|
|
|
Charter Reform Vs. the Loons on the City Council Council members are up in arms over Richard Riordan's fight for more power in the mayor's office.
Steve Soboroff, named California's 1995 Father of the Year by the governor, head of Big Brothers of Los Angeles, and a good man by most measures, sits in a packed hearing room at City Hall, his eyes swollen into puffy slits from surgery. He's checked out of the hospital, far too early, so he can be present as City Councilwoman Rita Walters publicly hangs him. And Walters is going at it full tilt, her voice crackling with rage, her fine, bony fingers compulsively smoothing a stack of papers, as she accuses Soboroff of being a lowdown, scheming dog. "Your actions don't pass the smell test!" Walters cries. Soboroff is in hot water, big-time. The parks commission, of which he is chairman, has decided to keep its shop operator at a city golf course instead of giving the fat contract to the councilwoman's buddy, famed former Laker Happy Hairston, and a company he represents. Walters is on an emotional bender, not merely because Hairston lost to the better bidder after nearly winning, but also because Soboroff knows Hairston has been heavily lobbying council members to overturn the decision. And rather than let long hours of his commission's work get squashed by politics, Soboroff is standing up to Walters, the Council's most openly vicious member. "This process has been tainted!" accuses Walters. Soboroff's lips appears to part. "Mr. Soboroff, you are not allowed to talk!" she orders. "I will tell you when you may talk!" Councilman Richard Alarcon, sitting by Walters, can hold back no longer. A career bureaucrat, Alarcon is highly suspicious of uppity commissions. He wants a full report on just exactly how Hairston's group got rejected. "It's highly irregular!" Alarcon charges. "It's highly unusual!" An assistant city attorney is dragged forth to settle things. In a judicious near-whisper, he offers, "The process is not tainted in any legal way." Out in the audience, a lot of people--normal people--have begun to audibly giggle. The council members' red-faced sputterings are funny. One man, seeking his own city golf-course contract, leans toward another and cracks, "Jee-SUS criminy what a frigging circus. This is how L.A. really runs?" The answer, often, is yes. L.A. City Hall is a place where much of what goes on seems to make little sense. The City Council's leftist feminist, Jackie Goldberg, often cries like a child to influence her mostly male colleagues; the council's Day of Tolerance organizer, Mark Ridley-Thomas, has launched racial attacks against Latino colleagues during executive sessions; and the council's fiery orator, Nate Holden, made into a rising star by frequent coverage in the Los Angeles Times, cannot prove his endless claims that conspiracies underlie virtually every City Hall issue he's against. Motives at City Hall are so murky that a cottage industry of interpreters now promptly offers translations of what they believe council members are really saying. After the Walters fiasco, translators out in a hall concurred that Walters had attacked the Father of the Year to take heat off her own politicking--a common diversionary tactic. Said one pundit: "It's pure arrogance of power at City Council. It's gotten to be an embarrassment." A few days later, in the marbled Council Chambers, Valley councilwoman Laura Chick was sounding reluctant about a proposal to merge the LAPD with the city transit police. But elsewhere in City Hall, a rival's aide listened over the intercom, offering blow-by-blow commentary on what Chick really meant: "She wants to hold off on the police merger because she suspects the mayor is behind it," said the aide, frowning, though Chick had said nothing of the sort. (Chick, who agreed to the merger last week, vehemently denies such a motive.) For his part, Holden has publicly attacked dozens of people this year, from the "police commission's lynching" of Chief Willie Williams to "secret dealers who control" city housing funds, to the "misfits and rejects" of the transit police. People who hear Holden on the news are no doubt alarmed by his claims, but, as Councilman Mike Hernandez notes, City Hall insiders instantly translate: "It's hot air from a man obsessed with getting on TV." Indeed, Holden sometimes turns to aides or journalists and chuckles at his own performance: "Wasn't I great?" If council politics is a mystery, the policies and laws the council approves sometimes seem even more baffling. Each year, for example, the council pays about $1.2 million in claims for accidents caused by 4,620 miles of buckling sidewalks--the exact same amount of cash the council needs to actually repair L.A.'s sidewalks. The council is perplexed over why companies avoid L.A., so it spent months working on a complex incentive plan to woo firms here to manufacture the big, blue trash-recycling bins that will soon appear on every L.A. doorstep. Yet even as the big, blue bin debate raged, down the hall Mayor Richard Riordan was releasing two studies, one by Arthur Andersen and one by Kosmont & Associates, showing that L.A. taxes its businesses a staggering 129% to 416% higher than other Western cities. The Council has yet to see the connection. Little wonder that the city council is under the most unrelenting fire from the public since the scandalous 1920s. Widespread disenchantment has fueled the first viable breakaway movement by the San Fernando Valley, and Riordan has placed a measure on next Tuesday's ballot to elect a citizen committee to reform the City Charter, the source of the council's bewildering array of conflicting powers. Most council members have bitterly opposed both efforts--but their motives require some translation. Councilwoman Ruth Galanter heatedly slams charter reform as "a power-grab by Mayor Riordan"--yet Galanter is clearly aware that Riordan won't even be in office when reforms kick in, due to term limits that Riordan himself forced upon City Hall. If voters next week back Proposition 8, the newly elected charter reform committee is expected to offer voters a package of reforms in two to three years that many observers believe will mirror past reform attempts: a shift in planning and other local decisions to neighborhood councils; creation of a true executive branch run by a mayor, as in New York and Chicago; a clear delineation of council duties as a legislative body--not an administrative body; and reduced council district sizes, from 230,000 residents to perhaps 100,000, to end the current era of non-representative "fiefdoms," which give L.A. council members power over more individuals than is permitted in any other city in the United States. The elected committee is expected to build on extensive work from 1970, when citizens tried to reform City Hall but were shut out by a power-hungry council. This year, in an eerie replay, the mayor was forced to go to court to impel the council to put Prop. 8 on Tuesday's ballot. Council members Wachs, Alarcon, Bernson, Chick and Svorinich announced last week that they now back Riordan's effort, but several others are looking to a competing charter reform committee, hand picked by the council, which has already begun meeting, in hopes that voters will let the council try to reform itself. "Not liiii-kly," says charter reform leader Richard Close, a Century City lawyer and president of the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association. As Close notes, the elected committee will bring its reform ideas directly to voters for approval--not, significantly, to the council. And although many candidates running for the committee have been endorsed by either the unions, Riordan, or a homeowners' coalition, Close and most political analysts have praised the field as broadly mixed and highly independent. The list of 52 candidates is filled with such local standouts as Sherman Oaks civic activist Jeff Brain, the Eastside's iconoclastic critical thinker, L.A. school board member David Tokofsky, and the Gay and Lesbian Center's executive director, Lorrie Jean. "Almost any committee selected by voters will be a far, far better thing than the City Council's hand-picked group," says Close. "Faaaar better." Council supporters argue that, given the council's attention to detail and long hours of hard work, L.A.'s problems are being addressed, charter reform is overrated, and the public needn't hear the messy aspects of how power is wielded. But, in fact, L.A.'s most pressing urban problems are, by and large, ignored by the council. Its working life is driven by thrice-weekly meetings whose agendas read like a lost chapter describing a backward society from Gulliver's Travels. In recent weeks, major topics in the council's chambers ranged from replacing batteries in police radios to hiring a cultural affairs "home page coordinator" to hearing the report of the Refuse Truck Accident Task Force, created after a tragic accident that killed two school-children, which wants the council to demand "quarterly reports" on how trash trucks are run. One particularly curious day, the council spent much of the morning heaping praise upon DARE, the anti-drug program. Chick, Goldberg and Braude all gushed over DARE for its successes as the council gave a big ovation, all of them apparently unaware that dozens of newspapers (including this one), several TV networks and numerous studies have shown DARE to be a costly, time-consuming, conscience-relieving failure that does not prevent kids from using drugs and is being rapidly abandoned by schools nationally--but, of course, not the schools in L.A. In recent interviews, when asked to list important citywide issues the council has effectively addressed, council members Alarcon, Alatorre, Braude, Chick, Feuer, Hernandez, and Wachs struggled gamely to respond. Some pointed to Chick's measure to get roaming bands of truant children back in school, an overdue effort that has led to some drops in truancy and juvenile crime. Chick cited another: "We are using 150 police officers to respond to false burglar alarms in L.A.," Chick says. "It's outrageous, and the council finally agreed to charge people for making the cops respond again and again. But the council slapped a sunset clause on the new law. It was just too good an idea." Meanwhile, the council has vowed for years to clean up slum housing, but can't figure out how. Yet Oakland, Seattle, and San Diego use proven, multi-agency, slum crack-down teams--an underfunded and virtually invisible pilot project here. Similarly, though Berkeley, San Francisco, New York, and Seattle have banned aggressive panhandling in a largely successful effort to take back public streets, the same law proposed here a few weeks ago by Wachs and Riordan left many council members reacting like they'd been asked to build a pauper prison. In one deliciously ironic moment, Ted Hayes--the city's outspoken, dreadlocked, homeless leader--stood before a council committee and publicly uttered what few council members are willing to concede: "Aggressive beggars have been allowed to go way too far in Los Angeles," Hayes warned. "They're scaring us all." For L.A., the implications of this disconnect between City Hall and the people are profound. Angelenos are cheated out of crucial civic debates which vastly improve the quality of life in big cities. One such example is San Diego, where the council recently enacted a nationally praised law to turn empty lots into permanent nature preserves--the result of a complex, boisterous, six-year civic debate. L.A. has an equally vital parallel issue--the grassroots and visionary effort to re-green the L.A. River--but the subject has proved far too sweeping and complex for the micro-oriented council to even consider. The council did, however recently take a stand on something that mattered to everyday people: after contentious debate, Alarcon won a bid to hold night-time zoning meetings--probably the single hottest topic in areas facing controversial projects. Should citizens be grateful? Says Alarcon, "L.A. residents have been begging the council for night zoning meetings for more than a decade." It's not that the City Council hasn't had more pressing things to do. But like a gossip who happily meddles in her neighbor's life while her own husband and kids flee, the City Council is merrily mired in the business of others. The council delights in playing the role of City Hall's shadow bureaucracy, and chronically puts off far more important legislative duties. As departing Braude notes, "They cannot deal with big issues when they are constantly handling tiny administrative matters and meddling in the executive branch. But they are addicted to it." Yet as bureaucrats, the council fails on a grand scale. It was so pleased with its stewardship of the massive public utility, the Department of Water and Power, that when newcomer Riordan floated a plan in 1993 to disband his appointed power and water commission to hire professionals who actually knew how to cut the fat from such a behemoth, several council members accused Riordan of "betraying the public trust." Instead, the council gave DWP employees a fat raise, and Riordan buckled under pressure from the council and unions. A series of studies commissioned by Riordan later confirmed his gnawing hunch: the supposedly lean-and-mean DWP, if sold today, is so bloated and badly managed it would put L.A. $7.9 billion in the hole--a bankrupting revelation that the council has no idea how to fix, especially with the DWP facing a tough new era of competition because of federal energy deregulation. Says Wachs, "The DWP staff told us for years, `We are the best, better than Edison,' and the council rubber-stamped that message like lemmings because that is what the council wanted to hear. But it was all blatantly untrue, and we had to spend millions to find out the truth." One lobbyist, now involved in the council's eleventh-hour effort to save the DWP--finally with help from a private company--says, "If it all works out, it will be completely by accident." The city's 100-year-old sewage system is in need of $500 million in repairs, with its decayed, giant underground pipes now held together in spots only by encrusted, fumes-hardened earth. The city's roads are so hopelessly pot-holed that they have been placed on a 108-year repaving cycle. Yet East Coast-style decay didn't materialize in L.A. because the city couldn't afford to fix it. Rather, in a practice that went unchallenged for 20 years under former Mayor Tom Bradley--and which Riordan has been powerless to stop--the council accepted broad decay of the infrastructure in order to hand luxe employment packages to powerful city unions--money that in well-managed cities buys materials and technicians to upgrade sewers and roads. A story in the Daily News last week showed that $462 million paid by L.A. residents in property taxes each year is funneled almost entirely to pay $420 million in city pensions--packages unparalleled in private life, which let city workers retire in their 50s and collect 70% of their highest pay. In 1994, the new council sweetened benefits again, extending medical and dental coverage to unmarried partners of city workers. Having no real power, and having failed to cultivate a majority on the council, Riordan is left to make threats. The retiring director of the Sanitation Bureau, Del Biagi, notes: "Riordan wanted to privatize the sanitation department like a lot of cities have, and that did not fly with the council and unions. But as tough as Riordan's message was for me personally to take, if he hadn't scared the heck out of everyone in City Hall, we wouldn't be seriously talking about finding a 25% reduction in staff, as we are now." If Riordan is hoping for thanks from the council, it will be a long wait. Says Wachs, "The council won't listen to Riordan. They wouldn't listen to (councilmen) Bernardi, Braude or me, and we knew long ago that the sewer system was a replay of the DWP fiasco. It's textbook fat and decay, a real mess." Charter reform, of course, is supposed to change all this.
But charter reform is the future, circa 2001 at the earliest. And until then, the council is 15 politicians who have little background in the extensive areas of planning, economics, business, development, and environment over which they preside, both as shadow bureaucrats and as fiefdom-protectors. And that is causing potentially devastating problems for L.A. that reverberate far beyond City Hall's gridlock and the feuds between the council and mayor. The council fiefdoms are the crucial metaphor that explains the public's growing distrust and the push for charter reform. Their fiefdom powers are so far-reaching that, for example, Rita Walters could have torpedoed the $240-million sports arena planned in her downtown district, Richard Alarcon cuts the deal over who develops the huge abandoned GM site in Panorama City, Hal Bernson controls the outcome of the controversial, Porter Ranch mini-city, and Jackie Goldberg decides if dowdy and shuttered Hollywood Boulevard should be made tourist-friendly. On rare occasions, outside forces manage to topple the fiefdom walls. For example, last year the Highway Patrol stopped a severe cruising problem on crime-ridden Hollywood Boulevard, patrolling the street under state domain rules and over loud protests from Goldberg, a fan of gritty urban tableaus, who actually insisted: "We don't need the CHP. We've cleaned up crime on Hollywood Boulevard." Housing Department director Gary Squier, freshly returned from a study of decaying Eastern cities, recently publicly urged the council and mayor to radically alter how L.A. addresses the city's aging housing stock. If the neighborhoods aren't cleaned up now, Squier argues, "L.A. will soon become another Newark," with a handful of snazzy, new, city-subsidized apartment projects sitting forlornly among vast tracts of urban ruin. Squier calls such new projects "diamonds in the desert." But Squier's big idea, widely reported in the news, got a big yawn in City Hall. Fiefdoms are proud of their crown jewels, and new, city-subsidized buildings are usually on any "tour" a council member gives of his or her district. "There's got to be a way to get Los Angeles focused on the big picture to save itself," says Squier. "I just haven't found it yet." Despite such power in the hands of individual council members, it is difficult to find many residents who actually clamored for these particular people to run things. In 1993, for instance, Alarcon won with just 250 votes over his opponent, Goldberg got in with a last-minute bump of 700 votes and Walters beat a promising newcomer with just 750 votes. In Hernandez's district, only 11,000 people voted at all, yet Hernandez purports to speak for 230,000. As Braude points out--irritating some colleagues who are privately celebrating his departure--council members won't willingly give up fiefdom powers. Braude says the fiefdoms are fundamentally undemocratic "because if you have a council person who hates graffiti, your area gets a strong graffiti-removal program and your life is better. But if your council member thinks graffiti is art, you get no serious graffiti removal. Is that a fair way to oversee the lives of 3.5 million people?" Such turf-control by Ruth Galanter is making way for the huge Dreamworks SKG studio, which will wipe out most of the remaining wetland wildlife acreage in L.A., despite the opposition of many residents. Without her support--and her decision not to seek a far more extensive federal environmental impact report--Dreamworks might have been forced to locate in a setting more appropriate to its slew of offices and warehouses. Similarly, quiet Atwater Village would not have been forced to accept a huge "big box" development in its struggling middle-class neighborhood if it had not been for Jackie Goldberg's nod. Indeed, when people protested the Toys R Us and Costco discount warehouses, they were called "racist" by Goldberg's staff. Again and again, opposition by the people hurt most deeply by such projects--most often neighbors--is deemed irrelevant so long as the council member in control gives the nod. "There's absolutely nobody you can appeal to in a fight against your council-person over a bad project on your street," says Jeff Brain, one of 52 fed-up citizens running for the Charter Reform Commission. "People who used to think of themselves as just too busy are finally hitting back." The fiefdoms work just as perversely against the public when a single council member opposes a project and holds the entire city hostage. The council's ill-fated decision last year to sue Pacific Pipeline over its plan to build a pipeline under the Valley and Eastside, for example, was made in deference to Hernandez and Alarcon's claim of "environmental racism" against Shell. In truth, few council members believed the "environmental racism" charge, since most of the seven major oil and gas pipelines in L.A. run under the Westside, not the Eastside. Sources say City Attorney James Hahn knew the council couldn't win against Pacific Pipeline because the courts give precedent to societal needs like regional pipelines. But, says one official, "Jimmy Hahn is too afraid of the council to say, "Hey! You cannot win!' So Jimmy told them, `You might lose.'" Looking back, one council member, afraid to publicly criticize colleagues, admits in private, "The environmental racism claim was absurd, and I'm not proud that I voted for a hopeless lawsuit." So why back Hernandez's lawsuit? "Because Mike turned it into a die-on-his-sword issue, and you can't oppose those. If you do, they might not back you on a project in your own district. It would shatter the process in City Hall." Perhaps that's not such a bad idea. The city lost to Pacific Pipeline, and now will lose millions of dollars in environmental improvements along the pipeline route that Pacific Pipeline had originally volunteered to pay for as "social goodies" for the area. Many political scientists would argue that this is what the ballot box is for--throwing the rascals out. But incredibly, since 1977, no L.A. council member has been ousted in less than 12 years, despite frequent incompetence, occasional corruption, and at least one known case of senility. Once again this year, the only council seat truly up for grabs is the open one in the affluent 11th Council District, where Cindy Miscikowski an Georgia Mercer are fighting for Marvin Braude's spot. The big question is not who will win on Tuesday among these two barely distinguishable, wealthy, liberal City Hall insiders, but how much damage will be wrought by the loss of Braude, a dignified individualist who backs charter reform and stands out as a frequent critic of the council's chronic failures. Seven incumbents are running Tuesday, but, as usual, none faces serious opposition. However, under the term limits Riordan forced upon the council, all council dynasties now must end after eight years. "It's kind of strange, but eight years isn't much time to do what you dreamed of," says Chick. "I feel like I just got started."
But eight years is a long time indeed to endure a council as disconnected as the current one. Los Angeles is a liberal to moderate city, 65% Democrat and 35% Republican, with a growing core of moderate Latinos. Yet the council is the most left-leaning in its history. Although the Times often refers to "council conservatives," there isn't an actual practicing conservative on the City Council, and moderates are limited to Hancock Park's John Ferraro, Wachs and--on certain issues--Braude, Alatorre AND CHICK. Republicans Rudy Svorinich and Bernson are so afraid of criticism that they often back the liberal agenda--or don't vote at all. As a result, there's no identifiable "slow-growth" coalition left on the council to fight high-rise zoning, as under Zev Yaroslavsky; no pro-business coalition to challenge high business taxes as Pat Russell once did; and no pro-homeowner coalition to stop cheesy mini-marts and constant threats to the city's backbone--its stable, single-family neighborhoods. "The only reliable alliances on this council are for feminist issues," Alarcon says. "There is really no definable group backing homeowners anymore." Currently, a reinvigorated labor movement tops the council's agenda. And Goldberg, as head of the council's Personnel Committee, has begun to recast the city's business practices in her own socialist-flavored vision. Last month, she won a resounding 12-0 vote to force employers with city contracts to pay a minimum wage of $8.50 an hour--$3 above the state and federal level. The pay boost is intended to help 5,500 poor families. Goldberg's victory offers a telling look at how City Hall works today. First, Goldberg began to cry while pressing a very reluctant Alatorre to quickly schedule a vote in his budget committee. "When Richard said no because her measure wasn't ready, Jackie cried," says one city official, "and Richard's staff just buckled and gave her the hearing date she wanted." Then the measure went to the full council, where, in a chamber packed with union activists, its two potential opponents--Ferraro and Bernson--actually ducked out of the room as the vote was taken. And Svorinich, who is said to "hate it when Jackie cries" fled the city entirely, on what he insisted was a preplanned trip to Washington. Riordan vetoed the so-called living-wage as promised, but was quickly overturned by the council. Meanwhile, even such Democratic strongholds as the editorial board of the Times criticized it as "bad economic policy" that will eventually cost $21 million a year for little demonstrable gain. But the council was unable to grasp the basic market truism that economists widely agree will torpedo the living wage: City contractors forced to pay $8.50 an hour--even with a "worker retention" law, approved by the council to make it harder to fire contract employees--will eventually find ways to get rid of entry-level, minimum-wage workers and hire the sort of people $8.50 an hour actually buys: a far more skilled and experienced worker. Joel Kotkin, a public policy analyst at Pepperdine University, says the council's understanding of economics is, "Business equals evil, poor people equals good." Perhaps not surprisingly, a subtle hostility toward the city's middle-class has emerged. A member of Hernandez's staff, for example, castigates the Bradley era as "a time when elitists like Zev Yaroslavsky stopped poor minorities from moving to the Westside by restricting housing density in all the nice neighborhoods."
Last year, Ridley-Thomas forced a low-income housing project into a potentially endangered, black, middle-class neighborhood, even after homeowners enlisted help from Congresswoman Maxine Waters and Riordan to stop him. Riordan and Waters both understood that a borderline neighborhood could be quickly tipped toward decline by a down-scale project. But Ridley-Thomas prevailed, and Riordan's veto was overturned by the council. Similarly, when residents of Silverlake sought Goldberg's help to get rid of a sudden influx of drifters, Goldberg initially provided the drifters with outdoor Porta-Pottys, to the disbelief of residents. Hernandez says the council is "politically further left than typical Los Angeles because activists run for council seats instead of other kinds of people." The Times has recently begun splitting almost invisible political hairs to explain the shift to the left. It calls Alarcon, who is a pro-labor liberal, a "centrist." Alarcon, who attacked Prop. 209, the anti-affirmative action initiative, as a neo-racist replay of Mein Kampf, laughs over his unexpected move to the center. "A centrist?" he chuckles, enjoying the attention. "What is a centrist, anyway?" Given the current Berkley-esque mood on the City Council, the unexpected brouhaha over U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein's visit there in February makes perfect sense. Feinstein was at City Hall to promote a major anti-gang bill, and she appeared before two council committees at the invitation of Chick and Holden to receive the council's blessings. But instead, Feinstein was attacked by the council's left flank in a show of political force, complete with a roomful of protesters. "If we declared our schools prisons we'd be able to get more funding," Hernandez intoned, claiming Feinstein was ignoring prevention in favor of punishment. "Do all these laws also effect militia organizations?" Goldberg snapped at Feinstein. As it turns out, Feinstein walked into a political trap which had long been in the works. Goldberg's staff agreed to meet Feinstein's on three different occasions before the senator arrived in L.A., but stood up Feinstein's staff each time--all while organizing a phalanx of protesters. "Does Jackie really think she can spit on a senator like that and get things done for the city?" asked one council member. A former staffer for Bradley asks an even more pertinent question: "What in the hell is going on in City Hall? Los Angeles is the most gang-ridden city in the country and people are sick to death of it, and the council doesn't think cracking down on gangs is such a good idea? The council is living in a bubble like nothing I ever saw during Bradley." If so, that bubble has been fashioned in part by the council's top confidante, Chief Legislative Analyst Ron Deaton. Deaton is widely viewed in City Hall as far more powerful than any council member, yet few residents of L.A. would recognize his name. Deaton, a Republican, lives in Orange County, where he and his family do not have to actually live under any of the policies or laws he helps the council create. "Deaton is a disturbing form of power, since he is not answerable to the public and can profoundly influence the city merely by which consultant he picks to study any given issue," says one political consultant. But Deaton failed in a big way last fall, in trying to persuade the council to make peace with Riordan and jointly address charter reform. "Deaton thought he had a compromise, but instead the council went ballistic and tried to stop Riordan on reform," says an official involved, "but the council ended up only drawing blood from itself." Lately, letters to the Daily News, where charter reform and Valley secession are sizzling topics, run heavily against the council, and its editorial board regularly taunts the council as Lord and Ladies of the Manor. An L.A. Times poll on Feb. 4 showed the public strongly backs Riordan (64%) in wanting to elect a Charter Reform Committee whose ideas are voted on by all residents--not decided by the council. "Galanter and others who already hated Riordan for being rich really hate him now," says one Democratic political consultant. "The thing really uniting the council is their desire to thrash the mayor."
"This is a rich boy/poor girl thing, more than a true political battle," says a council aide who delved into the feud, fearing that her own boss might get hurt for working with Riordan on an issue. "In particular, the left-most women hate the mayor because he's an up-from-upper-middle-class, Westside, rich, leveraged buy-out, venture capitalist guy, and still he's popular." Goldberg, Galanter, and Walters did not respond to repeated requests for interviews. Some of the male members also hold class-based suspicions of Riordan, but seem more capable of compromise. Alarcon, for example, acknowledges, "I also wonder if the mayor would ever sign over the city's assets to his billionaire friends, since isn't that what venture capitalists do?" But Alarcon supports Riordan for mayor, and Riordan backs Alarcon's plan for a mall and industrial complex at the abandoned GM site in Van Nuys. Even Riordan and Ridley-Thomas, who have bitterly feuded, are currently working together. Riordan supports Ridley-Thomas's plan to seek a massive renovation of the historic Los Angeles Coliseum in his district, to attract an NFL football team. One local pundit, struck by sight of two steadfast political enemies working so well together, asked both to comment. Both men replied the same way: "Scary, isn't it?" But few people believe Riordan and the council will work together, beyond such stand-alone projects. About seven council members want to be mayor in 2001, and several are merely trying to shine brighter than their colleagues. Nor does Riordan have any strong support on the council. His key ally, Alatorre, the powerful head of the Budget Committee, is more interested in completing Eastside projects taking a leadership role on the council. And as, Alatorrre notes, "I have great respect for Mayor Riordan, but we regularly disagree on big issues like the living wage." Riordan can take his message to the public, but he still lacks two political tools that gave Tom Bradley tremendous influence. Bradley held purse strings on $750 million in state redevelopment funds via his loyal Community Redevelopment Commission, and every council member badly wanted Bradley's money. Riordan has no such power, since the CRA is nearly out of money. Second, Bradley had 20 years to build his own team of loyal department heads in City Hall, handing top city jobs to good friends. This year, several department heads have departed, from the Harbor and Planning departments, the Bureau of Sanitation, the DWP and, most notably, the LAPD. But one top lobbyist says, "In New York, Guiliani hired 2,200 of his own people; in Chicago, Daly hired 1,400. But in L.A., the mayor gets to hire just a few people under the charter, and the council begrudges him every single one." In fact, the council can reject Riordan's choices for any of the top city jobs. Most council members argue that all is not hopeless, that the council will debate noble municipal issues and make L.A. more livable. Last year, for example, the council hammered out an experimental plan to keep kids out of gangs. Called L.A. Bridges, the $11-million project is based at junior highs, offering youngsters activities and counseling as an alternative to gangs. Most council members credit Ridley-Thomas with forcing a debate on gangs, and after months of hearings, with creating a unique--but untested and underfunded--new approach to battling gangs. Chick has also explored larger issues. She recently toured Seattle, where the council each year creates a priority list for civic debate--a simple idea, yet radical for L.A. "It's a list of major things they promise the people of Seattle they are going to fix or seriously address each year," says Chick, "and then they actually do it. We need a way to do that here." Wachs also wants to talk about the big picture. He is furious that the council debates--and, in essence, decides--the most controversial city issues in secret, by claiming that the topic is a personnel issue or might be the subject of a lawsuit: "It is just utterly and completely wrong that this city council makes its biggest decisions behind closed doors, such as on the Downtown Arena, where we are asking taxpayers to fork over $70 million dollars." His aide Gregory Nelson points out that a debate in Seattle over a virtually identical arena plan, "raged among the citizenry for months," and a group calling itself Citizens for More Important Things rose to prominence by opposing the use of taxes for a wealthy ball club. Another lone voice is that of Feuer, who has been dubbed "Saint Michael" by his council rivals because he has pressed the body to act more ethically. But Feuer still believes City Hall is heading in the right direction. "Every single member of the council wants to improve Los Angeles," Feuer says. "I honestly believe that." Perhaps. But for now, the council's reticence to grapple with major issues facing L.A.--the wide swaths of trashed neighborhoods east of La Brea, the graffiti tag teams that roam unfettered, the desperate lack of green space that has made L.A. the most park-poor city in the United States, the ever-raging gang wars, and the resultant continuing flight of black, white, and now even Latino middle-classes from the city limits--has left it to the less-than-articulate Riordan to utter the big ideas. The mayor has maintained a steady but modest vision of improving public safety to regain the confidence of residents, and of cutting red tape and record-high taxes that scare businesses away from tough-edged L.A. But in the end, the serious power in Los Angeles still rests with the council. And it can't get to the big issues again this month because it's absolutely swamped trying to decide which company should manufacture the big, blue trash-recycling bins to soon appear on your doorstep. |
|