PAULA-TICS : CHAMPION OF SECESSION, BOLAND'S LET'S-JUST-TALK STRATEGY GETS RESULTS.

Byline: Mark Katches Daily News Sacramento Bureau

She fancies Engelbert Humperdinck, drives the most expensive car in the state Assembly and is as comfortable in a bowling alley as she is at a Legislative black-tie affair.

Paula Lucia Boland, 56, is as much an enigma to her fellow lawmakers as she is to her constituents.

But with a bill last year to break up the Los Angeles Unified School District and a new measure aimed at easing San Fernando Valley secession, the Republican assemblywoman has tapped into her electorate's disenchantment with the power structure of the nation's second-largest city.

``I didn't go looking for hot-button issues,'' the Granada Hills lawmaker said last week. ``I'm really just doing the things the people in my district want.''

Her Valley secession bill, AB 2043, is scheduled for its first hearing in the Senate this week before the Local Government Committee.

``She knows how to get controversial measures that affect her community through,'' said Assembly Speaker Curt Pringle of Garden Grove.

``She's aggressive and she's focused. She delivers for our caucus and she delivers for the people in the community - be it the L.A. Unified issue of last year or the Valley secession issue of this year.''

Since moving the bill through the Assembly in early May, Boland has spent her days lobbying the Senate.

She is at war with city leaders who are trying to stop the measure that would strip the City Council of its veto power over any effort by areas such as the Valley to secede.

In Sacramento, she's neither a deal-maker nor a forceful debater, and California Journal magazine has consistently lampooned her with low rankings in an annual survey of the intelligence of state lawmakers.

But current and former colleagues and political foes say she is not to be underestimated.

``She may not be a rocket scientist, but she's not dumb either,'' said City Councilman Hal Bernson, a supporter of her secession bill.

``She's a business lady and she understands how the real world works. A lot of politicians have no idea about that.''

Instead of deals and heavy-handed tactics, Boland lobbies members with hugs and polite conversation. She methodically takes things one step at a time.

``I don't strike deals,'' Boland says. ``I just talk to members. I talk common sense with them. That's my method.''

Considered one of the ``worker bees'' during her five years in Sacramento, Boland often labors 12 hours a day, reading and responding to constituent letters and studying bills.

She survives on cigarettes and microwave dinners when she's in the Capitol. And when the Legislature is in session she rarely has time to bowl - one of her passions.

Because of term limits, she's on her way out of the Assembly. Hoping to return next year on the Senate side, she's running for the 21st District Senate seat being vacated by Republican Newton Russell.

Boland has gotten a substantial bounce in name recognition from her Valley secession bill, which is expected to help her campaign for the Senate. She has received press calls from as far away as Britain and France.

That has prompted Democrats to say she is more interested in political grandstanding than actually passing the measure.

Boland is bothered by the attack on her motives.

``It couldn't be more false,'' she said. ``I promised my constituents in 1990 that I was going to do this. I promised I would give them back their rights to self-determination.''

Her opponents also have called her a carpetbagger, citing her decision to live in a two-bedroom apartment in Glendale instead of her Northridge house in order to run for Russell's seat.

And while she considers herself a fiscal conservative, Boland drives the priciest car in the Assembly - a $44,000 Lincoln Town Car that cost $14,000 more than Pringle's Ford Explorer.

She also gave her chief of staff Scott Wilk a $13,000 annual pay raise just three months before he loaned her Senate campaign $40,000 - an issue that prompted an investigation, since dismissed, by the Fair Political Practices Commission.

Boland was part of the original Valley secession push in 1977, a movement that was crushed when the Legislature passed a law giving the City Council its veto power.

Although she had been involved with community activities since the late 1960s, the Legislature's actions in 1977 became a catalyst for her decision to seek office in 1990.

A former makeup artist, Boland is consumed with her image. She smokes a pack a day of menthol Saratoga 120s, but never lights up around constituents, making her an admitted closet smoker.

Her official portrait photograph is one of those fuzzy ``soft filter'' shots designed to disguise any wrinkles.

Boland was born in New York, the daughter of Italian immigrants who settled in the San Fernando Valley when she was 6 years old. Her parents opened a beauty parlor on Sherman Way in Van Nuys.

She was married at 17 and gave up a chance to attend college on a scholarship. She became a mother at 18 and a single mother in her mid-20s. She makes it a point to note she was a virgin when she married.

In the Legislature, Boland's determination and drive has even won over members on the other side of the aisle.

``She's very tenacious,'' said David Roberti, the former Senate president from Van Nuys who worked with Boland to craft a bipartisan school breakup bill.

But her critics accuse her of only a half-hearted commitment to legislation, saying she is more interested in immediate headlines than follow through.

``She has shown a unique ability to tap into one or two emotional issues, publicize them, work them, politically benefit from them and then walk away,'' said Assembly Minority Leader Richard Katz, D-Panorama City. ``The school district breakup is a good example. What's happened to it since she pushed the bill?''

Boland insists that she is still involved with a small group of community leaders who are trying to organize efforts to dismantle the school district, although she admits it is a slow process.

``She wasn't willing to do the really hard work to make the breakup bill workable legislation,'' said state Superintendent of Schools Delaine Eastin, another critic and former colleague in the Assembly.

``If you just want to pass legislation that gets held up in court for 10 years, that's one thing,'' said Eastin, who called Boland a ``nice person'' but ``simplistic.''

Opponents of AB 2043 are making the same argument, saying that even if the bill passes and is signed by Gov. Pete Wilson, it will never result in the Valley actually leaving the city.

Boland has tried to keep her bill simple and focused on Los Angeles. That approach has helped her get support from dispassionate Northern California lawmakers who don't care whether Los Angeles breaks into a million pieces - let alone two big ones.

While other lawmakers might seek out leaders in both houses as well as check with the Governor's Office before introducing a bill, Boland didn't have her first conversation with a state senator until the measure passed out of the Assembly.

Aside from Sen. Tom Hayden, D-Los Angeles, who has offered amendments that Boland has thus far rejected, she has spoken on the Senate side only to the seven members of the Local Government Committee.

She said she has had no discussions with the governor on the bill.

The approach keeps her focused on the immediate hurdles ahead.

When Assembly Democrats contended that they saw no grass-roots movement in the Valley for secession, Boland took the comments to heart, encouraging constituents to write members of the Senate.

As a result, the Local Government Committee has more than 160 letters on file supporting the Boland bill.

When she's not trying to bust up the governmental structures of Los Angeles, Boland's other passion has been legislation aimed at child abuse.

Now the chairwoman of the Assembly Public Safety Committee, she wrote a bill two years ago calling for life sentences for repeat child molesters.

``I have two grandchildren of my own,'' Boland said. ``And if anyone were ever to touch either one of them, I don't know what I'd do.''

But she has been criticized for siding too often with the powerful gun lobby, which has contributed $5,000 to her campaign fund since 1994.

``She is firmly in the pocket of the gun lobby,'' said Barrie Becker, a lobbyist for Handgun Control Inc. ``I have never seen her vote for anything that was opposed by the NRA (National Rifle Association.)''

An abortion foe, her stance is rooted in her Catholic upbringing. She also has been a staunch supporter of some of the new Republican majority's most controversial measures - including a ban on same-sex marriages, a bill allowing schoolchildren to be paddled and a measure that would allow almost anyone without a criminal record or history of mental illness to carry a concealed weapon.

When she is successful with one of her own bills, Boland can hardly contain her emotions.

After the Valley secession bill moved out of the Assembly on May 9, she pumped her fist, raised her hands and smiled broadly, hugging anyone who got in her way.

``I didn't come here to be a politician,'' Boland said. ``I didn't come here to have a title, or the prestige. I really came here to get things done. I came here to work, and I've never run away from a fight in my life.''

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Photo: (color) Paula Boland

Known as ``worker bee''