Paul Wellman

Assemblymember Pedro Nava at a hearing on Greka's oil spills.

Assemblymember Pedro Nava invited his dad to sit in on a committee field hearing he was chairing in 2006 at the historic Santa Fe Railroad Depot in San Bernardino. Before the hearing began, the two strolled around the renovated, Mission Revival-style depot, designed for the railroad by W.A. Mohr in 1916, to serve as “the gateway to Southern California.” Then his father, a Mexican immigrant, told Nava a bit of family lore he had not heard before:

“Here is where I jumped off the train” after riding the rails to California, Nava recalled him saying.

The assemblymember’s pride in his father’s story—hopped a train from Monterrey, raised his family doing manual labor in the baking heat of the Central Valley, became a U.S. citizen years later—offers a glimpse into the way he goes about his own business. A former prosecutor with a fireplug build, balding buzz cut, and soft-spoken bluntness, Nava takes a blue-collar approach to politics, focusing on incremental, pragmatic fixes of government programs more than big ideas or sweeping reforms.

“I’m a practical problem solver,” he told me over penne marinara and Pellegrino last week. “No one’s going to write any books about that.”

At 60, Democrat Nava is gearing up to run for his third—and, if successful, final—two-year term to represent the 35th Assembly District, which includes the Santa Ynez Valley, the South Coast, Oxnard, and the City of Ventura. Since Nava last ran in 2004, Democrats have padded their gerrymandered advantage, and now lead the GOP in registration, 46 percent to 30 percent, with the rest independents or third-party voters, according to the secretary of state.

His long-shot Republican opponent is a former member of the Carpinteria City Council, Greg Gandrud. The incumbent seems quite content to run for reelection without ever acknowledging his rival: “If he wants exposure, let him raise some money for TV and mail,” Nava growled of Gandrud. “I expect voters to make their decision based on what I’ve done.”

A good example of the unintended consequences wrought by legislative term limits, Nava will be forced from office in 2010, just as he is gaining influence in the Capitol. He’s chairman of the Banking and Finance Committee, which referees high-stakes fights between and among consumers and powerful special interests; he sits on the Appropriations Committee, which oversees all spending; he leads a special panel on emergency preparedness and homeland security, where he’s won a fight to get legislative oversight of $350 million in federal anti-terrorism grants to the state; and he maintains other assignments on transportation and environment committees.

Asked for a shorthand assessment of Nava, a well-scarred veteran of several decades of Capitol politics told me, “He’s a good guy, and he’s not stupid, which puts him above two-thirds of the rest of them up here. But there’s not one or two things that he’s done that you instantly think of and say, ‘Wow.’”

As a lawmaker, Nava closely minds the interests of his district, as with recent legislation to crack down on Greka and other “serial spiller” oil companies, to help ease recovery from the Gap Fire, and to require hunters to use lead-free ammunition in areas where the California Condor thrives (short digression: how about a lead-free requirement for ammunition used to shoot people?).

With the red ink state budget still mired in stalemate, one issue on which Gandrud might gain some traction is in contrasting his opposition to tax increases to Nava’s embrace of the Democrats’ consensus budget plan, which includes $8 billion in new taxes. “We don’t have any more tricks or accounting gimmicks to paper over the deficit,” Nava explained.

The assemblymember demurs when asked about his political future. He considered running for mayor of Santa Barbara before seeking his assembly seat several years ago and there’s talk in Sacramento that he’s eyeing a run for attorney general, at a time when termed-out, relatively unknown lawmakers routinely seek, and sometimes win, statewide office.

A true product of California’s higher education system—community college, state university, and UC Davis law school—Nava sometimes still sounds surprised at the success he has already achieved, just one generation after his father jumped off a train from Mexico.

“You can’t forget where you come from,” he said.

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