Contra Costa County Supervisor Mark DeSaulnier, a New England transplant who wisecracks about starting his political career as a saloon keeper, has emerged as Contra Costa's highest-profile local leader.


Contra Costa Voter Fraud Network
Please visit my blog called The Homeless Candidate 

This occurred less than ten minutes
after his staff laughed me off the phone 


DeSaulnier owns TR's Bar & Grill in Concord, the county's No. 1 power lunch hangout and political watering hole, where scribbles on crumpled napkins can show what power brokers are thinking.
"I can't tell you how many times I've learned something while busing tables," said DeSaulnier, a onetime partner of chef Jeremiah Tower.

This bar was Concord Cocaine Central 

Tower, who owns the celebrity hot spot Stars Restaurant in San Francisco, said that when DeSaulnier worked at his Santa Fe Bar & Grill in Berkeley, he began as a bartender and left as a partner.
"From bartender to higher office in 20 years. That's America," Tower said. "When you have to smile at everybody who comes in the door, what better training for a politician?"
By luck and instinct, the 46- year-old Republican, the son of a politician whose career ended in disgrace, has become Contra Costa's "go-to man," wielding influence disproportionate to his district, which includes one-fifth of the county's 900,000 residents.
His first critical vote as a supervisor decided the fate of public health care in Contra Costa by leading to the building of a new county hospital. When the federal government unloaded spent nuclear fuel rods at the Concord Naval Weapons Station in July, DeSaulnier was on the dock. Last month, he pulled strings behind the scenes to pressure Browning-Ferris Industries to settle the three- week garbage strike.


If TR's was the 1980's bar in Concord CA was power house of County then you could assume that former Concord Police Officer Mike Foley would have known Mark.
I asked for help from Supervisor DeSaulnier a long time back as I've known him since 1981 when I built a bar on the same block today is known as VinniesBar.com opened as Hobies Roadhouse and the City of Concord was really pissed over those really fun lingerie shows.


THE KKK Lives in Concord CA 

The 1986 Lynching of Timothy Lee




Talked about as a candidate for higher office within days of taking his supervisor's seat four years ago, DeSaulnier has been on key panels and commissions, helping pick a new Bay Bridge design and starting a multicounty drive to rein in suburban sprawl.
"He's been a real leader in trying to tackle regional issues," said Gary Binger, planning director for the Association of Bay Area Governments. "People like him. He has a self-effacing attitude. He doesn't seem to have a secret agenda."
Now DeSaulnier has staked his political fortunes on resolving the decade-old battle over safety at the county's four oil refineries.
Far more is at stake than DeSaulnier's political ambition.
"They (the refineries) produce a lot of the lifeblood of the economy," said DeSaulnier, whose business sympathies are checked by unusually strong union backing for a Republican. "If the general public all of a sudden had to start paying 50 cents more a gallon in Northern California because of the actions of the Contra Costa Board of Supervisors, they wouldn't be too happy about that."
DeSaulnier wants to replace the county's controversial Good Neighbor Ordinance, the industrial safety law passed in 1996, with a compromise measure reached by oil companies and unions.
To win, DeSaulnier must preserve the strained alliance while persuading environmentalists and refinery neighbors that the replacement ordinance will lessen chances of explosions or chemical releases.
DeSaulnier and Supervisor Joe Canciamilla of Pittsburg withdrew a previous proposal this year when industrial leaders bolted. One environmentalist accused DeSaulnier of getting "weak in the knees again" for backing down.
But DeSaulnier believes diving into tough policy questions will pay off in the long run.
He describes his French-Canadian immigrant grandfather in Lowell, Mass., as a "little Joe Kennedy" -- a Republican version -- who guided his son into politics.
His father, Edward J. DeSaulnier Jr., won a seat in the Massachusetts Legislature in 1948 and later became a Superior Court judge. But he was disbarred for grossly improper conduct and resigned in 1972 after being accused of accepting a $60,000 bribe.
At the time, Mark DeSaulnier, who grew up reading newspaper articles lauding his father as potential governor, was entering his sophomore year at the Jesuit-run College of Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. Confronted by his father's alcoholism, gambling and corruption, the younger DeSaulnier swore off politics.
He landed in San Francisco, tending bar at Henry Africa's and later joining ranks with Tower at the Santa Fe Bar & Grill. In the early 1980s, DeSaulnier, who was already a part-owner of TR's, sold his share in Santa Fe and became full owner of TR's, which was named after his model of progressive Republicanism, President Theodore Roosevelt.
DeSaulnier's father shot himself at his Florida retirement home in 1989, spurring a new round of soul-searching. DeSaulnier had already relented on staying out of government, serving as a Concord planning commissioner. Two years later, as "part of the redemption stuff" over his father's past, he ran for the Concord City Council and won.
But DeSaulnier pledged he would never let ego and hubris get the best of him, if for no other reason than to spare his sons, Tristan and Tucker, now 15 and 13, a similar ordeal.
When four-term Supervisor Sunne McPeak resigned in 1994, Governor Pete Wilson appointed DeSaulnier to serve the remaining nine months of her term. The free- thinking DeSaulnier soon snubbed Wilson by opposing the anti-illegal immigration Proposition 187, a central plank of Wilson's re-election campaign that year.
Months after winning a new four-year term with the endorsement of U.S. Representative George Miller, D-Martinez, a lunch regular at TR's, DeSaulnier infuriated anti-tax conservatives by voting to build a $125.6 million county hospital instead of sending county patients to three community hospitals.
The mostly Republican opponents of the new hospital branded him a traitor. But DeSaulnier's pro-labor, socially moderate outlook, along with his business ties, have made him appealing to people in both parties.
"He's certainly worked very hard and he's accomplished a lot," said state Senator Richard Rainey, R-Walnut Creek.
Rainey is only one of the politicians urging DeSaulnier to make a run for the Legislature.
"My political consultant says Sacramento needs a good restaurant," DeSaulnier joked.