Bill Lockyer

William Westwood Lockyer (born May 8, 1941) is a retired American politician from California, who held elective office from 1973 to 2015, as State Treasurer of California, California Attorney General, and President Pro Tempore of the California State Senate.

Lockyer attended the University of California, Berkeley, graduating with a B.A. in Political Science in 1965.

The following year, he received a Teaching Credential from CSU in Hayward, then worked for his father's roofing company and as a fork-lift driver at Ward's before getting his first job with the Legislature on the staff of Assemblyman Robert W. Crown.

Lockyer first won a State Assembly seat in a Special Election of September 4, 1973, following the accidental death of his political mentor, Bay Area Assemblyman Robert W. Crown.

As a freshman legislator in 1974, Lockyer wrote the first legislation to provide state funding for emergency oil spill decontamination.

During his legislative career, as a close ally of environmental pressure groups like the Sierra Club and the Planning and Conservation League, he wrote other environmental laws, including the first state regulation of trucks hauling toxic substances on California roads and highways, which preceded federal policies adopted by the EPA.

In 1984, Lockyer sponsored the State's first "hate crimes" legislation which, as later amended, provided that "no person...shall by force or threat of force, willfully injure, intimidate, interfere with, oppress, or threaten any other person in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him or her by the Constitution or laws of this state or by the Constitution or laws of the United States because of the other person's race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, gender, or sexual orientation, or because he or she perceives that the other person has one or more of those characteristics."

Later, as Attorney General, Lockyer was responsible for coordinating enforcement of this statute by local law enforcement.

In 1986, Lockyer graduated with a J.D. from University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law.

Lockyer considered his greatest environmental achievement to be his 1987 bill to create a Bay Trail, which he envisioned as an eventual 500-mile-long hiking and cycling path, a continuous recreational corridor, with adjacent bayshore parks and protected natural habitats, that would entirely encircle San Francisco and San Pablo Bays.

On September 10, 1987, while Lockyer chaired the State Senate Judiciary Committee, he and Speaker of the Assembly Willie Brown met at Frank Fat's Restaurant in Sacramento with representatives of bitterly competing special interests – insurance companies, trial lawyers, doctors and manufacturers – to formalize their agreement to "the most sweeping changes in California's civil liability laws in decades".

After many days of painstaking negotiations, these warring interests had accepted a compromise bill that included "a drastic restriction in product liability laws offset by fee increases for lawyers prosecuting medical malpractice cases. Doctors got promises that protections already in place against lawsuits would not be touched. Insurance companies won a reprieve from threatened regulations gaining momentum in the Legislature."

This compromise had already been worked out; the dinner was meant to ratify a future "peace pact" among all the concerned parties to abide by the compromise.

Lockyer, who had acted as mediator during the earlier negotiations, scribbled the terms of the

"pact" on a restaurant cloth napkin, and so ended a political war.

The compromise bill was then ramrodded through the assembly and state senate on the last night of that year's legislative session, and was signed into law by Republican governor George Deukmejian.

Though it was only Lockyer's "theatrical touch" of writing the agreement on a napkin that made it especially memorable, the "napkin deal" became legendary in the State Capitol.

Proudly reproducing the original napkin on a poster titled "Tort-Mania 1987", Lockyer and Brown regarded the special interests compromise and conciliation they had arranged as a great legislative accomplishment.

"The public is better served", Lockyer said at the time, "when these groups are trying to mend rather than tear the fabric of society".

He served in the legislature for the next twenty-five years, more than half that time in the state senate, where, in 1994, he was chosen by his peers to be President Pro Tem, the most powerful position of the upper legislative house.

In his spare time, Lockyer attended law school classes in Sacramento and received a Juris Doctor degree from the McGeorge School of Law, University of the Pacific.

Federal legislation signed by President Clinton in 1996 required California to enact “welfare-to-work” legislation to help welfare recipients move from government assistance to employment and “self-sufficiency”.

The resulting establishment of a new CalWORKs (California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids) program had a major effect on the state budget, propelling difficult negotiations between the Democratic legislature and conservative Republican governor Pete Wilson.

As Senate President Pro Tem, Lockyer was a key negotiator in these private negotiations, which, he later recalled to journalist Daniel Weintraub, produced the State's “last... old-fashioned balanced budget,”, linked to a bi-partisan billion-dollar tax "mega-deal", a complex legislative package that cut state income taxes for middle class Californians.

As legislator, Lockyer won close friends on both sides of the partisan aisle, including Jim Brulte, Republican Minority Leader of the state senate, who would long remember Lockyer's skill at compromise and consensus-building., and Democratic Speaker of the Assembly Willie Brown, who recalled that, by the time Lockyer left the legislature in 1998, "Capitol insiders took his prolific effectiveness for granted."

Elected attorney general in 1998 after 25 years as a legislator with a small, close-knit staff, Lockyer took on an executive position that demanded both policy direction and managerial acumen.

The Department of Justice, of which he was “chief executive officer”, had some 5,000 employees, 1200 of whom were attorneys handling a caseload of 100,000 lawsuits – the equivalent, in the private sector of the seventh largest law firm in America.

Much of the department's effort was as a service agency for the staggering demands of California's local law enforcement – 90,000 officers at 70,000 police terminals expecting split-second response from a state telecommunications network that received three million inquiries a day; background and fingerprints checks of a million annual applicants for positions as police officers, teachers and day-care providers, and “live scan” of another million and a half fingerprints taken during booking arrest, plus searches connected with 750,000 outstanding warrants for wanted suspects.

This required Lockyer to radically restructure and reinvigorate his department with high-tech efficiencies and policy innovations to modernize the relationship between the attorney general and the law enforcement community.

Having grown up in the Berkeley 'Sixties atmosphere of anti-police rhetoric, Lockyer, now described by the press as the state's "Top Cop", insisted on attending memorial services for more than 50 officers killed in the line of duty during his years in office.

At the same time, Lockyer steered the Justice Department to a new legal activism that reflected his liberal values in such areas of litigation and regulation as civil rights and anti-trust enforcement and consumer and environmental protection.

He became one of the two most prominent state Attorneys General in the nation, rivaled in media attention only by New York's Eliot Spitzer.

The two men were personal rivals as well, once nearly coming to blows after "screaming expletives at each other" at a Los Angeles convention of the National Association of Attorneys General.

Lockyer, who lives in Hayward and Long Beach, California, was married in April 2003 to public service attorney Nadia Lockyer, a former Alameda County Supervisor, with whom he has three children: a son born in 2004; and two twin sons, born in December 2015.

By an earlier marriage, he also has an adult daughter who is an attorney at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

That organization elected Lockyer its president in 2003.

As attorney general, Lockyer sometimes had to defend official positions he found objectionable, such as asking the courts, in 2004, to invalidate San Francisco same-sex marriage licenses which conflicted with state law, though he personally supported the right of same-sex marriage which brought him under fire from both social conservatives and gay activists.

(He returned to the classroom in 2009 as a non-tenured college professor, teaching undergraduate courses in American State Politics at the University of Southern California and the University of California at Irvine.) With his early legislative experience, Lockyer began his own political career as a School Board member of the San Leandro Unified School District, as chair of the Alameda County Democratic Central Committee, and California coordinator of Senator George McGovern's 1972 campaign for the Presidency.

Requiring city, county and regional cooperation, the Bay Trail marked its 20th year in 2009 with 293 miles so far open to hikers, bicyclists, joggers and walkers.

As nominal "father" of the Bay Trail, a segment of the shoreline had been named in Lockyer's honor.