Griego Fought City Hall; Now She Hopes to Change It : Campaign: Bouts with bureaucrats to get restaurant OKd led to deputy mayor’s post, then to her candidacy.

Like many Angelenos, Linda Griego had dreams of starting a business.

Two years and 53 building zoning variances later, after countless bouts with government bureaucrats who were warring among themselves and struggles over code violations, blocked sewer lines and a mysterious barrel buried on the property, Engine Co. 28 was created.

Throughout, the naysayers wondered why she would take on the monumental hassle of refurbishing a 1912-era firehouse and turning it into a plush, downtown eatery. But they did not know Linda Griego very well.

That struggle not only persuaded others of Griego’s intense drive to succeed, it persuaded Griego that City Hall needed to change.

Today, as she campaigns for mayor, Griego faces an even greater struggle and the critics of her candidacy are even more vociferous in their doubts. Griego reacts the same way she did during the early stages of the restaurant venture: She dismisses others’ expectations. After all, her life was never supposed to go the way it has.

Although Griego may appear timid on the campaign trail, those who know her say she is determined and tough behind the scenes. To get the restaurant project finished, the savvy businesswoman would schedule meetings with bureaucrats late in the day on a Friday, when they would be eager to leave for the week. She’d plop down in their offices, open her briefcase and ask how they could work out the latest snag.

But even a creative entrepreneurial drive could not solve the occasionally Orwellian range of problems she faced in the project.

Because her site was a registered landmark, Griego had to jump through hoops set up by the U.S. Department of the Interior, the state Office of Historical Preservation and the Community Redevelopment Agency. A web of conflicting orders ensued: One building inspector would order one thing, only to have a functionary from another department countermand the order.

The restaurant, and the sluggishness, unfriendliness and inflexibility that Griego discovered in City Hall while trying to shepherd it through, have become the foundation of her race for mayor. Listen to her knock the city’s labyrinthine bureaucracy and it is personal experiences, full of frustration, that inevitably creep into her words.

“I ran into obstacle after obstacle,” she said. “I was the biggest complainer about city government.”

But the grueling episode also got Griego noticed, making her a part of the very institution she was criticizing.

With her frustrations still in mind and some experience on policy groups and volunteer boards behind her, Griego was tapped in the fall of 1991 by Mayor Tom Bradley as his deputy mayor in charge of economic development. The behind-the-scenes post turned Griego into the city’s chief business advocate, a trouble-shooter who would aid those bogged down in the city’s maze-like rules and regulations.

When the riots hit and scores of businesses were battered, her work grew in importance during a chaotic, frustrating time. She won many fans, many of whom are sticking with her during the campaign.

The owner of a Pico-Union paper store, for one, had been repeatedly stymied in an effort to win a federal riot assistance loan; a call to Griego changed all that. A Small Business Administration official moved the store’s application to the top of the list and the crucial loan check was in the mail soon afterward.

“We didn’t get lip service from her,” said Al Ricca, general manager of Paper Source.

As part of Bradley’s inner sanctum, Griego was the first of the candidates to learn that the mayor was calling it quits. Yet she did not rush off to print campaign signs. She pondered, talked to friends and associates, floated to the press the idea of running.

Then, on Jan. 13, after just 13 months in public life and only three months before the primary, she became one of the 24 who filed as official candidates to become mayor of the nation’s second-largest city.

Maureen Kindel, a City Hall lobbyist who has made contributions to several mayoral campaigns, including Griego’s, recalls reacting to her announcement this way: “It’s a little early in your career and late in the game but go for it, girl.”

Griego, a Mexican-American whose father worked on the railroad and whose mother was a baker, grew up in Tucumcari, N. M., a small town that is better known as a training ground for ranchers than politicians. Feeling the same lack of opportunity she says many in Los Angeles feel today, Griego sought to escape. As her high school years neared an end, she worked her connections well--arranging a job in Washington with her local congressman, who happened to be married to her primary school teacher.

The receptionist’s job at the office of Democratic Rep. Thomas Morris was a gateway to a whole new world. She met her future husband there, started taking college classes and never looked back on Tucumcari.

Morris, 73, a rancher who still lives in Tucumcari, remembers Griego as an aggressive yet shy youngster who had been raised speaking Spanish in a town that did not offer much of a future to the young.

“If she had stayed in Tucumcari,” he said, “she would have been another person in a small town with a minimal living.”

Her decision to leave and to become the first in her family to graduate from college (it took her nine years) has left Griego with a sense that she ought to set her place in the world.

After Morris was defeated in 1969, she moved to the offices of Sen. Alan Cranston of California. Later, she took a position that really puzzled the folks back home--as the supervisor of a telephone company work crew. That job was more of a dare than anything else. An executive had told her that women would be too concerned about breaking their nails or messing up their hair to take such a job.

She vividly recalls climbing telephone polls, hauling heavy ladders and facing intolerance in a virtually all-male environment. She uses the experience now to connect with blue-collar voters, although former workers say the job required her to spend more time on administrative matters than out in the field.

“I really do believe that I’m different based on my experiences,” Griego said. “I can connect with everyday people. I don’t care if someone is president of a company or a parking lot attendant. My own struggles have given me an ability to look beyond stereotypes. A CEO and a welfare mother are both people to me. They are different but one is not better.”

Critics of her candidacy say Griego, a slender, soft-spoken 45-year-old, lacks the experience in government to take on the rigors of the top job. They complain that she has been timid in her public appearances with other candidates and has focused too much on her mainstays of job creation, economic revitalization and streamlined government, giving her remarks a cold, technical ring.

“I really want to support her,” said one disappointed woman who believes it is time for a woman mayor. “But I find myself disappointed again and again. She hasn’t thought everything out and the election is around the corner. Linda may not be ready to be Mayor Griego. She ought to consider this a practice run.”

With an entrepreneur’s view of the world, Griego argues that the stagnant economy and the flow of jobs out of Los Angeles must be the key aspect of the next mayor’s agenda. Other problems--race relations and crime, for instance--are direct results of the feelings of hopelessness pervading L.A.

“The criticism I get is I’m too diplomatic, too nice, too willing to work with people,” Griego acknowledged. “I’m not angry enough, people say. Well, anger is not strength. I think I’m tougher than the rest of them. I know I am. I just don’t come across well in those forums. I’m not polished. I admit that. I don’t think who can shout down their opponent the best is a trait I want.”

Uneasy about alienating any voting blocs, Griego also has been reluctant so far in her campaign to play up the fact that she is the only major woman candidate, or that she is one of two politically prominent Latinos. She says those classifications are self-evident, but others say they are part of the reason her candidacy has life.

In a city divided by racial tensions, Griego maintains that she has what it takes to appeal to all the city’s communities. She moves comfortably from her fund-raising pitches in downtown boardrooms to the city’s ethnic neighborhoods--she lives in a Baldwin Hills home with a panoramic view of the city--to far-flung lands across the world.

She and her husband, downtown attorney Ron Peterson, have driven a Jeep through Africa, skied in Switzerland and toured South America, Europe and India. China is the couple’s next scheduled vacation spot, but she’s hoping those plans are spoiled by a successful showing in the April runoff.

As deputy mayor, Griego was Bradley’s chief of protocol, and she praises the mayor’s effort to connect Los Angeles to the world.

Because this is Griego’s first run at public office, her supporters have encouraged her to stick around even if she loses. Consider this a learning experience, they advise her. And Griego is learning.

Early on, she was the model of civility at campaign forums, which sometimes resemble free-for-alls. When her time was up, Griego would stop on a dime, sometimes in mid-sentence, and pass the microphone on. “Women are so polite,” one surprised moderator quipped.

But as Election Day nears, Griego’s voice has become a touch more intense. She has stood up a few times as she speaks. And at one forum, her time ran out and Griego went on--15 seconds past the time limit.

Such decorum is unusual for a politician, her supporters say.

“She’s very much behind the scenes,” said Tammy Bruce, president of the National Organization for Women’s local chapter and one of many feminists backing Griego’s campaign. “She doesn’t grandstand. It’s not natural for her to be in your face. Her campaign is like her, understated but with substance. Why should we look negatively on someone who does not behave like a candidate?”

As deputy mayor, she shocked some who dialed her number and found her answering her own line.

“Usually with bureaucrats you have to go through 14 layers of secretaries, receptionists and front men designed to keep the bureaucrat in hiding,” said attorney Daniel Wax, whom Griego assisted with a business dispute. “With Linda, you’d call and you’d get Linda.”

EMILY’s List, the national political action committee for female candidates, signed Griego on as its first-ever candidate for a local office after investigating her viability. In early March, the group sent out more than 10,000 letters to politically active women plugging her run.

“I think voters are sick to death of politicians who huff and puff and make a lot of noise signifying nothing,” said Ellen Malcolm, president of the Washington-based group, which stands for Early Money is Like Yeast (It Makes the Dough Rise). “They want a candidate who can bring people together and solve problems.”

Profile: Linda Griego

Born: Oct. 27, 1947

Residence: Baldwin Hills.

Education: Bachelor’s degree, UCLA.

Career highlights: Restaurant owner; former deputy mayor; has served on a number of boards and commissions, including the Community Redevelopment Agency, the Handicapped Access Appeals Board and the Cultural Affairs Commission.

Interests: Hiking, reading, Los Angeles Lakers basketball and cooking chili.

Family: Married.

Quote: “I know the problems because I’ve been on the other side of the counter, struggling with the bureaucracy.”

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