Bradley Defends Trip to Europe as All Business

Fresh from a two-week trip to Europe, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley on Monday strongly denied that the excursion was a last-minute pleasure jaunt at public expense, and said his stops in London, Paris, Frankfurt and Milan were an essential part of restoring the city’s battered post-riot reputation.

“I’m a seven-day-a-week mayor,” Bradley said during a City Hall news conference. “Most of those days are 15 hours a day, rarely taking a vacation. Now do you think in the closing four months of my tenure as mayor I’m somehow going to depart from that serious commitment to this city?”

The five-term mayor, who once criticized his predecessor, Sam Yorty, for traveling too much, has come under fire in recent weeks for overseas trips that critics have viewed as an eleventh-hour grab for perks by the lame-duck Bradley Administration.

Knocking Bradley and his appointees, the City Council last week adopted a strict policy for foreign travel that allows only one appointed or elected official to travel to each city and requires prior approval from the mayor and council.

“Let us not raise the specter of Sam Yorty,” Bradley said Monday, indicating that he opposes the council’s interference. “Every trip that I’ve taken I have carefully raised the needs and the benefits.”

Bradley had been out of town for much of the hoopla, learning of it through daily telephone conversations with his staff while on the $250,000 European tourist and trade mission, which was funded by the city’s Department of Airports, the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau, American Airlines and a federal government grant.

A separate 10-nation Asian and Pacific tour planned by Harbor Department officials for later this month was drastically scaled back last week after City Controller Rick Tuttle and others blasted the trip as excessive. Tuttle’s criticism also prompted harbor officials to cut back on the delegation of five retiring commissioners set to go on a marketing trip in February to San Francisco and Hawaii.

Bradley said he telephoned Harbor Executive Director Ezunial Burts from Paris on Thursday to object to the Asian trip. Bradley said he canceled his participation in the venture.

He had planned to attend a ceremony in Tokyo to close a long-negotiated agreement for a $180-million coal exporting facility for the Port of Los Angeles. Yet he said the proximity of the verdicts in the Rodney G. King civil rights trial, which he said he followed closely while in Europe, prompted him to bow out.

“I haven’t lost all of my senses or my sensibilities or my commitment to this city,” Bradley said. “I’m going to continue right until the midnight hour of June 30, 1993, giving every ounce of energy to the city I love.”

As evidence of his good judgment, Bradley said, he noted that he had been scheduled to attend a board meeting of the League of California Cities on April 30, 1992--the day after rioting broke out after the verdicts in the earlier King beating trial. But he said he canceled the trip to Yosemite National Park ahead of time because he knew the verdicts were near.

Releasing a detailed schedule of his meetings with journalists, government officials, tour operators and others while in Europe, Bradley called the criticism “political posturing” during an election season and said he engaged in a “pounding schedule” to drum up tourist dollars for the city.

“There was no sightseeing,” he said. “There was no time for shopping. This is business. I don’t go on a serious mission of this kind for pleasure.”

But criticism of the late-term travel lingered nonetheless.

“I cannot fantasize how one delegation of seven people can spend $260,000,” said Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who sponsored the crackdown on foreign travel and has been at the forefront in grappling with the city’s budget crisis. “You’d have to really exert yourself to spend that kind of money.”

In his defense of the trip, Bradley said that “not a dime of city taxpayers’ money was spent.” Although that is technically correct, Yaroslavsky said, the trip did rely on public funds such as airport fees and hotel bed taxes, some of which could be transferred to city coffers if the federal government approves.

“If they’re spending this money on receptions, $260,000 will buy a lot of shrimp cocktails,” Yaroslavsky said, citing an earlier estimate of the trip’s cost. “We need more cops, not shrimp cocktail.”

But Bradley disputed the notion that the money could have gone elsewhere, saying most of the funding was specifically intended for tourism promotion.

“That money could not be used for adding a single police officer or fireman,” Bradley said. “It couldn’t be used for public works or street sweeping.”

Details of spending on the trip were not available Monday, although itemized reports must be forwarded to the controller’s office in the coming weeks. Those who attended said the delegation stayed in luxury hotels in all four cities. In London, the Los Angeles contingent stayed at the Regent London, where rooms usually go for $188 to $292 a night.

They also attended receptions for tour operators in each city. And about $70,000 went to public relations consultants who arranged media interviews with the mayor.

“Our No. 1 objective was to get the mayor on television,” said George D. Kirkland, president of the Convention and Visitors Bureau and one of those on the trip. “He projects very well and he almost has celebrity status over there. People stop him on the street.”

Celebrity or not, Bradley at times encountered a highly skeptical European press corps.

“The sphinx of City Hall was living up to his reputation,” Christian Tyler wrote in London’s Financial Times. “Tall, powerfully built and belying his 75 years, Tom Bradley, mayor of Los Angeles, sat stiffly upright in the ersatz luxury of a hotel suite and impassively rebutted all criticism of his megalopolis.”

Tyler added: “What else could he do . . . barely a year after (Los Angeles’) reputation--and large parts of its fabric--were shattered by riots described as the worst in American history.”

Rising as early as 4 a.m. and sometimes working until 11 p.m., Bradley said he plugged the city at every turn, trying to boost the city’s tourism industry and answer concerns about safety a year after the riots.

Tourism was hit hard after the civil unrest, costing the city as much as $500 million by some estimates. Los Angeles relies on an estimated 1.3 million tourists a year from Western Europe, officials said, and now is when they purchase tickets for summer vacations.

“I told them that in April and May of 1992, when there was terrible destruction and violence and burning, we had over 70,000 visitors in our city . . . and not one of them suffered any harm,” Bradley said.

Participants in the mission said they were startled by Europeans’ high level of fear about Los Angeles.

“The bad news is I can’t believe the concern for what is going on in the trial right now,” Kirkland said. “They are really focused on it. I think the mayor put into perspective the riots of last year. . . . Whether that translates into growth in tourism this summer, time will tell.”