Wachs’ Keen Eye Ranges From Fine Art to Populism : Campaign: Councilman finds support in Valley and creative community. Strength in inner city is untested.

When a nationally acclaimed collector of avant-garde art and habitue of the New York gallery scene runs for mayor of Los Angeles, his campaign can depart radically from political norms and rituals.

In the Joel Wachs campaign, the rubber-chicken political dinner is replaced by a meal cooked by artist-celebrity Sherrie Levine in a New York City loft apartment.

Wachs’ idea for job training? Have sculptor Robert Graham teach teen-age gangbangers to make bronze statues in his Venice studio.

And, if elected, Wachs has pledged to appoint more arts and film industry folks to City Hall posts. “Our creative citizens are one of our most underutilized resources,” said the 54-year-old Wachs, a Museum of Contemporary Art trustee.

Such departures from the shop-worn conventions of politics can seem refreshing, or bizarre. But they do not tell the whole story.

For 22 years, Wachs has represented a suburban San Fernando Valley constituency more interested in tax revolt than art, more concerned with utility rates and traffic jams than David Hockney.

During his six terms on the Los Angeles City Council, the former tax lawyer has easily won reelection, showing as keen an eye for lowbrow populist programs at City Hall as for highbrow art trends on La Cienega Boulevard.

Wachs fought the city’s real estate lobby to help get a rent control law for tenants. And he battled the Department of Water and Power bureaucracy to win new rules to provide lower utility rates for fixed-income senior citizens.

Last year, he set up a hot line to field citizen complaints about a $180-million rail contract with a Japanese firm. Though he was accused of Japan-bashing, his tactics helped force transit officials to rewrite the unpopular contract so that the company had to provide more jobs to U.S. workers.

To fit in with his blue-collar constituency in Sunland-Tujunga, which he gained through redistricting in 1986, Wachs, the art sophisticate, sponsored a country music festival.

Recently, Wachs has embraced a plan to break up the Los Angeles Unified School District into several systems, an idea especially popular in the Valley, and has proposed setting up scores of elected neighborhood councils to provide grass-roots advice to City Hall.

“There’s so much to be gained by involving people in everything we do,” Wachs said. “That, to me, is the essence of this election.”

Clearly, Wachs is hoping that Valley voters will give him a boost April 20. The school district breakup plan and his longtime support for former Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates may bring in conservative Valley voters.

In April, 1991, Wachs was a leader of a City Council majority that blocked a Police Commission move to suspend Gates soon after the Rodney G. King beating. Suspension would have violated Gates’ constitutional rights, Wachs argued.

Wachs is also targeting several specialized voting blocs, including tenants and senior citizens who benefit from rent control and utility rate discounts, and the city’s homosexual and artist communities.

Wachs hopes that gays and lesbians will appreciate his authorship of landmark laws barring discrimination against them and against people with AIDS, and that the arts community will appreciate his creation of the city’s Endowment for the Arts, which funds cultural programs.

Published polls, including a Los Angeles Times survey, show Wachs to be consistently among the race’s top four candidates. The polls show that his major strength lies in the Valley and on the Westside, home to the city’s arts community and much of its gay population.

“He is a tenacious fighter and survivor,” said Bill Rosendahl, a cable TV executive and political talk show host. “Joel reminds me of the cat with nine lives, and he’s a guy most political pundits have underestimated.”

Still, Wachs’ campaign has stumbled in recent weeks.

Questions have arisen about whether he violated city ethics laws by offering limited-edition, signed prints by famous artists, including Hockney and Sam Francis, to donors who gave more than $1,000 to his campaign. At stake is the legality of almost $200,000 in contributions, nearly a third of his war chest.

The controversy also has jeopardized Wachs’ access to tens of thousands of dollars in public matching funds. Only properly received private contributions can be matched with tax dollars.

Wachs has insisted that the artists’ contributions of prints to his campaign are not only legal but involved no quid pro quo. Art money is “clean money,” he said. “The artists don’t want anything from me or city government.”

Critics say the Wachs candidacy invites questions about whether a Harvard Law School graduate and art aficionado can comprehend the needs of a multiethnic city troubled by economic problems, self-doubt and racial tension.

Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Panorama City), also a candidate for mayor, calls the Wachs-created Endowment for the Arts program a luxury in an era of municipal belt-tightening. Katz asks if that program’s $5-million annual budget might be better spent on law enforcement.

Others point out that Wachs was quoted in a weekly newspaper as saying he was unaware of the depth of inner-city despair until last year’s riots and that he admitted at a mayoral forum in South-Central Los Angeles that he had never visited a Watts housing project.

Indeed, Wachs’ strength among minority voters has never been tested. Though parts of the Valley are beginning to mirror the city’s population, Wachs’ 2nd District does not include any solidly African-American, Asian-American or Latino enclaves.

“If you’re talking about a candidate who’s built bridges to the inner city, Wachs is not one of them,” said Kerman Maddox, an African-American community activist. Suggesting that Wachs may even be unpopular among blacks, he added: “It’s hard for me to see Joel Wachs without recalling his support for Daryl Gates.”

Wachs’ opposition to the proposed suspension of Gates after the King beating also troubled gays and lesbians, one of Wachs’ earliest constituencies. But gay activist Bruce Decker said the political damage to Wachs may have been only temporary.

“No one’s bringing it up now,” said Decker, who is raising funds for Wachs in the gay community. “The city was in a difficult position, and Joel was trying to be a peacemaker of sorts.”

Besides, he said, Wachs redeemed himself later by using his influence with Gates to get the chief to resign: “Those of us who know him think Joel played a valuable role in smoothing Gates out of office.”

Despite the complaints from community leaders such as Maddox, Wachs argues that he is leading a reform movement to help all areas of the city, citing his neighborhood councils idea.

Unlike narrowly focused homeowner or business groups, whose voices are regularly heard at City Hall, the neighborhood councils would be elected and represent a broad spectrum of local opinion, Wachs says.

Citizen empowerment will bring fresh ideas to city government and give people a new sense of involvement, he says.

“We need to open up decision-making to a broad diversity of people and to trust that they care enough to make this city better,” said Wachs. “Most people are good, they do care and they will work for the city’s good if we give them the opportunity.

“The job of leadership is to motivate people, challenge them and give them opportunities,” he said.

The only big losers under his plan are politicians, who would have to share power, Wachs said. “I’m not reinventing the wheel here,” he said. “I’m just the only one with the guts to implement it.”

But Richard Weinstein, dean of UCLA’s School of Urban Planning, fears that new layers of government would paralyze Los Angeles’ civic affairs and further Balkanize the city.

Others say citizen councils are a good idea, including Ken Thomson, a Tufts University researcher and one of three authors of “The Rebirth of Urban Democracy,” a new book on citizen involvement in local government.

Elected citizen bodies, such as Wachs is proposing, play varying roles in the governments of Portland, Ore.; St. Paul, Minn.; Birmingham, Ala.; Dayton, Ohio, and San Antonio.

“Instead of chaos, there is a degree of empowerment,” Thomson and his colleagues write. “They do not produce policy gridlock or increased political conflict.”

But similar success is not guaranteed in Los Angeles, a larger and more heterogenous city than the ones studied, Thomson said. “To see if these systems can be adapted to Los Angeles would be exciting to watch,” Thomson said.

While Wachs is pushing neighborhood councils in stump speeches, he has not employed similar appointed citizen councils as ambitiously as his colleagues.

Councilman Hal Bernson, who represents an adjoining district, has six appointed citizen committees that he regularly consults on planning and land-use issues. Wachs only once consulted such a panel on a land-use issue.

A shop owner’s son, Wachs got his first taste of politics when he campaigned for and won the vice presidency of his junior class at George Washington High School. In 1961, he was elected student body president at UCLA.

In 1970, two political consultants who knew of Wachs from their UCLA days were looking for a candidate to run against incumbent Councilman James Potter. Wachs, then a tax lawyer six years out of Harvard Law School, became their man.

With strong financial backing from his parents, Wachs easily won the rowdy 1971 contest against Potter. Wachs’ father stood outside grocery stores waving a sign urging motorists to vote for his son.

Wachs’ father and mother, who is now widowed and living in Bel-Air, also pitched in when he ran for mayor for the first time in 1973. Wachs came in fifth in a field of 13 candidates and got 4% of the vote. Tom Bradley was the winner, ending the 12-year reign of incumbent Sam Yorty.

“That was just to get my name known in the city,” Wachs said recently. “This is for genuine.”

Probably his most spectacular moment at City Hall was his election to the council presidency in 1981.

Wachs had initially pledged in writing to vote for Councilwoman Pat Russell for the job--which was particularly coveted that year because it was believed that Bradley might soon be elected governor and the council president would have a leg up to replace him.

But Wachs made a last-minute deal with Councilman John Ferraro and won the job on an 8-7 vote. Ferraro, who was Russell’s arch-enemy, engineered a coup by offering Wachs his vote and those of six council allies. All Wachs had to do was vote for himself.

While the episode is still offered up by critics as an example of Wachs’ capacity for treachery, others say he only did what half the council’s members would have done if given the chance.

Politics aside, Ferraro, now council president, insists that Wachs was qualified for the job and served well. “Joel is the most intelligent member of the council,” Ferraro said.

A city official and fellow Pi Lambda Phi fraternity brother at UCLA said Wachs has a near-photographic memory. “His ability to pick up stuff is pretty awesome,” said George Wolfberg, a top city budget analyst.

While his intelligence has never been in question, even his admirers admit that he can be inattentive and distracted.

Wachs was absent from council sessions for 30 days in 1992, the second-worst record among council members. In addition, Wachs is frequently late for council meetings.

A typical City Hall tableau: Wachs racing to a committee hearing eating a candy bar while a fast-talking aide briefs him. “He can walk into a room and, with very little preparation, sound like he knows what he’s talking about,” said one longtime observer. “It’s an art, and he’s one of the best.”

The real question is whether Wachs would be excited about the mayor’s job, said political consultant Steve Afriat, who was an 18-year-old Young Democrat when he worked in Wachs’ first campaign for the council. “If Joel gets excited about something, he has the intellect and the energy to do it extremely well.”

Some may doubt that Wachs is still excited about his council job, but nobody doubts his zeal for art collecting.

From the outside, the councilman’s Studio City ranch-style house is indistinct from the other modest homes on a winding hillside street. But inside, artworks are everywhere: from the kitchen counter to the walls of a tiny back bathroom. Paintings by Andy Warhol, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Franz Kline, Adolph Gottlieb and many lesser-known artists. His City Hall office also is filled with art.

In 1990, ARTnews rated Wachs’ collection as one of the world’s top 200, and art experts estimate its worth at more than $500,000.

“It’s a collection of (mostly) young, cutting-edge artists,” said Peter Clothier, art critic and former dean of the Otis Art Institute. “It’s great, not because of its worth. Other collections have bigger, more important paintings. But it’s great because he’s done it with such thought and care and an eagerness to be intellectually challenged. It knocks you off the dime.”

Wachs has served on the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art board since 1973. “I really see an incredible relationship between my interest in the arts and what I do in government,” he said.

“I don’t see this as a hobby,” he said. “(Art) expands my vision, helps me understand more people, exposes me to many of the conditions we often try to shut out of our lives.

“Most of the social issues we’re concerned about--poverty, homelessness, AIDS and the battle over women and the body--artists have been speaking to them for a long time,” Wachs said.

Critics have wondered how Wachs could have acquired such an impressive collection on his City Council salary, now $91,000 a year. But Clothier and Sotheby’s art consultant Marc Selwyn said Wachs has collected the relatively inexpensive works of young artists before they became famous.

Museum records show that Wachs has donated 20 works to MOCA. “Eventually all of it will go to the public,” he said, noting that he has willed his personal collection to the museum.

As for complaints that the city’s Endowment for the Arts Program is a frill, Wachs said recently to a group of downtown business leaders:

“When the ads say: ‘Come to New York,’ it’s not for the crime, the dirt and noise. It’s for Broadway, the museums and the arts. That’s one of New York’s biggest industries, and it’s one of ours too. What do we have to export anymore? It’s our creative products.”

IT’S ALL IN A NAME: Candidates for L.A. mayor choose words carefully in discussing last year’s event. B1

Profile: Joel Wachs Born: March 1, 1939. Residence: Studio City. Education: Bachelor’s degree, UCLA; law degree, Harvard University; advanced degree in tax law, New York University. Career highlights: Practiced law in Los Angeles for six years. Elected to City Council in 1971 and served as council president 1981-83. Interests: Collecting modern art. Personal: Unmarried. Quote: “The fundamental thing we must do is reform the system. Rather than having a government that tells people what to do, we need a government that gives people the opportunity to govern themselves through the neighborhood councils program that I have proposed. I want to rebuild this city from the bottom up . . . making Los Angeles a family of neighborhoods.”