Mayor Begins Selling LAPD Buildup Plan : Policy: Riordan again avoids detailing the cost of an ambitious police expansion. Some say his strategy is to try to persuade the public to back his proposal, then present the City Council and taxpayers with the tab.

Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan took his ambitious police expansion plan on the road Thursday, still declining to fill in the politically volatile financial details and thus leaving other city officials to calculate the full economic dimensions of the law enforcement buildup.

After conferring with city analysts, Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, chairman of the council’s budget panel, produced rough estimates that the Riordan proposal’s modest first-year cost of $15.3 million would soar to $130 million by the second year and to $300 million by the fifth and final year of the expansion.

Officials said those estimates are conservative because they do not include costs of additional patrol cars and other equipment, and they assume that police, who are now campaigning for a new contract, receive no pay increases for five years.

“It is a staggering amount,” said Yaroslavsky, who during an interview abandoned a desk calculator to tally cost estimates using a pencil and paper. “My calculator doesn’t go that high,” he quipped.

The mayor’s chief of staff, William McCarley, did not dispute Yaroslavsky’s estimates, but he reiterated that the Riordan Administration will not discuss detailed costs or funding proposals--other than the already funded $15.3 million for the first year--until the mayor presents next year’s budget in April.

“There’s no question we’ll need a lot of resources to do this. It’s going to be hundreds of millions of dollars,” he said. “But the mayor is committed to finding a way.”

Riordan’s strategy, knowledgeable sources said, is two-pronged: First, try to rally public support for a vastly beefed-up police force, and then later, in less-ominous-sounding year-to-year installment payments, present the City Council and taxpayers with the tab.

The mayor conceded as much during his first stop of the day, a community breakfast meeting organized by Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar) in Studio City. Delaying discussion of funding is “part of the equation,” Riordan told reporters after pitching the plan and winning an endorsement from Katz, who had been a rival in this year’s mayoral campaign. “If you’re a politician, you (first) want the public to be solidly behind you.”

With the mayor was his popular new ally, Police Chief Willie L. Williams, who has joined forces with Riordan to sell the largest LAPD expansion in decades--adding the equivalent of 4,335 officers in five years and more than quadrupling the routine patrol force.

The plan calls for the 7,600-officer force to grow to 10,455 over five years through a combination of hiring of thousands of recruits, luring hundreds of officers from other departments, and curbing early retirements and resignations. More officers would be made available by freeing them from desk duties and by paying millions for overtime and holiday shifts.

Some praised the mayor’s savvy in dodging, for now, the sticky issue of funding.

“That’s probably a smart way to go,” said Bonny L. Matheson, president of the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn. Councilman Joel Wachs, a Riordan supporter, also lauded the mayor’s political shrewdness.

But some observers said the mayor is running the risk that he will undercut his carefully cultivated image of an outsider offering simple, straight talk.

“To come out with a program of this magnitude and not even hint at where the funds are coming from is in the best tradition of irresponsible politics,” said Larry Berg of the Jesse Unruh Institute of Politics at USC. “It makes the citizen-mayor sound more like the politician-mayor.”

As the scope of required funding for Riordan’s plan became clearer Thursday, Yaroslavsky, a key player on budget matters, joined several other council members in predicting that Riordan will be forced to propose a tax hike.

Although stressing that he supports the “very noble” goals of the plan, Yaroslavsky said: “I know of no way to do this without a tax increase. The mayor is going to have to tell the public and the City Council how he is going to pay for it. And that discussion can’t wait until next April.”

Complicating Riordan’s ability to find funding is a looming budget deficit next year, which revised estimates released Thursday indicated will range from $130 million to $155 million, depending on whether voters approve a half-cent sales tax extension in November.

That means Riordan must come up with $250 million to $300 million worth of savings and new revenues in next year’s budget to fully fund his police plan. He has said he hopes to accomplish that through streamlining the bureaucracy--not by raising taxes--but officials said Thursday that that goal appears to be nearly impossible without wholesale elimination of other services and programs.

Later Thursday, Riordan sought to peddle his plan to South-Central Los Angeles residents as an antidote for the city’s ills. Most of those he came across were eager buyers. Some, however, were skeptical, or just not interested in more police.

Led through the area by Councilwoman Rita Walters, the mayor told senior citizens at the Theresa Lindsay Senior Center that they would be able to shop in the evening and that their grandchildren would no longer have to dodge gunfire behind parked cars.

Jewel Anderson, manager of a South-Central retirement home, said elderly residents are frequent crime victims.

“We hear a lot of rhetoric about the changes we’re going to get,” she said. “They’re going to do this. They’re going to do that. But nothing is ever done in our neighborhood.”

Norma Gooden, a resident leader in the Pueblo del Rio Housing Project, gave Riordan the thumbs up when an aide whipped out a copy of the plan in her living room. Three residents were injured in a drive-by shooting three weeks ago, and the police, she said, took forever to arrive. “I’m sick of hearing boom, boom, boom, boom,” she said.

But others that Riordan encountered disagreed with the idea of putting more police in the community. “We’ve got enough police already--too many,” said Percy Kendrick, a homeless man. “Flooding the area with more police won’t work. What we need is drug programs, recreation, something to do.”

Times staff writers John Schwada and Jim Newton contributed to this story.