Council colleagues look back and ahead

November marks the end of an era for an unlikely tag team on the Modesto City Council — Will O'Bryant, a Democrat and retired sheriff's detective, and Janice Keating, a Republican accountant.

They've been allies since before they won their first elections in March 2002, back when O'Bryant approached Keating at a forum to ask which council seat she would seek.

" 'All I want to know is what seat you're running for,' " Keating remembered O'Bryant asking her when he introduced himself in 2001. " 'Because I think we should work together.' We've been friends ever since."

Keating and O'Bryant are at the end of their council terms. Now that Modesto has switched from citywide to district elections, if either wishes to run again, it must be in 2011, when their districts choose candidates

In one sense, it's a good time to leave for O'Bryant, who has been fighting cancer while participating in council meetings by phone since January.

As they get ready to leave office in December to be replaced by candidates elected by district, the two have been taking stock of their seven rough-and-tumble years on the council, time in which they often carried each other's points in debates they won and votes they lost.

They participated in the second half of Mayor Carmen Sabatino's term, dug up data on how the city bungled its Village I development, outlasted four city managers, put a spotlight on more than one project that they believed wasted public money and notched a few solid accomplishments of their own.

Keating helped bring a new homeless shelter downtown. O'Bryant passed a controversial rent-control ordinance in 2007 to protect seniors in mobile home parks.

They spoke with The Bee last week in Keating's office, which still holds the 2002 City Council handbook she read to get up to speed when she won election.

BEE: What do you see in the next year as the first candidates from district elections take office?

KEATING: The incoming people are going to have more of a mentality for a specific area of the city. It's going to take time to weld together the two systems of being elected at-large and by district. You're going to have someone on the council get elected with 500 votes to represent a city of 210,000.

BEE: Tell me about the fight over Village I (the northeast Modesto subdivisions where the city failed to charge for the full impacts of development).

O'BRYANT: The battle with Village I was that we didn't know how much money wasn't being collected in developer fees. Carmen had these outlandish numbers, and he wanted to freeze everything, but it wasn't legal. I tell you what, there wasn't a developer in this county who wasn't listening to that.

BEE: But the council did freeze development for a time.

O'BRYANT: Not the ones that already had vested maps.

KEATING: It was a matter of stopping the bleeding, readjusting the fees to cover the remaining expenses and spreading the costs among the remaining developers. There wasn't a conspiracy. There was a lot of sloppiness on the part of the city.

O'BRYANT: The city was sloppy and the developers took advantage of it.

BEE: Mayor Jim Ridenour won election in 2003. What changed?

KEATING: He was just the calming influence we needed.

BEE: When I think of you two working together, I remember the Public Works maintenance building that was being constructed without the council's consent in 2006. How did that come together?

KEATING: We had been searching for it and the (tipster) said look for the giant warehouse building with no doors. They ran out of money and couldn't build the doors. So we go there and my purse spills out as I leave the car. I'm snapping pictures with my camera and trying to stuff everything in my purse.

BEE: I've seen you pick up each other's arguments time and again, even when you don't win over your colleagues. What's it been like for you, Councilwoman Keating, over the past year with Councilman O'Bryant participating in meetings by phone?

KEATING: It's been harder because Will and I just sort of intuitively understand where we're coming from. With just myself, I feel like I'm talking and people are just staring. It's really nice to have someone on the other side of the dais.

BEE: Any advice for your successors?

KEATING: You never run out of problems to solve. We really got a kick out of everything.

O'BRYANT: You get back what you put into it. If you work hard, you'll get good things.

Bee assistant city editor Adam Ashton can be reached at aashton@modbee.com or 578-2366.