Hartley Rides Out His Baptism of Fire : City Hall: The first-year councilman has as many fans as critics. Constituents enjoy his attention; officials bemoan his lack of focus.

It was not so long ago that the drug trade in the alley near Carol Seneff’s City Heights home was so brisk that she kept her 10-year-old daughter indoors, protected from the violence that repeatedly flared outside.

Despite Seneff’s pleas for help, Councilwoman Gloria McColl and the City Hall bureaucracy had produced little progress. But when John Hartley, who had campaigned on an anti-crime platform, replaced McColl a year ago, Seneff and a small group of City Heights mothers decided to lobby the 3rd District council office for relief once more.

Today, 10 police officers walk a beat near Seneff’s Wightman Street home, the neighborhood crack house has been shut down, and Seneff believes that the neighborhood is safe enough to let her daughter play in the back yard.

Seneff, who campaigned for McColl, credits Hartley for pushing through a multifaceted program involving the police, the city’s code enforcement department, and school and recreation programs to combat crime in the gang-infested neighborhood.

Hartley “came out here, he listened to us, he walked blocks with us,” she said. “I think he still has a lot to learn, but I think he genuinely cares for what’s happening in the area.”

Such praise from residents and community leaders conflicts so dramatically with the record Hartley has compiled at City Hall during his first year in office that it sometimes seems 3rd District voters sent two councilmen to City Hall when they replaced the patrician McColl with the unpretentious Hartley in 1989.

In contrast to the Hartley who has assiduously devoted himself to district affairs like Seneff’s crime problem and neighborhood redevelopment, there is the Hartley who has taken so many pratfalls that only the impending recall election facing freshman colleague Linda Bernhardt has spared him the designation as class clown.

In just a year in office, Hartley, 48, has stumbled through debacles of his own creation by approving an expensive office renovation and later reviving the matter--after the political heat had died down--by announcing that he had canceled the move. He voted to hike council salaries during the city’s budget crisis, then later announced that he would not accept the pay raise.

By introducing the now infamous “Hartley” reapportionment map--which he had only a small role in creating--Hartley forever stamped his name on the most bitter and enduring council controversy of 1990, a political turf battle between council factions that is still in court and promises to linger into next year.

Hartley has continuously sparred with Mayor Maureen O’Connor, embraced the Guardian Angels but failed to get the city’s police to cooperate with them and spent a year unsuccessfully attempting to win a permit to sell beer and wine for a campaign contributor over the objections of police and surrounding neighbors.

Hartley’s inarticulate delivery, “aw shucks” persona and high staff turnover have not created the image of dynamism that an incoming councilman traditionally seeks in his first months in office. For the second consecutive year, Hartley will hold no committee chairmanships, considered political plums by council members.

“I don’t think John is a politically sophisticated person. I think that’s what appealed to the voters,” said Susan Hoekenga, chairman of the Greater North Park Community Planning Committee. “But downtown, on the (council) floor, where everything is so political . . . that naivete has hurt him.”

Whether Hartley’s focus on district issues is the proper strategy in the era of district-only elections remains to be seen.

Hartley “has a naivete about how the city works, how the press works, how the elite work,” said former aide Glen Sparrow, who quit Hartley’s office less than 10 months after being appointed. “But he knows the community. He knows instinctively how they come down on things. In that respect, he’s a good representative.”

Hartley’s supporters credit him with coercing Caltrans to tear down vacant homes that the state agency had bought up for its planned expansion of Interstate 15 in City Heights, which had become magnets for crime and drug use.

Hartley also moved City Heights and North Park’s redevelopment projects forward and won $100,000 in city money for a study of how to best cover several blocks of the freeway and convert the area into badly needed park space.

Throughout, Hartley has kept up a steady drumbeat against crime, widely considered the most pressing issue in District 3. Hartley created a nonprofit organization, called Safe Neighborhoods, to help organize neighborhood watch groups and train residents in crime-fighting measures.

Hartley also believes that task forces he created on expanding downtown courts and jails and addressing the homeless problem in Balboa Park should take action in 1991.

“John has, out of the gate, been more bold, has been willing to take on the harder problems and do it in a more aggressive manner,” said Jim Bliesner, chairman of the City Heights redevelopment project and a Hartley partisan since the days of the 1988 ballot initiative campaign that brought in the city’s district elections system.

But on major citywide issues that faced the council in 1990, Hartley has seized few leadership roles, remaining content, he said, to be part of council coalitions that placed a black and a woman on the Port Commission, approved the Human Dignity Ordinance and created the Housing Trust Fund, among other accomplishments.

“My idea of leadership is often to create what needs to be created and support what needs to be supported,” Hartley said. “I’m not conscious that I have to charge to be the point person. But I’m willing to do what needs to be done.”

But, he added, “As a person who created the district elections campaign, I need to show that we can have citywide leadership, even from somebody elected out of district elections.”

Hartley’s critics say that hasn’t happened.

“He’s a follower. He follows (Deputy Mayor Bob) Filner,” said Paul Downey, spokesman for O’Connor, who has been at odds with Hartley most of the year. “In terms of any real (citywide) initiatives or anything he’s brought to the council, he really hasn’t.”

“He still needs to focus,” said the head of a city interest group who believes Hartley has offered a variety of views on crime and prison issues. “It’s just not focused.”

A solid vote for progressive causes and the environment--Hartley ranked second among council members in the Sierra Club’s recent evaluation--Hartley nevertheless bungled a chance to impose tighter protections against development in the city’s urban reserve, resulting in a subsequent vote to remove restrictions, according to the Sierra Club.

The defining characteristic of Hartley’s attitude toward his job may be that he has yet to shed the role of community organizer for a role as legislator or leader. It was stumping door to door that brought Hartley to political prominence as one of the main forces behind the 1988 ballot initiative that shifted the city to a district elections system.

Hartley said he is attempting to blend the two roles.

“The uniqueness of me is my background in organizing,” Hartley said. “Rather than sit here and be a legislator and then, as things come up, just vote on those, what I like is combining organizing on the issues.”

In much the same way that Hartley personally traversed the district in pursuit of electoral victories for the district elections initiative and his council candidacy, he now promises to personally put a neighborhood block watch program on every block of certain crime-prone neighborhoods.

“His own personal view is that he needs to be in touch with the day-to-day problems of the person on the streets, and that the majority of people aren’t going to call him at City Hall,” Hoekenga said. “Not every elected official would do that.”

But Barbara Pake, member of the Webster Community Council, said that Hartley’s office did nothing for her community, because, she believes, her organization consistently opposed Hartley’s efforts to win a beer and wine sales permit in the Webster area for a campaign contributor. In the city’s reapportionment, the Webster community was moved to Councilman Wes Pratt’s 4th District.

“From the time he got into office to the time we went over to Wes Pratt, nothing got done,” Pake said.

An acknowledged devotee of self-improvement programs, Hartley has been through Dale Carnegie courses “five or six times,” taken training in “est” and its successor, The Forum, and studied communications and time management. He is currently enrolled in a Jenny Craig weight loss course and is lifting weights.

“As a kid, I always felt that I had to make up for something,” Hartley said. “I was the first one to go to college in my family. And nobody in my family is intellectual, and ideas and speaking wasn’t part of my family. And so I always felt that I needed to . . . grow.”

During his year in office, Hartley has used thousands of city and campaign dollars in similar self-improvement efforts for his staff and constituents. In June, Hartley paid the Phoenix-based Institute for Cultural Affairs $3,000 to stage two two-day seminars on “facilitation methods” for his office staff, city records show. The second seminar has yet to be held.

Hartley also paid the institute $5,300 in campaign funds to help plan and then run a daylong conference focusing on issues facing Mid-City youth. After City Atty. John Witt’s office ruled that city funds could be used for the workshop, Hartley replaced $3,000 of the payment with government money. The institute’s executive director, John Oyler, said that he has reimbursed Hartley’s campaign.

In October, Hartley spent $1,500 of city money to hire the La Jolla firm Get Organized! to improve staff members’ “time and desk management.” And in January, Hartley paid consultant Mark Reynolds $1,000 from his campaign funds to teach his staff communication skills, according to Reynolds, a former est official who is now Hartley’s chief of staff.

Hartley campaign treasurer Sandra Burton said she inadvertently neglected to list the Jan. 7 payment to Reynolds on Hartley’s campaign disclosure form.

Hartley, who hired the outside consultants at the recommendation of the city’s Organization Effectiveness Program, believes that some of his staff benefited from the training, while others did not.

“Some people want to grow and learn, and some don’t,” he said. “I’d like to see more results.”

Former aide Sparrow, however, said that Hartley suffered from similar problems.

“He can’t use staff, because he’s never had staff,” Sparrow said, adding that such conflicts are the main reason he departed. “We had to train him on how to use staff and he never got it right. He’s a loner type, afraid to delegate.”

Hartley’s supporters in the 3rd District are willing to allow him some room to work out the growing pains of a council newcomer, focusing instead on the progress they see in their communities, which more than makes up for Hartley’s “lack of experience in negotiating the system,” Bliesner said.

Ever idealistic, Hartley calls his rough first year in office “a learning experience” that has prepared him for progress in 1991.

“So far, I wouldn’t say that I like it, it’s just that I get satisfaction out of it,” he said of his post.

“As much as we hate politicians as a society, (the council) is a place where you can have more things happen, faster and quicker, than anywhere else. You can inspire people. You can create programs. You can actually make things happen here. . . .

“The question is: How much can we accomplish? How much can we do?”