R.I.P. ROGER DIAMOND, HUGE INFLUENCE ON STATE’S POLITICS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MARCH 11, 2025, OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“R.I.P. ROGER DIAMOND, HUGE INFLUENCE ON STATE’S POLITICS”

 

If you’ve ever been accosted by an initiative or recall petition carrier outside a grocery, big box store a la Costco or Home Depot or voted for or against any California initiative in the last 50 years, you have been affected by Roger Jon Diamond.

 

Diamond, possibly the least known major contributor to California politics in the last century, died at 81 in February, exactly six weeks after he and his family lost their bluffside home in the early January Palisades fire.

 

The blaze destroyed Diamond’s hacienda-style home of 50 years overlooking the Pacific Ocean and two other homes just blocks away that belonged to his two daughters and their families.

 

Diamond was best known for his 20 years as head of a community organization called No Oil Inc., which successfully fought off several attempts to drill major oil wells below his bluff and in other coastal zones.

 

But his biggest political contribution came first in a shopping mall more than 90 miles east in San Bernardino and then in a series of courtrooms.

 

In 1970, Diamond took on as a nonpaying pro bono client a grassroots group called the People’s Lobby, headed by activists Ed and Joyce Koupal (no relation to Jonathan Coupal, head of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn.). The Koupals’ group sought to put an omnibus measure called the Environment Initiative onto the 1972 ballot, and began to gather signatures for it.

 

This was long before the days when consultants offered anywhere up to $6 per signature for valid John Hancocks from registered voters.

 

Ed Koupal came up with the then-original idea of seeking out voters at indoor shopping malls, then a fairly new and growing phenomenon. Diamond among them, some Koupal associates began soliciting shoppers at San Bernardino’s Inland Center and were quickly kicked out by county sheriff’s deputies.

 

Diamond, who had been a lawyer just four years at the time, sued. He claimed shopping malls like the Inland Center – which at the time hosted upwards of 25,000 visitors daily – were de facto public places. He put his name on the lawsuit against 28-year Sheriff Frank Bland, referred to in one biography as “a John Wayne lawman.” It was known as Diamond v. Bland.

 

The case was quickly laughed out of San Bernardino County Superior Court, as the mall’s owner Homart Development Co., tightly regulated all activity in its 32-foot-wide corridors and the adjacent parking lots.

 

The bottom line: Diamond took the case to the state Supreme Court and won access. Eventually, a variety of other court cases and settlements reduced petition carriers to operating almost exclusively outdoors, but still allowing them on store and mall properties. Those settlements have been imitated in most states across the nation.

 

Koupal’s Environment Initiative made the ballot and lost, but Diamond’s lawsuit lives on.

 

If you’ve ever walked down a beach accessway between private properties, you were a beneficiary of the 1972 Coastal Initiative, one of the first measures to gather signatures on commercial property.

 

Then-Gov. Ronald Reagan used the same tactic to qualify a tax-cutting ballot initiative in 1973 also taking advantage of Diamond’s lawsuit. Reagan’s measure lost, but morphed into the landmark 1978 Proposition 13, which remains law today and keeps property taxes here well below national averages.

 

The consumer advocates who qualified the 1988 Proposition 103 to regulate insurance prices also circulated petitions at shopping malls. So did sponsors of later initiatives to ban smoking in most indoor spaces and tinkering with the definitions of felonies and misdemeanors.

 

Diamond loved all this. “I wanted California to have open politics and I’m glad I helped with that, even if I don’t always agree with the causes they push.”

 

Diamond was always vocal for the environment, accosting nearby smokers in the stands at countless baseball, football and basketball games. He never left a game early and would castigate friends who sometimes did.

 

Roger Diamond was a unique contributor to California politics, giving outsiders like himself influence they otherwise never could have had.

 

Rest in peace, Roger. May we sometime soon encounter more of your kind in politics.

 

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net