Taking the lead: State-led coalition strengthens.
political heavyweights as Nancy Pelosi and Valerie Jarrett as Obama shook hands. He couldn’t quite place her. “He looked at me like, ‘Why are you here?’ ” Pavley said. “And I said, ‘Well, I’m the state senator who wrote this law.’ And he thanked me for it and said, ‘You know, state senators can do remarkable things.’ ”
For more than a decade, the soft-spoken Pavley, 68, has been Sacramento’s go-to woman on legislation addressing climate change, energy or the environment. Many Californians wouldn’t recognize her name, but auto industry executives, oil lobbyists and climate activists nationwide do.
While in the Assembly, she wrote the state’s landmark 2006 global warming law, AB32, that committed California to curbing its emissions. This year, as a state senator, she penned the sequel, SB32, that mandates even deeper cuts.
She will leave office in December, termed out just before President-elect Donald Trump’s administration takes office with promises to gut the national effort against climate change. Pavley holds out hope that voters will want to keep the environmental laws that protect them.
“I would bet any of those Rust Belt states, they care just as much as Californians do about protecting the health of their people,” she said.
California Gov. Jerry Brown and legislative leaders have made clear that the state’s climate fight will go on, regardless. As for Pavley, she is far too restless to sit at home in the Los Angeles suburb of Agoura Hills doing nothing, but she hasn’t decided her next steps.
People who worked with Pavley say her absence will be felt, though plenty of lawmakers appear poised to delve into the issues she championed.
“I’ve been on Fran’s good side, and I’ve been on Fran’s bad side, and you don’t want to be on her bad side,” said Kathryn Phillips, California director for the Sierra Club, who tangled with Pavley over hydraulic fracturing. “But she’s left an incredible legacy.”
Pavley has even, on occasion, won over some of her staunchest foes.
Obama’s embrace of her car-emissions standards was preceded by years of courtroom battles with the auto industry, which didn’t want an individual state re-writing mileage regulations. But after Obama negotiated a deal with them to apply the rules nationwide, those same car companies eventually came to view Pavley as a partner on such issues as promoting electric vehicles and fuel-cell cars.
In 2013, she received a Legislator of the Year award from the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, one of the trade groups that sued to block her law.
“The auto industry went to the mat with her on that,” said Curt Augustine, the trade group’s West Coast director of policy and government affairs. “But frankly, after the president’s deal, she’s been one of our best allies in the Legislature. She found out maybe we weren’t the bad guys we were portrayed to be, and we found out she was really willing to work with us.”
Tellingly, however, the group sent Trump a letter this month urging him to revisit and possibly revise the mileage standards Pavley inspired. Although the federal government has been slowly raising mileage requirements since the 2012 model year, steeper improvements will soon be required, with the fleet-wide average due to top 50 miles per gallon by 2025 (though loopholes will somewhat reduce that number in practice).
The standards are Pavley’s biggest legacy, at least outside California. She doubts that Trump will gut them, despite his dim view of regulations and his history of calling climate change a hoax.
Even if Trump were to remove the federal auto standards, he would not be able to undo Pavley’s 2002 California law, which remains in place. Canada adopted the same greenhouse gas and mileage standards after Obama did. So if Trump undid her legacy, the carmakers would be back where they started, facing different standards in different places.
“I don’t think the automobile sector would welcome going back to what they sued over to begin with — to use their words, a patchwork quilt of standards,” Pavley said.
Pavley’s entry into politics came step by step, as a sideline to her day job.
In 1982, she was teaching at Chaparral Middle School in the Ventura County town of Moorpark and living just across the Los Angeles County line, in unincorporated Agoura Hills. She got involved in efforts to incorporate her small community, tucked into the Santa Monica Mountains, and decided to run for City Council at the urging of her friends.
She not only won — she became the new city’s first mayor. She didn’t quit teaching, though, handling her civic duties after school hours.
“Starting a city from scratch is an amazing experience,” she said this month in her Sacramento office, a bale of green bubble wrap waiting nearby for packing up mementos. “There’s no book. There’s no City Hall. So the first meetings were at a kitchen table in my house.”
Much of her new job involved making decisions on land use, so she went back to school at Cal State Northridge for a masters degree in environmental planning — still without quitting her job teaching middle school. The degree helped pave the way for stints with the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and the California Coastal Commission.
After four terms on the Agoura Hills City Council, she made the leap to Sacramento, winning a seat in the Assembly in 2000.
The clean cars law became her introduction to the slow, painstaking work of state legislation. She introduced a version of it in 2001, saw the opposition it faced and parked it for a year. Then she set about assembling a coalition, roping in environmentalists, medical groups, entrepreneurs and religious leaders.
With other legislators, she emphasized the effects that global warming could have on California, because “I knew I couldn’t sell the arctic or polar bears.” She also won the crucial backing of Senate President Pro Tem John Burton, who corralled labor leaders who had misgivings about the bill.
The coalition-building worked. Gov. Gray Davis signed her bill, AB1493, on July 24, 2002.
“She has a manner that people can underestimate,” Phillips said. “But she’s always thinking, always planning about how to get something through.”
Pavley also remained conscious of which ideas wouldn’t fly with her fellow legislators, or with the succession of governors she faced.
She was able to find common ground with Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to pass the California Global Warming Solutions Act, AB32, in 2006. The law, which requires California to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, gave Schwarzenegger a way to appeal to Democratic voters as he ran for re-election.
But Pavley was unable to pass a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing in 2013, in part because Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown opposed it. So she amended her bill to focus on regulating fracking, rather than stopping it. That sparked an unusual fight pitting Pavley against environmentalists who had long supported and admired her. The bill, SB4, passed.
“I still have some scars from that,” said Phillips, whose environmental group fought SB4. “I don’t think she understood why we were opposing it. She thought we shouldn’t be opposing it.”
Pavley credits some of her legislative skills to teaching middle school. Both pursuits involve dealing with large groups of people you don’t get to pick. Both require homework and patience.
“People ask me all the time, ‘How do you stay so calm?’ ” she said. “Middle school. Because if you ever yell at middle school kids, they would declare victory, in that they finally got to you.”
Although known for environmental issues, Pavley has also worked on legislation addressing the developmentally disabled, a personal cause for a woman with an adult autistic son. She has also carried bills affecting guide dogs for the blind, in part because she and her husband, Andy, have raised several.
While climate activists will miss Pavley’s presence in Sacramento, they’re confident other legislators will carry her baton. Those include Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León and Assemblyman Eduardo Garcia, who teamed with Pavley to pass a pair of climate-related laws this year.
One, SB32, requires the state to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030, though a stronger target Pavley had hoped to include in the law— 80 percent by 2050 — got cut from the bill. The other, AB197, gives the Legislature more oversight of the state’s air pollution regulators and prioritizes emissions cuts from industrial facilities that are often located in poor communities burdened with pollution.
“Now more than ever, there’s the possibility that California’s climate policy will truly reflect California,” Garcia said.
His district, covering Imperial County in California’s desert southeast, suffers from high unemployment and air quality problems — a very different place from Pavley’s affluent, coastal base. The two legislators were able to form an effective partnership anyway.
“When you look at the bills she’s written and put into law, she’s certainly changed the game,” he said.
“She has a manner that people can underestimate.” Kathryn Phillips, California director, Sierra Club