jamesjohnsonn [EDITOR'S NOTE:] A version of this article—based on an interview Dave Wielenga conducted with James Johnson outside the It’s A Grind coffee house on Atlantic Blvd. when he was a candidate for the 7th District seat on the Long Beach City Council —first appeared in the now-defunct District Weekly in January 2010. It is re-published here with minor changes to provide context to a citizens’ group’s just-announced attempt to recall Johnson from his 7th District seat on the City Council.

This is James Johnson’s first-ever candidacy for a public office—specifically, the 7th District seat on the Long Beach City Council currently occupied by two-time incumbent Tonia Reyes Uranga, who is ignoring term limits to run for re-election as a write-in—but he isn’t portraying himself as a newcomer.

“I’ve been in public politics my whole life,” Johnson asserts. “My first campaign in Long Beach was when I was 16 years old, along with some friends of mine at Poly. We worked for Kathleen Brown for governor. It was a lot of fun. That’s how I cut my teeth in politics.”

That was half Johnson’s life ago; he’s 31, with a birthday coming Feb. 16. But even as he makes the case for his years of experience he still doesn’t seem very far from a fresh-faced kid, even though a 5 o’clock shadow long ago replaced the peachfuzz and strands of gray run through a dark helmet of hair. Johnson’s voice sounds very youthful, too, both in its tremulous tone and in the way he tends to mush words together when he speaks.

While these characteristics tend to emphasize his earnestness, they also insinuate some overcompensation. The effect is hard to describe, but remember the vulnerable bluster that Steve Carell dishes early in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” when his co-workers at the consumer electronics store ask about his sexual expertise?

Sort of like that.

“Number one, anyone can govern in good times, obviously—so I think you really want your strongest leaders in the difficult times,” Johnson says stridently. “If I am on the city council, I want to have the attitude where, ‘Councilmember X, I may not agree with you on this issue but I want to work together with you on issues where we do agree.”

This simplistic confidence might be laughable if, well, if anyone were laughing.

“I’ve been endorsed by over 400 people—everyone from Alan Lowenthal to PTA moms to Boy Scout leaders,” Johnson says, and somehow the agitated quaver in his voice seems less noticeable as he does.

Besides, Johnson doesn’t have to say one word to make his most-legitimizing point, which is registered by the numbers on the campaign contribution reports. As of last June 30—only 2 ½ months after he announced his candidacy—Johnson had raised $53,650.70, more than eight times as much as his nearest opponent.

The results of the latest reporting period will be released any day now, and Johnson needs only three words to describe the way those numbers are adding up: “I’m absolutely happy.”

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NIGHTFALL IS APPROACHING on what has been a sunny Saturday in early January. Like nearly every weekend since last April 13—exactly one year before Election Day, set for this April 13–James Johnson has spent the day walking the varied streets of the Seventh District. They range from the bungalowly neighborhoods of stately California Heights, where Johnson and his wife, Nicole Altamirano, bought a home about five years ago, to the higher-density-and-diversity environs of Long Beach’s working-class west side.

“I really enjoy it,” says Johnson. “It’s a huge time commitment, but I always tell people, ‘If you want a hard-working councilmember, look for the hard-working candidate.’’’

Occasionally, Johnson’s wife accompanies him. More often, he goes alone. “Sometimes I feel bad about that,” he acknowledges. “That’s when I’ve got to tell myself, ‘At the end of the day, if it’s worth governing, it’s worth winning.’”

But what does make the prospect of governing worth all the work that goes into campaigning? Of all the motivations Johnson might reveal when asked about that, this is the first one he chooses:

“I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this story, but I like to tell it on the campaign trail,” he prefaces. “Basically, I had a teacher in my junior year in high school who said, ‘James, you seem to have a knack for economics.’ There was this national competition—I’d never been outside Long Beach much, I was kind of nervous about it–so I rode my bike down to our Main Library. There was a really nice librarian, he sat me down and he said, ‘I’ve got 30 to 40 books on economics, but they are non-circulating, so you have to come back every day.’ So I spent, like, three weeks riding my bike back there. I ended up learning a lot, I got first place in that competition and that was probably why I got into Harvard. You know, for me, I realized that if that library hadn’t been there, if it had been closed…”

Johnson stops in mid-sentence, leaving the horrific alternatives—the variations on his untraveled road–to the imagination.

So let’s imagine them:

• Johnson might not have gotten that economics degree at Harvard or that law degree at UC Berkeley. He might not have landed that position at the world-renowned law firm of Morrison Foerster, which enabled him to buy that home in California Heights.

• Johnson might not have been recruited to City Hall by then-newly elected Mayor Bob Foster in 2006 to write proposed changes to the city charter that would give Foster significantly more power. Since approval by voters in May 2007, Foster has had a veto that requires six city council votes to override, as well authority (along with the council) to remove members of city commissions for any reason.

• A position for Johnson—non-existent before he took it, apparently unfilled since he left it—might not have been created, in which he was paid by the City Clerk’s office on the ground floor but actually worked adjacent to the mayor’s office on the 14th floor.

• Johnson might not have been such a convenient choice to fill the vacancy that appeared in November 2007 in the City Auditor’s office, where as assistant to Laura Doud he has been earning around $150,000 a year.

• Johnson might not have meanwhile risen to the presidency of the Long Beach Democratic Club, where in the summer of 2008 he led the organization’s endorsement of Measure I—the property parcel tax proposed by Foster but ultimately rejected by voters.

• Johnson might not have ended up with the connections—from Harvard, Berkeley, Morrison Foerster, and perhaps most importantly, with Foster and the rich and/or influential network that have supported his political interests since his days as a Sacramento lobbyist.

No question, Johnson’s blessed interaction with that downtown librarian was a life-changer, although he’s adamant that he has never known where all the changes were taking him.

“If you asked me in law school, ‘Do you want to be assistant city auditor of Long Beach?”—I didn’t even know what an assistant city auditor was,” Johnson says. “I think a lot of times, and not just for me, you do thing right at the time, you make your choices and sometimes they lead you to a different path. And as long as the whole time you’re trying to do what you think’s good for you and your family, that’s OK.

“To be frank, the only reason I went to law school, I thought it would open up doors. I thought it would give me the security to do what I wanted to do—that if I had my J.D. (Juris Doctor), if I had my bar card, I could kinda do what I wanted to do and not worry about where the next check’s going to come.”

Speaking of paychecks, a victory in April’s election would represent a loss in salary of about $120,000 a year for Johnson—the difference between the approximately $150,000 he makes now and the annual remuneration of about $30,000 given to council members.

“Financially, this is very, very foolish,” Johnson says. “But it’s an honor to be able to run for city council. And I think it’s a serious thing. That’s why I decided to give a whole year of my life to this race.”

From a Saturday evening’s perspective on a long day of campaigning, Johnson considers a Sunday of the same thing.

“It’s one of those things where you never really know how to run for office until you do it yourself,” he says. “The thing I remember every day is why I’m doing it—to give back to the community. The temptation is to take the easy way, to pander to some group. I want to run with integrity.

“At end of the day, if people don’t vote for me, I’m OK with that–as long as people did hear from me. The most important thing I can do is make sure they hear my message. My goal is to make sure that no one says I never heard from James.”

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THE ISSUES?

James Johnson says he is in favor of a lobbyist-registration ordinance, opposed to the currently pending swap of city property to developer Tom Dean for part of the Los Cerritos Wetlands, supportive of the version of the Clean Trucks Plan that Long Beach embraced a few months ago when it broke away from a lawsuit it had filed with the City of Los Angeles, and interested in continuing the infrastructure-repair discussion that began with Foster’s proposed Measure I. He says he wants to preserve public services, improve public safety and operate city government more efficiently. Oh, and save the environment.

“If you care about these things, you have to care about the money that funds them,” says Johnson. “One thing I do bring to the table—and you know my boss, Laura (Doud), has endorsed me, and also (state controller) John Chiang—is I do understand budgets.”

Johnson says he favors a “holistic” approach to most aspects of Long Beach government—producing a general improvement through a combination of small solutions. He cites his philosophy about public safety as an example.

“We need police on the streets, no doubt, and we need to look at our finances to do everything we can to keep those boots on the ground,” he says. “But we need things in the community too—after-school programs, city beautification efforts like litter abatement and taking care of vandalism right after it happens—that send a message that people have pride of ownership and are not going to tolerate illegal and reckless behavior.”

That’s definitely a philosophy—but do these feel-good generalizations amount to a policy?

Johnson comes closer to the latter with a call to audit Long Beach’s utility-users tax.

“It’s one of our city’s top revenue streams—over $40 million a year,” he says. “It only has to be off by two or three percent to be real money. Yet the last time it was audited was around 2003. The question is, do we know people are sending in the right amounts? And by people, I don’t really mean individuals or residents but the big companies. As a city we need to look at all our streams of revenue and make sure protections are in place—the utility users tax, the towing tax, the whatever tax.”

As for the pollutants—much of it from the Port of Long Beach—that foul the air in the Seventh District?

We have a real public health crisis—for me, it’s a real mark of shame, even though I am really proud of Long Beach,” says Johnson. “I go to academic conferences and I hear folks from Michigan and Harvard and Yale say, ‘Yeah, if you want to study the effects of these particulates on kids, come to Long Beach.’ That’s horrible.”

Johnson’s solutions, however, sound a lot like the status quo—cold-ironing (powering docked ships electrically instead of with their fuel-burning engines) and the clean trucks program.

“The port is a department of the city and I think we can work with them to really make positive change,” says Johnson. “I don’t think we have to halt economic activity but I do think we need to look every time we have a decision that, hey, we have to take into account the health of our neighbors.”

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NO MATTER HOW Johnson positions himself on individual issues, however, perhaps the most-significant questions underlying his candidacy go back to the matter of his political virginity:

Did he arrive in this preferred position–loaded with endorsements and cash–on his own? Or did a powerful coalition led by Mayor Foster put him here? Is he his own man? Or does he come with puppet strings attached?

It’s interesting that Johnson’s hundreds-long list of endorsements doesn’t include Foster’s name. And it’s interesting that when you point that out, Johnson makes it sound like an eventuality: “He hasn’t endorsed me yet, no.” (Foster did not respond to an interview request for this story that was left with his aide, Becki Ames.)

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Foster endorsed Johnson's candidacy in May 2010.]

In the wake of the city charter amendments he helped write, Johnson has heard the increasing use of the terms “Mayoral Majority” to reference a voting bloc that Foster has supposedly created to rubber-stamp his policies. The core of this consists of Suja Lowenthal, Gary DeLong, Dee Andrews and Val Lerch. It most-definitely does not include Tonia Reyes Uranga (or Gerrie Schipske or Rae Gabelich, for that matter), who Johnson is trying to oust.

Would Johnson become another brick in the Mayor’s bloc?

“The answer to that is pretty simple: I’m running for city council on my own merit, my own record” he responds. “I think people should see me as an independent thinker who is going to vote in the best interests of his community, period. I’m not going to be in some bloc for or against the mayor. That’s a simplistic way to look at it.”

Rather than deny his compatibility with Foster, Johnson embraces it.

“I do have a good relationship with the mayor—I don’t see that as a negative, and I’m not going to apologize for it,” he says. “As a councilmember I would have to work with the mayor and other councilmembers to get things done. There are certainly times I expect I would disagree with him, and with them. There are times I expect I would agree with him, and with them. But what I would hope to do with all those times is have a professional relationship with him and them.”

Johnson acknowledges that’s easier said than done.

“At end of the day, you have to know what you can or can’t control,” he says. “I can’t control rumors. There are always going to be people who are naysayers. I can only talk about what I think about community. It’s not about me, but about what direction the city is going to take with the people’s choice in this election.

“That said, I hope it’s me. I think it will be me. I think I’m going to win. But regardless, it is a tremendous honor to be able to run.”