Author: Dan Morain

ATWATER – The reality of the nation’s health care crisis has struck hard at the Bellevue Bowl, a bar and bowling alley that has been owned by the same family for 50 years.

Owner Bob Cardoza got word that the premium for the health insurance policy for his family and a few key employees is jumping 75 percent. He made sure his congressman heard about it.

The congressman happens to be Bob’s younger brother, Dennis Cardoza, a Democrat from Merced.

Cardoza and his fellow Central Valley Democrat, Rep. Jim Costa of Fresno, are two of the holdouts on historic health care legislation heading for a pivotal vote later this week.

They should be among the first to sign on to the bill, given the need for health care in their districts. That they are mulling it over means they are torn or very savvy – or, most likely, that they are both.

“How we pay for it is of grave concern to me,” Cardoza told me on Tuesday. “My constituents are lukewarm because if it costs them a dime more, they’re stretched.”

Cardoza is seeking a medical school at UC Merced. Costa is using the opportunity to leverage assurances from the Obama administration of more water from the federal government for farmers in his district.

The brinksmanship will continue up to the vote. But it shouldn’t. There may be no part of the nation that needs a health care overhaul more than the San Joaquin Valley. Both congressmen surely know that.

Cardoza, in particular, is steeped in the issue. His wife is a physician, and he has been following the issue since he was a Capitol Hill intern 30 years ago and was directed to monitor health care hearings held by the late Sen. Edward Kennedy.

Cardoza’s district covers one of the most distressed regions in America, from Stockton, a center of the home foreclosure crisis, south to Modesto, Madera and Fresno.

Huge numbers of his constituents are out of work. Unemployment rates in counties he represents range from 16.6 percent to 21.7 percent. Nearly 24 percent of the people in Madera County population have no health insurance. Teen birth rates are high and a Merced hospital recently shuttered its neonatal unit.

But make a few stops along Highway 99, and it becomes clear why the vote is tough for a San Joaquin Valley Democrat.

Danny Prather used to have insurance, back when he worked as an auto mechanic and later a cable splicer.

Now he is MIA. The term doesn’t mean he is missing in action, though there are tragic similarities. He is a medically indigent adult, meaning he has no health coverage, and must go to the place of last resort, the Health Service Agency clinic of Stanislaus County.

Prather has diabetes and depression and has had heart attacks and strokes. He is 55. A friend lets him sleep on her couch. Otherwise, he’d be at the homeless encampment over by the creek bed.

“I thought about killing myself,” Prather said, standing in front of the sprawling clinic in an old hospital across from a cemetery on Scenic Drive in Modesto.

Prather would benefit from the health care bill. His bills would be paid partly by the federal government, and he would have greater access to care. But like many potential beneficiaries, he shrugged.

“It’s just another way for politicians to control us,” Prather said.

Back in Atwater, at the Bellevue Bowl, Ronald Roberts sips an O’Doul’s. He has a pacemaker and survived prostate cancer. At 74, the retired Air Force sergeant doesn’t worry about health insurance for himself.

But politicians, including Cardoza, need to do what is best for the people. “We’re the richest country in the world and we don’t take care of our own,” he said.

Then there is Bellevue Bowl owner Bob Cardoza. He worries about what he will do if he can’t find a new policy, and must come up with the extra 75 percent. Business is not exactly booming.

“What I see really concerns me,” the congressman’s older brother says.

As the vote nears, Pelosi is lining up votes. If Cardoza doesn’t vote for the bill, he can kiss his coveted spot on the House Rules Committee goodbye.

Obama offers a sweetener – money in his budget that could be used to create a medical school at UC Merced, in the heart of Cardoza’s district. That too could disappear.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is airing ads in his district, warning that the legislation will drive up prices and cost jobs.

But a congressman’s job security is no excuse. The vote may be tough. But there may not be another opportunity like this again for a generation.

Ed Roski Jr. and his entourage will watch the Super Bowl from a club box on the 40-yard line at Sun Life Stadium in Miami, while millions of the rest of us gather in front of television sets with our chips and beer.

A billionaire real estate mogul, Roski has spent 14 years seeking admission into the rich man’s club that is the National Football League. He is close to his goal of fielding an NFL team in the Los Angeles area, thanks to a pliant Legislature and governor.

As the football season began last fall, Roski tapped Assemblyman Isadore Hall, a Democrat from Compton, to carry an extraordinary bill that ultimately swept aside a lawsuit that blocked him from building an 80,000-seat football stadium in the City of Industry.

Roski’s end run was the latest chapter in a power-politics story that stretches back decades. The City of Industry, 20 miles east of Los Angeles, is a mere 12 square miles. But it has a colorful and sordid history, and plays far larger than its size in Sacramento.

The episode points to a deeper issue: today’s term-limited legislators and celebrity governor, unfettered by a sense of history or precedent, do the bidding of moneyed interests, while those patrons become ever bolder.

Environmental law regularly is invoked to slow hospitals, housing, even levees that might avert floods. But pro football? Legislators become enthralled by professional sports and, perhaps, of more campaign money.

Since Oct. 22, when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the bill into law, Roski’s privately held Majestic Realty has spread around $502,450 to California politicians and their causes. Beneficiaries and benefactors say, as always, that the money is coincidence and has no influence on policy-makers.

Of course.

Majestic, among the nation’s largest property owners, gave $10,000 three weeks ago to Schwarzenegger, pushing the total from Majestic to the governor’s committees to $111,000 since 2003. Majestic Realty has given $3.2 million altogether to California politicians and their causes since 2000.

The bill, AB81 X3, was nothing other than a piece of special-interest legislation sponsored by Majestic Realty for Majestic Realty, and endorsed by the City of Industry.

Roski hopes to bring a team to Los Angeles next year and have a stadium built by 2013. Whether all of that happens, Hall’s bill did end a lawsuit by residents of a neighboring city who demanded further environmental study.

The bill did more than halt the litigation. It exempted the project from future lawsuits over the California Environmental Quality Act. State land-use planning laws do not apply to this project.

Majestic’s lobbyists straight-armed several opponents, including Los Angeles County, which opposed it because officials are no longer sure they can enforce basic public works requirements on the project.

Under normal circumstances, a bill touching on such topics might have faced hearings in legislative committees with jurisdiction over local government, the environment and the judiciary.

Majestic’s bill went through one committee in the Assembly – Arts, Entertainment, Sports, Tourism and Internet, hardly a force in the Capitol – and no Senate committee.

Sen. Dave Cox, R-Fair Oaks, not known as a radical environmentalist, still is incensed about the Majestic bill, which passed the Senate 21-14, with five not voting.

“All the rules were bent, broken or disregarded,” Cox said.

It’s not the first time the Legislature has bent for the City of Industry. Over the decades, the city’s lobbyists have secured exemptions that have allowed the city to maintain its status as an enclave for industry, and not people.

The exemptions are arcane but significant. One, for example, exempts the city from having to provide low-cost housing within its boundaries. The city does not pretend to be a place to live; it has 800 residents and fewer than 100 voters. As its name implies, the city is devoted unabashedly to promoting industry.

The City of Industry was dubbed the City of Insiders in a 1980 investigative series in the now-defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner. Those articles detailed how the city’s founder, James M. Stafford, wielded power over virtually all its affairs.

The series prompted a federal investigation that led to Stafford’s indictment in a kickback case. Stafford pleaded guilty in 1984, served three years in prison and died in 2001.

City of Industry’s past is all but forgotten in these term-limited days when institutional memory is vague at best.

“I was graduating from sixth grade,” Hall said, when I asked if he knew anything about the fall of the city’s founder.

“As far as history, I’m not that locked in,” said Assemblyman Curt Hagman, a Republican who represents City of Industry and supported the bill.

Back in 1984, Victor Valle was a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, as was I. We teamed up on stories about Stafford’s indictment, and about the clout the city wielded in Sacramento.

I moved on, but Valle, who became an ethnic studies professor at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, stuck with the story, ultimately producing a book published last year, “City of Industry: Genealogies of Power in Southern California.”

Roski was not implicated in Stafford’s criminal wrongdoing. But Valle detailed Stafford and Roski’s friendship and business relationship, writing that Roski “inherited his mentor’s influence in the city.”

“That’s why I wrote it, so people would remember,” Valle told me by phone.

Then as now, Majestic Realty enjoyed a place of prominence in City of Industry, where it has extensive holdings, including warehouses, a hotel and the hillside where Roski hopes to construct the football stadium.

To bring football to City of Industry, Roski has enlisted Maria Elena Durazo, the powerful head of the Los Angeles County Labor Federation. The two walked the Capitol halls buttonholing legislators, seeking support for the legislation and project.

Soon after Schwarzenegger signed the bill, Durazo formed a campaign committee to place an initiative on the ballot in November to alter California’s term limits. The change would permit legislators to spend 12 years in the Assembly or the Senate, rather than the current six years in the lower house and eight years in the upper house. Majestic gave $300,000 to the effort and the L.A. Labor Fed gave $100,000.

As the Saints-vs.-Colts game kicks off, John Semcken, the Majestic vice president overseeing the stadium project, will join his boss on the 40-yard line. Isadore Hall won’t be there. But he does have a souvenir for his effort – a football signed by Schwarzenegger and Roski.

Semcken said creation of the term-limit initiative committee was “coincidental” to the bill signing.

“As a company, we feel that Sacramento is broken,” Semcken said. The City of Industry is anything but dysfunctional, he said, calling it “one place in California where you can do business.”

For a few weeks last fall, Sacramento was a place to do business, too, at least for Majestic Realty.