Heidt Learns Populism Requires Tact : Santa Clarita: The 2nd-term mayor’s politics don’t always mesh with the community she represents. Still, some who disagree with her are admirers.

Jan Heidt is a politician not precisely defined.

Now mayor again of Santa Clarita, she has campaigned to save oak trees, clean up toxic waste and fight a proposed landfill--liberal causes not ordinarily identified with someone who is also sufficiently conservative to crusade for small-business development and who organized a patriotic salute to American troops who fought in the Persian Gulf War.

And although she takes pride in thinking of herself as a populist--both ears cocked to what constituents and other customers tell her inside the Newhall bookshop she owns--some say that she rams her agenda through with all the tact of a cavalry charge.

“You hear people say Jan’s a bully, but she’s really someone who can take charge,” said Jack Curenton, a Canyon Country resident and a director of Citizens for a Better Santa Clarita. “She’s detail-oriented and she’s not going to B.S. anybody. Those qualities are, frankly, admirable.”

Even if she isn’t always associated with the quality of tact, Heidt recognizes what it means to community stewardship. Her brief remarks to Santa Clarita residents after she took her oath as the city’s first second-term mayor last week, began with a quotation on tact from Benjamin Disraeli, the 19th-Century British statesman-writer: “Without tact, you can learn nothing. Tact teaches you when to be silent.”

Heidt then told the crowd: “I understand this to mean that when you are silent, you are listening.” And during Santa Clarita’s brief history as a city--its fifth birthday is today--she has “practiced and improved my skill of listening. What I have learned is that in certain issues, ideas or solutions, there may be more than one answer.”

Heidt exudes a 1960s-style activism tempered by pragmatism, having grown up with one foot in the protest generation, the other stuck firmly in the late 1950s.

“I’ve always thought all of us in my high school class of ’57 were unique,” said Heidt, 53, relaxing in her City Hall office.

“I always felt we were going to do something because the world was just starting to open up to women. It was becoming more acceptable to do other things besides be married, have children, be a schoolteacher, be a nurse. Some people went berserk in the ‘60s, but a lot of us played it straight and did things.”

What Jan Heidt did was cultivate a reputation for shooting from the lip, even at the risk of embarrassing herself politically.

Not long ago, Heidt suggested at a City Council meeting that citizens should use video cameras to record customer visits to a Newhall drive-in condom shop she abhors. The other council members hastily abandoned the discussion, but Heidt said this is one small business that should not be encouraged.

“Let’s face it, this is a pretty conservative community,” she said. “You’d expect to find this sort of thing happening in Hollywood, but not out here.”

On the other hand, Heidt’s stand in favor of abortion rights (“I wouldn’t have chosen it for myself, but I’m not opposed to others choosing for themselves”) doesn’t mesh with the community’s conservatism. Still, some who disagree with Heidt on abortion count themselves among her staunchest admirers.

Vera Johnson, an abortion opponent and community transportation activist, ran unsuccessfully against Heidt. “I certainly respect Jan’s views,” she said. Johnson added that Heidt and her predecessor as mayor, Jill Klajic, didn’t always agree politically, but “they’re both very progressive. Their programs have moved our city forward.”

A council colleague, Jo Anne Darcy, commends Heidt as someone “who tries very hard to be a role model for women and speaks out on behalf of women’s issues. She always carries herself with great dignity--in dress, in speech, in thought.”

Jan Heidt grew up Janice Lee Hahn, a farm girl, outside Saginaw, Mich.

Not until after she was graduated from Michigan State University in 1961 with a bachelor’s degree in psychology did she ever leave her home state.

“When you grow up on a farm, as I did,” she said, “just going away to college was like, God, the world!”

In 1962, she joined the Navy and became a communications officer at the Pentagon. From there, she took assignments as a personnel officer in Naples, Italy, and a recruiter in Los Angeles and Washington.

Along the way, she married Gerald Heidt, an ex-Air Force pilot and one of four children of the late bandleader Horace Heidt.

Together they reared two children (Matt, now 22, and Robin, 18) while pursuing business careers--Gerald as a developer of shopping centers, Jan as the proprietor of One for the Books.

Five Saturdays ago while the store was closed, someone made what she felt was a political statement by tossing a concrete block through the locked front door.

“I think it was directed at me because it was just thrown through the glass,” she said. “They took nothing.”

On most days, however, Heidt’s bookstore is the scene of more peaceful political discourse.

“I’m accessible to people who come in to buy books and to others who just want to talk,” she said. “We’ve had some great discussions. People are usually much more reasonable in a setting that’s away from City Hall. You’re not listening to your own little special-interest group. You’re listening to a broad range of ideas.”

Fast-growing Santa Clarita’s priorities for 1993, she said, will be to finish work already started toward unclogging the city’s major traffic arteries by widening stretches of San Fernando and Soledad Canyon roads, among others.

Heidt also wants to strengthen local businesses because sales tax accounts for the biggest share of the city’s revenues. “A woman in our community sells the same kinds of planning diaries that everyone uses at City Hall,” she said. “But we’ve been ordering them direct from the manufacturer in Utah.

“She sells them here for the same price, so why don’t we buy from her? We all need to start thinking about buying local.”

Issues such as mass transit, development and the environment are what attracted Heidt to politics long before she would campaign vigorously for cityhood in 1987 and be elected to the city’s original council, serving in 1989 as its second mayor.

A community activist in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Heidt spearheaded committees that successfully blocked two toxic waste dumps from being located in the Santa Clarita Valley. She also worked with the Sulphur Springs school district and a Junior Achievement pilot program at Canyon High School.

It wouldn’t be long until growth would become so volatile an issue that when Heidt wasn’t gathering signatures to put cityhood on the ballot, she joined the fight to hold Los Angeles County and developers at bay.

“We saw projects come through the county--10,000 and 7,800 houses at a time--and they didn’t seem to be concerned about any infrastructure,” Heidt recalled.

Now, even after Santa Clarita voters rejected a slow-growth initiative last April, the city’s strategy appears aimed at making developers jump through hoops that had seemed unthinkable only a decade ago.

“That’s what it’s going to take to give us the quality of life we need in the future,” Heidt said. “Look at California, too. I’d say we’ve got a 10-year project to bring this state back to where it was.”

To help meet that challenge, Heidt has pushed strenuously for mass transit such as the Metrolink commuter trains that whisk Santa Claritan residents to and from downtown Los Angeles each weekday.

Serving since 1990 on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission’s Congestion Management Policy Advisory Committee and as an alternate member of the five-county Southern California Regional Rail Authority, Heidt pursues her cause with missionary zeal.

“One key to our future,” she said, “is getting people out of their cars.”

Earlier this month, Heidt fumed when her quest for the north county seat on the 13-member Metropolitan Transit Authority board, which will be formed in February, was turned back by a Glendale councilman’s successful bid.

The voting relegated Heidt to a seat as an alternate on the board and left the sprawling Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys without board representation on the authority, which will replace the Rapid Transit District and the county transportation commission. Its 30-year budget is projected at $183 billion.

Heidt worries that the Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys won’t get their fair share of those transit dollars.

The City Council’s only Democrat in a largely Republican community, Heidt is a self-described moderate, committed to building bridges in a society she believes is increasingly polarized.

“I believe that any society or organization works better in the middle,” she said.

Moreover, as Heidt points out, her Democratic Party politics should have no impact on her helping to provide city services or serving as mayor, a largely ceremonial position that is rotated each year among Santa Clarita’s five council members.

“This work is really about curbs and gutters,” she said.