By David Siders

McClatchy Newspapers

(MCT)

LAS VEGAS - California Gov. Jerry Brown, who said little about job creation for the first seven months of his term, suddenly can't get it off his mind.

In the last two weeks alone, Brown appointed a jobs adviser and touted the state budget's passage as a measure to improve investor confidence in California.

He proposed changes to the corporate tax structure that he said would create jobs, and when he left the state on Tuesday for the first time since taking office, it was to promote California's green energy economy.

"There's a lot of stuff we can do, and it takes investment," Brown said at a clean energy summit in Las Vegas. "And the same kind of curve of rising investment and profit and jobs is in the energy field as was in the microchip field many decades ago."

The rhetoric represents a change in course for the Democratic governor, who focused almost exclusively on the state budget deficit the first half of the year. Brown's turn to jobs follows criticism he neglected the subject as unemployment reached 12 percent and other politicians, including Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, announced jobs proposals of their own.

"For the most part, really the only thing they've hard from the governor is about managing the budget, which is important," said Adam Mendelsohn, a political adviser to former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. "But it's equally important to have a proactive agenda on the table. I think the public wants to know that government is on the case."

In a clean energy jobs plan proposed during last year's campaign, Brown said he could fast-track permits for solar projects, install solar panels along state highways and otherwise promote the creation of 20,000 new megawatts of renewable energy by 2020. He said the initiative could create about 500,000 jobs, and on the day this month that he appointed his jobs adviser, Michael Rossi, he said the state is "well on our way" to achieving that goal.

"Even the brightest people in the world have a hard time figuring this out, and there's a certain amount which is just the global economy doing its thing," Brown said Tuesday. "So, the governor has a function, and I'm exercising that function, I think, in a very creative, positive way."

Many of Brown's steps are incremental. Intervening in local land-use decisions to defeat opposition to renewable energy projects, he facilitated a settlement between environmentalists and the developers of two solar power projects in San Luis Obispo County.

In the Mojave Desert, where environmentalists worried about desert tortoise habitat filed litigation to block a solar project, Brown filed a legal brief asking a judge to let it go forward.

"We're going to take care of the tortoise," Brown said in a crowd-pleasing moment recently in Fresno. "We're going to give it a lot of shade."

The long-term effect of his energy push is uncertain. The state most recently estimated that only about 3.4 percent of total employment is in the production of green goods and services, with about 433,000 people working at least part time. Nor has the industry been without setbacks.

Near the Arizona border, the massive Blythe Solar Power Project has been delayed since Brown visited to celebrate a groundbreaking in June. Full-scale construction, once expected to begin this fall, is now expected to start a year later due to a decision to use different technology, a company official said.

It is projected to create about 500 construction jobs, about half as many as the company once predicted.

"To a large extent, jobs in California are hostage to jobs in the United States," said Alan Auerbach, an economist at the University of California-Berkeley. "You can't separate the California economy from the U.S. economy. That's really beyond the governor's reach."

Still, Auerbach said, through broad policy initiatives a governor "can essentially force an industry to grow." He cited as an example Brown's signing in April of legislation requiring California utilities to obtain one-third of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020.

Voters know state government "can't be the solution to the global slowdown," said Thad Kousser, a political science professor at the University of California-San Diego. "But we still want to see the people we put in office fighting for the thing that's the biggest issue of the day."

Brown has acknowledged the limitations of state government. He said recently that "if we really wanted to get the country moving, we'd get a stimulus out of the federal government."

But on Tuesday, Brown said the state "over the long term" can affect job creation by investing in infrastructure, energy, schools and public safety.

"This is the nuts and bolts of strengthening the economy," he said. "You have to do whatever it is you can do."

Job creation is politically significant to Brown, who is trying to corner the issue for Democrats before statewide elections next year, while also considering what tax increases to propose to voters in November 2012.

Brown said Tuesday that polls on taxes are generally unfavorable but said voters might approve sales and income taxes.

"Sales and income could pass under certain circumstances," he said. "It could. And it couldn't."

Brown's proposal last week to eliminate one corporate tax benefit in return for others - a controversial measure he presented as a jobs plan - was criticized by Republicans, and they are likely to defeat it in the Legislature. Senate Republican Leader Bob Dutton, of Rancho Cucamonga, issued a series of statements Tuesday urging lawmakers to oppose bills he said would hurt businesses, including the bill containing Brown's corporate tax proposal.

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