A Real Straight Shooter at City Hall -- With a .45

Los Angeles City Councilman Dennis Zine became a police officer in 1968. He was elected to the council in 2001, and these days his goal is to teach his colleagues how to shoot straight.

We’re not talking metaphorically. We’re talking 9-millimeter handgun.

Zine, who represents the southwestern San Fernando Valley, still serves as a reserve Los Angeles Police Department officer two days each month, a job that means he’s working for an agency that the council helps oversee. From his dual perspectives, Zine believes that too many of his council brethren know too little about guns.

“This is about educating my colleagues,” Zine said. “I’m not trying to turn them into people who like guns. I want to show them the realities of guns because they have to vote on settlements on officer-involved shootings.”

Several weeks ago, Zine took council President Eric Garcetti shooting at the Police Academy in Elysian Park. More recently, a Times reporter accompanied Councilman Kojak on a lunch-hour training session for Councilman Jose Huizar, bringing up the question ...

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Question: Will Huizar be joining SWAT anytime soon?

Answer: “For the record, I don’t like guns,” Huizar said as Zine pulled from the back of his SUV a duffel bag containing three handguns, including a snub-nosed .38, a .45 and a 9 millimeter. Zine made it clear that he sometimes brings a gun into City Hall and even council chambers.

Zine said he did so for reasons of protection and that he had received death threats in the past.

“It has been in chambers on occasion, but it’s concealed -- you couldn’t tell I had it on me,” Zine said. “You never know when something might happen. I don’t want to have to run home or to the station to get my weapon. I’m not an NRA member. I consider myself very reasonable and use common sense.”

Indeed, LAPD rules allow off-duty officers -- and that includes reserve officers -- to carry their weapons.

With guns popping at a neighboring range, Zine gave Huizar a basic rundown on gun safety and showed him how to load the guns. Huizar was a good student; he never accidentally pointed the gun at the reporter with the camera.

Huizar grew up in Boyle Heights and recently moved back to his old neighborhood from El Sereno. So he’s no stranger to gunfire, but never before had he fired a gun.

And how did he do? All of his shots hit the target -- one of those silhouettes of a body. Using the 9 millimeter, seven of Huizar’s 16 shots were bull’s-eyes.

“That’s darn good -- you should be proud,” said LAPD tactics instructor Sgt. Frank Mika.

Huizar was wobbly-armed from the guns’ recoil but said the session was worthwhile.

“I still dislike guns,” Huizar said, “but I’m walking away from this thinking about the power of guns and what they mean.”

And, sure enough, an officer-involved shooting lawsuit came before the council a few days later. Huizar voted for a $1.5-million settlement for the mother of Devin Brown, the 13-year-old fatally shot after he stole a car in the middle of the night in 2005. Zine voted against it.

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Q: Can Zine shoot straight?

A: Yes. All of his shots hit the target in the chest or head. “Just like they taught me at the academy,” he said.

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Q: Why is Los Angeles too often the City of Eyesores?

A: It’s the city’s parking requirements, stupid, or so say some developers and community activists.

“You have to devote so much of a site to parking that there’s little room left over for whatever you were trying to do or build,” said Mott Smith, the principal of Civic Enterprise Associates, an urban development firm. “If you want to open a boutique, you end up opening a parking lot.”

So much space devoted to parking lots, he said, is the reason that commercial corridors often look so dreary and end up being a mishmash of auto-intensive businesses such as fast-food outlets and mini-malls. (See the accompanying graphic.)

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Q: What does Smith want to do about it?

A: Smith’s outfit created a new parking plan for downtown Eagle Rock that waives the parking requirements for most businesses and instead will rely on underused street parking.

Colorado Boulevard is Eagle Rock’s version of Main Street, and it has never quite lived up to its potential. In other words, stretches of it look like commercial stretches across L.A. In a word: ugly.

The hope is to give developers an incentive to do something interesting with the area and put in more pedestrian-friendly businesses. Under the new parking regulations -- which will soon be considered by the council -- new businesses will buy into a pool of public parking spaces, about half of which often sit empty, according to city officials. Pasadena has a similar program with its downtown parking garages.

And if Eagle Rock turns into the next Melrose? Smith says the next step would be to create a community valet service and, then, to build a parking garage.

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Q: What is the MTA board doing to make the city’s light rail system more convenient?

A: Nothing.

Transit advocates and even some MTA officials for years have dreamed of building the so-called downtown connector that would tie together four light rail lines -- the Blue Line to Long Beach, the Gold Line to Pasadena and the future Gold Line extension to East Los Angeles and the Expo Line to Culver City, which are due to open in 2009 and 2010, respectively.

The beauty of the connector, for example, is that it would allow for a train from Culver City to run to Pasadena or Long Beach trains to run to the Eastside, among other possibilities.

Contrast that with the system under construction.

Let’s say someone in Boyle Heights wants to take the train to the Coliseum to see the city’s new NFL team, the L.A. Leaf Blowers, get flattened by the Cincinnati Bengals. That person would have to ride the Gold Line to Union Station, the subway to 7th and Figueroa streets and the Expo Line to the stadium. Convenient, eh?

“The disaster is if they don’t figure out what they are doing now, they’ll open two more lines without connectivity,” said Bart Reed, executive director of the Transit Coalition, an activist and watchdog group.

The MTA board later in the year will decide whether to include the connector as part of its long-range plan. The agency’s own estimates show the rail line could cost up to $723 million to build, but it would also have the highest ridership of any future rail project.

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Q: Can politicians teach themselves not to sweat?

A: Sort of, said Dr. David Sawcer, an assistant professor of dermatology at the USC Keck School of Medicine.

Here’s the issue: The mayor and the council frequently hold news conferences in which they stand in dark suits in the blazing sun. The weird thing about it is they rarely look as a normal person should -- as if someone had turned the hose on them.

At one recent press event, Villaraigosa and seven council members stood on a hot field at the LAPD Academy to sign the city’s budget.

About three dozen cops stood behind them on a riser to create a photo op -- and one of the officers had to be escorted to the meat wagon after nearly passing out from the heat.

Sawcer said the politicians haven’t willed themselves not to sweat. More likely, he said, it’s because they’ve gotten used to their own annoying tendency to hold news conferences in egg-frying conditions.

He added: “I think it’s not that they don’t sweat, but it’s more likely that you don’t ask them hard enough questions.”

Duly noted, Doc.