Q&A; : Lake Says Crime Is the No. 1 Election Issue

Laura Lake, 46, candidate for Los Angeles City Council, 5th District.

Claim to Fame: An environmentalist and slow-growth advocate making her second attempt to unseat incumbent Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky. (City Building Inspector Mike Rosenberg is the third candidate in the race.) Lake received 33% of the vote in 1989. She is president of Friends of Westwood and helped found Heal the Bay and Not Yet New York. She helped block the LANCER trash incinerator project for South-Central Los Angeles, West Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley. She has been active in the fight against the proposed Ward Valley nuclear waste dump in the California desert. She serves on the board of the Commission on Women’s Rights and the Jewish Feminist Center of the American Jewish Congress.

Background: A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., Lake graduated from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1967. She received a Ph.D. in political science from Tufts University in 1972. She was on the staff of the Ford Foundation in New York for three years before leaving in 1976 to join the faculty at UCLA, where she was a professor of environmental science and engineering until last year. Her husband, Jim, is a UCLA molecular biologist. They have two children, Caroline, 12, and Jeremy, 9. The family lives in Westwood.

Interviewer: Times staff writer Ron Russell.

Q. What do you see as the most important issue facing voters of the 5th District in this election?

A. I would say crime. People see crime and graffiti, linking those two, graffiti being a sort of precursor to gangs.

People feel very betrayed and frightened by the City Council and Zev not acting to protect them. We were promised 10,000 police (officers) four years ago. We had more then than we do now, and that alone doesn’t do it.

We’re not employing the force in the right way. Forty-five percent of (a police officer’s) time is taken up (on duties) outside (actual policing). Other police departments have the police dictate their reports and have them typed by professional typists. That gives you an enormous control capability.

There are hours and shifts where you don’t really need two-person patrol cars. You could spread them out and have more patrol cars out there. I mean these are big deployment changes.

Q. You’ve called for a 10,000-member police force, which would add about 2,400 officers to current levels. Given the city’s financial woes, how would you pay for it?

A. When it comes to funding the police, there are programs that need to be abandoned and programs that need to be paying more. Let me give you an example. The (Community Redevelopment Agency) is something I’ve been speaking out against for many years.

It has first dibs on tax (revenues) and that takes away from what the city can do (to hire more police) and what the school district can do. I would say thank you and goodby (to the CRA).

Q. How many police officers could be added in two or three years as a result of dismantling the CRA?

A. I don’t even want to say. I’m saying that it is something that needs to be explored.

Q. You oppose Proposition 1 on the April ballot, which is aimed at putting 1,000 new cops on the streets. Why?

A. No. 1, it’s not going to give us 1,000 new officers. No. 2, I believe that we have to look at other programs and expenses before we start taxing, and other ways to have revenue.

Prop 1, as it is structured, is subject to abuse because there is no way we could staff up to 1,000 new police officers immediately. So that money would be there and would go into the (city’s) General Fund and not to a police trust fund.

Q. You mentioned other ways for the city to increase revenues. What are some?

A. There’s a report that’s going to be coming out of City Hall soon that will propose changing the franchise agreements and increasing the revenue from those from oil and gas pipelines. I fought them over the Mobil Oil pipeline. The city signed off on that pipeline for a pittance. And before me, Women For: objected to excessively low franchise fees for gas pipelines to no avail.

I don’t know if it was $200,000 or something; it’s been estimated that the city could get $130 million in the next 15 years if it just did a proper analysis of the value of all the private pipelines in the public right of way.

There’s another thing I’d like to check--and I don’t know if it’s legal or not--and that is to have an oil severance tax (a tax on oil where it is extracted from the ground) within the city.

That’s never been done by a city. It’s usually done by states and that’s why I don’t know if cities are allowed to do that.

Q. You advocate making graffiti-painting a felony and publishing in newspapers the names of parents whose children are convicted. Doesn’t that pose some difficult civil liberties questions?

A. It’s like felony drunk driving. I want it to be like a traffic ticket. The courts are already overburdened and right now to keep somebody (incarcerated) for (misdemeanor) graffiti (offenses) is a very cumbersome process.

Q. Do you have in mind a minimum age at which a child might be prosecuted as a felon for this?

A. Seeing as how there’s no age cap when kids turn violent anymore, the answer is no.

I mean, when you’re getting 12-year-olds killing people, something is profoundly wrong. We can’t process (the graffiti problem) in the same way. We have to say this is the first sign that a child can go wrong.

Q. If law enforcement were to be used to launch a serious attack on the graffiti problem, wouldn’t it swamp an already inadequate juvenile detention system?

A. I think you’d see (the problem) slack off. If you saw real penalties and parents being billed for damages and parents having their names in the press, you would see a backing off.

I compare it to what happens in a school when a certain administrator comes in who gets tough and really makes a difference. The really severe problems stop because (parents) know that it’s not going to be tolerated and (their children) are going to be out in a flash.

Q. You say Councilman Yaroslavsky shares much of the blame for the city’s budget woes. What specifically do you fault him for?

A. Yaroslavsky chairs the Budget and Finance Committee, so if there’s a problem it was on his watch, and you don’t go back and ask a person who overspent and didn’t watch the money to go and fix it.

What we’re seeing is a double standard of bending over backward for billionaires like Rupert Murdoch (who owns 20th Century Fox studios) and sticking it to small business with things like the 7.5% business tax (surcharge).

I’ve sat around the table with a lot of business leaders who say they will not locate in this city, that the taxes are too high. They will put their businesses in Culver City, in Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, anywhere but Los Angeles.

Q. Given the city’s declining economic fortunes and the choice between taxes and what some argue would have been intolerably low levels of city services, how would you have responded differently?

A. Another example of the difference in priorities is that there are funds sitting in accounts not being used that can help business very much. The parking meter fund is a good example.

In 1984 I don’t know how many millions of dollars went into the fund, but that was taken out and used to balance the budget deficit and the same thing is about to happen.

It’s negligent not to have spent that money to build free parking like Beverly Hills has done.

Q. I was referring to the big picture--to your solutions for the city’s overall economic woes.

A. Let me explain why this is very important. The big picture is small-business people can’t compete against the malls without free parking. The big malls are the big campaign donors. The little guys in (Westwood Village) and on Robertson, La Cienega and Ventura (boulevards) don’t throw the banquets, don’t get these special deals, and they desperately need parking because they’re in facilities that were built pre-code without adequate parking. People won’t shop if they have to worry about getting parking tickets.

Q. I understand. But I want to come back to the big picture. A majority of the City Council has supported raising certain taxes as a way of dealing with the budget deficit. Can you give an example of what you might have done differently in choosing between an onerous tax or lopping off city services such as garbage collection?

A. In talking with business leaders I pose this question: How would you approach cutting back on the city’s services? The way the city approaches it is not a very thoughtful process.

Some business people have been able to cut back on operations, and even though business dropped tremendously due to the economy, their business is doing better than ever and it was because of a bottom-up evaluation of what’s needed. What’s the real mission of the company? What do you need to cut and where can we go? Not the meat-ax approach.

So that’s what I want to see happening, as well as looking at privatizing and contracting out some services.

Q. How do you respond to the accusation that you’re trying to have it both ways in opposing new taxes while railing against the inadequacy of police and other vital services?

A. I think that we have to say what our priorities are and what the missions are of services the city provides. Public safety is a fundamental mission of local government. Spending money on junkets, traveling around the world, that’s something that is optional. I’d like to look at the travel budget.

Q. Those things won’t yield enormous sums, will they?

A. No, it’s not going to, but I think that it is indicative of other issues. There’s money in each council office which could be spent differently. Each council office gets $700,000, plus the private cars and car phones. I don’t need a press officer, for example. I can speak for myself.

Q. What are some things city government can do to improve the Los Angeles economy?

A. I would like to see a moratorium on the business license tax for four or five years for new businesses. We need to explore what the city can do to encourage and share in the benefits of high-tech consortiums involving research and development at places like UCLA and USC as a way of helping create jobs. We should link our plans for a subway system with an economic development plan. In rebuilding the inner city, we need to make sure it’s not just the same good ol’ boys getting rich again.

Q. Your claim to fame is as an environmentalist and slow-growth activist. At a time when real estate development has hit the skids and unemployment locally is among the worst in the nation, do you find that to be a hindrance?

A. My claim to fame is planning and not slow-growth.

I think that’s a distinction that needs to be made. Good quality planned development is welcomed in every community. What’s not welcome is the project that paralyzes and chokes its host community in a parasitic way.

One thing missing in this city is that the Planning Commission hasn’t been planning for the city as a whole. It’s been a tribunal for site-specific controversy. I’ve proposed community planning boards to give attention to projects in their communities, and giving the (five-member) Planning Commission, which I would like to see expanded to perhaps nine members, the time to take up these very important larger issues.

Q. You use terms such as “planned development” frequently, which has prompted your critics to say you’ve changed your tune about slow-growth. Is that true?

A. No, and I’m not going to change my tune. I’m saying what I’ve always said, which is you need to strike a balance. You don’t role over and play dead; that’s not changing your tune. It’s saying, ‘Let’s get something decent for the community,’ and that’s what I’ve always been saying.

Q. In the current economic climate, is there a downside to your association with slow-growth issues?

A. No. In fact, I see it as useful. We need to use the downtime in the economy to formulate the ground rules for what development should be in the future so that when the money comes back there will be a process that truly works.

I’m on record as supporting projects when they meet sensible criteria, and when somebody is pigging out of saying that’s too much, it’s going to hurt the community.

At the same time, I think Zev has to stand on his track record, which is overdevelopment and apologies for misjudging situations, such as the Beverly Center, the Westside Pavilion, the Wilshire Corridor and so on.

After 18 years of looking at Zev’s devastation of communities, people are saying, ‘No, you’ve flunked. You’ve failed. You’re not doing your job to protect us.’

Q. How does your opposition to Fox Studio’s planned 771,000-square-foot expansion, which the studio contends will mean 1,600 new jobs, square with your call for a friendlier business environment?

A. I have been saying that the community must be protected, that merely sticking on some stop signs and speed bumps isn’t enough. What I’ve outlined is having no driveways coming out of the studio on Pico Boulevard, taking everything in and out of Olympic (Boulevard), having Fox pay for building a southbound on-ramp on the 405, keeping traffic off the local streets and scaling back the project by, at the minimum, what (Fox) has padded it with, which is 250,000 square feet. Cut that out totally and address the microwave radiation issue (related to Fox’s proposal to install several satellite dishes to accommodate its TV operations), which is a very serious, major issue.

Q. Mr. Yaroslavsky favors the Fox project, slightly trimmed down, and emphasizes the jobs argument. Given the high unemployment out there, doesn’t this put you in a tough position?

A. No. I’m on the side of having a system that protects both sides. And that’s not come out of (Yaroslavsky’s) office.

The way you (contend with it politically) is through leadership. You sit down and you say, ‘You can have it, but these are the conditions. Now do you still want it?’ You’ve got to be realistic with developers and say there’s got to be a give-and-take. Normally developers ask for the moon and (politicians) split the difference. That’s not planning, but that’s the normal mode, the way they operate.

As for jobs, I’ve looked at what (Fox) has said and it keeps changing. Actually, from Fox’s figures and admissions, there will be a shrinkage of jobs because any time you have mergers you have a loss of jobs.

I’m prepared to say, ‘Get real.’ Yaroslavsky is just saying, ‘I’m powerless.’

Q. You support the Metro Rail subway. In 1989, you said Metro Rail was financially infeasible and that car-pooling and improved bus service were better alternatives. How do you answer the charge that you’ve flipped-flopped?

A. I would say that I had very serious concerns about the safety from (possibly explosive) methane gas (deposits) and the earthquake issue.

I only resolved the earthquake issue in my mind after the Landers Quake last year after talking to some of the state’s top seismic experts about the consequences for the (proposed) Ward Valley nuclear waste dump, which I oppose. The question was whether it is safer to store (nuclear) waste underground or above ground. As part of that process I learned that subways are a relatively safe place to be in an earthquake, which is sort of counter-intuitive.

Q. You say that the incumbent has failed. Given his reelection four years ago with 63% of the vote, is there evidence that he is vulnerable this time?

A. I got 33%, which was a very good, strong showing without any direct mail.

It’s a very different climate now. We had the lowest turnout in the history of the city four years ago. It’s a different day. It was very hard for me to get volunteers last time, and now people are calling up and volunteering and they feel good about it. They feel they can make a difference.

Next: An interview with Yaroslavsky.