The 2 Women Behind the Mayor at City Hall

Two of the most powerful women in Los Angeles politics, certainly the two most powerful in non-elective offices, are unknown to most people outside City Hall.

But to those who need city approval for major business ventures and to the political power brokers at City Hall, Fran Savitch and Maureen Kindel are very well known, and they like it that way.

To admirers, they are simply Maureen and Fran--key “persuaders” and “facilitators” in helping the city run smoothly for their boss, Mayor Tom Bradley. To detractors, they are “the matriarchy” of City Hall--well-to-do women who have a lot of influence and gleefully flaunt it.

Savitch said she has “never been just another aide to the mayor,” while Kindel said she does not “wait for the mayor to ask me what I think. I just tell him, and he listens.”

Kindel, 47, the more visible of the two, is president of the mayor’s appointed Board of Public Works. With policy-setting authority second only to the City Council, the board oversees construction and maintenance of city streets and sewers, issues permits to allow movie and television crews to film on city streets and awards lucrative city contracts.

Before her appointment to the board, she tapped her contacts throughout Southern California in 1977 to raise $1 million in four months for Bradley’s reelection effort. She still supervises how money is spent in the Bradley political organization.

Savitch, 54, is executive assistant to the mayor, a title recently bestowed to reflect her long-held high place in the mayor’s inner circle. She is a key adviser in dispensing Bradley’s main patronage power--appointments to city boards and commissions.

As one prominent downtown businessman put it: “If Bradley had been elected governor and I had wanted a state-related job, I would have gone to one person, and that person would have been Fran.”

Kindel and Savitch are not the only powerful women in Bradley’s administration. One of his two deputy mayors is Grace Montanez Davis, who among other things oversees grants, social issues such as the homeless, and Latino affairs. She is the administration’s highest-ranking woman and Latino.

But Kindel and Savitch have a broader, and in the unanimous view of City Council members and Bradley observers, more influential role in establishing the policy path the mayor takes. They, along with Deputy Mayor Tom Houston, are the City Hall troika who most regularly advise Bradley on citywide, state and national political matters.

Kindel and Savitch were the only women who regularly helped formulate policy in the mayor’s 1982 gubernatorial campaign and probably would figure prominently in any Bradley planning for a 1986 gubernatorial campaign.

Said one council member: “Maureen and Fran are the cutting edge of the Administration. If you don’t know them, you’re not dealing with the highest level of the inner circle.”