Franco the Greatest

After Franco Consolacion died on June 6, 2014 at age 75 from serious health complications that had debilitated him since 2005, a mutual friend, Cip Ayalin, asked me to say a few words at his Cypress Lawn funeral wake on June 14. I replied that I wasn’t sure if I could find enough good words to say about him. Nonetheless, his brother, Alex, and his son, Gary, asked me to speak and so I did. 
At one point, Franco and I had been close friends, as my law office was right across his accountancy office on Market Street and we would often have lunch together, along with another friend, the late Jess Esteva, publisher of the Mabuhay Republic.  
We were such close friends that I was the first one he called when he was arrested for pointing a gun at a homeless man who had harassed him late at night as he was walking to his car. When his call woke me up at 3 a.m. one very early morning, I asked him why he didn’t call his wife. “She would kill me if she found out,” he explained. So I bailed Franco out, represented him in court and got the charges against him dismissed.  
And yet, years later, when I ran for election the BART Board in 1990, where I would be the first Filipino elected to public office in San Francisco, Franco turned his back on me and supported my opponent, James Fang, who had the unified backing of his Chinese community and the endorsement of every major political official in San Francisco. When I lost by 56 votes, Franco publicly claimed credit for my defeat boasting that he convinced at least 56 Filipino voters in San Francisco to vote for my opponent.  
Many years later, we patched up our differences as Franco apologized and explained that he just wanted to teach me a lesson. It wasn’t much of a lesson because I ran for the San Francisco Community College Board two years later and won as I did for 3 consecutive elections thereafter. But our friendship had been strained. 
So it was with mixed feelings that I agreed to deliver a eulogy for Franco. I began by declaring that of all the Filipino community leaders I had met and known over the past 43 years in the U.S., I would say, without fear of contradiction, that Franco Consolacion had the biggest ego of them all. He was an unabashed egomaniac.  
To my surprise, the chapel audience composed of his family and friends all nodded their heads in agreement. They all knew Franco to be the best Filipino community leader, the best accountant, the best lover, the best in everything he did. If you had any doubt, just ask Franco.  
But, I said, sometimes, one’s greatest flaw is also one’s greatest strength. 
I shared that when Rev. Jesse Jackson was asked if he had a big ego for his decision to run for the Democratic nomination for president in 1992, he replied: “Show me a presidential candidate without a big ego, and I’ll show you a national security risk.” The general consensus then was that an African American could never hope to win the presidency so his election campaign was a joke, a futile exercise. 
Franco immigrated to the US with his family after martial law was declared in the Philippines in September of 1972. At the time of his move, he was a successful Certified Public Accountant (CPA) – the a “topnotcher” in the accountancy exams he told me – in the Philippines and was teaching accounting at the University of the East. 
Franco secured a job as a senior accountant of the University of California in San Francisco Medical Center and earned enough to buy a home in Pinole, a bedroom community outside the City.  
To be a certified public accountant in California, one had to pass the accountancy exams or obtain a “waiver” from the California Board of Accountancy granted to a qualified applicant who is a holder of a valid and unrevoked certificate as a Certified Public Accountant issued in a foreign country.” Starting in 1971, Filipino CPAs from the Philippines applied for this waiver but they were uniformly denied. 
In 1973, Franco led a renewed effort to secure “waivers” for Filipino CPAs by mobilizing the Bay Area Filipino community to rally to their cause as a civil rights issue. After all, the state Board of Accountancy routinely approved waivers for foreign accountants from British Commonwealth countries who just happened to be white. In a number of these countries, like Ireland, one could be a CPA after only two years of college education.
 Franco sought to get the law amended to prohibit discrimination by the Board of Accountancy on the basis of national origin. But the 1977 legislative effort failed because of the forceful opposition of the California Society of Certified Public Accountants and other vested interests.
 The tide turned for the Filipino CPAs when Robert Gnaizda, the founder and senior partner of Public Advocates, joined the fray by filing an administrative complaint with the State Board of Consumer Affairs (BCA) charging the State Board of Accountancy with discrimination against Filipino CPAs. After a lengthy hearing, the BCA ruled in favor of the Filipino accountants. The BCA director, Richard Spohn, wrote: The Board (of Accountancy) has instituted a double and discriminatory standard for foreign CPAs based on race and national origin.” 
But conservative Republican Attorney General Evelle Younger ignored the BCA finding and ruled that the Board of Accountancy was right not to “inquire into the qualifications of the applicant or certification.” 
The tide turned in 1978 when Jerry Brown was elected governor of California – with the strong support of Filipinos led by Alex Esclamado’s Browns for Brown movement. Brown repaid the Filipinos’ support by signing into law Assembly Bill 1495 which made it unlawful for licensing boards to establish qualifications for licensure that would have adverse effects on specified classes unless the qualifications were job-related.
 Brown also appointed a Fil-Am lawyer from San Francisco, Mel Santos, Jr., to the State Board of Accountancy. Santos, together with another Brown appointee, Stu Pollack, sponsored a Board resolution granting waivers to all foreign applicants who were otherwise qualified and who had applied for or had been discouraged from applying for the waivers before December 1, 1977. The Pollack resolution passed by a 6-3 vote, a major victory for the Filipino accountants. 
But it was premature exuberation because the Board, in July 1979, voted to hold public hearings before the resolution could go into effect.  
On June 1, 1980, after waiting for the Board to out the Pollack resolution into effect, Franco filed a class-action lawsuit in the Sacramento County Superior Court on behalf of the Filipino accountants against the State Board of Accountancy. At the trial of the lawsuit, Gnaizda presented evidence that the State Board of Accountancy had granted waivers to 68 applicants from the British Commonwealth countries, half of whom were only high school or vocational school graduates from their countries.  
On October 29, 1980, the Court handed down its decision finding that the Board had abused its discretion in denying waivers to the Filipino CPAs and directing them to re-evaluate all the previous waiver applications. The State Board of Accountancy voted 9-0 to accept the court order and not appeal it to the Supreme Court. Now the celebration could begin.
 But it would be short-lived. By then the California Legislature, bucking to the pressure of the California Society of Public Accountants, had passed a bill abolishing the waiver provision and prohibiting the State Board of Accountancy from issuing any further waivers to foreign applicants.
Fortunately, the new state law would not be applied retroactively. The Filipino CPAs who qualified to be granted waivers would still receive their waivers if they applied for it before July 9, 1983. 
About 646 Philippine-trained CPAs applied for the waivers and 294 of them had their waivers approved. By the end of the waiver process, there were more Filipino CPAs in California than there were African-American and Latino CPAs combined.  
It was a major civil rights victory for the Filipino community and for all foreign applicants who had been discriminated against because of their national origin. It was a victory that was the result of the dogged determination of a Filipino community leader with an outsized ego. Anyone with a small or medium-sized ego would not have had the self-confidence to take on the mighty Goliath that was the State Board of Accountancy and the California Society of Public Accountants. 
Rest in peace, Franco. Okay, okay, you win, you were greatest.
 (For more information on the struggle for justice by the Filipino CPAs, please read “America Beckons: the Chronicles of an Immigrant” by Sal Partible, the partner and close friend of Franco Consolacion.)