Woo Blends Liberal Agenda With Dash of Old-Time Pol : Politics: Mayoral candidate has clashed with status quo in and out of City Hall. But he knows insiders, too.

Only months after joining the Los Angeles City Council, Michael Woo plunged his colleagues into a racially charged clash over old and new visions of the city with his plan to declare Los Angeles a sanctuary for refugees from war-torn Central America.

It was to be a bellwether: over the next eight years the Hollywood lawmaker who now wants to be Los Angeles’ next mayor sponsored a liberal urban agenda that frequently put him at odds with the city’s status quo, both inside and outside City Hall.

In his exploration of cutting-edge policies, Woo has pushed to legalize sidewalk vendors, to extend rent control to more than 200,000 leased single-family homes and to bring City Hall under a new code of ethics.

The 42-year-old lawmaker repeatedly clashed with former Police Chief Daryl F. Gates, for years the city’s most visible symbol of law and order, over reforms to make the Los Angeles Police Department more sensitive to its multicultural constituency.

And he is the patron of an unusual city policy that extends leave benefits to unmarried city employees whose partners die or get sick.

But even as he has carefully positioned himself as a new breed of politician--one who would avoid back-room deal-making, the crass perks of office and conflicts between his private and public interests--Woo has at times drifted into old-style political behavior.

In the late 1980s, for example, Woo--who boasts of his training as an urban planner--gave the city’s professional planning staff fits by working with lobbyist Art Snyder to gain special treatment for a major commercial project.

In 1988, Woo ordered a hip remodeling of his City Hall office at a cost of more than $275,000. It turned into a public relations gaffe after it was pointed out that Woo had made a campaign issue out of criticizing his predecessor, Peggy Stevenson, for spending $15,000 for an office bathroom.

And only months after championing ethics reform, Woo appeared to mix his public and private interests when he led a delegation of Los Angeles business leaders to Hong Kong. During the trip, a Chinatown bank tied to his family was showcased as part of a business development campaign.

Mixed Record on Crime, Development

A Times review also found that Woo has an uneven and parochial City Hall record on economic development and crime control, the two issues uppermost in the minds of voters.

On police matters, for example, Woo has distinguished himself more for seeking to reform the LAPD than for trying to beef up its crime-fighting ability.

Woo said he is proud of his record as an activist lawmaker who has taken bold stands that have at times run afoul of conventional wisdom and public opinion.

“It’s not very popular to champion the cause of newcomers (immigrants),” Woo said. “Even taking on Police Chief Gates was unpopular at the time. Eventually public opinion caught up with me.”

But Woo also said he has a convincing mainstream record on police protection.

“I don’t think my efforts at fighting crime . . . are out of step,” Woo said. He noted that he has secured redevelopment agency funds to hire private security guards to supplement LAPD patrols in Hollywood and has supported crime watch programs for businesses and homeowners.

Woo also points out that he has steadily endorsed unsuccessful ballot measures to increase property taxes to hire 1,000 more police officers and has consistently voted for plans to revise the city budget to find more money for police.

Still, it has only been in the context of the mayor’s race that Woo has authored sweeping initiatives to increase the size of the LAPD. “Earlier in my career I was more focused on representing my own council district,” Woo said. “It was not my responsibility at that time--not being a member of the council’s Public Safety or Budget and Finance committees--to tackle those larger issues.”

Some political analysts note that Woo’s legislative record does not figure prominently in his campaign ads and mailers.

Woo acknowledged as much, but insisted that the absence of a strong message on his record results from the limitations of his campaign budget, not the weakness of his record.

“I’m proud of the record I’ve accumulated,” he said, complaining that he does not have the luxury of broadcasting an array of messages to voters.

Overall, Woo’s record endears him to youthful, multicultural and reform-minded voters.

“He’s a progressive guy who carries on what he believes,” unaffiliated political consultant Rick Taylor said. “You have to give him credit for that. The reality is that this city needs some shaking up.”

Views Unpopular With Moderates

But others speculate that Woo’s record may make him vulnerable as he competes for crucial middle-of-the-road voters against businessman Richard Riordan.

“He is sort of captured by the politically correct crowd,” said Steve Erie, a UC San Diego political science professor who studies Los Angeles. Woo’s legislative record excites liberals, but it frequently does not speak to the rest of the electorate, Erie said.

“Mike Woo went to college and majored in the wrong subjects,” political consultant Bill Carrick said. “He majored in civil rights and economic justice. In another time, another place, that would have stood him well.”

For example, as part of a trilogy of major immigrant rights initiatives he has advanced over the years, Woo launched a drive in 1990 to restrict the LAPD’s ability to help the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service identify illegal aliens.

But recent Times polls show this position is hugely unpopular with a broad cross-section of voters, including 62% of Latinos.

“It’s one of the reasons he’s having the problems he has now,” said Larry Berg, director of the Jesse Unruh Institute of Politics at USC. “The kinds of things (in Woo’s record) are not terribly attractive to voters in 1993.”

Woo disagrees. “I think that’s a misreading of the electorate,” he said in a recent interview. “I think the electorate is looking for leaders who will take bold stands . . . and reflect its concerns about crime and jobs, and I believe I have done that.”

But as the mayoral campaign has increasingly focused on moderate voters, Woo’s position has appeared to shift as he called for deportation of immigrants accused of serious crimes. That has drawn criticism from some Latino leaders.

The first major signal that Woo would push for a boldly liberal agenda came in 1986 when he introduced his sanctuary plan, the first of several initiatives that marked him as a City Hall pioneer of multiculturalism.

Critics, led by the INS’s former flamboyant West Coast chief, Harold Ezell, warned that Woo’s proposal to declare Los Angeles a sanctuary for political refugees would invite a flood of illegal immigrants to Los Angeles.

But Woo, the son of a Chinese immigrant and student of 1960s-style UC Berkeley politics, called it a necessary antidote to a rise in immigrant bashing.

After a bitter debate, the measure was narrowly approved by the City Council amid pronouncements by Woo that it was a sane, rational policy.

Three months later, however, after a colleague threatened to undo the sanctuary plan with a citywide referendum if necessary, Woo was forced to delete the sanctuary language.

In 1990, Woo joined former Councilman Robert Farrell in another bid to make the city more hospitable to its increasingly influential Latino immigrant population by sponsoring a plan to decriminalize street vending.

His original proposal, based on the findings of a task force he had set up, included a call to create special districts where large numbers of the pushcart vendors would be permitted to operate.

But Woo also included a controversial provision that would have allowed one or two street vendors to operate on every commercially zoned block in the city.

Policies Slow to Be Enacted

This element drew vocal protests from restaurant owners, small merchants, the city’s affluent hillside homeowner associations and the Planning Commission’s own homeowner representative, who said the Woo plan would allow an unwelcome Third World aesthetic to permeate the city.

In January, 1992, the Los Angeles City Council, forewarned and chastened by the protests, agreed to approve only the special-district element of the Woo proposal and sent the matter to the city attorney to draft a final ordinance.

Nearly 1 1/2 years later, the plan remains with the city attorney.

At least one lawmaker, Councilman Mike Hernandez, who has endorsed his colleague’s mayoral bid, has speculated that Woo has allowed the street vending plan to lie idle for political reasons.

In 1987, Woo’s focus on the needs of the city’s underrepresented also led him to create an ambitious, privately funded Task Force on Family Diversity.

Woo asked the task force to study the problems affecting “variable family groups, such as single-parent families, unmarried couples, immigrant families, gay or lesbian couples or families with senior or disabled members.”

After a yearlong study, the task force produced a report with 110 recommendations. Among them: that the LAPD deploy more officers to “protect the homeless from crime and to protect businesses and residents from criminals posing as homeless persons”; that the city attorney study gay and lesbian family violence; that the LAPD collect data on the disabilities of crime victims, and that health care benefits be widely extended to domestic partners working in the public and private sectors.

Eventually, one of the task force’s recommendations was adopted as city policy--a proposal to grant unmarried city employees with domestic partners, whether gay or heterosexual, the right to take paid leaves of absence if their partners died or got sick.

The city’s budget office objected to this “domestic partnership” plan, estimating that it would cost the city $2.6 million in wages spent on leaves of absences.

Woo said he thinks the plan has worked well, but city officials say they are unable to calculate the cost of the program.

Woo’s record on police has won him the strong support of gays and liberals but others say he has not paid enough attention over the years to the fundamental issues of police protection.

“I don’t think he’s been a person who understood the bottom line of the crime issue or the management of the department,” said Sharyn Romano, a co-chair of United Streets of Hollywood, an community group in Woo’s district. Romano is one of Woo’s appointees to the Hollywood Community Advisory Council and a liberal Democrat, but she said she has recently decided to support Riordan.

Between the time Woo took office in 1985 and last year, homicides in the LAPD’s Hollywood Division increased at nearly double the citywide rate. Aggravated assaults doubled--about the same as the citywide rate--while robberies went down, counter to the citywide trend.

Just as the statistics provide a mixed picture of crime in Hollywood, its residents have differing views on Woo’s anti-crime performance.

Bob Burton, another co-chair of United Streets of Hollywood, said Woo’s office helped bring a crime-plagued park under control and has generally made headway on overall street safety. “He’s tried different things. They haven’t all been effective, but that’s what happens,” he said.

Woo defends his anti-crime record, saying that his office helped establish and equip a network of neighborhood watch patrols, created police bike patrols and secured redevelopment agency funding for private security guards who soon will supplement the LAPD.

And Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who led efforts in the mid-1980s to build up the LAPD, said Woo was among his supporters. “I can’t recall an incident where he didn’t support my efforts to increase the Police Department,” Yaroslavsky said.

Helped Win Wide Changes in LAPD

Still, Woo has criticized the LAPD as being out of step with the city’s changing population, both in its law enforcement tactics and in the makeup of the force.

In 1987, Woo clashed bitterly with former chief Gates over what he called raids on gay bars in the Silver Lake area.

He also played a lead role in negotiating far-reaching changes in LAPD practices designed to eliminate discrimination against gay and lesbian officers as part of a settlement of a lawsuit.

Woo said the historic settlement was a way to end “the bitter legacy of relations between the gay community and the Police Department.”

Besides paying $770,000 in damages, the council-approved settlement required LAPD administrators to recruit new officers at gay community events, eliminate questions that would reveal an applicant’s sex orientation from job screening material and ban anti-homosexual slurs by officers.

In 1990, Woo joined Councilman Richard Alatorre to win council approval of the plan to restrict LAPD cooperation with the INS after an incident in which the police rescued 27 El Salvadoran nationals from smugglers and then turned them over to the INS.

At the time, Woo said the LAPD had created such a climate of distrust that immigrants would be leery of reporting crimes against them for fear of deportation.

A year later, after the beating of Rodney G. King, Woo became the first city official to call for Gates’ resignation.

That put Woo at the forefront of the city’s police reform movement.

The great irony for Woo, according to political consultant Carrick, is that the public’s appetite for police reform has been largely satisfied by Gate’s departure and the arrival of Chief Willie L. Williams. “Woo deserves great credit in these matters,” Carrick said. “But that chapter on police reform is closed. Now what the people want is more police.”

Meanwhile, Woo’s efforts to portray himself as the candidate best qualified to lift the city out of its economic slump have been handicapped by his own mixed record on revitalizing Hollywood.

Woo cites his innovative program to provide small- and medium-size entertainment industry firms in Hollywood with special loans so they will come to Hollywood and expand.

He also says he personally intervened to keep a Sears store, burned in the riots, in Hollywood. “I persuaded them not only to keep the store open, but to rebuild it, without using city funds, and to hire minority contractors,” he said.

He said the accomplishments “disprove the Riordan assertion that I have never been involved in creating jobs.”

But despite the councilman’s alliance with the city’s powerful redevelopment agency to stem the hemorrhaging of Hollywood, motion pictures, banks and other businesses have continued to leave the community, doing little to reverse the aging film capital’s image as a haven for drug dealers, gang members, prostitutes and the homeless.

Woo acknowledged that his Hollywood agenda has been frustrated by a protracted lawsuit, a stubborn recession and angry residents.

In the official campaign catalogue of his record, Woo said his fight against new city business taxes was a further example of his efforts to “improve the business climate of Los Angeles in order to stimulate the growth of jobs and businesses.”

Indeed, Woo voted in 1992 to oppose enactment of a temporary 7.5% business tax surcharge tohelp close a midyear city budget deficit. However, in 1990, Woo voted for a permanent 10% increase in the same taxes.

Inconsistencies also have bedeviled Woo’s image as a new breed of politician and a key architect of the city’s ethics reform movement.

Links to Old-Style City Hall Insider

In the late 1980s Woo caused a flap in the Los Angeles Planning Department with two proposals that smoothed the way for a major commercial project--whose owners had ex-Councilman Snyder as their City Hall lobbyist--to be built on the traffic-sensitive corner of Sunset and Crescent Heights boulevards in Hollywood. Woo acknowledges that Snyder, who epitomizes the old-time City Hall insider, has been a political fund-raiser for him over the years.

Woo introduced a motion to insert an unusual footnote in the Hollywood community plan to grant the Condor Wescorp project the right to build at a density 15% greater than similarly zoned properties in Hollywood, said city planner Michael Davies.

The footnote language was obtained without the kind of public scrutiny that normally accompanies community plan amendments, according to city records.

With help from Woo, Condor also managed to avoid a comprehensive review process before building a bell tower-elevator structure at the site that was 21 feet higher than the project’s original 60-foot limit.

As a result, the city has since enacted new guidelines to prevent other developers from taking advantage of similar shortcuts, city planners said.

Woo defended his efforts and said they resulted in a smaller, more acceptable project.

Charges of hypocrisy have dogged Woo.

After touting his work on ethics reform, Woo came under fire for sidestepping campaign spending limits that he helped draft. Critics complained that Woo made exhaustive use of a special political fund to give his mayoral campaign an improper head start. Woo spent tens of thousands of dollars building computer lists of potential contributors, hiring fund-raisers and traveling to cities to which he later returned to collect funds for his mayoral bid.

Woo said he never violated the law. The city Ethics Commission reviewed the matter and this month decided to take no action.

Woo also tarnished his image as a leader in efforts to protect hillside communities from overdevelopment when he remodeled his Silver Lake home.

As it turned out, Woo’s extensive home improvements were at odds with tough new rules he proposed to regulate hillside construction. Woo emphasizes that the law, adopted as work was proceeding on his house, was not on the books when work began.

Similarly, Woo’s personal and public interests appeared to overlap in the 1991 Far East business trip involving Cathay Bank--an institution in which Woo held stock and of which his father and late grandfather were board members.

The delegation led by Woo consisted of Los Angeles firms hoping to tap into Hong Kong investment and business opportunities as the British-controlled colony prepares to rejoin China in 1997. Although Woo’s delegation was privately funded, it was timed to merge with and reap the publicity benefits of a large city-funded trade mission led by Mayor Tom Bradley.

Woo’s delegation was organized by an entity called Los Angeles Week in Hong Kong that was headed by Woo aides and used a City Hall address. It included the councilman’s father, Wilbur Woo, and the delegation’s effort to attract new investment prominently featured Cathay Bank executives.

Mike Collins, senior vice president of the Los Angeles Visitors and Convention Bureau, said Cathay and other businesses join such trips to gain contacts.

Having figures such as Bradley and Woo, both of whom received widespread coverage in the Far East media during the trip, is crucial to attracting attention to such business development effort.

Woo defended his participation in the trip, saying, “The main purpose was to benefit the city” and noting that Cathay was not the only company showcased. A Cathay spokesman acknowledged that the bank was seeking new business contacts on the trip. But he emphasized that the bank’s financial contribution to the trip did not subsidize the expenses of any city official.

But Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores, who was on the city trade mission, said: “The average person, (when) told that there was this trip and Mike Woo’s father went as part of the business connections, and his son was there as a representative of the city . . . it might well raise a question in their mind.”

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