Powerful Council Ready to Test New Mayor’s Mettle : Government: First challenge for Riordan or Woo will be winning over skeptical legislators.

A weak-willed publicity hound with a bad case of limousine liberalism. An imperious, right-wing plutocrat given to back-room dealing.

Those unflattering assessments will be waiting for Mayor Michael Woo or Mayor Richard Riordan when the winner of the June 8 election arrives for his first day on the job at City Hall.

The critics? Members of the Los Angeles City Council, a legislative body that has lived alongside Woo, Hollywood’s councilman, for eight years and has had more than a few telling brushes with Riordan, a multimillionaire lawyer-businessman.

“The council’s big fear about Mike is that he’s going to come into the mayor’s office with his head in the clouds and then lead them down a series of blind alleys,” said one longtime City Hall lobbyist.

“Riordan!” sputtered another. “He’s got big philosophical differences with a majority of the council. And then there’s the arrogance thing.”

All this could be dismissed as catty backbiting. But the Los Angeles City Council is the 800-pound gorilla at City Hall, a group that can spoil the best-laid plans of any mayor. In the blunt view of Councilman Mike Hernandez: “The council has more power than the mayor does.”

Indeed, from Day 1, one of the next mayor’s top challenges will be winning over a headstrong 15-member legislature whose collective ego and powers--through default and design--have expanded in the final years of Mayor Tom Bradley’s Administration.

“I think the new mayor is going to be immediately tested,” said one top city official. “The council will be trying to see how much steel he has in his backbone.”

And that could mean problems for a city desperately seeking solutions to a long menu of ills. “If there’s no partnership and no leadership then we’re going to be in deep trouble,’ said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, Claremont Graduate School political scientist.

Most council members, particularly when speaking on the record, are quick to say they could work with either man.

And most can summon up at least a few words of praise for both. Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky takes pains to balance his past criticism of Woo with accolades--saying his colleague had the courage to take unpopular stands when he voted for taxes and layoffs. And Council President John Ferraro has lauded Riordan for making overtures to him about developing a partnership with the council.

In fact, aware of possible trouble lurking behind the scenes, Riordan and Woo have met the council’s most powerful members to assuage concerns and build bridges.

But both will carry a considerable amount of baggage into the mayor’s office that will be difficult to shed, many observers agree.

Stories about the two mayoral candidates abound at City Hall:

* Hernandez, despite being a Woo ally on many issues, said his colleague has not “shown enough political backbone,” and speculated that Woo has dragged his feet on a Woo-sponsored proposal to legalize street vending because he feared that the law would alienate suburbanites.

* Councilwoman Rita Walters said Riordan’s manner was overbearing when he came to her office and proposed building a swap meet in partnership with a church in her district. Walters said she was so offended by his style that she finally had to show Riordan out of her office. She said later: “He was very obstreperous. He was very rude.”

* Yaroslavsky accused Woo of spinelessness last year for berating colleagues before the media instead of on the council floor. Said Yaroslavsky after the 1992 debate on term limits: “Mr. Woo, you’ve got to learn to speak straight to people’s faces and not behind their backs and through the papers.”

* Councilman Joel Wachs, a failed mayoral candidate, has accused Riordan, while a city parks commissioner, of negotiating overly favorable deals with businesses. “Riordan was ready to give away the store,” Wachs said after he tore up much of a contract that Riordan, 62, had negotiated for the Griffith Park equestrian center. Despite that, Wachs said he is not prejudging either candidate.

* Woo helped solidify his reputation as a grandstander when in the spring of 1991 he jumped in front of several colleagues--who wanted to take unified action--to hold a news conference by himself to call for the resignation of then-Police Chief Daryl F. Gates. Several lawmakers contend that this move--which became a centerpiece of Woo’s mayoral campaign--unnecessarily hampered and politicized their efforts to ease Gates out of office.

Woo and Riordan say those incidents were badly misinterpreted.

Woo said without his call for Gates’ removal, the rest of the city’s leadership never would have agreed to get rid of the powerful chief. His spokeswoman said that the street vending plan has been held up, in part, to allow Hernandez to refine it. And, the spokeswoman said, Woo has been far more collegial than others--and less likely to criticize colleagues.

As for Riordan, an aide said that he negotiated the best deal possible at the equestrian center. The swap meet, he said, had the support of the church and has been a bonus in a neighborhood with few shopping opportunities. Riordan did not respond to a call seeking comment on his manner during the meeting with Walters.

But memories of council members are long and their power has been on the rise for several years.

A 1991 City Charter amendment gave the 15 lawmakers veto authority over half a dozen of the city’s most potent commissions--including those that run the airport and water and power departments. The mayor had previously ruled these departments, with nominal council scrutiny.

Bradley’s laid-back style in the waning years of his Administration also led the council to seize more power than it would have dared when the mayor was in his prime, some observers said. They noted the council’s rejection of a mayoral appointee, attorney Melanie Lomax, to the Department of Water and Power commission, and predicted similarly aggressive scrutiny of the next mayor’s choices for commission posts.

“The City Council has stepped into the vacuum,” said one high-ranking bureaucrat. “The council is not going to give up its new-found power very readily.”

Even now, the council is talking about abolishing the city’s five-member Board of Public Works, a body that controls hundreds of lucrative city contracts and whose members are well-paid mayoral appointees.

Perhaps because he is better known at City Hall, Woo, 41, has been the target of particular disdain. Said one observer: “Familiarity has bred contempt.”

More than once, council President John Ferraro, a physically imposing ex-football player, has publicly and roughly needled the slightly built Woo, calling him “little Mike” and deriding him for his frequent absences from council meetings.

“There are some people who want to screw him just to screw him,” one council member said of Woo. “With all the programs he has and all he wants to do, he has some real problems.

“Here is this young, rich kid who never had to work for anything and who got everything given to him,” the lawmaker said.

Said another: “He’s a young upstart, and some people can’t handle that.”

But much of the animus may be nothing more than envy.

After all, half of Woo’s colleagues have coveted the mayor’s office at one time or another.

“There’s not one of the council members who doesn’t look into the mirror each morning and see the next mayor of the city of Los Angeles staring them in the face,” Jeffe said.

The soft-spoken and bookish Woo said his actions speak more strongly than the image colleagues would like to draw of him. He pointed to his stand against Gates and to his willingness to risk his comfortable council post.

“They question my backbone,” Woo said. “But I am the only one who had the backbone to give up my seat on the City Council to take the chance of running for mayor.” (Other council members who ran for mayor this year did not have to give up their seats because they are not up for reelection until 1995.)

Meanwhile, others contend that Riordan also would have a tough time trying to foist his boardroom management style on City Hall.

“Riordan might not have as much baggage going in as Woo,” said Steve Afriat, a veteran political consultant and confidant of several lawmakers. “But I think it’d be only a matter of hours before he created some of his own. The way some on the council see it, he’s going to treat them like his latest corporate acquisition.”

Being heavy-handed with the council will not work in a government structure that gives the council powers roughly equivalent to the mayor’s. To win enactment of his legislative program, the mayor must secure the votes of a council majority.

Significantly, too, Riordan may be destined to have sharp philosophical disputes with the majority of the council. Riordan is a Republican, while the council is dominated by liberal Democrats.

A top city official speculated that Riordan’s major campaign pledge--to hire 3,000 additional police with the proceeds from the lease of Los Angeles International Airport--will be roughed up by the City Council. “It’s pretty much the sole plank of the Riordan platform and it will run dead up against significant opposition in the City Council,” he said.

A councilman also scoffed at Riordan’s proposal to privatize the city’s trash collection system. “A white, Republican mayor will never be able to privatize trash collection in this town,” he said. “The last thing he can do is . . . lay off 1,000 African-American rubbish collectors. There’s no way.”

And urban lawmakers are likely to greet Riordan, who lives in a $6-million Brentwood mansion, with skepticism.

“With his background, it’s going to be difficult for him to prove to a lot of us in the inner city that he’s got our best interests in mind,” Hernandez said.

But Riordan denies that he is an unbending conservative or high-handed.

Privatization is only a means to an end, Riordan stressed in an interview. “I’m not an ideologue,” he said as he acknowledged that the city’s garbage collection bureau has traditionally provided “entry-level jobs for various ethnic groups. I have an open mind to other means.” And suggestions that he is autocratic are “pure baloney,” Riordan said. “I’m a collaborative person.

“The council knows . . . I’ll share power with them,” Riordan said. “I can’t go in and run all the companies I have without sharing power.”

Despite lingering suspicion and hostility, council members and the candidates acknowledge that they will have to work together.

Woo predicted that much of the highly charged animosity of the campaign will fade when officials focus on governing.

In contrast to Bradley, who at City Hall tends to remain in his office on all but a few ceremonial occasions, Woo said he will keep a high profile, routinely dropping by the council chambers and lawmakers’ offices to lobby for votes.

“As new mayor I’m going to get beyond the personality conflicts and ego issues,” Woo said. “Regardless of whatever unhappy experiences in the past, I need (the council) to be successful.”

Riordan, a big campaign contributor to council members and other politicians, said he is on good terms with most of the council and will treat them as “social and professional equals.”

By way of example, he added: “I play chess and ride bikes with Marvin (Braude).”

In the end, petty jealousies will give way to practical realities, some predict.

Council members like to play up the candidates’ shortcomings now. “But the council will forget that in a hurry,” one said, “when they want the mayor to sign an ordinance or appoint their constituents as commissioners.”