NEWS ANALYSIS : Candidates’ LAPD Plans Clash With Budget, Law : Mayoral race: Riordan, Woo pledge to add officers. But the ideas are not new and face legal, political hurdles.

With swing voters fixated on the issue of crime, Los Angeles mayoral candidates Richard Riordan and Michael Woo are tripping over each other to pledge the largest police force buildup in modern city history.

But the stump speeches and sound bites about putting thousands more officers on the streets without raising taxes conceal a tangle of legal, political and fiscal uncertainties that easily could render either candidate’s scheme unworkable.

“To do what either of the mayoral candidates is talking about doing in terms of police hiring, within existing resources, is very, very difficult,” said Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, the council’s top budget specialist.

Indeed, what the candidates and their handlers promote as bold new ideas to pay for a steep, costly buildup of the 7,800-officer LAPD--down from a high of 8,400 three years ago--are largely dogeared plans that have languished for years in various stages of City Hall study and debate.

Riordan’s proposal to add 3,000 officers within four years by pushing a fast-track lease of Los Angeles International Airport to a private operator rests on a shifting foundation of financial guesswork and conflicting opinions about whether the plan is legal.

Woo first called for boosting the police force by 1,000 officers through a new tax, but that proposal collapsed with the defeat of a ballot measure last month. Last week, he presented a proposal to build a 10,000-officer force in four years through cuts in other spending, budgetary shifts and the reassignment of civilian City Hall employees to free desk-bound officers.

Some of Woo’s figures are questionable, the prospect of City Council approval appears dim and even Woo aides concede that threatened state budget cuts could hamper the proposal.

Woo’s proposal “is a layoff plan” and would be “extraordinarily painful and disruptive to other services on which many people in this city depend,” Yaroslavsky said. He estimated that it would require about 1,000 layoffs--an action contrary to the prevailing political will at City Hall.

Riordan’s plan is even “more pie in the sky,” Yaroslavsky said, in part because it appears extremely unlikely that various legal barriers in federal law can be overcome to permit the city to siphon profits out of the moneymaking facility.

Indeed, federal law and contracts generally have required that airport-generated revenues remain at those facilities, if they receive federal funds, officials say. LAX has received hundreds of millions of dollars in Federal Aviation Administration grants, which the city could be forced to return if it drew money from the airport without federal permission.

The Los Angeles city attorney’s office has not yet “found a way to transfer money off the (airport) site,” said City Administrative Officer Keith Comrie, the city’s chief fiscal officer. “That’s the significant issue that has to be decided first.”

Riordan insists that his plan requires no change in federal law, citing in part legal opinions generated by former officials in President George Bush’s Administration, which strongly favored contracting out public facilities and services. He also cited an executive order by Bush last year that directs federal agencies to cooperate with such privatization efforts.

But the new Administration of President Clinton may not have the same appetite for turning public facilities over to private operators--a move strongly opposed by organized labor, which helped Clinton win the White House.

“We have not yet developed a policy on privatization,” said Hal Paris, a Washington spokesman for Secretary of Transportation Federico Pena.

And Fred O’Donnell, a Los Angeles spokesman for the FAA, said at this point “money cannot be taken off the airport” for other city services.

Despite Riordan’s optimism, overcoming such legal obstacles may not be easy.

There are additional uncertainties about just how much money the airport might generate.

Relying heavily on a year-old city study, Riordan said he will pay for the 3,000 new officers through a 30-year LAX lease that could generate a payment of $250 million upfront and annual payments starting at $130 million and rising to $700 million.

But Mark Brown, a private consultant who helped prepare the 1992 study, said it never was meant to be the basis for developing such spending proposals. Based on a string of assumptions that could--and in some cases have--changed, the study was chiefly a vehicle for comparing the relative benefits to the city of retaining the airport, selling it or leasing it, Brown said.

The consultant said he “shudders every time” he hears the report’s figures cited in terms of budget talks or police funding plans. “The purpose of the analysis wasn’t to estimate (potential revenues) with any precision,” he said. “One caveat of the study--easily overlooked--was that the numbers should not have been used as a basis for estimating” revenues that would be available for other city services.

Last month, at the request of airport officials, Brown produced a revised estimate of potential airport revenue to the city--based on more current conditions--that slashed the near-term estimates of the money that could be generated at the airport to just $15 million a year.

Airport Department General Manager Jack Driscoll said the airport can and should generate more money for the city, but that the initial city study grossly overstated the potential near-term revenue the facility could generate.

Riordan’s aides say the revised figures were politically motivated to help Woo, and Riordan said Friday he remains “100% behind my plan.”

“I feel my estimates of revenues are accurate,” he said. He cited a new study supportive of his position by the Reason Foundation, a conservative think tank that has been pushing private operation of LAX for several years. He also said he has received assurances that his leasing plan is feasible from keenly interested officials at Lockheed Corp. The firm’s airport operating division has hired a battery of City Hall lobbyists and is positioning itself to bid on any LAX lease, which would be the largest and most lucrative public airport lease deal in the nation.

A Lockheed spokesman, Victor Gill, would only say that the firm “continues to believe that there is considerable economic value to the city of Los Angeles in some kind of public-private partnership in regards to LAX.”

There also are doubts about the political viability of Woo’s police funding plan, as well as some of his figures.

Woo has promised to make a 21%, 872-officer increase in the number of police on patrol within one year, and build the force to 10,000 officers by the end of his first term.

More than 600 of the officers in the first year would be shifted to the streets from desk duty, and replaced by civilians transferred to the Police Department from other city agencies, Woo said. Another 250 new officers would be funded by a 20% cut in the City Council and mayor’s office budgets, reducing telephone expenses and other belt-tightening, he said.

Although there is sentiment on the City Council for adding police officers, lawmakers’ political instincts are likely to block big cuts in their own budgets, which have been squeezed in the harsh economic times.

“I don’t know if that’s feasible,” said council President John Ferraro. He said council members have trimmed their staffs and are nervous about alienating constituents, who face delays in getting their complaints handled.

Yaroslavsky said a 20% cut in mayoral and council budgets would fund only about 50 new officers a year, and it is not clear that Woo can generate some of the savings he says he can.

As for freeing up officers by assigning more civilians to LAPD desk jobs, that proposal has rattled around City Hall for years, but always bogged down in financial and political problems. Last week, a City Council committee recommended boosting the LAPD field force by giving Police Chief Willie L. Williams 300 additional civilian employees to take over office tasks. But it is not yet clear how the proposal would be paid for, or whether reassigning city employees from other departments is possible.

Inevitably, cutting jobs in other departments means other services must be cut. What Woo might place on the chopping block could be “another elected official’s cause celebre, “ Yaroslavsky said.

Woo’s spokesman, Garry South, said “it’s hard to imagine that you can’t, in a city this large, find 622 employees” who could be better used at the Police Department. There are about 32,000 city employees.

Ramming through a series of new budget cuts--beyond those being made just to close a $180-million deficit--would be required to continue Woo’s police buildup. And that may prove even more politically difficult. Woo says he would cut departments other than police, fire and sanitation 5%, and use surplus revenues from the Community Redevelopment Agency for police. The latter element would require state legislation, and a bill to provide the necessary authority was defeated last year.

Given the cutbacks made in recent years, Woo’s plan would require rounding up enough City Council votes to begin layoffs, officials said. Yaroslavsky said he doubts that it is possible.

“No one wants to fire people,” said Ferraro.

Woo said he will press ahead. His plan “will mean making tough decisions about cutting government spending,” Woo said last week. “I know some folks at City Hall will howl . . . but I’ll do it any way.”

Even Woo aides acknowledge that much of the councilman’s plan could be sidetracked if the state approves threatened cutbacks of hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue to the city.

“Obviously, if that were to occur, it changes a lot,” said South, Woo’s spokesman.

Despite the tenuousness of the police buildup plans, the simple promise that thousands of new officers will soon be on the streets will be hammered home to voters in the remaining five weeks of the campaign--and Times polling data shows why.

Overall, the economy was the top issue cited by voters in last month’s mayoral primary, but “the election seems to be turning more on the crime issue than on the issue of jobs, at this point,” said John Brennan, director of The Times poll.

Woo and Riordan supporters pick the economy as a concern in roughly equal proportions, Brennan said. But on crime--the No. 2 issue--Riordan does much better with voters than Woo.

And crime was a key issue in the primary election for 43% of Jewish voters and 45% of white moderates, two key groups where Woo must expand his appeal to tip the scales of the election.

The police force proposals are getting the most campaign play as solutions to crime and violence. It is an easy idea to communicate, but it is not entirely clear how effective that strategy will be in swaying voters.

“Much of the voting public is thinking of things other than more police when it talks about ‘crime,’ ” Brennan said. “To tap into those complex feelings, a candidate may have to have more than a simple plan to put more cops around.”

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