Zev Yaroslavsky: The orchestrator

Sure, the name’s familiar, even if you can’t spell it or pronounce it. Zev Yaroslavsky’s been a big presence in this town since he was elected to the Los Angeles City Council in 1975, and then to the county Board of Supervisors in 1994. Before then, in his impetuous, impassioned youth, he and some fellow activists came alongside a Soviet ship in L.A. harbor, jammed a toilet plunger against it to steady their boat and hurriedly spray painted “Let Jews Go” on the hull. He reads history and politics for pleasure. Mitch Miller inspired him to play the oboe. His predecessor on the board, Ed Edelman, played the cello, and did so once at the Hollywood Bowl. Yaroslavsky would prefer to take a Bowl bow narrating “Lincoln Portrait” by Aaron Copland. He ran uncontested in the primary in June, so he’ll be a supe until he’s termed out in 2014. The question is, is this his swan song to politics or the overture to a long-speculated run for mayor of Los Angeles?

After three decades in politics here, people still have trouble with your last name. Chick Hearn once called you “Zevalosky” at a Lakers rally.

Zev is a Hebrew name that means “wolf.” I’m named after my grandfather, whose name in Yiddish was Velvel, and Velvel is a diminutive for wolf. My first campaign for office was ninth-grade Boys League vice president. My slogan was “Vote for the guy with the shortest first name and the longest last name.” I won in a landslide.

The county has budget problems but not as dire as those of the city of Los Angeles; why is that?

We’ve lived within our means. We worked with our unions to meet their needs and asked them to work on our needs, so they’re getting paid the same as they were getting paid two years ago. In good years we’ve socked away money so in the lean years we could navigate a recession. In 1995, the first year I was here, when the county almost went bankrupt, we received a call from our creditors in Switzerland. They grilled us like a prosecutor: What are you doing about employee salaries? What are you doing about employee benefits? What’s your reserve? Up until then the county had been spending about a billion dollars a year more than it was taking in, but [this conversation] convinced [the supervisors] that we never wanted to be in this position again. It was humiliating, but it was also scary because we realized they’re going through our books, and they were nervous enough to call us to account. It’s a good thing they did. L.A. County government is in as good a financial condition as any major urban county in the state, but I don’t know for how much longer.

What’s government going to look like in 10 or 15 years?

It’s going to have to be a lot more innovative, more entrepreneurial than it is currently. We’re going to have to partner with nonprofits. We do that already with health clinics; they do it less expensively than we do, and they do it better; they’re less bureaucratic. I think we’re going to do more of that, probably at all levels, not just human services.

So have you changed your philosophy of governance?

I don’t know how much of it is a change. We can either go broke doing it the way we were doing it, or we can find a better way of fulfilling our mission, which at the end of the day is about the most marginal among us, the most needy, the sickest, the most unfortunate.

Richard Nixon wrote about six crises; what crises top your list?

I think homelessness is a major human services crisis and a major moral crisis. [The county’s] Project 50 has been a successful attempt to create a template for the toughest cases. I think we’re on the right track. We need to accelerate it. It’s not cheap, it’s not easy, but we can do it.

My daughter called me one night. She’d taken a walk in Berkeley and saw a homeless person on the curb. She sat and talked to him. She said: “Dad, while we were there, hundreds of people walked by and not one person made eye contact.” That was a description of me. I get off the Hollywood Freeway and this [homeless] man [is] there; I would not make eye contact with him. When you make eye contact, you can’t ignore them. If you don’t, you can drive right by. That’s a metaphor for how our society addresses [the] homeless in general. And once you make eye contact, you can’t turn away.

Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, the political analyst, said the supervisors are the most powerful, least known public officials in the nation. Should you all have higher profiles?

I don’t think we get the attention city [officials] get because newspapers tend to write for the readership, and we don’t deal with a lot of middle-class issues. Most of [the board’s] work involves services for people on the margins, as opposed to cities, which deal with tree trimming and street paving and that sort of thing.

In City Hall, you go to the men’s room and you’re likely to see a constituent or a bureaucrat. In the Hall of Administration, you need to get cleared into the 8th floor. There’s a certain amount of isolation. [And] there are five of us. It’s not the best system: Five supervisors in Los Angeles County, where we have 10 1/2 million people. [There are] five supervisors in Mono County, where cows outnumber people 10 to 1. But that’s what the constitution provides unless the people change their charter.

Development is a battleground here. Where’s the balance?

Whoever said that Los Angeles is a collection of neighborhoods in search of a city said it right. Increasingly, you’re seeing neighborhoods defined not only by name but by character. My philosophy really has not changed very much since the early ‘80s: When is enough enough? There always will be tension between real estate developers who believe they have the God-given right to do anything they want and raze anything in their way, and the role of the city, [which] is not to facilitate that march but to ration it and ensure that developers exercise their rights in a way that doesn’t diminish the value of property and overall quality of life.

You backed Measure R, the half-cent sales tax for transportation projects. Now these projects need to go pedal to the metal to justify voters’ support.

We’ve got to bring the projects to fruition as quickly as possible, both to make good on the promise we made and because we desperately need a transportation infrastructure. It’s killing everybody. When I opened the Orange Line in 2005, I was going to be hanged in effigy. Now it’s the “Valley’s own.” A woman walked off the bus, saw me standing there and hugged me — not something I’m used to. She said she lived in Van Nuys and worked in Long Beach, and the Orange Line cut her commute time by 45 minutes each way. We talk about transportation as an economic development tool, but this is how it impacts real people.

You’re termed out. Is this your last campaign?

It’s my last campaign for county supervisor!

So what about being mayor? You said long ago you’d love to be mayor, you just don’t love what you’d have to do to get there.

I think that’s probably true of most politicians. I guess I must be a decent politician because I’ve survived all these years in a very competitive [district], but politics is not what I spend most of my time thinking about. Policy is. People come up to me every single day and ask me to consider the mayor’s race — some serious people, people you just can’t ignore. People feel you really need somebody who, to use Dick Riordan’s term, is tough enough to turn it around. I will consider it, but it’s not first and foremost on my agenda.

[Not running against Tom Bradley in 1989] was the right decision for me. I’ve had a great opportunity at the city and the county: saving the healthcare system in the mid-1990s, the trauma tax which saved the trauma system, the role I’ve played in arts and culture in the county, Disney Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, LACMA, to mention a few. Even if you don’t like ballet or classical music or opera, it’s an economic engine, it puts people to work, and it pays well.

How is your diabetes doing?

It’s doing fine. I get checked every four months, and so far so good. I have a history of diabetes in my family; it can be acquired genetically [or] through lifestyle, and everybody needs to know the genetic history of their family and be careful what you eat and get exercise. I jog 25, 30 miles a week. I wish I could tell you that I religiously adhere to every dietary principle that I espouse, but sometimes I don’t. I was eating ice cream, chocolate cake, pastries galore; being diagnosed with diabetes probably extended my life 10 or 15 years.

Do you have a political hero?

If I had [to choose] one, it would be Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the late senator from Washington. He launched the [1974] Jackson-Vanik amendment, which tied most-favored-nation status [with] the Soviet Union to freedom of immigration. He didn’t have to do that politically; he did not have a significant Jewish [constituency]. He did it because he thought it was right. It produced freedom for a million, a million and a half people; we may still have had an Iron Curtain but for his efforts.

And John Kennedy — I went to see him [campaign] at the Shrine Auditorium. I took a stick from our yard and put a Kennedy bumper sticker on it. Because I was a little runt of 11 years old, the adults let me go right up front and wave my sign. He had to back away; he thought I was going to poke his eye out! He’s probably one of the reasons I got into politics.

patt.morrison@latimes.com

This interview was excerpted and edited from a longer taped transcript. An archive of Morrison’s interview is online at latimes.com/pattasks.