There was a rousing welcome for California Gov. Jerry Brown on Tuesday, who made his first, last and only appearance before the Sacramento Press Club in eight years.“I’m not here to make news,” Brown quipped. “I’m here to enlighten you.”Brown is finishing his fourth term as governor -- a total of 16 years in the executive office -- with more time than anyone else will ever serve because of term limits.“I want the next governor to have something to do,” Brown said, with a twinkle in his eye. “I don’t want to solve every problem, I want to leave a few."After joking with the packed room at the Masonic Lodge, Brown turned serious when KCRA 3 asked him about two of his biggest projects: high speed rail and the Delta water tunnels.What will happen when he leaves office? “They’ll be built in a timely responsible way,” Brown said to applause.If completed, California would be the only state with high speed rail. Brown also said the Delta tunnel project is critically important.“The Delta will be destroyed unless we build some sort of peripheral canal or tunnel,” Brown said. But for Brown, the word legacy is a loaded one.“What’s so interesting about Brown,” said David Siders, a national political correspondent for Politico, “you ask him about his legacy and he hates that.” “But the things he cares about, and that he devotes all his attention to, are really these legacy issues of humankind -- which climate change is: Is the world going to survive?” he addedBrown has been a warrior on the fight over climate change, and he’s also been a fiscal hawk.“His legacy is keeping the budget on track,” said Barbara O’Connor, an emeritus faculty member at Sacramento State, where she is the director of the Institute for the Study of Politics and Media.O’Connor added that Brown proved himself adept at “saying no to a Democratically dominated legislature.”By cutting government spending and with help from an improving economy, Brown was able to turn a $27 billion deficit in 2011 into a more than $14 billion surplus today.Brown, the intellectually curious scholar, has a fun side, too. In the 1970s, during his first two terms, he would frequently socialize after hours with reporters over drinks, according to CALmatters’ Dan Walters. “He liked to drink beer back in the 70s,” Walters said. “But he liked to drink Coors beer, which was on organized labor’s bad list because the Coors family was very right-wing Republicans. So, he would drink Coors beer only when he knew he wouldn’t be photographed drinking Coors beer."As for the governor’s next move, historian Miriam Pawel said she knows the answer. Pawel wrote the book, “The Browns of California." She said Brown will retire on his Colusa ranch house, the same land where his great grandfather lived 140 years ago.“His ancestral homeland has really become important to him,” Pawel said. “He’s been spending a lot of time up in Colusa on this land, where August Schuckman settled in 1878. It’s where his grandmother was born and raised.”Brown briefly ruminated about his future Tuesday.“I enjoy what I’m doing,” he said. “I try to do things that are important and also interesting to me. But what I’m proud of, that’s something you can ask me on the ranch after I’ve been there a couple of years.”