A Dream Job Comes True
Marin Realtors Group CEO Combines Politics with Public Relations

Keri Brenner
Marin Independent Journal
Sunday, June 19, 2005
kbrenner@marinij.com

Early on, Edward Segal's parents tried to divert his passion for politics to other, more profitable ventures.

"They thought an interesting career like politics would not guarantee long-term employment," recalls Segal, named this year as chief executive of the Marin Association of Realtors.

But his parents were not only much too late - they were wrong. If there were a store called "Politics 'R' Us," Segal would be behind the counter - or perhaps hired as its public relations rep.

Since starting work at the Realtors' trade association in January 2003, Segal has led the charge on real estate issues, raised the group's profile in the Marin public arena, launched an array of educational programs, lobbied for changes at various Marin government meetings and increased membership - but not without stepping on a few toes along the way.

"Some people get really upset by our tactics and take it personally," Segal said recently. "For us, it's a matter of politics: Some people don't understand how important it is for us to stand up for our rights.

"It's not personal," he added. "It's politics."

San Rafael City Manager Rod Gould, whose office was caught by surprise in 2003 when a reporter and photographer showed up to record Segal and others delivering a business license tax protest letter to City Hall, declined comment for this article.

Despite ruffled feathers, the incident had results. A short time afterward, the city changed its mind on proposed business license tax reforms that would have affected area real estate agents.

"Edward knows how to get his message across," said Jack McLaughlin, 2005 president of the Marin Association of Realtors. "He understands our mission as Realtors is to protect the rights of property owners and to be vigilant about government attempts to intervene in our process."

Segal orchestrated a similar success in overthrowing a point-of-sale low-flow toilets retrofit program at Marin Municipal Water District; he is hoping to do the same with a point-of-sale sewer lateral inspection proposal at Las Gallinas Valley Water District.

"We were the first private organization to come out publicly against the expansion of San Quentin's death row," Segal said. Asked if he and the real estate association have taken some heat about that position from people who say they just want a "land grab," Segal says it's a bad rap.

"A lot of people don't have a clear understanding of what a Realtor does," Segal says. "They confuse Realtors with developers - the difference is night and day."

Real estate agents, he notes, "list and sell homes," while developers are the ones who buy up land to build houses.

Groundbreaking on the death row expansion, to cost $220 million, is set for this fall next to the existing 153-year-old prison on the bay front near Larkspur Landing.

"In the San Quentin issue, our concern is about the quality of life in Marin," Segal says.

"We are advocates of workforce housing, and San Quentin represents one of the precious few opportunity areas for people who are looking for affordable places to live."

If some of his methods are controversial, Segal says it comes with the territory when taxpayers' money, the public trust and political power are involved.

As a press secretary in Washington, D.C., in the 1970s, Segal helped devise campaigns and media events for a string of congressmen, including former state Sen. John Burton, D-San Francisco, who served in the House of Representatives from 1974 to early 1983.

"(Segal) is hardworking, diligent and intelligent," recalls Burton, who was termed out of his state Senate post last year and now heads the John Burton Foundation for Children Without Homes out of his private law office in San Francisco. "Did you want a more compound sentence?"

Segal says Burton, who was Senate president pro tem, and his brother, former U.S. Rep. Phil Burton, D-San Francisco, had "a reputation for being loud and profane - and they certainly lived up to that.

"But they were also passionate about fighting for the poor and dispossessed," added Segal, who calls John Burton his hero. "Politics mixed with passion is a very powerful formula for success - there's no way you can argue with (Burton's) success over the years."

Elissa Giambastiani, chief executive of the San Rafael Chamber of Commerce, said she and Segal collaborated on numerous local campaigns, including one for Measure A, last year's successful transportation sales tax ballot measure.

"We were out there with our Burma Shave jingles," she said, referring to Segal's idea for a sign campaign at Marin street corners. "I wrote the jingles, we put them on signs and carried them around town - it was an interesting way of getting the message across."

Most memorable was a Marin candidates forum last year involving Democrat Carole Migden and Republican Andrew Felder, vying to replace Burton in the Third District Senate seat. Migden won the race despite offending almost everyone at the Marin event by being late and refusing to shake Felder's hand.

Segal's and Giambastiani's organizations jointly sponsored the event, which stunned area officials while offering opportunities for choice quips - such as Segal's description of the "audible gasp" in the room, followed with, "You could hear a pin drop."

"He has a very good sense of humor," Giambastiani said.

Later, after Migden was elected, the event became history. Segal offered the senator a full page in the monthly association magazine for her commentary; Migden took him up on it.

The author of a book, "Getting Your 15 Minutes of Fame," (April 2000, John Wiley, New York), and a frequent public speaker and media skills trainer, Segal also does private coaching on presentation skills.

During last year's heated Marin supervisor's race between Charles McGlashan and Andrew Thompson, Segal offered both candidates free coaching sessions "as a public service."

In a move that was surprising to some observers, the real estate group endorsed McGlashan, a former Sierra Club official who later won the race, over Thompson, who works for a commercial real estate firm in San Francisco.

"The last place I thought I'd ever work was a trade association, but it's a great combination of politics and P.R.," Segal says. "In a lot of ways, it's my dream job, and it's very political."

After leaving their home in Georgetown in August 2000, Segal and his wife, Pam, moved back to California, settling in a seven-acre apple orchard in Sebastopol. The couple has two dogs, Sparky and Charlie, and a cat, Johnny.

At the time, Segal was running his own public relations firm, which he started in 1990. Over the years, his clients included Ford Motor Co., Marriott Corp., the Consumer Electronics Show and the FBI. Segal also was a columnist for a Wall Street Journal-run Web site, startupjournal.com.

But within a short while after the move, the dot-com and stock-market implosion dried up a lot of public-relations work, so Segal began scouting for a steady gig.

An ad in a local newspaper for a real estate trade association government affairs director caught his eye. The Marin Association of Realtors was looking for a replacement for former Marin Supervisor Al Aramburu, who was moving to Sacramento to set up his own real estate office.

Hired for the job in January 2003, Segal was quickly promoted to executive vice president and then, this year, chief executive. During that time, membership in the association has climbed from about 1,200 to more than 1,600.

"We're seeing in Marin a different type of people getting into real estate," he said. "Former trial attorneys, journalists, health-care professionals, serial entrepreneurs."

Marin's other-worldly median home prices, among the highest in the nation, perhaps have attracted a different group of agents than the stereotype housewife or middle-ager who dabbles in real estate part-time.

"Here, people are really serious," Segal said. "They don't regard it as a hobby or sideline - the approach is very professional."

The son of an accountant father and travel agency operator mom, Segal and his younger sister grew up in the Southern California community of Inglewood, a suburb of Los Angeles.

By age 16, Segal had started his political career, volunteering for a local political campaign. His job was to yell campaign slogans through a megaphone mounted on a truck riding through the neighborhoods.

"I liked to talk," he says.

Later, in 1972, he served as student body president at the California State University campus in Dominguez Hills and was editor of the school newspaper, the Bullsheet.

In college, Segal once attended a speech by Sen. Robert Kennedy at a local defense contractor and invited the senator to speak on campus. The visit never took place: Kennedy was assassinated a month later.

While still in school, Segal volunteered for a job as a press aide for U.S. Rep. Glenn Anderson, D-Hawthorne. Later, after Anderson was re-elected, he offered Segal a patronage job in his Washington, D.C., office delivering mail and helping out with office duties.

That led to Anderson introducing Segal to Burton, who had just won a special election to serve in Congress. Burton hired Segal as his first press secretary in 1974.

Segal soon formed a club, the Capitol Hill Young Democrats, and served as the group's president.

In 1984, as a press aide to U.S. Rep. Mickey Edwards, R-Okla., Segal persuaded Edwards to run his re-election campaign off the rear platform of a rented Santa Fe Railroad train on a 102-mile "whistle-stop" tour of the state.

Though the election itself was a non-event, the whistle-stop campaign - the first such tour of Oklahoma cities since President Harry S. Truman and New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey campaigned for the presidency there in 1948 - scored national media coverage.

Edwards, with Segal's coaching, also became famous for being the first congressman to use televised House proceedings to publicize the case of a missing Oklahoma City teenage girl. Although the girl wasn't found, the program drew wide support among other members of the House and among families of missing children across the nation.

"Sometimes," Segal says, "you have to break eggs to make an omelet."