Election 2004

Martinez: Refugee, lawyer, politician

Mel Martinez offers a compelling life story and reputation as a consensus builder. His foes say he's too eager to please.

By STEVE BOUSQUET and BILL ADAIR
Published July 18, 2004

	[AP file photo]
	Housing Secretary Mel Martinez, center, Donald VanCleff of Orlando, left, and Lecia Lane, Habitat for Humanity homeowner, raise the wall of a Habitat for Humanity house in Orlando.

ORLANDO - Mel Martinez has been many things.

He was a Democrat who became a Republican. A trial lawyer who made a living suing large corporations but who now favors limiting how much a lawyer can win for a client.

As Orange County's elected chairman, he won praise for creating afterschool programs and health clinics, cutting taxes and putting the brakes on suburban sprawl. But some say he took a nonpartisan office and politicized it.

As President Bush's housing secretary, Martinez was the White House's link to Hispanics. Martinez kept HUD scandal free, but he left it largely as it was before he arrived - "the ugly duckling" of a vast federal bureaucracy, as he called it.

Martinez, 57, one of eight Republican Senate candidates, offers a candidacy built around a compelling life story. At 15, he became a refugee from Castro, separated from his parents in Cuba. He became a lawyer, a leader of the town that nurtured him, Orlando, and the first Cuban-American Cabinet member.

His friends describe a compassionate man who seeks common ground, dislikes conflict, keeps his eye on the big picture and delegates details.

"He's always been a consensus builder, somebody trying to bridge the gap between wants and needs," said Skip Dalton, who practiced law with Martinez for years and remains a close friend. "I don't think he ever forgot what it was like to be alone in this country, not speaking the language, not being able to function."

Others see a leader who tailors his views to the moment.

"I think he likes the ether of power and he kind of succumbs to it," said Dick Batchelor, a Democratic strategist and lobbyist. "The pliability that he's now demonstrating shows that he likes the ether."

Martinez calls himself a consensus builder. But both in Orange County and at HUD, he took stands on issues that he could have avoided.

Mel Martinez was a law student at Florida State in 1972 when he registered to vote as a Democrat, in heavily Democratic Leon County.

"There was no thought about it. There didn't seem to be an option to vote for anything else," he said. "I wasn't particularly political, period."

Martinez said he became a Republican around 1979, when Ronald Reagan was running for president and Jimmy Carter was in the White House.

"Carter was running," his wife, Kitty, recalled. "I remember putting down the paper and saying, "Mel, we're not Democrats."'

Martinez became a Republican, but his colleagues and mentors were Democrats, including former Orlando Mayor Bill Frederick, who hired him out of law school.

Martinez represented plaintiffs, mostly victims of car accidents and manufacturing defects. Some were immigrants too poor to pay legal fees. Like most trial lawyers, Martinez did not get paid unless he settled or won a case, which entitled him to up to 40 percent of a settlement.

"I have been a trial lawyer, and I'm proud of the work I did,' Martinez said.

He climbed the ladder of the Academy of Florida Trial Lawyers, the politically influential voice of the plaintiffs' bar, where his advocacy skills and Horatio Alger story were much admired.

"Mel was a bridge-the-gap kind of person, a peacemaker," said Mark Lang, a Winter Park lawyer who served on the trial bar's board when Martinez was president.

Orlando lawyer David Best, who opposed Martinez in some cases, remembers a very good lawyer, but he can't remember Martinez being conservative.

"There was no hint that he was a conservative Republican, back when he was doing trial work," Best said. "I can't say whether he changed or he kept his views to himself."

As president of the trial bar, Martinez helped defeat a doctor-driven ballot initiative in 1988 to limit jury awards in personal injury cases. Voters sided with the lawyers. The ballot amendment failed.

"Florida voters sent a clear message that victims deserve to be compensated and wrongdoers must be held accountable for their actions," Martinez wrote in a triumphant letter to the St. Petersburg Times after the vote.

A devout Catholic, Martinez ran for lieutenant governor in 1994 on a ticket headed by one of his best friends, Ken Connor, a trial lawyer and leader of the antiabortion movement in Florida. Their candidacy stood no chance in a primary against Jeb Bush, but the experience whetted Martinez's appetite for politics.

Four years later, he ran for the nonpartisan post of county chairman in Orange County. His opponent, John Ostalkiewicz, was a very conservative, very rich Republican state senator who put $1.3-million of his own money into the race.

Martinez, who won with more than 60 percent of the vote, enjoyed widespread support from Democrats. The first Republican to hold the job, he is probably best remembered for the Martinez Doctrine, which sought to prevent home construction until sufficient classrooms were in place to absorb the influx.

Gov. Bush, who appointed Martinez to lead a Growth Management Study Commission, said in 2000: "I commend Mel Martinez for having the guts and the courage and the leadership to step up to the plate in a place that truly needs it. ... Every community is going to have to deal with this."

David Heath, a deputy Orange County administrator, said the Martinez Doctrine has twice stopped subdivisions from being built, including denial of a 1,000-unit complex that was upheld by the courts. As a result, Heath said, developers now work out agreements with the Orange County School Board in advance because the county won't approve them.

"They know if they come forward, they're going to get denied," Heath said.

The Martinez Doctrine hasn't stopped growth. But Martinez was at the crossroads of where school overcrowding meets suburban sprawl.

"The Martinez Doctrine forced a thoughtful dialogue about our future," said Jacob Stuart, longtime president of the Greater Orlando Chamber of Commerce. "There was a seismic shift in how we viewed the future, and that was directly related to chairman Martinez."

Democrats supported Martinez because the alternative, Ostalkiewicz, was much more conservative. But their enthusiasm cooled after he hired Dan Murphy, a former aide to Vice President Dan Quayle, as chief of staff.

"He was the hatchet guy. He was the Karl Rove Mini Me," said Democrat Batchelor, who supported Martinez for county chairman.

Then came the light-rail controversy.

As a candidate, Martinez opposed a $600-million light-rail system to reduce gridlock in Orlando. In office, he supported it. But his consensus building faltered when he could not secure a fourth vote to get the project through the County Commission.

"The timing was terrible," said Linda Chapin, a Democrat who preceded Martinez as county chairman. "Mel had been against it, then for it. It was the most crucial vote in decades for this community and a tragedy that we lost the opportunity."

Martinez saw it differently. He said he inherited the issue, his support was mild and the dynamics of the project changed.

"I was not a huge believer," Martinez said. "I had an agenda set by others."

After less than two years in Orange County, with his agenda incomplete, Martinez was on the move again. President Bush was calling. He wanted Martinez to run the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The job of running the federal housing agency is not glamorous.

With 9,500 employees and a $32-billion annual budget, HUD is a low-profile agency that provides homes for the poor and regulates the complex transaction of buying a house.

In three years at HUD, Martinez was more famous for who he was - the top Latino in the Bush White House - than for anything he did. He traveled much and served as the administration's spokesman on Hispanic issues, including a reassuring presence on Spanish-language TV after 9/11.

Martinez's signature issue at HUD was an effort to pump new life into an old proconsumer rule called the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act, to protect buyers through the complex process of buying a house.

The effort fizzled when Martinez left HUD to run for the Senate. Disagreement persists about his role.

"On the consumer protection side, for people buying a house, there has been nobody more innovative," said Kenneth Harney, a real estate columnist.

"He was a very insignificant secretary of HUD," said Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., the ranking Democrat on the House committee overseeing housing.

The law is supposed to protect consumers by disclosing where all that money goes at closing time among the companies and agents in a real estate transaction. Martinez wanted to simplify things for consumers; he said reforms could save buyers as much as $700 and make it possible for more people to own homes.

He struck a chord with many homeowners when he said even he was confused by the stack of closing documents.

HUD officials told Martinez he would encounter opposition from companies that profit from home sales, that his predecessors had made similar efforts only to learn that the issue was considered the "third rail" of housing law: Touch it at your peril.

Martinez said he pursued it because it was "the right thing to do."

As expected, he ran into strong opposition from the real estate industry, which launched an all-out lobbying effort. They enlisted allies in Congress, who put pressure on HUD to kill the proposal.

Shortly after Martinez resigned to run for the Senate, the opponents won. HUD scuttled the proposal because congressional leaders had threatened to hold up the confirmation of Alphonso Jackson as Martinez's successor.

Frank said the failure of RESPA reforms shows that Martinez didn't have enough backbone to stand up to the real estate lobby. But Harney, the columnist, praised Martinez.

"Martinez was the first guy who came along in a long, long time who did something for the consumer," Harney said. "What was unusual was that anybody would be willing to take on all these industry groups."

Overall, Martinez received mediocre reviews during his HUD tenure.

The Bush administration's internal ratings gave the agency "unsatisfactory" grades in all five management areas, including financial performance. But the ratings, by the Office of Management and Budget, did indicate HUD improved in each category during Martinez's tenure.

Colleagues describe Martinez as a manager who delegates authority and trusts his staff to handle day-to-day matters. He left HUD's management to deputy Jackson, who had run housing authorities in Dallas and Washington.

"He surrounds himself with very smart people and, just as in Orange County, he expects them day in and day out to keep the trains running on time," said Murphy, his chief of staff at HUD and in Orange.

Frank saw it differently.

"Mel was hands off," Frank said. HUD "was run by the assistant secretaries."

Frank said that Martinez's main role in the Bush White House was "to be a Cuban-American, to provide diversity," and that he didn't do enough to promote low-income housing.

Martinez and his friends say he spent a significant amount of time dealing with problems inherited from previous administrations. He said it was hard to change a big agency.

"HUD is an ugly duckling, and it wasn't going to turn into a prince overnight," he said. "I think we made significant and steady progress."

- Times researcher Kitty Bennett contributed to this report.

[Last modified July 17, 2004, 23:38:10]