© 2006 The Daily Journal Corporation. All rights reserved.

LAW PRACTICE  o  Dec. 12, 2006

Continuing Three-Generations of Political Activism
Childhood Visits to the Inner City Spurrred Legal-Aid Lawyer to Assembly Judiciary Panel

By Linda Rapattoni
Daily Journal Staff Writer

SACRAMENTO - Politics have run in Dave Jones' family for three generations. He has vivid memories as a boy campaigning with his father as he ran for the school board.

He also remembers his parents taking him and his sisters to inner-city neighborhoods of Chicago, a city with a colorful political history, to clean trash out of vacant lots, serve meals to the needy and read to the elderly shut-ins.

Those experiences led Jones to become a legal-aid lawyer, winning battles for affordable housing, then veering into politics, from the Sacramento City Council to the state Assembly, where he chairs the Judiciary Committee.

He continued his personal war on poverty into the Legislature, introducing bills to assure access to justice for the poor, affordable housing, and medical and dental care for foster youth.

Gary Smith, executive director of Legal Services of Northern California, gave Jones his first job as a lawyer, when Smith was manager of the Yolo County office. He said Jones was "extremely concerned" about the plight of individual clients but wanted to do something for the broader community needing affordable housing.

"Eventually, he became a real leader in statewide public-interest law in land-use law, then a very novel concept," Smith said. "Within each new development that occurs, the law requires some percentage of those units to be made more affordable to those people at lower income levels. Dave really pioneered that concept."

While fighting hard for the issues he believes in, Jones sometimes has rubbed people the wrong way and has not always been willing to work toward solutions when there have been disagreements, according to several sources around the Capitol.

Jones said that responding to such criticism is hard without knowing the circumstances, but he said that, as chairman, he makes every effort to ensure everyone has an opportunity to voice views on the issues.

"There are going to be some areas where I'm going to disagree because I do have some core values - we all do - to bring to the job," he said.

Jones grew up in Orland Park, a suburb southwest of Chicago. His father was a human resources manager for several large manufacturing companies. His paternal grandfather pursued a career in industrial arts and, on retirement, turned his longtime community involvement into a successful race for mayor, Jones said.

Jones' father later ran for the school board and served several terms, the assemblyman said.

"I remember as a boy campaigning with him," Jones said. "That was my first taste of political involvement."

Jones described his folks as devout Protestants who would take him and his sisters to perform community service jobs in inner-city neighborhoods.

"That really stuck with me," he said.

In high school, Jones said, he ran for student council, whetting his appetite for a leadership role in public life. He teamed up for seats on the student council with friend and fellow student John Chiang, the former Board of Equalization member elected state controller in November.

A cartoon from their student campaign hangs in Jones' Capitol office.

After high school, Jones attended DePauw University in Indiana from 1980 to 1984, earning a bachelor's degree in political science while interning for Sen. Dick Lugar of Indiana and campaigning for Paul Simon's failed bid for the presidency.

His senior year of college, Jones said, he attended a talk on fair-housing issues in the suburbs of Chicago given by John Hammell, a Harvard Law School graduate who worked for Business and Professional People in the Public Interest.

"I was really inspired by what he described in bringing cases on behalf of minority plaintiffs who were shut out by people in towns," Jones said. "I chatted with him afterwards, and it happened I had been admitted to Harvard, too, and I said this could be a path for me."

At Harvard, Jones said he became president of a student legal clinic working for tenants in rent-control cases, and he worked at Harvard's Legal Aid Bureau. He decided in his first year of law school to become a legal-aid lawyer.

He also was admitted to the John F. Kennedy School of Government, which he said he pursued to build skills to serve as a public servant someday. He graduated from the joint-degree program in law and government in 1988.

At the Kennedy School, Jones met his future wife, Kim Flores, who, after breaking a leg in a fall on ice, told him she was willing to live anywhere where it didn't snow. Flores was from Napa, and the two decided to live near Sacramento, because both were interested in public-sector work and it offered affordable housing.

Jones quickly bonded with his future father-in-law, an engineer with a law degree who helped negotiate the United Farm Workers' first contract with Christian Brothers Winery. A picture of Flores on a picket line hangs in Jones' office.

Jones said his first job in California was as an organizer in 1988 in West Sacramento for Michael Dukakis' campaign for president. After the campaign, in which Dukakis won West Sacramento but lost the rest of the nation, Jones was hired at Legal Services of Northern California.

While there, he represented a group of tenants who faced eviction from a residential hotel that the city of West Sacramento was trying to close down. Jones said he got the city to offer full relocation assistance, four years of rent subsidies and a commitment to replace the 200 units with affordable housing.

His work soon led to advocacy before city planning commissions and city councils around Sacramento that eventually adopted new housing ordinances.

Jones said a paper he wrote on "inclusionary zoning" as a third-year law student and his master's thesis on the subject helped him figure out a way to get developers to provide more affordable housing.

In 1995, Jones was awarded a White House Fellowship and sought a position in the office of Attorney General Janet Reno, whom he now often quotes.

He said he was impressed by her holistic approach to law enforcement with its emphasis on strengthening communities and promoting early childhood education. At the end of the year, Reno asked him to stay on as counsel for another two years.

"It was a tremendous experience," Jones said. "It gave me the opportunity to see how government operates and how decisions get made."

In the meantime, his wife worked for the Urban Institute, dealing with health and social welfare policies. She gave birth to their daughter, Isabelle Flores-Jones, now 9, in 1997.

The couple reached a point in their careers where they had to decide whether to stay in the nation's capital or return home to work at the community level.

They moved back to Sacramento in 1998. Darrell Steinberg, a Sacramento city councilman who had decided to run for state Assembly, suggested Jones run for the seat he was vacating. The pair had met earlier through their neighborhood association and at Democratic Party functions.

Jones won the seat and supplemented his income by working part time for Assemblyman Dennis Cardoza to improve smog in the Bay Area.

In 2000, Jones and his wife celebrated the birth of their second child, William Flores-Jones, now 6. Kim Flores cares for the children while working part time for the Senate Office of Research.

Jones sat on the City Council between 1999 and 2004, focusing on affordable housing, a living-wage ordinance and revitalizing rundown areas. When Steinberg reached the limits of his Assembly term in 2004, Jones ran for his seat and won.

This past year, Jones and Steinberg found themselves on opposite ends of a fight over two ballot proposals to build a new stadium for the Kings NBA team in Sacramento with an increase in the local sales tax.

Steinberg, who represented Kings owners Joe and Gavin Maloof, supported the measures. Jones actively opposed them after concluding they would not provide the local community with a net economic benefit. The initiatives failed despite the backing of the local political establishment.

Jones said that the battle never got personal between him and Steinberg and that the two remain friendly. Steinberg agreed.

"I sought Dave when I was moving on from the City Council to the Assembly because he fits all the criteria for a great public official," Steinberg said. "He's very smart, very dogged and he cares about things. This is the first time we've worked together in the same body, and I'm looking forward to it."

Coming into a new legislative session, Jones said he wants to continue working on improving equal access to justice and is waiting for pending recommendations for improvements from the Equal Access Commission.

He said he would reintroduce a bill to provide court interpreters for non-English-speaking litigants in civil matters. The governor vetoed Jones' measure last year. Jones said the lack of interpreters is hurting litigants and burdening judges.

"Judges are not entirely sure if people who appear before them fully understand what's going on and have to drag someone out of the hallway to interpret or have a child interpret for a sensitive family law matter his parents are involved in," he said. "It's terrible."

Jones said he also would introduce a bill to add 50 new judgeships to the judiciary in addition to 50 approved this summer.

"That's an access issue, also, because we have civil courts in this state that have to go dark because there are not enough judges," he said.

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© 2006 Daily Journal Corporation. All rights reserved