Villaraigosa Sets a Style: ‘Hands-On’

His inauguration is still three days away, but for weeks Antonio Villaraigosa has appeared every bit the mayor of Los Angeles.

He brokered the settlement of a hotel labor dispute. He led classroom conversations to ease racial tension at a school beset by ethnic brawls. He handed out Little League trophies in Eagle Rock, went to church in South Los Angeles, waved to crowds from a red convertible in a Canoga Park parade.

On key campaign themes, he urged state lawmakers to give him control of the city’s public schools and staked his claim to lead the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. He pushed the city’s harbor agency to pare spending and he sought the city attorney’s legal advice on cutting noise at Van Nuys Airport.

By all accounts, the city councilman who trounced Mayor James K. Hahn in last month’s election has signaled a decidedly active approach to governing Los Angeles.

“He’s telling everybody that he’s a hands-on guy, and he’s willing to do this 24/7,” said Steven P. Erie, a Los Angeles politics expert at UC San Diego.

But as Villaraigosa prepares for his formal swearing-in ceremony Friday on the south steps of City Hall, an open question is whether over the next four years he will stay focused on his major goals. Also unknown: Will his political fate be shaped by such unforeseeable events as natural disasters, riots, strikes, scandal or an economic slide?

“Anything like that can take an enormous amount of time and attention and can divert you, as a politician, from your campaign promises,” said Elizabeth Garrett, director of the USC-Caltech Center for the Study of Law and Politics. “It can also define you as a leader.”

During his six-week transition, Villaraigosa has worked to frame his mayoralty around priorities he set in the campaign.

Most striking have been his call for a mayoral takeover of the school system and his decision to chair the MTA. Those moves reflect his pledge to remedy two of the city’s most acute problems: the decline of its public schools and the clogged traffic that defines day-to-day life.

Villaraigosa’s other central campaign vow was to expand the city police force. He has yet to release specific plans on public safety. But the morning after the election, he met with Police Chief William J. Bratton, and the event’s timing carried symbolic weight.

The mayor-elect has also tended to his public image. While continuing to play down the historic import of becoming the first Latino mayor of modern Los Angeles, he nonetheless has exploited the media attention to raise his national profile.

Three days after his victory, he posed in a business suit on Venice Beach for a Newsweek cover shot amid a cluster of lights and reflectors wedged into the sand. “Latino Power,” the cover blared. On ABC’s “Nightline,” he shared thoughts on race relations. He has been interviewed on CNN and National Public Radio.

He also gave speeches to Latino groups in Washington, D.C., and Fort Worth, Texas, where he mugged for cameras in a cowboy hat.

Villaraigosa’s embrace of the limelight has led to wide speculation about the reach of his political ambition. “I’m going to focus on the city of Los Angeles,” he told a nurse who asked at a union meeting if he would run for governor next year.

Privately, Villaraigosa has worked long hours since the May 17 election to build his City Hall staff, choose several hundred commissioners and otherwise prepare to govern. He has interviewed more than a dozen people for senior jobs and personally appraised some of the nearly 5,000 applications for work in his administration.

At the city’s emergency operations center, police and fire chiefs gave Villaraigosa an exhaustive briefing on plans to handle major earthquakes and other calamities. Villaraigosa also met with Michael Chertoff, the new Homeland Security secretary.

With a policy agenda that requires help from state and federal lawmakers, Villaraigosa has reached out to allies. He had lunch with the U.S. Senate’s top Democrat, Harry Reid of Nevada, at Patina restaurant in Disney Hall. Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, a longtime friend and fellow Democrat with shared roots in organized labor, went to dinner at Villaraigosa’s home in Mount Washington.

At City Hall, Villaraigosa has set out to pay personal office visits to all his fellow council members, not just to the six who backed his campaign but also to the eight who did not, according to aides.

“It’s interesting: We don’t go to him; he comes to us,” said Councilman Dennis Zine, who pulled his endorsement of Hahn and switched to Villaraigosa days before the election. “That’s the way he reaches out to people. You would think he’s on that pedestal, we’d have to go to him.”

On Saturday, Villaraigosa showed up in San Pedro to watch the current mayor swear in his sister, Janice, for a second term as councilmember. On Monday, the mayor-to-be attended the Hollywood inauguration of Councilman Eric Garcetti, who backed Hahn in the election.

“I fully expect that we’re going to have a great relationship,” Villaraigosa said of the two members.

Beyond cultivating political goodwill and forming his administration, Villaraigosa has kept a frenetic pace of public events. He kicked the first ball in a Major League Soccer match in Carson, dedicated a new Universal Studios attraction and witnessed an early-morning inspection of police reserve officers in Westchester. He has spoken at large breakfast, lunch and dinner gatherings and visited elementary, middle and high schools.

At a school centennial celebration one morning in Boyle Heights, he stunned reporters by saying he had been up until 2 a.m. mediating talks between hotel owners and union leaders from his City Hall office. With a potential lockout threatening the jobs of 2,500 housekeepers, bellhops and others who were on the verge of picketing seven major hotels, Villaraigosa kept negotiations going around the clock the next night.

Shortly before dawn, he announced the dispute was settled. Later, he said part of his job was “to try to resolve conflicts.”

“I’m one of those guys who has been blessed with a lot of energy, and there is frankly no challenge that I’m going to shrink away from,” he said.

Both union leaders and hotel owners gave credit to Villaraigosa, a former teachers union organizer, for averting a strike.

“Many of us were skeptical about what good it would do, but from the moment he walked in the room, the mayor-elect was focused and committed to avoiding a lockout and preserving labor peace,” said Brian Fitzgerald, the Westin Bonaventure general manager who led the hotel owners’ bargaining team. “He worked his magic. He played it right down the middle.”

Robin Kramer, Villaraigosa’s incoming chief of staff, described his role in the dispute as a sign of how he plans to approach the job of mayor.

“The results,” she said, “show that this is a guy who’s going to be incredibly energetic and walk into places where leadership is needed, and frankly where it has been lacking in our city for some time.”

Still, Villaraigosa’s push to keep promises will be constrained by his limited power over such key issues as education and traffic. His call for taking over the public schools and his determination to be hands-on with the transit system are first steps in what are sure to be vastly complicated efforts to wrest control and force improvements.

His police expansion plan also faces hurdles, starting with a shortage of money to hire recruits. Both of the city’s last two mayors, Hahn and Richard Riordan, fell short of police hiring goals.

Overall, the challenge of just staying focused on his agenda will play a big part in determining whether Villaraigosa succeeds or fails as mayor, said Garrett of the USC-Caltech center.

“Any successful mayor,” she said, “has to have two or three salient agenda items that he tries to deliver on” and eventually produce “something to show for those items.”