”
I called my trusted compadre and partner, Councilman Will
O’Bryant, and brought him up to speed. “I think I’m going to call the
city manager and ask him to look into this,” I told Will.
“What if he’s less than honest or doesn’t know about it?” Will said.
“Well, then we’ll just have to take a field trip,” I answered.
Two days later the city manager called to report that there was
no such building. “It doesn’t exist,” he assured me. “The employee
was mistaken.”
The employee had no reason to lie to me. I related the conver-
sation to Will, who said, “So we’re going on a field trip. I’ll pick you
up in ten minutes.”
We drove about 15 miles out on Jennings Road west of Modesto
and then turned south onto a long driveway leading to the secondary
water treatment facility. We surveyed the area. Our heads locked on a
big building down the driveway and off to the left. We both noticed at
the same time that it had no doors. “I think that’s the one,” Will said
and drove further along the driveway. I brought my digital camera.
We figured a picture spoke a thousand words.
We pulled up and Will stopped so I could get a clear picture
of the structure. I opened the passenger door of Will’s vehicle. Here
we were trying to conduct a clandestine undercover mission--like we
were engaging in espionage. But as I got out of the car, the handle of
my purse got hooked on my foot and I proceeded to dump the entire
contents of the bag all over the ground. I scrambled, hurriedly throwing
everything back in the purse, shooting the photos and rushing back into
the vehicle. Will and I looked at each other like, What are we feeling
guilty about? “Let’s drive by and see if anybody’s here,” I suggested.
We slowly drove around the outbuildings at the facility in Will’s
huge burgundy red Chevy Tahoe SUV with Flowmaster pipes that
37
made a lot of exhaust noise. We passed by the building that didn’t ex-
ist one last time to make sure it hadn’t disappeared since we arrived.
Then we headed back to City Hall.
As we pulled into the parking structure, we spotted two high
level Public Works Department supervisors with cell phones pressed
to their ears looking rather pale as they walked heads down towards
the entrance to City Hall. They must have been tipped off we were
out there. Will looked at me and said, “I think they know we know.”
We parked and went up to the city manager’s office. I turned on
my digital camera and showed him the photo of the structure without
doors. “Here’s the building that doesn’t exist,” I announced.
“Well, I can’t understand how this happened,” the city manager
stated.
In reality he probably didn’t know beforehand what was going on
even though it was later revealed he had signed a series of documents
pertaining to a building. Perhaps city officials asked him to sign papers
he didn’t read. No one expected Will and I to actually drive out there
and look for ourselves.
We knew there was a big problem if Public Works Department
personnel were taking action without following policy by “forty-nine-
fiving” it as we came to call the practice. I tipped off a Modesto Bee
reporter, who wrote the first of five straight days of news stories blowing
up the scandal for the public to see.
We immediately intervened by assigning the competent director
of another city departmentt to start reviewing the books and policies
of the Pubic Works Department as well as all of its active capital im-
provement projects. Meanwhile, the City Council hired an outside
auditor to do a performance evaluation in regards to the Public Works
Department’s adherence to city policies.
It revealed that this department, through a series of cuts over
the years, had become more and more reliant on temporary workers
employed by private outside contractors without any kind of public
competition or competitive bidding. There is a proper process for
bidding out government work to the private sector that guarantees
fair competition. The Public Works Department had been handing
business over to one particular firm with no bidding. Later, when the
38
same work was subjected to competitive bidding, we found out that

the firm favored by department officials had been overcharging the
city. Eventually, the job went through competitive biding to another
outside company that charged much less for the same work.
If the city hires a temporary non-benefited employee for any
function it can only use that worker for 1,000 hours. They call it a
1,000-hour employee. If the person works for more than 1,000 hours,
he or she becomes eligible for all the benefits and protections regular
city employees enjoy. We found the Public Works Department was
stacking its ranks for all kinds of jobs with 1,000-hour employees who
no one was tracking. A lot of them were working more than 1,000
hours. The audit we commissioned was devastating: No tracking or
oversight. Bidding requirements demanded of public entities were
being ignored.
The combination of our internal review and external audit plus
the public exposure in the press resulted in complete reorganization
of the Public Works Department, its policies and code of conduct.
During this mess we did hire an outside auditor. But for a long
time the city also had an internal auditor. We learned the internal
auditor discovered some of this misconduct but was pressured by city
staff and administrators to leave it out of his reports.
That was the springboard for Measure M, passed in February
2007 with nearly 79 percent of the vote, to create the charter office
position of city auditor, an independent post reporting directly to the
City Council so such scandals would not be repeated. I was part of the
committee sponsoring Measure M and, with Mayor Jim Ridenour, I
helped raise $110,000 to fund the campaign to the voters about the
need for increased accountability. (I’m also proud to have received
Mayor Ridenour’s endorsement in my campaign for state Assembly.)
Cutting through the muck to get things done

There are numerous networks of providers that employers and
individuals can use to obtain health coverage. Kaiser Permanente
stepped into the Modesto insurance market as an alternative to other
mainstream outfits such as Blue Cross and Blue Shield. Kaiser can be
less expensive than its competitors, but more importantly its range of
39
services are usually broader and generally housed in one large facility.
When Kaiser introduced itself to Modesto it didn’t have a facility.
So it partnered with the two main existing hospitals, Doctors Medical
Center and Memorial Hospital, for emergency services. Kaiser also
partnered with individual area physicians who acted as providers.
Kaiser became very popular, but its contracts with the hospitals
became expensive. So it looked for a place to build a brand new facility
Kaiser could operate as it does in other places.
It found a piece of county land immediately adjacent to the city
of Modesto. Kaiser’s application for a $500 million hospital/medical
complex came through the city Planning Department around 2003-
2004. This was very attractive to Modesto, providing an alternative
source of quality medical care for many residents across the entire
region as well as an economic boon to the city tax base with highly-
paid employees, including doctors and specialists, who would buy
homes, purchase goods and contribute to the community. In addition,
there was a huge multiplier effect from related commercial and retail
businesses that would serve the Kaiser facility, its staff and patients.
As Kaiser grew there would be the need for additional office space
for doctors who are related to the network but operate their offices
outside its complex.
The problem was our Planning Department staff had never seen,
experienced or organized a project of this size, scope and complexity.
The first order of business was forming a concentrated team from
the city that worked in conjunction with Kaiser’s team to get the facility
approved and built. Land had to be annexed to the city. Zoning had
to be changed to allow for this novel complex. The plan itself had to
navigate through the maze of the approval process, which was com-
plicated by the fact it was next to a state highway, SR 219. Caltrans,
the California Department of Transportation, had to be involved
because traffic impacts from the hospital would require significant
improvements to the highway as well as surrounding arterial streets
in the city of Modesto.
Drainage standards had changed and Kaiser wanted a green
facility, using new and innovative methods to save energy and create
a healthier inside environment in terms of air quality. So linoleum,
40
because it is petroleum based and emits low levels of toxins, was to be

replaced with specialized non-toxic flooring. The roofs were going to
be covered with slow-growing organic grass that reflects heat from the
sun and saves energy. Kaiser was using new material, called perme-
able concrete, allowing water that falls from the sky to permeate into
the concrete instead of pooling, and then flow into a state-of-the-art
drainage system below.
All of these concepts were new to staff in the Planning Depart-
ment and the city team trying to usher the project through in a timely
manner. Figuring out how this new development fit into the city’s
old assumptions and standards was arduous. For example, city staff
had trouble deciding whether the method of containing water on site
through the permeable concrete and elaborate draining system met
the 100-year storm standards Modesto had adopted for all construc-
tion projects.
The Economic Development Committee reviewed various
benchmarks of the project and discussed solutions to bureaucratic
logjams that were frustrating Kaiser’s application. Once Caltrans was
introduced into the mix because of the need for state highway improve-
ments, the difficulties became so great that to solve them we formed
an entirely new committee composed of Caltrans, Mayor Ridenour,
Kaiser, its experts and consultants, city staff and myself. It met more
frequently than the once-a-month schedule for the Economic Devel-
opment Committee I chaired. Since we were placing conditions on
the Kaiser facility that had to be met before it could open, city staff
were being pushed to act at an uncomfortably quick pace. Yet we had
to ensure every precaution was being taken so the project satisfied city
and state standards.
This process went on for a year and a half with the special com-
mittee meeting at least once a week, and sometimes more often, to
resolve issues and keep moving ahead on the application for construc-
tion of the hospital/medical complex.
One concern was that the complex was next to an affluent resi-
dential neighborhood. The neighbors wanted to be shielded as much
as possible from the affects of having a huge multiple-story complex
looming next door. Residents worried about the noise from helicopters
41
landing and taking off with emergency patients. Kaiser agreed to have
medical flights deliver patients to the nearby airport and to only use
the complex helipad in cases of genuine emergency.
Another serious problem was the concern by the two existing
Modesto hospitals that since Kaiser is an exclusive facility it would
not treat patients who were not part of its network. They feared Kaiser
would turn patients away who would end up in their hospitals. Kaiser
committed that this would not be the case and produced evidence
from its other facilities to back up its commitment. We had to take
Kaiser’s assurances on faith. It has kept its word.
By 2005, the Kaiser complex was going for approval before the
city Planning Commission. In the weeks before the commission hear-
ing, a commissioner unexpectedly tendered his resignation, which
required the City Council to review applications for replacements
on file, pick a qualified candidate and approve the new planning
commissioner at our next council meeting. The staff then spent time
with the new member to go over the project in detail so an informed
decision could be made at the hearing.
The project won approval by the commission with minor condi-
tions offered by the staff.
Then it moved to a public hearing before the full seven-member
City Council. A Caltrans representative testified at the hearing that
the necessary completion timeline was not going to be possible for
the state to meet. The deadline for approval gave Caltrans a full three
years to complete its work from the date of the final council vote. By
the time of this City Council hearing, the transportation element of
the project had been in the pipeline for a year and a half. Caltrans had
fully participated in all the meetings, including those of our specially
formed committee. During that period the state had never raised an
objection until this council meeting. In addition, these state highway
improvements had been included in Caltrans’ plans as a major project
for 20 years. When the Caltrans official testified “there is no way” his
agency could complete the necessary highway improvements with the
four and a half years of total notice it had on the project and within
the remaining three years, I observed that “Caltrans can’t tie it shoes
in three years.” I also commented as politely as I was capable about
42
the snail-paced bureaucracy and methodology at Caltrans.

I was outraged. “It’s totally unacceptable that you come to this
hearing and tell us what you can’tt do,” I said. “Your job is to tell us
what you can do and then put measures in place to accomplish the
deadline.” We had received little attention or interest from Caltrans
for the many needs of state-operated highways in and around Modesto,
I added. “The first time we ask for something, we get a ‘can’t do,’” I
told the state representative. “We’ve never seen Caltrans people in
our community. You’re the first. What color are your trucks anyway?”
I asked. The whole audience burst out laughing.
“You have a point,” the guy responded haplessly. “Let me go back
and talk with the district director. We’ll remove our objection and do
everything we can to complete the improvements for the opening of
the hospital,” he promised. Problem solved.
You know, sometimes people don’t like my unrestrained im-
patience in the face of bureaucratic incompetence, inadequacy or
unprofessionalism. They might have a point. But when I need to use
my impatience to cut through the muck, I don’t care as long as it get
things done.
The weekly special committee meetings at City Hall resumed
in earnest more than a year before the scheduled opening of the com-
plex. The project was so complex and there were so many issues that
it demanded constant attention. The mayor and I frequently played
referee among the personalities of the Kaiser team and sometimes
the pride of city staff reacting to new and different technologies and
building techniques. Sometimes Kaiser had to back down. Sometimes
the city staff needed to relent.
The complex was finally finished in early 2009, and dedicated
with guided tours and community celebrations. Now it’s operating
smoothly. The road improvements are completed or well underway.
There is what used to be an under-served county area that used to suf- f
fer from insufficient infrastructure such as road improvements, water
connections, sewer completions and intersections with coordinated
signal lights--now all paid for as part of the Kaiser project and on Kai-
ser’s dime. Those improvements amounted to no less than $10 million
because the Kaiser complex was annexed into the city.
43
The moral of the story: For as much as anyone wanted to

complain about the inconvenience or sheer size of the construction
project and the need for complicated roadway improvements, the
city of Modesto is a much better place as a result of completion of the
Kaiser complex. It would have taken us many years and many large
development projects to reach the critical mass of investment dollars
Kaiser supplied.
In August 2009, not long after the opening, I witnessed firsthand
what it meant to have a hospital facility such as Kaiser’s. My best friend
and closest colleague on the City Council, Will O’Bryant, was rushed
to Kaiser Permanente-Modesto Medical Center in a non-responsive
state. I hurried into Kaiser’s emergency room and sat with other friends
and Will’s family. We saw how well he was being treated and the care
he was receiving. Will eventually returned to full health and was able
to resume his council duties before leaving office with me at the end
of that year.
44
Chapter Five
Battling ineffective, wasteful regulations

that kill jobs and strangle the economy
It is my deep conviction that government needs to get out of

the way of the private sector by removing burdensome laws, rules and
regulations that are strangling business and impeding restoration of
California’s economic vitality.
No better example is AB 32, the self-proclaimed Global Warm-
ing Solutions Act of 2006, authored by former Assembly Speaker
Fabian Nunez, passed by the Democratic Legislature and signed into
law by Governor Schwarzenegger. It is an effort through legislation
to mandate the reduction of emissions from carbon dioxide to those
levels that existed in California in 1990. AB 32 directed the Califor-
nia Air Resources Board to create a scheme for implementation with
these goals: Arbitrarily set indicators of carbon dioxide output (what
produces CO2); decide how much it has to be reduced; then decide
which industries must comply with the mandates and how much of a
reduction in CO2 each has to achieve under the law.
AB 32’s implementation regulations hit every segment of the
state’s economy because all have carbon dioxide output, including
utilities, farms, dairies, trucking, other vehicles, manufacturing, food
processing and public transit. Each key economic sector must attempt
to achieve its mandated reductions that ultimately demand use of very
expensive and untested technologies. The costs then trickle down to
small businesses and ordinary customers and consumers serviced by
these key segments.
In terms of implementing AB 32 by reducing carbon dioxide
45
emissions through renewable energy over traditional fossil fuels, the

technology to do so is extremely pricy and the costs of producing re-
newable energy are four times higher than traditional energy sources
such as natural gas and clean coal. Therefore, purchases of alternative
forms of energy can only be achieved through government subsidies.
The government is using our tax dollars to subsidize these much more
expensive energy sources. If the subsidies disappear, people will stop
using alternative energy. That has occurred in Spain, which abandoned
all solar projects when the government stopped subsidizing them in
the wake of an economic crisis.
The year AB 32 passed, 2006, was the height of scare tactics
heralding the devastating and irreversible affects of global warming.
Then, if you asked most people whether they wanted to help the
environment by reducing carbon dioxide emissions back to 1990
levels, the overwhelming majority would have answered “Yes.” No
one wanted to be politically incorrect by asking how much it would
cost, whether AB 32’s mandates and regulations would be effective
and whether or not the law would have an overall impact on global
warming--across the globe.
An April 22, 2010 article in the Modesto Bee entitled, “Cattle
feed may be cause of air woes,” illustrated the dire shortcomings of AB
32’s implementation. “Feed for dairy cows appears to be the biggest
single source of a key ozone-making gas in the smoggy San Joaquin
Valley,” the piece observed. The story reported:
The finding [that feed is the largest cause of CO2 on dairies]

overturns a suspicion experts had several years ago that dairy air
pollution mostly comes from manure and cow belching.
Fermenting corn silage and other feed create almost twice as
much reactive organic gas as cars do, says a study by the University
of California at Davis. [The study] will help local air officials as
they revise rules for dairies in the next two months.
When the rules were made several years ago, many experts
considered the region’s 2 million cows and their manure as the
primary source of these gases. Under the rules the industry spent
millions of dollars cleaning up barns, corrals and manure stor-
46
age areas in the nation’s most productive dairy region (emphasis

added).
Dairies, the number one agricultural revenue generator in our

region, were heavily targeted by the state in its quest to improve air
quality because it was believed their carbon dioxide output was high
due to manure and cow belching. Between 2006 and 2010, dairies
spent millions and millions of dollars treating those sources, which now
experts know were not the cause of most of the emissions. That means
AB 32 required one of our biggest industries and largest employers to
spend millions for no good reason. That money could have gone to
expand their businesses and hire more employees.
By the way, what do people think we’re going to feed our cows?
There is no choice about using cattle feed.
Paying the price in high unemployment and lost jobs

That’s just one example out of many wasteful abuses.
The state air board’s diesel rules for off-road construction and
farming equipment used calculations that were off by a factor of four.
That’s a huge mistake. But mandates and rules were blindly based
on these false calculations that hadn’t been properly checked out.
Meantime, the construction and agricultural industries spent millions
of dollars to solve problems that were magnified way out of proportion
to reality.
How many other major economic sectors in California have been
and are being victimized by these inaccurate and poorly researched
mandates that allow for no margin of flexibility and no opportunity
for protest, appeal or ability to correct errors once they are issued?
A big part of AB 32 is called cap and trade. It essentially caps
carbon dioxide and pollutants at a certain level. If emissions from a
business or industry fall below that level, firms can trade credits to other
businesses or industries with emissions that exceed the government-set
amount. So if you’re a business operating over a limit on the level of
emissions you can produce, you can either achieve reductions, often
at exorbitantly high costs, or arrange to trade for credits from another
business that is below the state-mandated cap, which can also come
47
at a high price.
Cap and trade will cost California businesses $143 billion over
ten years on top of the other mandates for reductions in carbon dioxide
emissions through implementation of AB 32, which amount to tens
of billions of dollars more.
AB 32 appealed to politicians seeking to clean every spec of dirt
out of the air in a naively idealistic notion of the environment that
doesn’t exist now and never will. The law ignores the reality of hard-
working Californians who are paying the economic price in unneces-
sary high unemployment, needless high energy and food costs, and
lack of economic and job growth that is so badly needed right now.
We’re all concerned statewide unemployment exceeds 12 per-
cent. It’s 20.1 percent in Stanislaus County.
California has always led the way in business innovation and
technological advances. It will do so again by finding viable alternative
energy sources. But you can’t place a thoughtlessly arbitrary deadline
on research and development. Real progress evolves out of genuine
science, research and testing, none of which is being applied by the
state air board or the Legislature and governor through AB 32.
Taking, and wasting, money from

job creators and taxpayers is wrong
The California League of Cities asked me to testify before the
state Air Resources Board in December 2008, after local government
was hit through enactment of another law, SB 375, by state Senate
leader Darrell Steinberg, which applied emission reduction mandates
to cities and counties. I advocated suspension or postponement of
the implementation regulations for AB 32. My theory was if we don’t
boil things down to the ultimate cost on the average citizen instead
of pretending that only big corporations pay, we won’t understand the
true impacts of this draconian measure.
First, I had to thoroughly understand the issue. So I called our
local utility agency, manufacturing council, Farm Bureau chapter,
Chamber of Commerce and three of the region’s largest food process-
ing businesses. I asked them all to tell me what AB 32 meant to them
and our local economy. Most of my education came from organizing
48
a public forum in March 2009 at the Modesto Irrigation District audi-

torium attended by about 200 community members, elected officials,
and business and industry leaders.
At the forum, I learned electricity rates would go up by a mini-
mum of 25 percent in 2009 to pay for the renewable energy mandate
under AB 32. (They did.) The electricity provider sadly raised rates
because of the state air board’s AB 32 implementation plan while
rate-payers voiced outrage at the utility for doing so in a recession.
The alternative energy required by AB 32 costs as much as four to five
times more than other energy sources.
A food processor that employs 3,000 local residents suffered
because it had to roll emissions back to 1990 levels. That arbitrary re-
quirement meant that the 40 percent reduction in emissions expected
of this industry really amounted to a 60 percent cut since processors
had expanded their businesses since 1990, but received no credit for
the growth, which was a positive thing for the community, its tax base
and work force.
A large poultry operator told me any improvements in reducing
energy use or carbon dioxide output he voluntarily made between 1990
and 2006, when AB 32 was passed, did not qualify for credit under the
law. For example, using hydro-electric power produced by water from
a damn was not considered renewable, even though nothing is more
natural and less polluting than power by water.
Overall, I learned that in industry after industry, there is a
pervasive fear preventing people from buying, selling and investing
in California: The business community has no confidence in the
economic future of the state. Neither do many consumers. So they
are not going to invest or spend money that is so critically important
to restoring our economy.
In testifying before the state Air Resources Board, I said if the
state of California really wants to respond to the ever-increasing fear
of the loss of jobs and further deterioration of our economy, it should
suspend all parts of the cost-prohibitive AB 32 regulations that are
taking money from our businesses’ pockets that would otherwise be
used to hire good people who are eager and ready to work. In contrast
to business, I noted, the Air Resources Board boosted its payroll over
49
the five years since AB 32 was enacted by 50 percent, from $61 mil-
lion to $114 million.
Let’s compare, I testified: Private sector earnings were down by
40 percent while the state air board enjoyed a 50 percent increase in
spending with money taken from the job creators and taxpayers of the
state. That’s wrong, I argued.
Righting that wrong will be one of my top priorities as a member
of the California state Assembly.
50
Chapter Six
Community does more than government
One of the biggest problems facing California is so many people

think government can and should do it all. What aspect of our lives do
those who believe in more government think government should not
be involved in? I don’t think they can name a part of our lives they don’t
want the government taxing, regulating, litigating, directing, cajoling,
interfering with or usurping. Maybe the only exception is creating a
radical wall of separation between church and state that doesn’t even
let us open a city council meeting with a prayer.
Letting the government do everything erodes our civic society,
our sense of community and the spirit of self-help--helping others in
need that helped make America and California great. And it encour-
ages us to think all the problems are being taken care of by government
when they are not.
From what I learned growing up in my church, I believe we as
individuals have a responsibility to help those in need. In the Gospel
of Matthew, 25:40, it said, “Whatever you did for one of the least of
these brothers of mine, you did for me.” And in Matthew 18:10, Jesus
said to His disciples: “Be careful not to look down on these little ones.”
Commentaries on the Bible identify the little ones as the weak, un-
educated, wounded and vulnerable, the dispirited, the sick, the lonely,
the alcoholic and the homeless.
Like many people, I’d seen the tragedy of homeless people, often
mentally ill, struggling to survive in the cold of winter. In 2003, just
before Thanksgiving, the issue came to my attention when caring and
well-meaning homeless advocates complained the city of Modesto
51
and county of Stanislaus were paying scant attention to the dilemma

of homelessness, never delivering on promises of help.
The advocates invited city and county officials to an open meet-
ing at the Stanislaus Public Library. I think I was the only elected
public official to show up. I listened to the advocates voice frustration
with the lack of interest and initiative by local government and how
the city and county failed to make good on their commitments. After
an hour, I told the group, “The problem is you’re relying solely on
the government to act and meet a community need that should be
funded by the private sector. If government funding subsequently fol-
lows, that should be icing on the cake.” I made a commitment then
and there that if they were serious about pursuing solutions through
private means, I would help them accomplish their goal.
There was a collective gasp and stunned silence. No one had
discussed that alternative before. The assumptions were that govern-
ment is the solution and people in government just didn’t care. My
attitude was that I’ve always taken care of myself, my family and my
obligations and responsibilities. I’ve always been charitable to those
less fortunate. And I was convinced in my heart that getting homeless
people off the streets and into a safe, dry and clean environment oper-
ated by a faith-based or other non-profit organization was the answer.
Many advocates were surprised and skeptical. Their focus on a
government solution was grounded in lack of faith that the commu-
nity and private sector would respond because they never had before.
Homelessness is messy stuff. The chronically homeless have
nothing and nowhere to go. They tend to be mentally ill and self-
medicating through alcohol and drugs. They’re penniless, unclean and
have worn out their welcome with family and friends. Many residents
see the homeless as a public nuisance and shun them. They aren’t
exactly subjects for a Norman Rockwell painting.
Getting down to work

Within days I got down to work, convening a meeting in a friendly
local nonprofit group’s conference room of 15 people to fashion a road
map on how to locate, build and operate an emergency shelter for
single homeless adults. Such a non-religious facility did not exist in
52
Modesto. There was greater compassion for homeless mothers with

children, who did have places to go. At this meeting were people
from the disabled community, homeless advocates, the county health
services and mental health agencies, and the Salvation Army. I also
brought along a commercial real estate agent, Chris Shaw.
I asked if anyone knew of an existing facility that could be con-
verted, improved on or added on to so as to accommodate an open
space shelter meeting city conditions, which meant an industrial area.
Chris had a list of qualified properties. We discarded those that didn’t
work and split up the remaining list so we could all go out and physi-
cally check each location.
Chris and I teamed up and were soon in front of a large vacant
building, the one-time Berberian Nut Cold Storage Company facility,
well over 100,000 square feet and nearly three stories high. One of the
sections appeared to be a mezzanine. I had an idea. The agent and I
used a tape measure to estimate that if enclosed, creating a building
within a building, the mezzanine, with roughly 25,000 square feet,
could house shelter space for about 100 people.
After our group reconvened and everyone heard my idea, there
was general agreement on enclosing the mezzanine for the shelter.
Now we needed someone to operate it. All eyes fell on the local op-
erations manager for the Salvation Army, Dave Bowman, who wasn’t
sure since his organization’s programs were under funding strains.
Meantime, we went to the city Planning Department, which
demanded answers to technical questions. Chris, the Realtor, and I
spent hours crawling around the dusty old abandoned building with
tape measures, emerging looking like homeless people. After a city
attorney raised another long list of intricate and expensive issues, we
decided to ignore the city except to get plans approved.
Then, between Thanksgiving and Christmas we painstakingly
fulfilled nonsensical city requirements, from taking soil samples for
environmental testing to documenting previous uses of the building
since its original purpose. We got the City Council to declare a “shelter
emergency” to avoid minor but time-consuming code conditions. We
wanted to have the shelter up and running that winter.
We had the newspaper run stories about what we were doing with
53
the hope of soliciting building industry donations of time, materials

and labor. Steve Madison, executive director of the Building Industry
Association, received a message from Salvi Delarbarca, a Modesto
general contractor. A commercial builder, Salvi had a son who had
been mentally ill and homeless for a time. He called in favors from
every one of his vendors and subcontractors, getting at least 30 of them
from most of the building trades to donate labor and materials totaling
$70,000. He also contributed an onsite manager to coordinate and
oversee identification of necessary skills for the renovation. It worked.
Close to completion of various project phases, we let the Planning
Department know when to send inspectors, obtaining their approvals
at each step to keep the renovation moving ahead at a fast pace.
Steve Madison also coordinated, pitched in and cleaned up
behind me every step of the way. The Salvation Army honored him
with its prestigious “Others” award for his unbelievable commitment
to the shelter.
Now it was being built, so before Christmas I met with the Salva-
tion Army local board in Modesto, noting how building the homeless
shelter had been a goal for 20 years. Would they run it? Salvation
Army Captain Mike Dickinson, then in charge of Modesto, doubted
I could get the necessary clearance from his regional headquarters
in San Francisco in time to open the facility. I asked for the contact
information of who I needed to talk with and wrote a letter outlining
everything. Two days later I got a call from Captain Dickinson: He
didn’t know what I did or said, but San Francisco immediately ap-
proved the army’s participation. He told me he had never seen such
a fast response.
The Salvation Army wanted to know when it would open. I had
no idea. There was a calendar on the wall of its conference room dis-
playing three months, January through March. I closed my eyes and
touched the calendar. My finger fell on Jan. 12, my son’s birthday.
“It’ll open by January 12,” I declared.
Turning in tears to the mayor and fire chief

Even with all this progress and the renovation well under way, I
still didn’t have a lease agreement for the building from the property
54
owner--nothing in writing. When I told this to a local land-use attorney

friend in a phone call, he gasped for air on the other end of the line.
The only words he could get out of his mouth before hanging up were
an imitation of the Sergeant Schultz character in the 1960s TV sitcom
“Hogan’s Heroes”: “I know nothing--NOTHING!”
The owner wanted the city as his tenant, which wouldn’t work
because of numerous legal conditions that would take months to
resolve. We needed the Salvation Army. We knew it would qualify
for federal funds through the city to operate the shelter. There was
an impasse and the danger of everything falling through. Tearfully, I
turned to the mayor, Jim Ridenour. The two of us met personally with
the property owner and convinced him to lease to the Salvation Army.
As the January 12 deadline loomed, in addition to construction
of the former mezzanine area, dozens of subcontractors and trades
people, church activists and ordinary citizens were volunteering long
hours in a hotbed of activity to fix up office space and bathrooms for
use in parts of the building not being renovated.
But what about beds? Nicki Lane, a good-hearted homeless ad-
vocate by my side throughout heard the former military base at Ford
Ord would donate furnishings from old Army barracks, including bunk
beds. But how could we get 100 beds to Modesto from Monterey?
After speaking to every area firm with a fleet of trucks, Wayne Henry
of Jack Frost Ice Company in Modesto supplied his trucks and driv-
ers. Another angel.
My husband, Tim, our son, Colin, and some members of the
Knights of Columbus, the Catholic men’s group, volunteered inside
the two-story barracks at Ford Ord. Pieces of solid wood bed frames
were strewn everywhere in the abandoned structure full of dust and
cobwebs. They assembled complete sets of beds, carried the heavy
loads down the stairs and loaded them in the trucks. (I also called John
Rogers, one of the finest gentlemen I have met and a major philanthro-
pist from the homeless project in Turlock, to see if he needed beds.
He kindly told me no one had ever called and asked to do something
for him before. Now, I’m sure many have over the years, but what a
sweet thing to say. He said he could use 50 bunk beds. So altogether,
we transported three truckloads of 160 bed frames and whatever mat-
55
tresses were usable.)

The shelter building in Modesto had roll-up doors on its north
side. The trucks pulled into the building and right up to the converted
mezzanine. Modesto city firefighters showed up in force and formed a
production line that unloaded the beds in 20 minutes flat. The Knights
of Columbus turned out to clean and assemble the bed frame parts
into 100 bunk beds.
A few days before the opening, a fire inspector denied approval
of the permit because we didn’t have an upgraded system of direct
notification to the Fire Department in case of emergency. We were
stressed out, working so hard and fast to get ready in time. Once again
in tears, I went this time to Fire Chief Jim Miguel. He immediately
came to the shelter site, gave all the employees direct phone num-
bers and trained them on how to contact the Fire Department in the
event of emergencies. When my friends who are firefighters receive
the occasional call from the shelter at 2 a.m., usually for a medical
emergency, they comment, “Ah, the house Janice built is calling.”
Nicki Lane and I went out and I purchased mattress covers for
all the beds. But how were we going to feed people in the evenings? I
called my priest at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, Father Joseph Illo,
asking if he could find volunteers who would prepare meals at the
parish hall kitchen and deliver them for a few days so the homeless
could eat at the shelter without worrying about losing their beds for the
night. Fellow parishioners Rick and Pam Dinubilo and the Knights of
Columbus organized the whole thing. To this day, St. Joseph’s has a
ministry called “The Daily Bread,” which is still the largest provider
of meals for the homeless shelter on a regular basis. The Dinubilos
plus my mother, sister, daughter and myself are steady volunteers. So
was my father until he passed away last year.
We worked hard with neighboring businesses to allay their
fears about impacts from the homeless descending on their area.
They toured the shelter and nearly everyone ended up supporting
us. I made some good friends with people who initially were pretty
unhappy with me.
On January 12, 2004, they and hundreds of community members,
colleagues and friends, contractors and volunteers showed up for a
56
joyous celebration. The shelter was a pleasant place with warm and
friendly freshly-painted colors staffed by former homeless people who
were now employed there.
On Christmas Day, December 25, 2003, before our opening, the
Modesto Bee published a lengthy editorial that read in part:
It takes a special quality to look into the eyes of a home-

less adult and feel compassion...Sometimes it means looking at
someone a lot like yourself. Such a vision fails most of us...The
story of Modesto’s newest shelter involves many dedicated people
and years of trying to generate momentum. But it wouldn’t be
happening this winter if not for one high-energy person.
Janice Keating took up the cause of the homeless only re-
cently...Politicians, it is widely believed, do little out of altruism.
For every good deed, political payback is required. It’s hard to
see that in Keating’s commitment. The homeless don’t vote, they
can’t make big campaign contributions and it’s unlikely she’ll ask
them to go door-to-door for her.
A few years later the owner donated the property to the Salvation
Army, which then qualified for state bond financing. It was turned into
a much larger shelter, a $1.5 million facility, that had long been a goal,
moving into an additional 50,000 square feet of the building. Grant
funding from the Veterans Administration to aid homeless veterans
provided for 22 of 44 beds for transitionally homeless people who
can live there for up to two years while seeking jobs, getting educated
and dealing with mental or health issues while they find permanent
housing.
I always believed that a person who has the courage to go for a
job interview or seek assistance should feel clean and fresh and hu-
man again. A contractor who constructed athletic clubs built men’s
and women’s showers, laundry facilities and a clothes closet to provide
clothing for shelter residents to use for job interviews or when they
visit family.
While the initial shelter was built with private philanthropy, it
later sought and received government assistance. I still think govern-
57
ment does too much and by doing so confuses what should be public
and should be private. My shelter experience taught me the challenge
for conservatives: How do we limit government to its proper place while
ensuring the least favored among us are not forgotten?
Finally, I promise not to cry in Sacramento--unless I need to
convince some Democratic lawmakers to vote right once in a while.
I’m not sure it will work, but I’ll try anything if it will straighten out
the mess they have created in our state.
I was named Woman of the Year for our community in 2004
by Assemblyman Dave Cogdill for my work on the homeless shelter.
58
Conclusion
A Republican who get things done
You know, sometimes during my eight years of service on the

Modesto City Council or when I’ve volunteered to spearhead civic or
community causes or projects, I haven’t been very good at hiding my
impatience in the face of government fraud and waste or bureaucratic
incompetence, inadequacy and unprofessionalism. Some people
haven’t liked it, especially the ones I took on. They have a point.
But when I need to use my impatience to cut through the muck,
I don’t care as long as I get things done. That’s why I got involved with
all of my kids’ school and after-school activities. It’s why I’m active with
my church. It’s why I got elected twice to the City Council. And it’s
why I’m running now for state Assembly.
Life is too short and it takes too much time and trouble to get
elected and serve in public office--taking time away from the family I
love--if I don’t have anything to show for it, if I can’t help the people
and advance the principles that drove me to be a candidate in the
first place.
There wasn’t enough time, space or money to cover everything
I wanted to say in this book. But I hope it told you something about a
Republican who strives to have her words match her deeds. No matter
who you vote for, thank you for reading it.
59

Words and Deeds, Janice Keating

Enviado por

Dados do documento

Direitos autorais

Formatos disponíveis

Compartilhar este documento

Compartilhar ou incorporar documento

Opções de compartilhamento

Você considera este documento útil?

Este conteúdo é inapropriado?

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

Words and Deeds, Janice Keating

Enviado por

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

Janice Keating

R ep u blican for State Ass e mb l y

Decide for yourself

My children sometimes say you have to walk the walk as well

Conservative Republicans believe in eliminating government fraud

unemployment (20.1 percent in Stanislaus County), needlessly high

Raised to value faith, family and

The great Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw once wrote,

A great life for a kid

Everything happened around our church

sacraments and about communion, how sacred it is and how, why

opinions and understand their positions even if they didn’t necessarily

Being teenagers, but Christian teenagers

Taking the initiative

Building a family and a small business

Central Catholic High School was where I met my future hus-

Proud to be a ‘soccer mom’

to offer our children. Now Tim is general manager and a shareholder

year I’m serving as assistant coach.

I came to public office to solve problems

By 2002, my kids were ages seven and 12. I wanted to be with

Refusing to ask permission to run for ofﬁce

sought to control the candidates who seriously offer themselves for

wants to do is balance every budget.” In one fell swoop, my opponent

Money is a good place to start

make cuts in a program without understanding whether those reduc-

When privatization makes sense

In general, the private sector is reluctant to bid against the public

Demanding a live body in every city job

empty positions they could put into favored programs or activities we

Creating basic change in budget and ﬁscal practices

Recreation Department section called “Culture.” It was for around

Without these changes and other ﬁscal reforms we initiated, the

Saving the taxpayers $32 million

stakeholders such as the county taxpayers association, Chamber of

Throwing the developer out the door

phase was slated for completion. Every city or county is required by

Making government business friendly

One of my goals on the City Council was bringing a customer

By contrast, if a city department ever reached out to ask customers

Finding the building that didn’t exist

in revenues, nothing like today, we were reviewing travel reports for

same work was subjected to competitive bidding, we found out that

Cutting through the muck to get things done

because it is petroleum based and emits low levels of toxins, was to be

the snail-paced bureaucracy and methodology at Caltrans.

The moral of the story: For as much as anyone wanted to

Battling ineffective, wasteful regulations

It is my deep conviction that government needs to get out of

emissions through renewable energy over traditional fossil fuels, the

The ﬁnding [that feed is the largest cause of CO2 on dairies]

age areas in the nation’s most productive dairy region (emphasis

Dairies, the number one agricultural revenue generator in our

Paying the price in high unemployment and lost jobs

Taking, and wasting, money from

a public forum in March 2009 at the Modesto Irrigation District audi-

Community does more than government

One of the biggest problems facing California is so many people

and county of Stanislaus were paying scant attention to the dilemma

Getting down to work

Modesto. There was greater compassion for homeless mothers with

the hope of soliciting building industry donations of time, materials

Turning in tears to the mayor and ﬁre chief

owner--nothing in writing. When I told this to a local land-use attorney