Interview with Wally Knox

Then this year also there was the whole area code issue. [Knox succeeded in rolling back the necessity of 10-digit dialing for people in the 310 area code, and keeping it from coming to the 818 area code.] After realizing that we were being fed a bill of goods by the phone companies, I formed a kind of a media alliance with [Los Angeles Times columnist] Bob Scheer, your competitor. I just have to give Bob enormous credit. Without his constant coverage of what was going on, this dynamic relationship wouldn’t have been established between a legislator moving a bill in Sacramento and a community down here. Getting that communication going back and forth was absolutely key.

WEEKLY: What are the lessons of what you learned about public utilities from your battle with the phone companies? KNOX: That they have a lot of power in the State government. They’re not happy with the fact that they were beaten. And the fact that we rewrote area code law last year is all well and good, but they’re not going to let it lie. They will be back in spring or summer of this year attempting to completely gut everything we achieved. They don’t like to be beaten. WEEKLY: Was this a tough bill to get through?KNOX: It was a fascinating fight. I mean, the bill died six different times and was resuscitated by a combination of artificial respiration and smoke and mirrors. We were beaten over and over again, and revived the bill over and over and over. On the last day of the legislative session, we dropped one bill, seized another bill, rewrote its entire text, rammed it through the Senate, brought it to the Assembly, and rammed it through the Assembly -- all in one day. That’s a classic example of how what you learn by being a legislator is absolutely crucial. I could not have done that in my first or second year in the State legislature. I wouldn’t have had a clue to take a bill that was dead, dead, dead, and somehow bring it back to life. WEEKLY: Briefly, are their other things you’ve accomplished you’d like to call attention to?KNOX: Well, the Holocaust Insurance Registry Bill was a really important one for the Jewish community. That took me two years. As a result, in April of this year, the insurance companies will be compelled to turn over information about the Holocaust policies they’ve had on their books hidden for fifty years. WEEKLY: And this covers Holocaust victims who had life insurance that was never paid? KNOX: Right. The commonest method of savings for middle class and working class people in Eastern Europe prior to World War II, were insurance policies. That was how people saved. And hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of family members of people who perished in the Holocaust went to the insurance companies and asked for payment on those policies and were denied. Sometimes, simply denied, sometimes, in some language that doesn’t deserve repeating. They were told things like, "Well, do you have a death certificate from Auschwitz?" "Do you have proof that the policy was taken out?" "Do you have a copy of the policy?" Delicate little things like that. It’s taken me two years, but I got the legislation through. And in April of this year, every company doing business in California will be compelled to turn over its list of Holocaust era policies to be made publicly available so that everyone can find out if a relative took out a policy.

In education, I began working on a program in 1989 to establish high school programs on community college campuses. That has turned out to be the most successful dropout prevention program in the State of California.

WEEKLY: And what is that program? KNOX: In it, a high school campus is placed on a community college campus. The high school is drawn from the surrounding high schools. It removes some of the worst students in the surrounding high schools from those campuses, where they have been disruptive students, on the verge of dropping out, driving teachers crazy, preventing teachers from teaching other kids. We take 300 or 400 of some of the worst students possible and bring them together. I mean, you could imagine that could be a disaster. It doesn’t become a disaster, because what happens is those 300 kids are surrounded by thousands of community college students who are basically two, three, or four years older than them, not a lot. They come from exactly the same neighborhoods, the same block, everybody knows everybody. There’s just a big difference: the community college students are a self-selected group that are determined to move up in life and get ahead with their lives and succeed. The 300 kids we have put onto that high school have seemed determined to destroy their lives. They are flunking out of school. They are dropping out of school. They are the worst problems in their local high schools. For the first time in their lives, those kids are surrounded on all sides by a culture of success. They cannot escape it. We never link them with an official mentor, because I think that would be disastrous. It would be seen as, you know, the institutions linking you up to some flunky. But they are completely immersed in a culture of success. The result was beyond our wildest dreams. These schools have the lowest dropout rate of any institution in California education bar none. WEEKLY: How many of these schools are there? KNOX: There are about 12 at this junction. Governor Davis has authorized an expansion of a fairly significant nature. My hope would be that at the end of a decade, we would have created a system of about 30 of these throughout the State of California. WEEKLY: Any last highlights of your time in the assembly before we move on to what you’d work on in the senate?KNOX: Well, I should mention the transportation work, because that has been key. I began focusing on the 405/101 intersection as a way of drawing attention not just to the intersection, but to transportation issues in general. We’ve gone through a decade of these semi-utopian approaches to transportation issues, everything from subways to dedicated busways to maglev systems for I don’t know what, and I haven’t seen a lot of progress. And a tremendous amount of public anger and frustration has built up as the government can’t do some simple things it’s supposed to do like build a road. By focusing on the freeway issue, by focusing on doable projects, we can regain some public confidence that we can do something. And as we begin to do these projects. What we now need to do is fold into the freeway improvement projects a discussion of what we’re going to do about mass transit.