COLUMN ONE : Leaders Lose Feel for L.A. : Mayor Bradley and the council are accused of neglecting L.A.’s neediest areas. Critics say economic isolation laid groundwork for the riots long ago.

Somehow, somewhere along the line, connections had been frayed and confidence lost.

Conceived in the ashes of Watts, this was supposed to be a municipal administration built to absorb ethnic shocks. In a city of so many colors, of so much wealth and poverty, it was expected to keep the peace.

But on a single evening in late April, the flames that lighted the Los Angeles sky revealed that despite its multiracial hues, Mayor Tom Bradley’s model City Hall was powerless to keep the lid on. In the eyes of disillusioned residents, the city’s leadership had come to symbolize misplaced priorities and unfulfilled hope.

The frustration was evident on the first night of the riots--in the mayor’s own church, in the neighborhood that launched his remarkable political career 30 years ago.

With fires raging only a block away, Bradley took to the pulpit of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in South-Central Los Angeles. In the monotone he reserves for the most urgent moments, Bradley pleaded with the assemblage to vent its rage through “appropriate channels” and not join the anarchy of the streets.

While some applauded, others booed.

“Sit down!” one woman shouted. “What are you going to do?” someone else yelled repeatedly as the mayor, appearing confused and distracted, pressed on without acknowledging the catcalls.

It is, of course, too simplistic to blame the upheaval entirely on City Hall; too many social, political and economic forces beyond the control of the mayor and City Council have eaten away at the inner city.

But sifting through the destruction of the disorder, there are many in and out of the bureaucracy who believe that city government should have done more to address the ills of a rapidly evolving city, perhaps easing the disaffection underlying the worst U.S. riots since the Civil War era.

“We lost touch,” concedes Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Hernandez, whose district includes the riot-ravaged Pico-Union area. “The council was living in a different world.”

Bradley refuses to accept any responsibility for the unrest, blaming Washington instead.

“The underlying alienation” of inner-city residents, the mayor insisted, “is due to the fact that since 1980 there has been a tremendous reduction of federal funds and of interest in the cities of this nation.” Poverty in Los Angeles, Bradley said, cannot “be corrected by a mayor or all of City Hall put together.”

But that is not the entire story.

During the past three months, The Times has talked to dozens of scholars, politicians, consultants, community activists and residents in an effort to gauge the impact of City Hall on the quality of life in the city’s poorer regions. Combined with an analysis of public records, the picture that emerges is of a leadership distracted by parochial interests and political ambitions.

* Despite Los Angeles’ changing ethnicity, City Hall decision making remains tilted toward parts of the city represented by a majority of white, middle-class council members who are personally and politically detached from the urban poor. Rich in votes and campaign contributions, these areas have dominated the political agenda.

* Amid a downtown office boom and a Westside renaissance, City Hall did not map an effective strategic plan for revitalizing South-Central Los Angeles, even as 70,000 jobs were lost because of plant closures. After a decade of dependency on federal anti-poverty funds, city government failed to come up with a new blueprint for the inner city when Washington’s aid dropped off sharply in the 1980s.

* As the mayor’s political ambitions grew, his power base, originally rooted in Southwest Los Angeles, shifted toward the city’s affluent areas, where votes and donations could be mined. Bradley’s reelection strategies, as well as his two failed bids for governor, stressed issues and accomplishments with broad voter appeal, leaving concerns of the underclass shortchanged. Minority leaders, with an eye on Bradley’s success, followed his lead.

Today, city leaders are focusing on the future, hoping that Los Angeles’ corporate culture can bring jobs and a modicum of prosperity and comfort to the city’s impoverished minority neighborhoods.

So far, Los Angeles officeholders have yet to undertake any concerted review of what may have gone wrong in the past at City Hall. But a number of academicians, political insiders and community activists say there are important lessons to be learned--and not repeated--by looking back at the strained relationship between local government and its neediest constituents.

During the 1980s, the problems of the inner city--gangs, crack cocaine, homelessness and ethnic tension--frequently dominated Los Angeles news. But at City Hall, the focus seemed elsewhere.

Countless hours and millions of dollars were spent fighting over whether oil drilling should be permitted along the coastal bluffs of Pacific Palisades and whether developers should be allowed to construct office buildings that would cast shadows on suburban homes in the San Fernando Valley.

There also were debates on whether smoking should be banned in restaurants and whether lobbyists should be allowed to buy coffee and doughnuts for elected officials. The council spent a number of sessions--including public hearings--on whether dogs should be allowed to run free in a Laurel Canyon park perched above Studio City.

For many people struggling to survive in the poorest neighborhoods, City Hall in the 1980s seemed to be talking about someplace else, an older Los Angeles, where preserving the city’s suburban ambience remained a top political priority despite a decade of profound social and economic changes.

Los Angeles had become a destination for nearly 1 million immigrants, most of them poor Latinos seeking opportunity in the nation’s second largest city who found that its boasts of multiculturalism concealed an uneasiness and hostility toward outsiders.

“If the system worked the way it should for the disenfranchised, I think there would have been less chance of a riot,” said immigration-rights advocate Carlos Vaquerano of the Central American Refugee Center. “There really was a feeling among those who vented their anger that no one with power spoke for them.”

The gulf between Los Angeles’ newcomers and the city’s elected leaders was highlighted in the council’s rejection last year of a proposal that would have relaxed restrictions on sidewalk vendors. For some immigrants, selling goods on the streets is a first step toward economic self-sufficiency.

“In the minds of many council members, the vendor ordinance forced them to make hard choices of whether L.A. would become a Third World city or not,” said Councilman Michael Woo, a mayoral candidate who sponsored the measure. “They saw it as a choice between order and dirty streets, food that smells funny. It’s part of the reaction that has set in here, the sense that L.A. is losing its identity as a large Midwestern suburb.”

In the African-American community--where unlike the newly arrived immigrants, families have resided for generations--the feeling of political abandonment runs even deeper, reinforced by years of slights.

Former Bradley aide Kerman Maddox, for one, bitterly recalled the outcry at City Hall and the rewards offered in the 1988 slaying of 27-year-old Karen Toshima, a graphic artist randomly shot in a gang skirmish in Westwood.

“I didn’t hear anyone offering rewards in the deaths of black kids,” Maddox said. “While the gang-murder rate soared and innocent bystanders were slain, elected officials did little to respond to the pain in the community.”

Then there was the journey a group of Watts residents made to City Hall last April when they heard that a new library planned for their community was about to become a casualty of the city’s budget crisis.

After arriving by the busload, they say they were shunted from pillar to post. Their questions were ignored and they were treated rudely. It took them another trip to City Hall to learn that the library was not in jeopardy after all. The experience, they say, left them furious, convinced that no one gave a damn.

“The first time we went to City Hall, there was an animal rights group ahead of us so we couldn’t talk,” said Getachew Tamrat, a member of Friends of the Watts Library. “To me it’s as if they equate people with less than dogs. I lost wages that day. I am a transit mechanic. I am an average man with a family. I dressed in a suit, a double-breasted gray suit.”

Even when council members talk among themselves, cultural insensitivities occasionally surface--as illustrated by an angry exchange between the council’s oldest member, who is white, and one of its newest, who is black.

During a debate over police reforms recommended by the Christopher Commission, seven-term San Fernando Valley Councilman Ernani Bernardi referred to freshman colleague Mark Ridley-Thomas as “Curly.” Ridley-Thomas erupted. “What you said just now has very serious implications,” he warned. “Don’t ever say that again.”

Bernardi was apologetic, but he also was perplexed by the furor, saying he did not mean anything personal by it. “I call everyone ‘Curly.’ ”

In a fight over when to schedule an election, Councilman Mike Hernandez said a colleague remarked of him: “This guy just wants the Mexicans to vote.” Another time, he said, a councilwoman referred to Central American immigrants as “the little people.” And on still another occasion, Hernandez said, after he and a councilman were getting nowhere in a debate, the exasperated colleague blurted out: “It must be a cultural thing.”

In some respects, the very structure of Los Angeles government--and the sprawl of the city itself--has made it easy for the majority of the city’s elected officials to remain detached from the problems and concerns of minority areas.

Spread over 469 square miles, from San Pedro to Granada Hills, the city of Los Angeles is carved into 15 districts, with the majority of them ruled by suburban council members who, like their constituents, have little reason to venture into the city’s impoverished core.

Simply put, most of them “aren’t thinking about poor people and have no reason to think about poor people,” said Bruce Cain, associate director of the Institute of Government Studies at UC Berkeley.

Byran O. Jackson, a Cal State Los Angeles professor who is researching Los Angeles’ ethnic politics, put it another way. City Hall, he said, is a “very cozy, comfortable, old boys’ network . . . detached from this big mass of folks they call the population out there.”

During the 1980s, sweeping demographic changes in the city made it easier for politicians to ignore the city’s neediest communities.

While the population was soaring in those districts, the number of voters was dropping dramatically. The newcomers were mostly poor Latino immigrants moving into neighborhoods abandoned over the years by middle-class African-Americans--those more likely to participate in the electoral process.

They left behind neighborhoods divided by language and ethnicity, ill-equipped to compete for attention with the well-organized Anglo homeowners associations that can back up their demands with votes.

“The fundamental trend that occurred in this city,” said Woo, “was that the voting population became increasingly white, older, more affluent and educated while the general population was going in the exact opposite direction.”

Consider these statistics:

In the 1973 mayoral primary, 48% more votes were cast on the Westside than in central and South Los Angeles, despite having roughly the same population. By 1989, although voting was down citywide, the gap had widened, with the Westside casting 78% more votes than the inner-city districts. Voter turnout in one of those districts had dropped so precipitously that Councilwoman Rita Walters was elected last year by garnering a mere 6,251 votes out of a population of 250,000.

Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores, who represents a portion of Watts, said that during battles to divert funds from affluent districts to poorer ones, she has heard colleagues remark: “ ‘We’re not going to give money to people who don’t vote.’ ”

Good to their promise, she said, council members in recent years have opposed a plan to tap Department of Recreation and Parks funds to shore up deteriorating athletic facilities in several South-Central housing projects and resisted efforts to redistribute aid to the city’s neediest senior citizens.

“There haven’t been enough people (council members) who recognize that to help the whole city, sometimes you have to give extra help to its weaker parts,” Flores said.

Further diminishing the clout of inner-city residents has been the influence of political contributions from the Westside, the San Fernando Valley and the downtown corporate community. Since 1983, six times as much money--about $8 million--has come from the Westside and Hollywood as from the Crenshaw district and South Los Angeles.

For the most part, the big donors got what they wanted--the lion’s share of access and attention.

“If you have money, you can play the game,” said Ben Bycel, executive director of the Los Angeles city Ethics Commission. Elected officials, he said, tend to “intuitively know (the urban poor) don’t vote and don’t give money.”

“When you talk about rejuvenating neighborhoods around streets like Florence and Manchester,” said political consultant Rick Taylor, “those aren’t big money influences.”

Inevitably, discussions about City Hall and the inner city turn to criticisms of the black council members who represented the area during the 1970s and 1980s.

Former Watts resident Abdul Rahman Abdul Aziz, a Hawthorne chiropractor who still counsels gang members in his old neighborhood, offered this widely held, harsh assessment: “It seems they are afraid to stand up and be counted as a friend of the black community. It seems as though they are selling out. . . . I don’t know what the other agenda is, but it hasn’t been the black community.”

Chief among the complaints has been that council members who for years represented Central and South Los Angeles failed to push for broad economic and aesthetic improvements to make the areas’ crime-plagued ghettos and barrios more livable.

Instead, critics charge, they became complacent, taking for granted their districts’ shrinking core of older black voters who, in the tradition of African-American politics, rarely oust incumbent black politicians--a display of reverence for their accomplishments.

“The black community treats leaders as celebrities,” said Los Angeles Police Officer Carl McGill, president of the African American Peace Officers Assn.

Next to Tom Bradley, the biggest celebrity was the flamboyant Gilbert Lindsay, the City Council’s first black member, the self-proclaimed “Emperor of the Great 9th District.” He served for 27 years, until his death last year at age 90, even though it had become evident that his sharp intellect had been diminished by his advancing age.

Among critics of the council’s black leadership, Lindsay is remembered less for his racial trailblazing than for his neglect of the district’s neediest constituents.

Lindsay’s turf stretched from the poverty of South-Central to the riches of downtown, placing him in a position to benefit from loyal inner-city voters and corporate money. His electoral base never wavered, despite repeated accusations that he favored developers envisioning a skyline for Los Angeles and a hefty profit for themselves.

“He just allowed a level of deterioration (in South Los Angeles) that is an obscenity,” said Mary Lee, an attorney with the South Los Angeles Legal Services Office.

Serving beside Lindsay were veteran black council members David Cunningham and Robert Farrell, both of whom argue that bringing change to their decaying districts was more difficult than the critics would suggest.

Farrell, who served from 1974 until last year, said it was always easy to get the council’s attention on issues of concern to the Anglo majority--such as the impact of a major development project on traffic congestion.

“By contrast,” he said, “residents from South-Central, even if they could pack the council chamber, talked about more resources for human services, matters that would drain resources from other districts and represented deep social problems that nobody could or would deal with.”

As for economic development, Cunningham, who served from 1973 through 1986, said it is unfair to accuse him and the other City Council members of championing a downtown renaissance but ignoring the decay of poor sections of their districts.

Black council members, he said, continually found themselves faced with opposition from fearful residents and liberal activist groups, who complained that large-scale redevelopment would mean razing homes and worsening the areas’s housing crisis.

“They’d say: ‘You can’t do this to people. You’re gonna take (their) land,’ ” said Cunningham, who is now a development consultant. Cunningham said it was such an encounter, a very bitter one, early in Lindsay’s career that caused him to shy away from redeveloping poorer parts of his densely populated district.

“It left a sour taste in his mouth,” Cunningham said. “I don’t think any of us was ready to do to South-Central what we did to downtown.”

But as Cunningham and other City Hall observers say, there were other reasons behind the low-key conduct of the city’s African-American council members, reasons that had more to do with political ambition than community opposition. They were following the mayor’s lead.

Bradley set a standard and tone for urban black politicians. He spoke the language of white businessmen, eschewing the inflammatory rhetoric that made so many black leaders unelectable. The unflattering phrase, “non-threatening,” has often been used to explain how Bradley built the multiethnic coalition that has kept him in office longer than any mayor in Los Angeles history.

Cunningham, who inherited Bradley’s 10th District council seat, said that “aspiring black leaders” for years have taken their cue from the mayor, “keeping their eyes on the citywide voting base.”

Moreover, as Bradley’s statewide political hopes rose, many black leaders deferred any rigorous effort to call attention to the ills of the inner city and focused instead on “lofty goals anybody could buy into,” Cunningham said.

Bradley chose the “most progressive agenda he could, given his goals of staying in office and running for higher office,” said UC Berkeley professor Cain. But at the same time, he said, there was no one at City Hall “who articulated the lower-class black agenda.”

The mayor denies that his political aspirations either intentionally or inadvertently hurt the city’s underclass. “Absolutely not,” he said, adding that his strategy in no way favored the rich over the poor.

The shortcomings of City Hall leadership are particularly disheartening for many who remember the promise that Bradley’s 1973 victory over conservative Mayor Sam Yorty held for the city’s minorities.

“There was an immense emotional reaction when he did win,” recalled attorney Dan Garcia, a longtime Bradley confidant and political appointee. “A black man was finally able to overcome a racist campaign and open doors to formerly white bastions.”

And he did. Bradley substantially increased the ranks of black administrators and the numbers of minorities and women serving on city commissions, which hold sway over public works projects, recreation programs and basic services. Bradley also made sure that minority-owned businesses got a bigger share of government contracts.

Moreover, Bradley’s intensive lobbying during his first two terms brought hundreds of millions of dollars of federal aid to City Hall coffers--more than three times as much as his predecessor and more than any city except New York.

Much of the money went directly to neighborhood organizations that offered job training, day care, economic development assistance and a host of other services to poor people. With deep roots in the various ethnic and racial communities of the city, these groups became a vital source of political support for the mayor and the council.

Yet there were risks in relying so heavily on federal funds. In 1979, experts warned that city government was fostering a culture of dependency in the inner city.

“Clearly, many nonprofit organizations have become dependent on public funds,” said a lengthy study by the Brookings Institution on the impact of federal aid on Los Angeles. “Certainly, Los Angeles would have a political and fiscal dilemma if federal support ended.”

The report was prophetic.

Under the Reagan Administration, federal aid to Los Angeles was slashed.

Federal funds received by the city declined from $315 million in 1979 to $156 million this year--a drop of 75%, when adjusted for inflation. In addition, with more people living in poverty today, the money is stretched thinner.

Meanwhile, as the federal government was scaling back, Proposition 13 carved another 15% out of the city’s budget. On top of this, tens of thousands of South Los Angeles workers lost their jobs when manufacturers closed plants.

Through it all, according to critics and friends alike, the Bradley Administration failed to act with vision either before or after federal aid was reduced, forcing many agencies to shut down.

“I don’t recall (a strategy session with the mayor) ever being done on economic development and job issues,” said Doug Ford, who ran the city’s community development department from 1980 to 1987.

Today, not much has changed, according to Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, who represents one of the more racially mixed districts on the city’s Westside.

“We haven’t done anything in response to the economic problems (in South Los Angeles),” she said. “I am not aware of any joint effort among groups of council members or the mayor on strategic plans.”

Bradley’s critics say that when his Administration was doling out federal aid in the 1970s, some of it should have been going to establish programs that would strive to become economically self-sufficient.

“If you are dependent on politicians for funding, you can’t take them on,” said Cal State Los Angeles urban studies professor Lou Negrete, a leader of the Eastside’s United Neighborhoods Organization. “You cannot build a viable democratic community if it’s dependent on a political machine.”

The mayor dismisses criticisms that he had failed to forge a far-reaching and creative economic strategy. Among other things, Bradley said, he created an office of economic development and an advisory panel of business leaders who sought to attract investment and create jobs.

Bradley also said that brainstorming about economic development with administrators such as Ford, would have done little good.

“It was not a matter of calling on the heads of all city departments,” Bradley said. “They don’t have any resources, any ability to affect that kind of a problem. My sessions were with business community leaders.”

The mayor said his efforts were successful “to the extent possible.”

The cornerstone of Bradley’s strategy for economic development has rested almost entirely on the Community Redevelopment Agency. With $700 million a year in property tax revenues, the CRA represented Bradley’s largest source of capital in the years following Proposition 13 and Reaganomics.

The purpose of redevelopment was twofold: to resuscitate the city’s failing financial core and, in the process, generate economic benefits that would spread across Los Angeles.

But the intended ripple effect never materialized, critics say. “Nothing trickled down,” said Denise Fairchild, director of the local office of the Local Initiative Support Corp., a nonprofit agency that helps find capital for minority enterprises.

Bradley Administration officials say the mayor’s redevelopment strategy led to the creation of 17,000 construction jobs, $80 million spent on services for homeless people and 21,000 housing units that have been built for low-income residents.

However, the benefits were largely confined to the downtown area. And one-third of the most affordable homes built by the Community Redevelopment Agency went to people the agency displaced when it condemned poor neighborhoods to make way for office buildings on Bunker Hill and elsewhere.

While some jobs were created, “in no way did (redevelopment) begin to approach the loss of manufacturing jobs in South L.A.,” said Leo Estrada, a UCLA professor of urban planning and a nationally recognized expert on the problems of the urban poor. “The revitalization that has come has been mostly crumbs.”

The progress made by minorities through executive jobs at City Hall, commission appointments and city contracts has also been deceptive.

“When you talk about most of the African-Americans they put there (on city commissions)--and Latinos--they tend to be more affluent,” said Robin Cannon of Concerned Citizens of South-Central Los Angeles. “They don’t walk in our shoes. They don’t have the same point of reference we do.” Had average South Los Angeles residents served on the Police Commission during the 1980s, Cannon said, issues of officer brutality and controversial deployment tactics would have been raised sooner.

Last winter, responding to the decade-long criticism that he had been neglecting the urban poor, Bradley announced a sweeping program to breathe new life into a 40-block area near the home where he grew up in South-Central Los Angeles.

Surrounded by a fleet of gleaming new trash trucks and a squad of city workers scrubbing graffiti off nearby walls, the mayor insisted City Hall meant business. “We’re going to clean up South-Central Los Angeles,” he told reporters at a curbside news conference.

Some neighbors were skeptical. City Hall insiders had their doubts, too, pointing out that after 18 months in the making, the announcement turned out to be mostly a dressed up version of existing city refurbishment programs.

Progress on the mayor’s latest effort has been slow. City officials say 200 homes have been repaired and painted, 40 apartments have been built and 100 more are planned or under construction.

But the most ambitious part of the plan, a multimillion dollar job training program, is still on the drawing board.

Since the riots, City Hall’s strategy for revitalizing riot-affected areas has been to shift responsibility to the privately run Rebuild L.A., headed by Orange County businessman Peter V. Ueberroth.

But there has been little attention paid by city leaders to the political isolation that many critics contend contributed to the civil disorder.

Ideas for reform abound:

* Expand the council and make districts smaller so elected officials will be closer to the neighborhoods they represent.

* Open up the political appointment process to more working-class and low-income residents.

* Move commission and council meetings out to neighborhoods--in the evenings when most working people can attend.

* Strengthen campaign finance laws to diminish the influence of special-interest lobbyists and fund-raisers who consume inordinate amounts of political attention.

The crucial challenge, critics say, is crafting a wider, bolder vision of Los Angeles and finding the political backbone to advance economic and social programs that may offend powerful constituencies.

“The mayor sets the tone and context of leadership in the city,” said Prof. Michael B. Preston, chairman of the USC political science department. “He bears a certain burden . . . He didn’t push very hard.”

Reflecting on his 19-year tenure, a period bracketed by two of the nation’s worst riots, Bradley makes no apologies for his stewardship of the city. During an hourlong conversation in his City Hall suite, the mayor took issue with his critics. He talked of the shopping center developers that he persuaded to return to South-Central and of his role in bringing commuter rail to the area. He recalled nurturing nonprofit housing corporations and community-based job training programs.

“I have no doubt given more time and energy to the problems of South-Central Los Angeles than I have any other sections of the city, only because the need was greater there,” he said.

Bradley said he has heard the complaints of residents who say government has forgotten them, that they have been shunted in favor of the city’s monied interests. “When people don’t see (progress) in front of their homes . . . they don’t think anything is happening all over the city,” Bradley said. “And that is just not so.

“I go to bed at night and sleep soundly because I can say I did the best I could that day. And if somebody disagrees, I let that slide off my back like water off a duck.”

Power of the Pocketbook

Since 1983, Los Angeles city officeholders and candidates have received $23 million in political contributions, mostly from the Westside, the San Fernando Valley and downtown businesses. Political experts and City Hall critics say the contributions make elected officials more attuned to corporate interests and the suburbs than to the city’s poorer areas. The map below shows the percentage of overall political contributions coming from various sections of the city:

San Fernando Valley: 15%

San Gabriel Valley: 5.2%

Westside: 34%

Downtown: 13%

Eastside: 1.8%

South Los Angeles: 5.8%

Southeast: 4.7%

South Bay: 6%

* Donation Amounts: The average political donation is about the same in South Los Angeles as on the Westside--about $600. However, there are six times more donations made on the Westside than in South Los Angeles.

* Fund-Raising Locales: For most officials, fund raising is skewed toward the Westside, the Valley and downtown, regardless of the area they represent. For example, the Westside provided the largest share of contributions to Valley Councilman Joel Wachs, Eastside Councilman Richard Alatorre and former South-Central Councilman Robert Farrell. No one has a major fund-raising base in South Los Angeles.

* Contribution Bases: Even within South Los Angeles, contributions come mostly from the more affluent, middle-class African-American areas to the west, near Baldwin Hills and the Crenshaw district. Mayor Tom Bradley, for example, collected eight times as much in those areas as in the poorer areas between the Coliseum and Watts.

* Donors: Conservatively, about a third of all donations come from real estate and development interests, not counting the lawyers, lobbyists and consultants who represent them at City Hall.

SOURCES: City records and computer analysis by Richard O’Reilly, Times director of computer analysis, and Maureen Lyons, statistical analyst.

The Power of the Ballot

In Los Angeles in the 1980s, experts say, the political agenda was shaped by voters on the Westside and in the San Fernando Valley, whose concerns eclipsed those of inner-city residents.

While citywide there has has been a 50% drop in the number of people voting in city elections in the past 20 years, the decline in Central and South Los Angeles has been even greater.

Political scientists say this voter gap between the area’s poor and wealthy areas has influenced policy makers.

***

“If you don’t exercise political muscle by voting, you are not part of anything but a nondescript group.”

--Former City Councilman David Cunningham

Examples of Vote Disparities

* District Imbalance: Less than 20% of the citywide vote in the 1989 mayoral election came from four City Council districts in Central and South Los Angeles. Twice as many voted in four districts on the Westside and in the West San Fernando Valley with populations equal to those in the inner city.

* Unequal Patterns: Each council district represents about 6.6% of the city population. But only 2.3% of the 1989 vote came from the central city’s 1st District--while more than 12% came from the Westside’s 5th District.

* Voting Gap: It took just 6,251 votes for newcomer Rita Walters to win a City Council seat last year in her Central and South Los Angeles district, which has a population of 250,000. Westside Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, in contrast, won reelection in 1989 with four times that many votes.

* The Ethnic Factor: Immigration by non-voting Latinos has been a major factor in the decline of election participation in poor neighborhoods. While Latinos make up 51% of the population in Central and South Los Angeles, they account for just 10% of registered voters. Blacks, who represent 34% of the population, account for 72% of the registered voters. In the Westside and West San Fernando Valley, 87% of registered voters are Anglo.

SOURCES: City elections division, City Council records and 1990 census data.