O.C. Originals
Shirley L. Grindle
Who: The county’s freelance campaign finance watchdog
Home turf: Orange
Why you should care: If you care about reasonably clean politics in Orange County, you’d better hope she lives forever or succeeds in her quest to establish a Fair Campaign Practices Commission.
A particularly enterprising Orange County cynic posted an item last fall on a local politics blog headlined: “$1,000 REWARD for evidence that Shirley Grindle is a paid lobbyist.”
It was the Internet equivalent of a throwdown, a challenge to the world to explain why Grindle, 73, a retired aeronautical engineer, has for more than 30 years been the nagging conscience of Orange County politics. Surely someone must be pulling her strings. Why else would Grindle, armed only with a typewriter, 60,000 index cards, and simmering outrage, spend so much time and energy trying to keep the county’s politicians honest?
So far, the reward is unclaimed. All the challenge generated was a spirited online discussion among other cynics (“It just doesn’t pass the smell test that she collects all the records she does, often costing money to get from local governments, all for the good of the order.”) and true believers (“She has been a godsend to the county, and she demands our public officials behave in an honorable manner.”).
Grindle’s focus is unwavering: To ensure that local pols heed the laws governing campaign donations, and to force those who violate those laws to give the money back. She has been at it since she resigned from the Orange County Planning Commission in 1976, appalled by the “pay-to-play” game between the county supervisors and developers, and convinced, she says, that “the only way campaign rules would be put into effect was by the public.” She orchestrated the county’s first modern campaign finance reform initiative, “Time Is Now—Clean Up Politics,” or TIN CUP for short. It took effect in 1978. She successfully spearheaded an effort to update and improve the ordinance in 1992.
Grindle, who describes herself as nonpartisan, volunteered to catalog campaign donations by contributor, and, when necessary, blow the whistle on violators. “When people run a stop sign, they don’t get caught unless the policeman’s there,” she says. “I told them I would be there.”
She relies on the crudest imaginable tools of the Information Age and a memory for people, companies, and personal histories that can untangle even the most complicated donation schemes. Her critics are legion, but so are her admirers.
“Orange County has always struck me as a medieval place, politically, a place where small groups of people ran the county,” says Mark P. Petracca, chairman of the political science department at the University of California, Irvine. “[Grindle] came on the scene when Orange County was just beginning its maturation as a political entity. Like her or not, or like what she’s done or not, she has tried to give birth to a more modern political system in this county, which has been very hard to do.”
For the past decade, Grindle has “been thinking about what happens when I’m dead and gone.” In February, she introduced her solution: a measure to create a Fair Campaign Practices Commission charged with taking over as the county’s unpaid political watchdog. At the moment, she doesn’t have the votes among sitting supervisors to enact the measure.
“It’ll take a couple years to pull this off, but I’ll get it done,” she says. “It’s the right thing to do. ... The supervisors are term-limited. I’m not. So I’m just gonna wait ’em out.”—Martin J. Smith