Riordan Plans Diverse Team; Will Tap Business and GOP : City Hall: Mayor-elect’s Administration will be performance-oriented, according to his aides. He says he wants people to know he cares about them.

As he shifts his attention to the daunting challenge of governing Los Angeles, Mayor-elect Richard Riordan is expected to draw on a broad network of advisers--many of them newcomers to government--who will reshape the political face of City Hall.

Advisers said Riordan, the first Republican to win the office in 36 years, will assemble a team that will include more members of his party, more entrepreneurs, more San Fernando Valley residents and fresh faces from minority communities.

It also will probably include some well-traveled holdovers from the 20-year Administration of Mayor Tom Bradley.

But a key difference in the Riordan regime will be its business leanings. Aides said Riordan, a wealthy venture capitalist and philanthropist, will use his contacts in the business community to enlist retired executives in his drive to make City Hall into a more performance-oriented and marketplace-sensitive entity.

“The key thing that’s going to be different is the people,” said developer Tom Tellefsen, Riordan’s Brentwood Park neighbor and part of a 30-member steering committee that counseled the lawyer-businessman throughout his first campaign for office. “We will see people . . . you would not normally find in the public sector,” said Tellefsen, a Republican who had not previously been involved in City Hall politics.

Riordan on Wednesday reiterated his promise to bring representatives of all political affiliations, ethnic groups and neighborhoods into his Administration.

“I’m going to be a mayor who gets around to different parts of the city. Making people know that I care about them, that my Administration cares about them,” Riordan told reporters at a downtown news conference.

“We don’t care whether that person is a Democrat, a Republican, an independent. . . . We are going to take the person and not the party.”

Riordan named his trusted business associate and campaign chairman, Democrat William Wardlaw, to lead the effort to recruit a new governing team of staff members and hundreds of commission appointees.

“You are going to see a whole new group of people in City Hall and in the commissions,” Wardlaw said. “This is a significant change. . . . (Riordan) wants to bring in the best and the brightest and have his Administration reflect the diversity, the rich diversity of this city.”

In an election that drew 43% of the city’s registered voters to the polls--the largest turnout for a mayor’s race in 20 years--Riordan prevailed, 54% to 46%.

He carried nine City Council districts with concentrations of middle-class and Anglo voters in the Valley, the Harbor and Westside.

City Councilman Michael Woo--even though he was endorsed by President Clinton in a city where two-thirds of the voters are Democrats--carried only six districts, including his own in Hollywood, and heavily Latino and African-American districts in Central, East and South Los Angeles.

As Riordan emphasized that he will run a bipartisan Administration, his victory in Los Angeles was sending a strong message across the country: that a Republican can win in an urban Democratic stronghold.

And Riordan is not the only Republican to do so lately. On the East Coast, Bret Schundler left a good Wall Street job to immerse himself in politics in Jersey City, N.J., and in a November special election he became its first Republican mayor in 75 years. He was reelected in May, despite the fact that Republicans make up just 6% of the electorate. Like Riordan, Schundler was belittled as a wealthy Wall Street shark.

In Washington on Wednesday, GOP leaders sought to assign great significance to Riordan’s victory in Los Angeles. “(It) is the latest proof that people of all parties and all ethnic backgrounds are looking to Republican leadership to help solve our national and urban challenges,” Senate Republican Leader Bob Dole said.

William Schneider of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington said Riordan’s victory in the nation’s second-largest city is a tantalizing development for urban Republicans.

“Riordan really came on with a new kind of coalition--white voters with enough liberals and minority support to get elected. A lot of people are asking: Could this work somewhere else?” Schneider said.

“The larger lesson here is that cities everywhere are in decline. Democrats are in charge in almost all large cities. Republicans may be able to offer an appealing alternative, especially since the Democrats are showing they can’t even deliver with a Democratic President pledged to help the cities.”

But getting elected is a far cry from turning around a metropolis as crime-ridden, politically Balkanized and racially troubled as Los Angeles.

Riordan’s greatest potential pitfall, said Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce President Dan Garcia, is “that he’ll grow impatient with the intractability of the system” of slow consensus-building in City Hall decision making.

“Dick’s instinct is to make changes very fast,” Garcia said.

Lobbyist Steve Afriat, a close council observer who supported Woo, said Riordan will have “a lot of pressure on him. He is the citizen-politican who won. We’re all sitting back, kind of smug, saying: ‘OK, you do it better.’ ”

Riordan said he would “get along extremely well” with the 15-member City Council, even though the election of four new members Tuesday and shifting political alliances make it unclear whether the new mayor will have a working majority in the legislative branch.

Riordan took special care Wednesday to begin building bridges. He accepted an impromptu invitation from City Council President John Ferraro to address the body that can make or break his programs, including such controversial ideas as putting unionized city services out to private bidding.

Riordan will join council members and city executives today on a trip to Sacramento to lobby Gov. Pete Wilson and legislative leaders for funds to close a yawning budget shortfall.

As Riordan feels his way at City Hall, Ferraro and Council members Joel Wachs and Richard Alatorre, all of whom campaigned for Riordan, will be key transition advisers.

Outside City Hall, Riordan and his aides are expected to turn to an array of business, community and academic leaders for advice and recommendations for appointments.

In addition to developer Tellefsen, these include William G. Ouchi, a UCLA management professor and expert on U.S. and Japanese styles of management and industrial competition; businessman Nick Patsaouras, a former county transit official; psychologist Warren Valdry, president of 100 Black Men; Ivan Houston, chairman emeritus of black-owned Golden State Mutual Insurance; Latino businessmen Frank Sanchez and Anthony Souza; developer Robert Lowe, and city Planning Commission President Ted Stein.

A key voice in ensuring that Riordan’s Administration achieves the proper political balance will be that of attorney Stan Sanders, the top black vote-getter in the April primary who became a high-profile campaigner for Riordan.

Sanders, the first person Riordan thanked at his victory celebration Tuesday night, worked closely with Riordan for several years on the city Recreation and Parks Commission, and there has been widespread speculation that he may be Riordan’s chief of staff.

Sanders said he hopes to spend the next few months “helping Richard Riordan make the transition and then go off and pursue my own political interests.”

“He trusts my political judgment and he is going to need people like that,” said Sanders, who has expressed interest in running for City Council in 1995.

Olive branches were being extended to Riordan on Wednesday from one influential base of Woo support--the city’s gay community.

Gay activists struck a conciliatory note on Riordan, noting that he had met with gay and AIDS groups and courted their support.

Rose Greene, board co-chair of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center, said: “I think we made some progress in raising Dick Riordan’s consciousness. . . . I think he learned that the gay and lesbian community is a community that votes and takes a serious interest in the (city). . . . I think the gay community has a lot more to gain by cooperating with Dick Riordan than by immediately trying to thwart (his) plans.”

Times staff writer Bettina Boxall contributed to this story.

More Coverage

* PRIVATE LIFE--Michael Woo prepared to return to private life with Tuesday’s stinging election defeat still fresh. A24

* HOW HE WON--Richard Riordan scored big in the Valley, won moderate Democrats and benefited from a low minority turnout. A25

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