Mayor Gets Running Start on Campaign for 5th Term

Tom Bradley opened his campaign for a fifth term as Los Angeles mayor Wednesday with a promise of “new solutions” to the problems of gangs and drugs, but offered no specific programs.

“All of us are ready--more than ready--to wage an all-out attack on gangs and drugs that undermine the social fabric of this entire city,” he told about 300 people at a City Hall rally, one of nine stops during a daylong campaign tour of the city that began at the Los Angeles Wholesale Produce Market at 5:30 a.m.

It was a tour of carefully selected symbols, designed to illustrate what Bradley considers his major accomplishments, beginning with the produce market that his Administration saved from a threatened move to a nearby city. There, the mayor greeted proprietors and workers in the produce stalls and inspected produce ranging from Belgian endive, tiny carrots and delicate flowers favored by nouvelle cuisine chefs to the hearty plantains served by Salvadoran immigrants.

The mayor went underground to the Metro Rail and light rail station being built at 7th and Flower streets. He had breakfast with senior citizens at the headquarters of the Watts Community Labor Action Committee, which has been helped by the mayor in housing construction and training programs. He gave a speech at the harbor in San Pedro, with big cargo ships in the background, boasting of how the city port has moved from failure to economic success during his Administration, and visited a school where his after-school care programs are being conducted.

Bradley sampled the ethnic diversity of the city, walking through the predominantly Jewish Fairfax district and then speaking, lunching and shaking hands in Chinatown, paying his respects to two groups that are part of the black mayor’s multiethnic political coalition.

Coffee Break

The mayor also stopped for coffee at Vickman’s, the venerable produce district restaurant that is a favored haunt of Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who abandoned plans to run against the mayor, leaving Bradley in an easy race.

He faces only two well-known opponents in a field of underdogs, Los Angeles City Councilman Nate Holden and former Los Angeles County Supervisor Baxter Ward. They have few financial resources and are expected to trail the well-financed Bradley, a favorite in public opinion polls.

Draw Most Applause

Bradley’s comments on drugs and crime received the most applause of the day.

But in the speech and at press conferences afterward, he declined to offer specific programs on those issues, or on other problems he discussed, including the environment, housing, traffic congestion and education.

Those, he said, will follow in a campaign in which his lack of opposition will permit him to “shape and strengthen a citywide consensus for our future.”

‘Own Destinies’

The mayor promised to “give neighborhoods control of their own destinies,” to promote ride sharing, van pooling, more mass transit and restrictions on street use by trucks to ease traffic jams, to work with environmentalists and business leaders against air pollution and to protect Santa Monica Bay from further pollution.

A few minutes after the mayor visited Ann Street School, north of downtown, during the campaign swing, security officers at the school spotted what they described as an armed man walking into a nearby city housing project. Los Angeles police officers took the man into custody.