Conversation / WITH RAE FRANKLIN JAMES : ‘Learn Budgets, Learn Finance’

Question: When the mayor named you to this job, what was his charge to you?

Answer: He said, “Do you think you can make the hard decisions? Do you think you can stand up for a conviction and be able to face a confrontation that goes along with it and realize that I’m going to hold you accountable the whole time?� I said, “Yes.� I felt comfortable with that.

He didn’t know me, I didn’t know him. I was referred by Bill McCarley, then chief of staff. I had worked with Bill in the legislative analyst’s office for City Council for about five years.

Q: What ‘ s your background?

A: I’m from Oakland, went to UC Berkeley and did my graduate work at Cal State Hayward in public policy finance.

I started my career in personnel. I was working for the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and later Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, doing organizational consulting--looking at morale problems, trying to examine why one unit was more productive than another.

I kept coming up against this wall called the budget. Things that needed to get done were always turned down because of the budget. Also, I realized that the soft sciences didn’t have a lot of credibility. I had a great mentor, a scientist at the Berkeley labs, who said, “You know, female, black, you better get into another field because you’re going to hit a wall. You need to get into something that matters. Money matters. Learn about budgets. Learn about finance.�

I also had this sort of liberal leaning toward public policy issues. I wanted to be a legislative analyst in Sacramento. Being able to communicate policy to lay people so that they understand what they are voting for and realize the implication it might have on their own lives was very important.

Q: After you had worked in Sacramento, what brought you to Los Angeles?

A: I guess my curiosity, as you can tell, leads my life. I wanted to know what it was like to work in the private sector. So I took a position as senior financial analyst with World Airways in Oakland. I was recruited back to Berkeley to work for a genetic engineering laboratory, Cetus Corp. I caught the eye of a headhunter who was working in Los Angeles, looking on behalf of the Community Redevelopment Agency. The agency had gone through a lot of negative press and realized they didn’t have any way of accounting for their budget or expenditures. I came in 1983 and worked for CRA for about six years.

Q: What was it like for you, a Northern Californian, to move to L.A.?

A: My family thinks I’m in Afghanistan. My mother writes me letters and sends me clippings of things that are going on in Los Angeles. I say, “Mom, I’m here. I know.� It was quite an adjustment. But since I’ve been here, now 10 years, the people, the city--I’ve grown into it.

Q: Are you a Democrat or a Republican?

A: Democrat.

Q: What kind of doors did learning about budgets and finance help open for you?

A: You could “be with the big boys.� To this day, it does not surprise me to come into a room where there are no females, no people of color. It’s very common still; then, it was even more common. So the doors that it affords you are that you get to be at the table when the decisions are made. To me, that makes you a player. You’re there at prioritizing time. You’re determining the quality of the decisions as well.

A lot of what I do is working with the departments, making sure that they implement the mayor’s program. The mayor says, “Well, I said something on Monday, and Wednesday it’s like it went nowhere. Like I was speaking without a voice.� I make sure they follow through.

Q: When you’re on your own time, what kinds of things do you do?

A: Since I’ve had this job, I’ve taken up needlepoint because a friend told me it was good for stress, although I don’t know what happens when you have stressful needlepoint. I love to write. I don’t write as much as I used to. I was more disciplined before I got here. I read everything: fiction, non-fiction. Sportswise, I ski.

Q: Are there things about city government that you’re still curious about?

A: My curiosity about city government is more along the lines of implementation. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative, which is a little program that I created. Now I want to see that implemented and see if community empowerment works.

I was really struck hard, as we all were, by the riots of April, 1992. I realized that people felt disconnected from their neighborhoods, from their lives, from their government. Therefore, everything was vulnerable, everything was fair game.

It’s too much to identify with Los Angeles, but if you know your little four-block-square area with the grocery store on the corner or the park or the church, that’s your neighborhood. We had lost that. Suppose we let government step out of the way and said, “These are your neighborhoods, take ownership, get connected.� I pitched this to the federal government and just recently we had $2.3 million awarded by the feds to work with eight neighborhoods.

Q: What drives you in public service?

A: A child of the ‘60s, I always believed that an individual can make a difference. In my case, I guess I’ve always believed I should make a difference. I believe that lasting change is incremental. Revolutions rarely work. Blowing up things rarely works. It happens for a few years, then you have this backlash because it was not institutionalized.

Realizing that you can’t change everything, you have to get your issues down to sizes that you can change. If you just affect one person, you’d be surprised. That person could affect something else.

People talk about “the system,� about government. We are government, we are the system, so you can’t say it’s something outside of you. I used to say to my sons, “Did you vote? You’re 18 years old: Vote. That was fought for.� You have to participate in government. It’s not something that you can look at and complain about.