Garcetti joins mayors at White House meeting with President Obama

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti joined a group of other newly elected mayors in a meeting with President Obama at the White House on Friday, looking for ways they can work together to promote common priorities such as job creation and immigration reform.

Garcetti expressed eagerness to work more with the other mayors “to find the best ideas for L.A.’’ The group included mayors and mayors-elect, mostly Democrats, from a dozen states, including New York Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio and Boston Mayor-elect Martin Walsh.

It was Garcetti’s second trip to the nation’s capital as the city’s chief executive -– and a short one. He headed back to Los Angeles immediately after the meeting.

Garcetti naturally put in a pitch with the president -- as he did on his visit in October -- for a favorite cause: federal support to restore a portion of the Los Angeles River.

But the main purpose of this visit was the meeting with Obama and 15 other mayors, giving Garcetti an opportunity to build relationships with other city leaders and administration officials to address common concerns.

Garcetti, in an interview after the meeting, said the discussions included “the importance of immigration reform for cities of all size,” expanding preschool programs, “income inequality” and infrastructure needs.

“What I kind of said was that we don’t come looking to Washington to save the cities like we might have in the ‘60s and ‘70s,” Garcetti said, describing the message he delivered at the 90-minute meeting with the president and mayors. “We come as cities hoping to help save Washington.”

In light of Washington’s red ink, the mayors will need to need to find creative ways to address their priorities.

Garcetti opened the day by hosting a breakfast for other newly elected mayors at the Hay-Adams Hotel. He attended meetings with administration officials throughout the day, including talking trade during lunch with Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker.

Garcetti said Obama told the group not to expect new dollars from Washington but said the administration would look to the cities to be laboratories for new ideas and pledged to look for ways to make federal programs work better for municipalities.

Obama, joined in the meeting by Vice President Joe Biden, told the mayors that he hoped the meeting would produce a “strong partnership,’’ noting “mayors don’t have time to be ideological, and they don’t really have time to be partisan, because they, every day, are held accountable for concretely delivering the services that people count on all across the country.”

Obama used the meeting as an opportunity to call on Congress to extend unemployment insurance for 1.3 million jobless Americans, whose benefits expire on Dec. 28. “That’s not just bad for those individuals and for those families, that’s bad for our economy and that’s bad for our cities,’’ Obama told the mayors, “because if they don’t have the money to pay the rent or be able to buy food for their families, that has an impact on demand and businesses and it can have a depressive effect generally.”

The president also called for raising the minimum wage, saying it could have a “tremendous boost in a lot of the cities where there are a lot of service workers who get up and do some of the critical work for all of us every single day but oftentimes still find themselves just barely above poverty or, in some cases, below poverty.”

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richard.simon@latimes.com