Mayor Names Deputy for Communications : Government: City Hall veteran Robin M. Kramer is expected to help sharpen Riordan’s message.

Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan announced Tuesday that he will bring another seasoned City Hall veteran into his inner circle--appointing lobbyist and former City Council aide Robin M. Kramer as deputy mayor for communications and community affairs.

Kramer will replace Jadine Nielsen, who resigned last week as one of Riordan’s five deputies.

The mayor’s allies hope that Kramer will become a West Coast version of David Gergen, the savvy political hand who was brought in to prop up the sagging fortunes of President Clinton’s young Administration.

Although Riordan has not taken the early critical beating the President did, his confidantes have long bemoaned the lack of an experienced aide to help him sharpen his message, both to the general public and to key decision-makers at City Hall.

The opening for Kramer was created when Nielsen stepped down last week as a deputy mayor and took a position as a part-time volunteer adviser to Riordan. Nielsen said she left her full-time job voluntarily to pursue state and national political issues, others in the mayor’s office said she was forced out after a power struggle with the mayor’s chief of staff, William McCarley.

Riordan billed himself during his campaign as a political outsider who could reform and remake City Hall, and some observers say that Kramer’s appointment is an acknowledgment that a sophisticated handler is needed to manage the sometimes quirky ways of the City Council and city bureaucracy.

“I don’t want to say anything negative about Jadine, but she didn’t know the system and the list of players,” said one council member, who went on to call Kramer “very competent and reliable and very good to communicate with.”

Kramer will be paid $89,387 a year to help hone Riordan’s message on several fronts. Besides pushing Riordan proposals through the City Council, she will oversee field operations, including his five regional representatives. And she will supervise a three-person media staff and devise a more coordinated strategy for presenting Riordan to the public.

Kramer, 40, has worked for more than 17 years in civic and government affairs. For the last three years, she served as a lobbyist and communications expert representing a variety of corporate and nonprofit organizations.

She helped manage the 1992 campaign for the successful ballot measure that enacted the Police Department reforms recommended by the Christopher Commission. And she worked with Riordan on LEARN, the committee that has recommended greater autonomy for schools within the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Previously, Kramer served for more than four years as the top aide to Councilman Richard Alatorre and, before that, to Councilman Bob Ronka. Between those assignments, she was executive director of the CORO Foundation, a nonprofit organization that trains future government leaders.

The Hancock Park resident currently serves on the boards of several nonprofit organizations.

In an interview Tuesday, Kramer immediately reached out to council members by saying she appreciates the “hard work and the hard job they have to do.” She said she was attracted to the assignment because she found Riordan “incredibly energetic and impatient, wanting to get things done.”

She plans to start work next Wednesday and said no immediate changes in the office’s operations are expected.

Kramer predicted a smooth transition, noting that she has had a long working relationship with chief of staff McCarley: “I could finish his sentence and he could finish mine. We have a lot of mutual respect.”