John Foran — state legislator shaped transportation policy
John Francis Foran, who helped shape California’s transportation policy over a 22-year career in the Legislature, died Thursday at his home in San Francisco. He was 84 and had suffered from cancer.
Mr. Foran was an able and effective politician. He served for 11 years each in the California Assembly and in the state Senate and held important leadership posts. Among his accomplishments was a major role in enacting California’s Clean Air Act and in developing alternative state transportation policies.
He was for a time chairman of the Assembly’s Ways and Means Committee, but his main efforts came in his role as chairman of the Assembly Transportation Committee and later the Senate Transportation Committee.
When Mr. Foran first came to Sacramento as a freshman member of the Assembly in 1963, the state’s transportation policy was one dimensional — it consisted of highways and cars. Mr. Foran favored a broader approach with an emphasis on public transit and smog control.
Transportation bills
He authored bills that established the Metropolitan Transportation Commission in the Bay Area, which became the country’s first regional transportation authority, and legislation that allowed the Golden Gate Bridge District to broaden its authority to include bus and ferry transit systems.
He also helped redirect millions of dollars in state highway funds to transit projects. “Transportation was his thing,” said John Burton, who served with him in the Legislature.
After his retirement from the state Senate in 1986, the San Francisco section of the Interstate 280 freeway was named in his honor.
Mr. Foran was a lifelong friend and political ally of the late Leo McCarthy, who served as Assembly speaker and later as lieutenant governor.
For many years McCarthy and Foran were the powers behind a more conservative Democratic Party bloc in San Francisco which opposed the more liberal wing of the party — the so-called “Burton Machine” — headed by Rep. Philip Burton, his brother John, and Willie Brown, who succeeded McCarthy as speaker.
However, on hearing of his death, John Burton hailed Mr. Foran as “a great guy, a liberal Democrat, very smart, very strong with labor and helping people.”
John Foran was born in the St. Mary’s Park district of San Francisco on July 11, 1930. He and McCarthy went to local schools, and both entered a Roman Catholic seminary, but later dropped out.
They both served in the Korean War, McCarthy in the Air Force, Mr. Foran in the Army, where he was wounded three times, once so severely that he was left for dead.
After the war, both men enrolled at the University of San Francisco. One evening in 1953, when McCarthy gave his friend a ride home, the two were kidnapped at gunpoint by a man named Harold Miller, who had just shot a police officer two blocks from Mr. Foran’s house. Miller forced them to drive him to Los Angeles, but the two escaped unharmed.
‘Outstanding litigator’
Mr. Foran had a lifelong interest in politics and the law. He graduated near the top of his class at the University of San Francisco School of Law and served as a deputy attorney general.
In 1962, he ran for the Assembly and served in that chamber until he was elected to the state Senate. In the meantime, he also practiced law.
“He was brilliant, absolutely brilliant, an outstanding litigator,” said Stephen Leonoudakis, Mr. Foran’s law partner for many years.
After leaving the Legislature, he practiced law in Sacramento with the Nossaman law firm.
He retired in 2004 and traveled extensively. As recently as last spring, he and his wife, Constanza, traveled across Russia on the Trans-Siberian railway, and, in July, the two attended the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Ore.
Mr. Foran is survived by Constanza, his wife of 56 years; two sons, David of San Francisco and Thomas of Sacramento; two daughters, Mary Spangler of Sacramento and Kathleen Campbell of San Francisco; and four grandchildren.
A funeral Mass will be said at 10 a.m. Friday, at St. Ignatius Church on the USF campus at Fulton Street and Parker Avenue.