A Sour Note at End of the Tune? : Possibility of still another foreign junket doesn’t enhance Bradley’s legacy

Mayor Tom Bradley should want to leave office on a high note, not a sour one. One way to do that is to stay home and mind Los Angeles.

Even now in Europe on a two-week junket, the mayor is considering yet another overseas trip, this time to Japan. Bradley may visit Tokyo next month with Harbor Department officials who are scheduled to leave April 14 for Tokyo, where they will complete an agreement for a coal exporting facility proposed for the Port of Long Beach. Japan is the first stop on the harbor group’s two-week trip, which will include Australia and New Zealand.

A final decision on the trip, Bradley’s office says, will depend on what happens after the verdicts in the federal civil rights trial of four Los Angeles policemen in the beating of Rodney G. King. Whatever happens in the trial, the mayor ought to skip the Asian tour.

Trade certainly is important to Los Angeles, but Bradley’s international jaunts could be too easily perceived as an investment--at public expense--in his future at the Los Angeles office of the law firm of Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison, which he will join when his term expires. His major role there will be to introduce the firm to potential clients locally and in the Far East. Even some of Bradley’s close advisers privately are questioning his consideration of another overseas trip.

Bradley’s trip to Europe with six other city officials--three his appointees to the Airport Commission--is costing taxpayers about $250,000, or $35,714 for each traveler, an extravagance that’s drawing considerable criticism in a time of budgetary woes.

Going off to Tokyo for a trade mission would be a mistake. Participation would be merely ceremonial for a lame-duck mayor, and it would leave Bradley open to the criticism that he is spending his last days in office helping himself and his political friends. This mayor and this city deserve to be thought of better than that.

It would be more appropriate to send the next mayor overseas when the city can better accommodate the expense. Bradley, with his many achievements for Los Angeles, should not conclude his final term making decisions that dim his legacy.