Mayor Narrows His Focus : Bradley Eases Away From Role as Consensus-Maker

From the moment he entered politics 25 years ago, Mayor Tom Bradley displayed an uncommon talent for quietly assembling coalitions in city government and bringing together diverse ethnic and community groups.

Bradley in 1973 became the city’s first black mayor by successfully appealing to white voters, including many in the outer suburbs. He further ensured victory by bridging his natural constituency on the city’s heavily black Southside with affluent Jews on the Westside and Latinos on the Eastside.

But as he nears the end of his fourth term, there is evidence that Bradley is growing isolated in office and is losing his touch as a consensus-maker. A four-month examination of the mayor’s work habits shows that Bradley rarely consults anymore with City Council members, has stopped meeting with the city’s general managers as a group and no longer reaches out to the Latino community.

Instead, a study of his schedule reveals, Bradley’s focus is considerably narrower. He spends much of his day in his office listening to civic leaders but rarely summons these officials to discuss his priorities; he calls on certain City Council members when he needs a vote but chooses not to seek their advice, and he approaches his official duties on an issue-by-issue basis but rarely articulates a broader agenda.

Bradley’s activities are listed in his appointment calendar, a document that he had kept private throughout his 15 years as mayor. But recently, The Times obtained his 1987 calendar through the California Public Records Act. Bradley refused to furnish his schedule of personal appointments or records of telephone messages.

The thousands of entries in the 476-page calendar provide the first detailed account of Bradley’s official activities. Last year, Bradley made numerous appearances on behalf of black, Asian and Jewish groups while spending little time in the Latino community, according to the appointment calendar. The schedule, along with dozens of interviews with civic leaders, also shows that Bradley has lost many allies on the City Council.

Bradley insists that he remains as busy and involved in city affairs as ever. He suggested that his activities are not accurately reflected in his calendar. As an example, Bradley said, his schedule does not include his many conversations with council members either in impromptu meetings or outside City Hall.

Flashes of Temper

“I see members of the council who’ve got something of importance to discuss with me,” Bradley said in a series of interviews pertaining to his calender. “We may see each other at a social function. I probably have more communication with members of the council at those functions than I do at some formal meeting here in the office.”

During one interview, the mild-mannered, diplomatic mayor displayed flashes of temper that are not shown in public.

When pressed on why he has not participated in the annual Martin Luther King Day parade in Los Angeles, Bradley became enraged and angrily denounced Celes King III, the event’s organizer and a Republican foe.

Bradley marched in 10 parades last year as part of his unwavering commitment to participate in community events and ceremonies. But the mayor is so bitter at what he perceives as a snub by Celes King that he boycotted the city’s largest tribute to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. the last two years. Bradley griped that Celes King did not invite him to march in 1986, the first year the parade was held.

Angry Words

“Celes King deliberately--I want you to write this, deliberately--deliberately excluded me from that first parade!” Bradley said, his voice rising and a finger waving at a reporter’s tape recorder. “That tells me everything I need to know about his attitude. . . . Anything that Celes King organizes, he need not expect me ever again to show up.”

Bradley erupted a second time when told of Celes King’s claim that organizers mailed the mayor an announcement of the parade each of the last three years, in addition to personally extending an invitation in 1986 to William Elkins, a Bradley aide.

“No! Hell, no! I don’t receive invitations through Bill Elkins,” Bradley shot back. “If somebody wants me to come to a function like a Martin Luther King parade, they contact me . . . . They lie! They lie then! There have not been any invitations! That’s what I want you to put in the newspaper. There have not been any invitations!”

After a decade and a half as mayor, Tom Bradley is still an enigma. He has been lauded for creating the city’s downtown skyline, staging the successful 1984 Olympics at no cost to the taxpayer and surviving four terms in office without a personally damaging political scandal. But most people, including those who work around the mayor at City Hall, have only a vague notion of how Bradley leads and governs.

Unique Style

An examination of his appointment calendar, along with interviews of city administrators and staff members, offers some insights into Bradley’s unique management style: The mayor is constantly gleaning tidbits of information from countless conversations in the office and at social events. In these settings, the mayor listens attentively, but rarely expresses an opinion. He keeps his thoughts to himself, usually refusing to share his plans and strategies with his own political advisers, his close friends and even his wife of 47 years.

“He is difficult to explain,” said Ethel Bradley. “Most people at City Hall don’t understand the mayor. He is a very unusual person.”

And yet, she says, “You can see how many people he is working with and talking to to get the job done. He knows how to work with people.”

When faced with a critical decision, the mayor usually mulls his options alone. Often, Bradley follows his own instincts, not the political advice of his friends or supporters. Such was the case in 1985, his aides say, when Bradley approved a controversial plan by Occidental Petroleum Corp. to drill for oil in Pacific Palisades. One adviser called the decision an act of “political idiocy,” and environmentalists accused the mayor of caving in to major oil interests.

‘Integrity and Guts’

“A number of the mayor’s detractors were using (the Occidental decision) in a bad light,” said former City Atty. Burt Pines, a close friend and political supporter. “I remember . . . telling him I respect his integrity and guts in making that decision, knowing he had to call it based on what he thought the merits were. . . . The political decision would have been to do the opposite.”

At age 70, Bradley remains a hands-on administrator who continues to follow the same nuts-and-bolts work ethic that he developed as a 10th District city councilman and a veteran police lieutenant. He reads every piece of paper that crosses his desk, approves every appointment before it is logged in his calendar and personally returns all of his telephone calls. He consistently works days, nights and weekends, leaving virtually no time to relax or to spend with his family. He said he is so busy that he does not watch films or sporting events anymore, and could not recall his last vacation.

At City Hall, Bradley told The Times, he often gets so bogged down in meetings that he must remind his aides to clear an hour on his calendar to catch up on the paper work that piles up on his desk. Although the calendar does not list Bradley’s activities around the clock, it shows that Bradley sets aside only an hour a day during office hours to perform the tasks necessary to administer the nation’s second-largest city. His aides maintain, however, that the mayor does most of his work during night and weekend hours when he isn’t attending some social or community function.

Cabinet Sessions Halted

Nor does Bradley spend time with his city department heads and general managers as a group. He stopped holding cabinet meetings in 1986 because he considered them a waste of time. These sessions had presented the only opportunity for Bradley to kick around broad policy ideas with a group of city administrators.

“Tom does not like large gatherings of cabinet members, general managers or staff,” said Ray Remy, president of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce and Bradley’s former chief of staff for eight years. “Tom just really prefers to deal one-on-one. It is a style that works well, I think, for Tom and the city. I don’t think you could run the country that way. And it probably wouldn’t work if (Bradley) didn’t have a real in-depth, background knowledge of the city.”

Bradley said he prefers to huddle with his general managers and commissioners individually. These private meetings usually focus on a problem that requires the mayor’s attention and rarely venture into general policy areas, said one longtime member of the Bradley Administration.

“It seems to me that once in a while you’d sit around and say, ‘What do people think we ought to do,’ ” said the former administrator, who asked not to be named. “Those kinds of more reflective things . . . that’s what never occurred. . . . By and large, what we did . . . wasn’t of much interest unless we screwed something up.”

Not One Call

Councilman Marvin Braude, until recently an ardent Bradley supporter, added: “All the time I’ve known Tom Bradley, he has never called me into his office and said to me, ‘Marvin, let’s brainstorm together.’ . . . We have a right to expect the mayor to devote part of his energies, part of his soul and part of his talents to the long-range concerns of the city, and the mayor has been deficient in doing that. He is always dealing with brush fires.”

Bradley would not consider calling in a council member to “brainstorm,” said Deputy Mayor Michael Gage.

“He is an intensely private man and his way isn’t ever going to be to call up a (Councilman) Bobby Farrell or Marvin and say, ‘What do you think about this?’ Because the walls have ears. He’s not cut from that cloth, but . . . he will damn sure sit around and brainstorm with his staff and ask, ‘What if? Where will that take us 10 years from now?’ ” Gage said.

However, asked in an interview when he makes time to discuss his vision for Los Angeles, Bradley said he usually ponders these thoughts alone.

Thinking on the Run

“You’d be surprised how it is possible to manage every spare moment,” Bradley said. “Sometimes, it may be in the automobile moving from one place to another. Sometimes, it is just in the quiet of the night when I can think of something that I want to do or discuss. I get out my pad and jot (it) down.”

Over the years, the mayor has shunned major policy addresses to lay out his political agenda. Last year, for instance, Bradley set aside a total of one hour on his calendar to prepare for one substantive policy speech--a March 13 talk to business leaders at AT&T;’s downtown auditorium. Bradley usually outlines his priorities--from downtown development to mass transit--in the proposed budget he submits in writing each year to the City Council.

On April 18, however, Bradley broke from this mold in dramatic fashion. At the urging of Gage, his new chief of staff, the mayor gave a sweeping State of the City address to a cheering crowd of loyal supporters. The speech marked only the third time in 15 years as mayor that Bradley has used the State of the City format to present his programs to the City Council.

Never considered an eloquent public speaker, the mayor flawlessly delivered his polished speech from a Teleprompter. The address offered bold, innovative programs for the future, such as spending several hundred million dollars in city revenues on after-school child-care services. The speech, held in the vaulted City Council chambers, was politically important to Bradley, who is expected to face a stiff challenge next year from Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky in his bid for an unprecedented fifth term. The mayor’s staff sent more than 1,000 invitations and made follow-up phone calls to ensure an overflow crowd.

Some Stayed Away

In an apparent snub, six of the 15 council members did not attend. While most of the missing council members met in their districts with constituents and staff members, their vacant front-row seats in the council chambers were filled by the mayor’s aides.

Not so long ago Bradley could have commanded nearly the entire council to attend such an event. Today, the mayor has only three close allies on the council--Richard Alatorre, Robert Farrell and Gilbert Lindsay, all of whom attended and applauded his State of the City address. Farrell’s office issued a press release commending Bradley before the mayor had left the podium.

“There was a time when I first came to the council when the mayor literally controlled enough votes to get anything he wanted,” said Hal Bernson, who was first elected in 1979. “I think that has changed.”

For many years, most council members shared Bradley’s political ideology and consistently supported his programs. The Bradley coalition, which included council members Pat Russell, David Cunningham, Arthur Snyder, Yaroslavsky and Braude, consulted with the mayor regularly and was kept abreast of his agenda by Frances Savitch, the mayor’s longtime executive assistant and effective council lobbyist.

The coalition began to crumble in recent years with the resignations of Cunningham and Snyder, the defeat of Russell in last year’s election, the departure of Savitch to private industry and the recent clashes with Yaroslavsky and Braude. Both have battled Bradley on environmental issues, particularly the mayor’s support of oil drilling in Pacific Palisades.

Severe Setback

Russell’s defeat was most devastating to Bradley because it meant the mayor could no longer call on the council president to pave the way for favorable votes on critical issues or to lobby support for mayoral appointments. As head of the council, Russell regularly consulted with Bradley in person and on the telephone.

The present council president, John Ferraro, recently said that he has not met privately with Bradley and has received one phone call from the mayor since he replaced Russell last July. By comparison, Ferraro and Bradley consulted once a week during Ferraro’s previous term as council president, from 1977 to 1981.

Between his terms as council president, Ferraro noted, he and Bradley were opponents in the 1985 mayoral race. “I was defeated rather badly,” Ferraro said. “Why would I hold a grudge against him? Maybe he holds a grudge against me.”

Bradley said that, aside from the election, he and Ferraro have been “great friends” and enjoy a “cordial” relationship. At the start of his State of the City address, the mayor singled out Ferraro for his leadership and commended the council.

‘Great Friends’

“It takes a partnership, it takes a team in order to accomplish any of our dreams, any of our goals. And this council has worked closely with me on these kinds of issues,” Bradley said.

This closeness is not reflected in the mayor’s schedule.

Only two council members, allies Alatorre and Farrell, met more than twice with Bradley last year, according to the calendar. Five council members do not appear in any scheduled meetings. They are Nate Holden, Joy Picus, Gloria Molina, Ernani Bernardi and Yaroslavsky.

Bradley scoffed at the suggestion that his base of council support has eroded and his working relationship with individual members has soured.

“I’ve never turned down a councilman,” Bradley told a reporter. “Have you asked that? Never. And they know that they can reach me on the telephone or in person or I’ll go to their office. There is never any barrier to our getting together and working together.”

Won’t Make the Call

But Bradley will never make the call, said council member Braude. “If I want to meet with him, he’ll meet with me, but it has to be at my initiative and he’ll never get together to just chat, to brainstorm or to exude passion.”

Other council members also said that Bradley is noticeably less interested these days in council business.

“I think there is no question the mayor has less of a coalition of loyalists on the council than he had before the last election,” said Joan Milke Flores, a council member since 1981. “I don’t think he has been as involved in council decisions as he has in the past. . . . Maybe he . . . used to feel comfortable having input through his friends on the City Council.”

Since being elected to the council last year, Gloria Molina said, she has tried repeatedly without success to form an alliance with the mayor.

Molina Bypassed

“I don’t have much of a relationship (with Bradley),” Molina said. “I don’t know who does. . . . You’d think that there would be a closer relationship. After all, we make a lot of decisions. Everything has to be decided by the council. Sometimes it would be nice to have some leadership direction on some of these issues.”

Molina said the mayor’s office has excluded her from decisions that concern her Eastside constituents and her duties as head of the council’s Elections Committee. She said she drafted a plan to provide housing for low-income residents only to discover that Bradley had called a press conference to announce the very same program. In another case, Bradley bypassed Molina and her Elections Committee when the mayor’s staff arranged for a council vote on a proposal to place on the ballot a light-rail project in the San Fernando Valley.

“I certainly wanted to work with him and talk (to Bradley) about different priorities I had, but I’ve never been called back again,” Molina said. She recently advised the mayor’s staff not to count on her as a Bradley supporter. “I have certainly tried. I tell you this much: I am not trying anymore.”

But another new council member, Ruth Galanter, had no complaints about Bradley or his staff. “When I need the mayor’s office on something, I’m able to get them. We’ve been able to cooperate on certain things. There seems to be a comfortable working relationship,” Galanter said.

Under the current council alignment, Bradley and his staff must work to persuade individual members on each vote rather than relying on a coalition for overall support of his programs. Bradley can count on backing from Bernson and Flores on growth issues, for example, but he can no longer pick up the phone and direct the council president to drum up other votes.

Successes and Defeats

“I think that is the way it ought to be,” Bernson said. “(The mayor) needs to approach things on an issue-by-issue, impersonal basis in order to really serve the city well.”

How well Bradley has fared under these new ground rules varies. He has scored successes, such as securing council approval for his plans to limit sewer hookups and conserve water. And he has suffered defeats, such as failing to persuade council members to find sites for 102 mobile homes the city purchased to shelter homeless families. Today, 78 of the trailers remain empty.

The real test will come in future months as Bradley tries to push through his plan to use city funds to pay for after-school child-care programs. The mayor will need the the support of City Council members--as well as county supervisors and the courts--to tap higher property taxes generated by downtown redevelopment projects. Some council members already have balked at using city tax revenues to pay for programs that are financed by the state and federal governments.

‘Innovative Program’

“This is a very innovative program,” said Gage, the mayor’s chief of staff. “I don’t expect it to get accepted tomorrow . . . but I think it will happen two months from now, certainly within a year.”

The mayor’s programs and his visibility on the city’s Eastside are coming under attack in some quarters of the Latino community. Bradley made far fewer appearances last year on behalf of Latino organizations than black, Jewish or Asian groups, his calendar shows. He attended 41 events held by black groups, 37 events sponsored by Asian organizations and 33 events in the Jewish community, but participated in only 15 events at the request of Latino groups. These numbers reflect how segments of the Latino community are viewed within the mayor’s office, Molina believes.

“I think it is unfortunate,” Molina said. “People are saying he has not been around. . . . Doing an occasional press conference now and then is not really responding to the critical needs that the community has. How come our parks are not as nice? Our streets not as clean? Our police protection not as good? I don’t see him joining in on those issues that the community cries out about regularly.”

‘Very Visible Mayor’

The city’s other Latino council member, Richard Alatorre, said that he has not heard any dissatisfaction with Bradley. Alatorre, Bradley’s chief ally on the council, said he sees the mayor at every important Latino event.

“One thing he can’t be criticized for is that he is not a very visible mayor,” Alatorre said. “He is a very visible mayor and he reaches out to different parts of the city of Los Angeles.”

The mayor’s liaison to the Latino community, Art Gastelum, suggested that Latinos have not received their full share of the mayor’s attention because they are not as politically organized as Jews or as demanding of Bradley’s time as blacks. The result, Gastelum said, is that the mayor gets fewer invitations from Latinos.

“You don’t have the organized groups (among Latinos) as much as you do in the Jewish community,” Gastelum said. “You don’t have the housewives organizing for better kennels in their areas or better dog runs in their parks. You don’t have that on the Eastside. You have people out there working five and six days a week making a living.”

Failure to Reach Out

Several Latino leaders said that Gastelum’s remarks were insensitive and ignored the modest strides that Latinos have made in local political circles. These leaders said they feel that Bradley is accessible to Latinos, but that he fails to reach out.

“My feeling is he’s been taking the Latino community for granted,” said John Huarte, an attorney who formerly served as associate counsel of the Los Angeles chapter of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

“The Latino community by and large has supported Mayor Bradley. I think he has relied upon that support in the past and is not doing anything to continue to cultivate those relationships.”