City Hall’s Tenacious, Televised Critic Tries to Make a Difference

Leonard Shapiro, 73, was a candidate for mayor of Los Angeles in April. The retired medical products distributor from Granada Hills got 554 votes, putting him 19th among 24 candidates. But he had among the highest name recognition, mostly due to his tireless--and televised--efforts as a gadfly and watchdog who challenges elected lawmakers and administrators every Tuesday at City Council meetings. Shapiro, publisher of the Los Angeles Observer newsletter, is leaving the San Fernando Valley for a home in the Pacific Palisades after almost 30 years. He was interviewed by staff writer Josh Meyer.

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Question: What gave you the idea to create the Los Angeles Observer, and when?

Answer: About 12 years ago I started going to all the City Council meetings. When I would read the paper the next day, I’d find that it had no relationship to what was being discussed. So I said I’d write a little newsletter and after six months or so these guys would start writing what was really happening. After a year, nothing happened. And gradually I realized I’d have to do it forever. The coverage by newspapers has no relationship to reality. They do not cover the important things.

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Q: Like what?

A: Like the city Bureau of Sanitation. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent, the biggest expenditure of money in the city each year. And no one is writing stories about it.

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Q: Do you think your newsletter and your weekly speeches before the council have made a difference?

A: Yes, in certain aspects. I was the first guy to start saying they should use the airport for city funding. I said that five or six years ago, and if you look in the records, it’s called the Leonard Shapiro initiative on the airport. Right now everyone is talking about the airport--should they lease it, sell it, raise the landing fees. All the items I was talking about five years ago are now the order of the day because the city needs money. The same thing with the harbor and the Community Redevelopment Agency. Whether I got the media’s attention or the politicians’, the point is something is being done.

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Q: You retired in 1979 after suffering a heart attack. Do you worry that your constant fighting against City Hall is bad for your health?

A: The bulk of my business was delivering supplies in ghetto and poor areas. It was a tough business, very stressful. A day didn’t go by where there wasn’t an accident, a killing, a holdup or shooting and so forth. Compared with that, working with the politicians downtown is not stressful at all. Everything is relative.

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Q: What are some of your biggest victories?

A: I more than anyone else got TV coverage into City Hall. It took us three years, but we got it in there. Now I’m trying to get it into the County Board of Supervisors, so people can see what’s going on.

The biggest victory I ever participated in was when the city appropriated and had the money on hand, $250 million, to build the Lancer project, to build incinerators. I participated in the movement to stop the Lancer project, and we did stop it. That was roughly five or six years ago.

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Q: How about in the Valley?

A: One specific thing I helped fight against and won was the development of Porter Ranch. It was awful. It was supposed to take the needs of the residents into consideration, and the residents did not want that. But there was no public input. Overdevelopment in the Valley in general is something I’ve fought against, including Warner Center and Warner Ridge. I’ve been active in the North Hollywood redevelopment area, too.

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Q: What is your biggest frustration in dealing with city officials?

A: I only wish they would listen. As far as I am concerned, the intellectual capacity of the City Council, and this doesn’t make friends for me when I say this, is pretty bad. I consider Zev Yaroslavsky the most intelligent of the 15 members of the City Council, and based on a schedule from 0 to 10, I rate Zev a six and a half. And he’s the best! So you can imagine how many people there have an intellectual capacity of between two and three, which is awful. They don’t understand. They should use these things I tell them, because they know I’ve been right on many occasions. But there is nobody in City Hall that listens.

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Q: What have you told them that they’ve ignored?

A: During my campaign, I said what we need in City Hall is something like the state Little Hoover Commission, to check the operations of each department, not cut them with a meat ax and say 5% or 10% across the top have to go. That’s not the way to do it. You check the department to see if they are performing their original mission and if they have too much staff. You could save hundreds of millions of dollars by doing that.

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Q: Is that why you decided to run for mayor, so people would listen?

A: I decided to run because I wanted to bring out some issues I couldn’t bring out on the council floor. And I did bring out a lot of issues, like the fact that there should be night meetings of the council so people who work can go to the meetings, and meetings in each district. There should be more public participation, so people can feel that this is their government. Until the people get involved in the city of L.A., we’re going to have crummy, inept, incompetent, expensive and wasteful government.

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Q: You’ve often crusaded for Valley issues, to represent Valley residents. How do you see the Valley’s representation at City Hall now?

A: The Valley is becoming aware that its interests are different from the interests in the rest of the city. This is becoming obvious in the school system, where the City Council arbitrarily deprived them during reapportionment of one of two representatives. I told them about a year ago if they did that the Valley would break away, that it would not take that. They have no right, when there are as many people as there are in the Valley, to give them only one representative.

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Q: Is the school representation problem indicative of a larger problem?

A: Yes. In everything--police, fire protection, roads--as far as I am concerned, the Valley doesn’t get back half of what they give in taxes. They get back something like 25%. I point this out all the time, and other people have, too. But they make believe they don’t hear it. They just do not respond.

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Q: You spent a lot of time campaigning. Are you glad you ran for mayor?

A: I had no illusions of winning. I wanted to get a few issues out. I basically think I accomplished what I set out to do. I would have loved to have had different candidates in the runoff besides Woo and Riordan. But I learned a lot from the other candidates who were in the race--they had a lot to say. And they listened to what I had to say.

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Q: What’s next for you?

A: As far as I’m concerned, the big problem in the Valley and the city is that there is no money. The state is taking money away, there is less tax money coming in and the city is going to be short money on its own and even shorter when the state starts grabbing it. Someone is going to have to look into the operations of the city and see how they can conduct it more efficiently. I would love to be on a city Little Hoover Commission if one gets established. They need a guy like me.