Bradley Proposes Tutors, Child Care for Poor Areas

Mayor Tom Bradley grimly acknowledged Monday that street gangs threaten the future of Los Angeles, and he used a rare “State of the City” speech to propose that the city take on a new social burden and spend $700 million on tutors and child care for youngsters in poor areas where gangs thrive.

The new program, unveiled to loud applause from an overflow crowd of local officials and Bradley supporters, was billed by the mayor as the key to breaking the cycle of poverty that leads youth into gangs and drug use. It would provide tutoring and child care at 400 schools between the hours when regular school lets out and 6 p.m., so that children of working parents will not be left home alone, Bradley aides said.

“The city of Los Angeles has no financial or legal responsibility for our schools,” Bradley said. “But I want you to know, I feel a fundamental moral obligation to our children and to their parents.”

This initiative is an unusual step for Bradley. Officially, the city of Los Angeles has no authority over schools or the education of children. That role of government lies mainly with the Los Angeles Unified School District, which broke off from the city in 1937. And Bradley has been reluctant to step over such jurisdictional lines in the past--refusing for years, for instance, to put money into homeless shelter programs because the homeless were “a county problem.”

But Bradley said Monday that City Hall needs to step in and help in order to protect the future.

“We are in a war, and the enemy is within--poisoning our children and our neighborhoods,” Bradley said.

Street gangs have been an intimidating fact of life in many minority areas of the city for years, but the political uproar over gangs has soared with the death toll in recent months. Police say gangs have been responsible for 86 killings in Los Angeles County this year, and more than 1,400 suspects were arrested recently in police sweeps of gang areas in the city.

The city’s Community Redevelopment Agency has already approved about $2 million to get the new program started at 10 schools, Bradley aides said Monday. The rest of the money would come from the extra property taxes collected on downtown land since the city’s redevelopment efforts drove land values to record heights. But the money will not be available for Bradley’s program unless a Superior Court judge in Los Angeles lifts a spending cap that stops the city from using more than $750 million in extra taxes collected from the downtown “central business district” redevelopment area.

Bradley proposed earlier that the cap be raised to $5 billion, and that half of the money be used for housing programs in the next 20 years. The new child care and tutoring program would come out of the uncommitted half. However, even doing that may require a change in state law, Bradley aides said Monday.

Favorable Response

Nonetheless, Los Angeles school officials reacted favorably Monday to the plan. “I loved it. It was just music to my ears,” said Rita Walters, president of the Los Angeles Board of Education.

Jim Wood, a top Bradley confidant who is also chairman of the Community Redevelopment Agency, agreed. “I think it’s an excellent idea. The details have to be worked out, but it’s clearly the kind of thing we need to do.”

The speech, which was widely viewed as the symbolic kickoff to Bradley’s campaign for reelection to a fifth term, was delivered in the City Council chambers to an appreciative audience of 800 commissioners appointed by the mayor, old friends and government officials, all invited by the mayor’s office. The 30-minute speech, laced with inspiring quotes from John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was interrupted by applause more than 25 times.

It was a mixture of both solid promises and more sweeping expressions of a vision for the city.

High on the list of promises, Bradley reaffirmed that his proposed city budget--to be released today--will include money to hire 400 new police officers. The plan to hire more officers, which would give Los Angeles its largest police force ever, had already been announced by the mayor, and Monday he called it the first priority in his desire to make Los Angeles the safest big city in America.

By the end of the year, Bradley also said, he will announce plans for a citywide garbage recycling program that will reduce by half the amount of trash trucked away and buried, and provide the money and advice needed to set up a model neighborhood organization in southwest Los Angeles.

In laying out his view of the future, Bradley seemed to take a swipe at the homeowner groups behind the slow-growth movement--groups that are, so far at least, lining up more closely with a rival for Bradley’s job, City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky.

Different Views of Growth

Polls have found that slow growth is largely an interest of the city’s more affluent areas on the Westside and in the San Fernando Valley--sections of the city where the residents, most of them white, complain the loudest about traffic and smog. In the city’s poorer and minority neighborhoods, there is little discontent about traffic and runaway growth--mainly because there has been little growth there for several decades.

Although political pundits say the next mayoral race may turn on who wins the San Fernando Valley white vote, Bradley came out solidly with the downtrodden Monday, asserting that people in Los Angeles “know that you don’t prevail by running from challenges, by seeking refuge in nostalgia or by simply saying no to progress and change.”

Bradley said he would protect neighborhoods that don’t need or want any more development, but said he would fight blanket attempts to slow growth without regard to what a neighborhood wants. He announced the formation of “economic development councils” on the Eastside and in South-Central Los Angeles and defended the desire of leaders in those economically depressed areas to rise up.

“An issue of basic right and wrong is at stake here--a matter of fundamental fairness and justice. We will not permit those who have reached the top to kick away the ladder of economic progress from those just beginning their climb.”

Bradley has given “State of the City” addresses occasionally, the last in 1986 when he rode 2 miles from City Hall to the Wholesale Produce Mart to announce that the city was doing fine.

Children Sing

But this was the first speech to be turned into a full-blown media extravaganza, complete with side shows. Schoolchildren sang to the gathered guests before Bradley arrived, and as the mayor ended his speech by calling for a better future for the children, first-graders from two Los Angeles schools marched in, wearing name tags proclaiming them the “Class of 2000.”

Yaroslavsky and five other council members did not attend the speech. Many council members typically devote Monday to appearances in their districts, and Yaroslavsky said that he had long-scheduled meetings to attend away from City Hall.

“I congratulate Mayor Bradley on his 15 years as mayor of Los Angeles and 25 years in city politics,” Yaroslavsky said in a statement. “I applaud his decision to reveal his goals for the city; unfortunately, it’s only the second time in recent years he’s done so. Nevertheless, I look forward to working with the mayor to solve the growing number of problems facing our city.”

Council President John Ferraro, who ran against Bradley in 1985 but who introduced the mayor Monday, said it was inevitable that the speech would be regarded by many as the first rumbles of next year’s campaign. And he sounded mildly cynical about Bradley’s call for more action on gangs and a larger police force.

“People in public office always like to go on popular issues,” Ferraro said. “More fronting for police is a popular issue right now.”