Secretary of EVERYTHING.

Aileen Adams' long career in government serves her well for her current position heading the State and Consumer Services Agency, which oversees everything from fair employment to the Franchise Tax Board

AILEEN Adams' career in public service has evolved from the liberal activism of the '60s to the progressive leadership of the '90s.

In January, Gov. Gray Davis appointed her secretary of the State and Consumer Services Agency, which oversees such diverse entities as the Department of Consumer Affairs, the Department of General Services, the Department of Fair Employment and Housing and the Board of Control. It also is responsible for legislative oversight for the Franchise Tax Board and the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS), although not its investment policies.

A product of upper-middle-class Los Angeles, Adams served in the Peace Corps for three years before going to work for Ralph Nader in Washington. She decided to become a lawyer, and entered the law school at predominantly black Howard University. Returning to L.A. in the mid-'70s, she was an L.A. deputy city attorney, served as a member of the L.A. Fire Commission, and became legal counsel to the Rape Treatment Center in Santa Monica. That led to her appointment by President Clinton to the Justice Department, where she served under Attorney General Janet Reno as director of the Office for Victims of Crime for three years.

Question: Describe what you do.

Answer: I oversee one of the most diverse and broadest agencies in government, with 15,000 employees and a budget of $1.3 billion. It's an agency that helps people in so many different ways. We help consumers who have complaints get justice. We help to hire, through the Personnel Department, many of the people who work for the state. So we have a huge impact, both upon state employees and consumers in general. And there is real opportunity to make government more efficient.

Q: When you say more efficient, what kinds of things are you talking about?

A: Let me give you a couple of examples. I've been working very closely with the Board of Control to streamline how they interact with crime victims. They're the agency responsible for victim compensation, for providing funding for the mental health and medical benefits that victims receive.

Also, the Department of General Services makes recommendations on the financing of K-12 public school construction projects. There are about 41 state agencies that may interact on the school construction process. Nobody had compiled the names of those state agencies and what their roles are, to create a one-stop shop. With a great deal of information from the field, from the Los Angeles School District and others in the state, we are trying to streamline the school construction process.

Q: What areas of consumer protection are you focusing on?

A: I think that we took some giant legislative steps on behalf of consumers this past session. Gov. Davis signed a law extending (automobile) lemon law protection. He increased the Healthy Families program so more children get health benefits. One of the things we've been doing is convening consumer roundtables around the state to get a hold on issues they care about. Some of the areas we'll be looking at include credit practices, including the solicitations that children receive in the mail, and housing loans, which sometimes result in homes being taken away from people, especially the elderly.

Q: What in L.A. falls under your purview?

A: There are two state entities that own major real estate in downtown Los Angeles. Part of the real estate is owned by the Department of General Services, part of it is owned by Caltrans. General Services oversees real estate that sits across from the Los Angeles Times building. Then there's additional real estate on First and Broadway, about a whole block. I haven't discussed this with the governor yet, so I don't want to go down this road too far, but there are a lot of possibilities (for the land). Housing is one, a federal courthouse is another, additional state buildings are another possibility. There will be additional needs on the state's part for more office space.

Q: Aren't you responsible for Exposition Park?

A: We oversee Exposition Park, most of which is state-owned land, and the California Science Center and the African-American Museum. One of the major projects we're working on right now is a kindergarten-through-fifth-grade science and math elementary school for 700 kids in Exposition Park right next to the Science Center. It would be a training center for teachers all around the state, and create great synergism between the school and the museum, and the Natural History Museum, which is a county museum. Can you imagine being able to walk five minutes and be in either of those museums as part of your educational curriculum? It is a project that has been stalled for 10 years. But we're working very hard to get the decision-makers together to try and make this work.

Q: So why didn't we see your name in the paper as trying to bring an NFL team to the Coliseum?

A: Because my husband (Geoffrey Cowan) is dean at the Annenberg School at USC, and USC arguably would have an interest in the outcome of the negotiations, so I recused myself.

Q: Talk a little bit about your tenure in the Justice Department.

A: The attorney general has had a great influence on me. The words I heard most often from her were "coordination" and "collaboration." She would give them great emphasis and the one thing she would not put up with was people in her department who would not coordinate with one another. In the Oklahoma City bombing, there were 12 different agencies within the Justice Department that worked closely in responding. It was a massive effort to create the most humane, sensitive response possible.

Q: How do you view the role of government?

A: Something else I learned from working at the Rape Treatment Center is that it is very often the single complaint that gives you a view of what the system is really like. There was a law in place when I first went to work for the RTC as legal counsel which required victims to resist their assailant. The law shouldn't focus on the behavior of the victim, it should focus on the behavior of the assailant. So from one case, we rewrote the California Sexual Assault Law, and eliminated the victim resistance provision. It passed the Legislature without a single dissenting vote, but if we hadn't listened to the voice of that one victim, we wouldn't have been able to make that change for all victims. I think that virtually everywhere there are models, programs in some community in the country that are working on any given issue. And there's a real need in government to identify what works.

Q: When you went to Howard University's law school in the 1970s, how many other whites were there at the school?

A: When I entered Howard, there were four whites out of maybe 600 law students. I don't really remember the exact class size. I was the product of Ivy League schools my whole life, and we were living in Washington, D.C. which is primarily an African-American community, and I really wanted to feel more connected to that community. I got a great education at Howard Law School. The classes were small, the professors were very engaged, the students were fascinating.

Q: Where did you serve in the Peace Corps?

A: I was in the northeastern part of Brazil, in this little community of 3,000 people on the side of a mountain. I lived in a hut without any running water or electricity for three years. We grew our own food. I started a literacy class. I think one of my lasting contributions was, I brought in a breed of enormous pigs to mate with the other pigs that were already there to increase the size of the pigs (laughs). It's amazing the things that you can become an expert on. I lived in an area that was very remote, there were no other Americans there. I used to dream in Portuguese, it was all I spoke for three years.

Q: How much time do you spend in L.A.?

A: I spend about one day a week here. I'm in Sacramento four days a week. And I also go to San Francisco, Fresno, San Diego. Our focus is statewide.

Q: Any political ambition?

A: Zero. I love the job I have now. It satisfies everything I would ever want to be. It enables me to help people on a daily basis, to feel a sense of accomplishment each and every day, and also to learn things each and every day. That's very energizing.

Aileen Adams

Title: Secretary of the State and Consumer Services Agency

Born: Los Angeles, January 1945

Education: B.A., Smith College; J.D., Howard University Law School

Most Admired

Person: Her husband

Hobbies: Walking, reading, spending time with family

Personal: Married, one son and one daughter