West Sac, its mayor circling the bases

No one is more surprised that West Sacramento has managed to put together a $40 million deal for a Triple-A baseball stadium than the city's own mayor.

Not only does the ballpark cost about three times the Yolo County city's general fund, the municipality had to form political alliances outside its jurisdiction -- a rarity for the Sacramento area -- and overcome its reputation as a regional "backwater" in the process.

Many are saying the deal couldn't have been completed as quickly as it was without West Sacramento Mayor Christopher Cabaldon, an ambitious, 33-year-old politician whose connections and diplomacy proved to be the glue that held the stadium project together through months of difficult negotiations.

And, say some of the region's political leaders, Cabaldon is exactly what West Sacramento needs to emerge from Sacramento's long shadow.

"Christopher is keeping his eye on the bigger picture, which allows West Sacramento to participate and help drive some bigger issues like the waterfront," said Sacramento Mayor Joe Serna Jr.

On a sunny day last week, Cabaldon was working at his downtown Sacramento office, where he is vice chancellor of the California community college system, the largest in the nation.

"I'm usually overcommitted and overextended, but baseball made it even harder," said Cabaldon, reflecting on the four weeks in February during which the stadium deal was announced and then ratified by three local governments.

When it was all done, Yolo County and Sacramento County supervisors had voted unanimously to form a joint powers authority with West Sacramento to guarantee a $40 million bond sale for the 10,000-seat stadium. Art Savage, owner of the Pacific Coast League's Vancouver Canadians, has said he wants to move the team to the new stadium in the spring of 2000.

"When we did it we weren't terribly optimistic it would get anywhere," Cabaldon said. "And we certainly weren't counting on it."

But the young mayor has learned that participation on various committees -- from chairing the Yolo County Transportation District to participating in the Sacramento Area Council of Governments -- can pay big dividends.

One of the many reasons Sacramento County readily signed on to the deal is because supervisors knew Cabaldon from those boards and enjoyed working with him, said those involved in the deal.

"I sensed they all had good respect for him," said West Sacramento City Manager Joe Goeden. "People seemed to have welcomed the opportunity to deal with him again."

Cabaldon said he was aware of what interested many of the supervisors and what aspects of the stadium would appeal to them.

This is classic Cabaldon, according to friends who knew him during his years as a policy expert with the state Assembly.

Along with a comprehensive knowledge of how the law works, Cabaldon was extremely successful at assessing group dynamics, said Andrew Shaw, Cabaldon's campaign manager and a lobbyist with the County Welfare Directors Association.

He tried to understand every perspective and find common ground, former colleagues said.

"He got along very well with people of all ideologies, and that's hard," said Duane Peterson, former chief of staff to then-Assemblyman Tom Hayden, D-Los Angeles, for whom Cabaldon worked as chief consultant to the Higher Education Committee.

With a stylish goatee and youthful appearance -- one Sacramento city official described him as looking like "a kid in a three-piece suit" -- Cabaldon comes off as intelligent and serious.

"He is somebody who walks into the room, and you feel like you can work with him right out of the gate," said Serna.

Working with the biggest political players in the region and being a key figure in a deal that will likely put West Sacramento on the map has led many to conclude that Cabaldon is headed for higher office -- possibly in the Legislature.

But Cabaldon, who's single and originally from Los Angeles, insists he has no intention of going anywhere soon, and longtime friends like Shaw say they believe him. "I know a lot of other people who would like him to run for higher office, but he's very excited about the work he's doing right now."

At his community college office -- where he works only by the light of his computer screen and listens to a soft George Winston CD as a small fountain gurgles on a side table -- Cabaldon said his life has finally slowed down enough for him to catch his breath now that the joint powers authority is forming to issue the stadium bonds.

For Cabaldon -- described by friends as a "policy wonk" -- that meant enough time to craft a piece of public policy. He was busy polishing a paper on how to measure the performance of community colleges.

Cabaldon said his interest in politics was born during his high school days in Los Angeles, where he butted heads with the administrators as an editorial page editor of the school newspaper.

In college, his political curiosity was forged into a passion. He went to the University of California, Berkeley, a school he selected for active student government.

Within weeks of arriving, he volunteered to be an intern at its student lobbying office, which would travel to Sacramento to advocate against student fee increases and for divestment from a racially segregated South Africa, the burning issues of the day.

His activism around UC Berkeley led to his election as student body vice president. After he graduated in 1987 with a bachelor of science degree in environmental economics, he came to Sacramento.

He went to work for the University of California Student Association as a lobbyist. There he was received warmly and taken seriously, which invigorated him: "That was really an important experience for me, to see that politics could be what it was supposed to be in the textbooks."

The decade that he would then spend in the Capitol working behind the scenes for several lawmakers was a training ground. What worked for representatives from Los Angeles and San Francisco doesn't always prevail in West Sacramento, but along the way, he developed what would become his own political style.

Cabaldon first ran for City Council about a year after he moved to West Sacramento in 1993. He said he was tired of waiting for neighborhood improvements promised by his Realtor, so he decided to take action.

He lost, most say because he was new and nobody trusted his big-city ways.

However, he was elected in a 1996 special election to fill a seat vacated by a councilman who stepped down for health reasons.

That campaign and his re-election in 1998 have indelibly changed West Sacramento politics, veterans say.

"We more or less relied on our strong family ties, the friendships we have developed over time" to get elected, said Councilman Bill Kristoff, who has been on the council since city incorporation in 1987.

In contrast, Cabaldon organized teams of volunteers, collected rosters of registered voters, tracked their voting history, sent them material specific to their interests.

But, more than anything else, Cabaldon is likely to be credited for using the stadium deal to change the city's image.

West Sacramento was never the city on people's minds when they thought about where to plunk down a regional entertainment attraction. But with construction to begin this spring, the stadium and the mayor are on their way to becoming symbols of how West Sacramento is maturing.

And the significance is not lost on outsiders.

"Fairly or unfairly, people have viewed West Sac as something of a backwater with people who are not intelligent," said Sacramento County Supervisor Roger Dickinson. "Not only do I not happen to share that view, Christopher serves as a great standard-bearer of just the opposite."