Riordan Sees Renewal for L.A. : Inauguration: New mayor urges citizens, officials to take more responsibility for revitalizing city. He again pledges that more police and creating jobs are top priorities.

Richard J. Riordan was sworn in Thursday as the 39th mayor of Los Angeles, delivering a message of hope tempered by a call for personal responsibility that he insists can reinvigorate a city laid low by riots, crime and recession.

Riordan, the city’s first new mayor in two decades and the first Republican elected to lead Los Angeles in 36 years, takes over from Tom Bradley, whose 20 years in power were highlighted by some of the city’s greatest moments and tarnished by some of its most wrenching failures.

A political novice who was almost entirely unknown just six months ago, Riordan used $6 million of his estimated $100-million personal fortune to power his move into the city’s top job. With crime and the economy the most pressing issues on voters’ minds, Riordan promised to beef up the police force by nearly 40% and to cut through government regulation to attract new businesses and jobs.

After years of City Hall domination by a liberal Democrat, whose success often was tied to the intervention of the state and federal governments, Riordan called Thursday for a new direction in which citizens and local officials assume more responsibility for revitalizing the city.

“Fellow Angelenos,” he said, “the time has come to rekindle in our city . . . the spirit of personal responsibility. In the end, it will be you who will turn Los Angeles around.”

The understated inaugural festivities drew more than 2,000--a far smaller crowd than those that have jammed the same City Hall plaza to greet the city’s athletic champions.

Seeming to sense an anxious mood upon the city, Riordan turned to the religious message that underpinned much of his Inaugural Day: “The Scripture says to us, ‘Do not lose heart and the city shall be renewed.’ My fellow Angelenos: Don’t lose heart, because Los Angeles will be renewed.”

Put in office largely by Anglo voters and the relatively conservative San Fernando Valley, Riordan acknowledged that his Administration cannot succeed without the rest of the city. He said he would “show that all of us--of every race, gender and religion--can strive together to make a better Los Angeles.”

The Los Angeles City Council, on which many of Riordan’s initiatives will rise or fall, showed off its own greater diversity Thursday during the inaugural festivities. Four new members--the largest class of City Council newcomers since World War II--joined the 15-member body. The new lawmakers include the first openly homosexual council member, Jackie Goldberg, who attended the ceremony with her partner, Sharon Stricker. Also taking the oath were the council’s third Latino, Richard Alarcon; Rudy Svorinich Jr., a 33-year-old paint store owner who upset veteran Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores, and Laura Chick, who defeated her onetime boss, Joy Picus, to represent the west San Fernando Valley.

But for Inauguration Day, at least, the focus was on Riordan, 63, who started off the morning by taking Communion from Cardinal Roger M. Mahony at Our Lady Queen of Angels chapel, near the site of the city’s original settlement. Many of the 150 guests at the private Mass walked two blocks to Union Station, where a waiting area was converted into a breakfast room for religious leaders ranging from saffron-robed Buddhist monks to turbaned Sikhs and white-collared Catholic priests.

“Not all our problems can be solved by government committees or leaders,” said Mahony, who has been close to Riordan for several years. “Spirituality can play a very important part. Today, we are trying to rekindle that spiritual force in the city.”

That was the new mayor’s own message. “Spiritual values are something we have to restore to the city,” Riordan said.

Riordan, who became mayor at 12:01 a.m. Thursday after a private swearing in, left the breakfast for a half-mile walk, past the city’s birthplace near Olvera Street, to his new office at City Hall.

Some of the crowd of television crews and supporters pushed past police, creating an unruly scene and crowding the new mayor. But by the time he was halfway to City Hall, Riordan had broken clear and was striding briskly, stepping gingerly aside at one point to avoid a fallen TV cameraman.

Riordan then met with Bradley for 15 minutes. When reporters were allowed into the mayor’s office, Bradley gestured to his bare desk and said: “It’s all yours now!” Riordan joked: “I have never seen Tom so relaxed. I wonder what it means. It scares the hell out of me.”

Indeed, when about 50 dignitaries stepped onto the plaza south of City Hall, the outgoing mayor was the only one relaxed enough to remove his jacket under a blazing morning sun.

It was in the same location 20 years before that Bradley took office as the city’s first African-American mayor.

In that emotionally charged ceremony, hundreds celebrated a day that many thought they would never see. In stark counterpoint, 40 American Nazi Party members stood on the periphery, holding “Go back to Africa” placards and chanting “White Power!”

Riordan’s arrival at City Hall was considerably more serene, although about a dozen protesters from the AIDS group ACT UP/Los Angeles chanted through much of the ceremony and television helicopters hovered.

After taking the oath of office from retired state Appellate Judge Robert S. Thompson and U.S. District Judge Laughlin E. Waters, who years before had hired Riordan into their law firm, Riordan took the podium for the first time as mayor. Acknowledging the crowd, he laughed nervously before beginning an eight-minute address. The speech, written by campaign press secretary Annette Castro, returned to the two principal themes of his campaign: public safety and economic development.

“The city’s first responsibility is to provide for the safety and security of its citizens,” he said, followed closely by a promise to make “city government become a partner with business--particularly small business--not an enemy.”

Riordan supporters such as Joyce Prager of Woodland Hills were thrilled with the day’s events. “I believed in him from Day 1,” Prager said. “I wanted to be there from beginning to end. . . . This is the most exciting thing in Los Angeles since the Olympics.”

But others were more cautious.

“So far, it’s just kind of jargon and rhetoric,” said Miracle Mile district resident Monique Georges, even though she voted for Riordan. “Now, we are looking for specifics.”

Riordan, a novice politician used to completing deals over the phone and operating behind the scenes, said he is also anxious to get down to business. “I love problem solving,” he said after the swearing in. “I don’t like the rituals particularly.”

During a whirlwind, three-week transition, Riordan has been widely praised for sending the right signals, both to the communities he will serve and to other elected officials. He flew to Sacramento and Washington to plead for a continuation of financial support to the city, rode in a gay pride parade and embraced its participants, and hired one of City Hall’s most respected hands--legislative analyst William McCarley--to head his staff.

But controversy arose the day before the inaugural when Riordan threw a challenge in the face of popular Police Chief Willie L. Williams by hiring one of the chief’s harshest critics as a deputy mayor. Riordan’s selection of police union head William C. Violante shocked Williams, but both men have vowed to work together to reform the department. (One measure of Williams’ popularity: At the inaugural, he received almost as much applause as Riordan.)

Riordan will need all the help he can get. The city where he made a fortune as a lawyer, venture capitalist and leveraged-buyout artist is languishing in recession and hemorrhaging from a loss of aerospace and manufacturing jobs. The majority of the properties destroyed in last year’s riots--the worst in the United States this century--remain vacant lots. And drive-by shootings, carjackings and ATM robberies have become a reality of life.

Meanwhile, the city has a $48-million deficit to contend with.

Riordan has promised to tackle the city’s problem’s with entrepreneurial skills, but clouds hang over some of his central proposals. Most City Council members have said they don’t like his idea of leasing Los Angeles International Airport to hire more police because they would prefer the facility, and all of its profits, to remain in public hands. And council members have also objected to contracting out trash collection, fearing that a private firm would lay off mostly minority refuse haulers or cut their wages severely.

The new mayor acknowledges that there are obstacles but says he is not daunted by them. He maintains that he is not a free-market ideologue but a problem solver who will find a way to get things done.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Riordan’s arrival at City Hall is that he got there at all, given his standing in the polls earlier in the year.

Although Riordan had been a longtime financial backer of Bradley’s and was the mayor’s appointee to city commissions, the mayor did not endorse any of the two dozen candidates in an April primary. With Bradley silent, many assumed that his coalition of African-Americans, Westside liberals and Jews would fall to liberal City Councilman Michael Woo.

Woo performed well with those groups but his supporters tended to be less committed that Riordan’s backers--mostly conservative citizens who were alienated by the city’s current leadership and who said they craved new ways of doing business at City Hall.

In a nasty runoff campaign, Woo attempted to paint Riordan as a right-wing extremist and Riordan countered by calling Woo an ineffectual member of the City Hall status quo. Even a late revelation that Riordan had been arrested three times, many years earlier, on alcohol-related charges was not enough to derail his campaign.

The venom of the campaign behind him, Riordan was all smiles on Inauguration Day. After taking the oath, he returned to the third-floor office where Bradley had presided for so long. His staff said the new mayor would make few changes, using the same furniture and only bringing in a few photos and mementos to lend a personal touch.

For most of the day, Riordan was scheduled to meet with McCarley to discuss the dozens of commission appointments he must make to oversee city departments. Announcements on many of those posts are expected early next week. He also planned to meet with Violante to continue discussions on how to put more police officers on the street.

By evening, Riordan had returned home to his Brentwood mansion, where he and companion Nancy Daly prepared to host a dinner for the City Council and top advisers.

“This city cannot be run by the mayor alone or the City Council alone,” Riordan said. “We have to work as a team. And that’s what I intend to do. To work closely with the City Council, to share power and credit.”

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