Wachs-Yaroslavsky Dispute Over DWP Vote Simmering Down

TOUGH TALK: City Hall need not hold its breath for Councilmen Joel Wachs and Zev Yaroslavsky to duke it out. Several weeks ago, a blustering Wachs threatened a lawsuit over Yaroslavsky’s assertion, made on a radio talk show, that Wachs played a duplicitous role during talks to resolve a city utility workers strike.

While voting to oppose the controversial pay hike settlement in public, Wachs backed it in private, sneered Yaroslavsky (who was a yes-vote for the settlement).

Not so, Wachs said as he fumed, stewed and threatened to sue the city to obtain transcripts of the council’s behind-closed-doors pay negotiations so he could, as he said, prove Yaroslavsky to be a liar.

So where’s the lawsuit?

So far, there isn’t one.

But Wachs has asked the city attorney’s office to rule on the legality of releasing the transcripts of the council’s internal debates on settled issues. His request has apparently got the city’s lawyers rubbing their chins overtime. No word yet on their opinion.

Meanwhile, Wachs is no longer nursing a personal grudge against Yaroslavsky for his remarks on Warren Olney’s “Which Way L.A.” show on KCRW, or so he says.

“That’s over,” Wachs said. “This is not about Zev and me fighting, it’s about a broader thing of what the council did on the pay hike.”

The “broader thing” is that the council seriously erred by granting the costly pay hike to Department of Water and Power workers, Wachs said, and the public should know how the council reached its decision. “All the information ought to be out so the public can see what happened,” he said.

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MORE TOUGH TALK: When the council put the kibosh on his own novel police hiring plan on Oct. 5, Councilman Hal Bernson heatedly vowed to take his measure “to the streets” and obtain enough voter signatures to put it on the ballot, without the council’s help.

Bernson’s proposal would require the city to earmark enough money to hire about 250 extra police each year until the LAPD had 10,000 officers, even if such a buildup meant slashing civilian city departments to pay for it.

Asked when he would start his initiative drive, Bernson said “next week.”

But what’s that feisty San Fernando Valley populist done since Oct. 5 to make good on his pledge? Bernson did not return phone calls placed Wednesday and Thursday in an attempt to find out.

Last week, however, Bernson said: “I can’t give you any exact date but hopefully we’ll be on the street with the petitions sometime before Thanksgiving or Christmas.”

Bernson first proposed his police plan on Oct. 27, 1992, meaning the one-year anniversary on the idea was this week.

Political consultant Richard Lichtenstein, who remains an unpaid adviser to the still unborn Bernson-cops campaign, said the Bernson team is still trying to get organized.

The long gestation period, Lichtenstein said, has been due to Bernson’s understandable willingness to wait for law-and-order candidate Richard Riordan--now Mayor Riordan--to put forward his own plan to solve the cops crisis. But that plan, unveiled two weeks ago, while chock-full of specifics, offers few clues on how to pay for the buildup it prescribes, Bernson lamented recently. And that’s his plan’s forte, he said.

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$6 MILLION MAN: While other state lawmakers are taking a breather and perhaps slowing down a bit during the legislative recess, state Sen. David A. Roberti (D-Van Nuys) is revving up the engines of his fund-raising machine.

This month, after returning from an Italian vacation with his wife, June, Roberti hit the ground running in a dash for campaign money to finance his exploratory bid for the state treasurer’s office.

The Senate leader’s calendar is marked up with 30 fund-raising events--all scheduled before the beginning of January, when the Legislature reconvenes, said campaign consultant J.J. Kaplan. The first was a get-together at the Sheraton Universal with Los Angeles business leaders.

Of the grueling money-raising routine Roberti is embarking on, Ruth Holton, executive director of California Common Cause, says, well, who can blame him?

Kathleen Brown won the office in 1990 by spending $4 million to defeat Thomas Hayes. So, taking inflation into account, “We certainly can expect Roberti to be looking at a $5 million to $6 million race,” Holton noted.

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IMMIGRATION CLASH: Since early 1992, Rep. Anthony C. Beilenson (D-Woodland Hills) has been the most outspoken Democrat in the House about the need to curtail illegal immigration.

But he drew the line recently when Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) sought to bar the National Endowment for the Arts from dispensing money to illegal immigrants.

Beilenson rose on the House floor to castigate the proposal as duplicating existing law and trivializing the effort to prevent undocumented residents from obtaining public benefits.

Rohrabacher’s action was prompted by an incident near Carlsbad last August in which three San Diego performance artists, who were indirectly funded by the NEA, handed out $10 bills to day laborers. The NEA later ruled that the $5,000 grant had to be reimbursed.

Referring to Rohrabacher, Beilenson said: “He is trivializing a very important issue. He is correct that billions of dollars of benefits paid for by American taxpayers get into the hands of people who are here in this country illegally.

“But for him to speak out about a few thousand dollars which were not paid for by federal funds against and, contrary to, the law and to regulations of the endowment itself . . . makes it more difficult to deal with the serious problems.”

The proposed ban lost by four votes, 210-204.

In the aftermath, Rohrabacher, while attesting to Beilenson’s genuine concern about illegal immigration, maintained that the veteran Democrat is “being beaten up badly behind the scenes by his fellow Democrats. . . . The Democratic Party has decided that providing taxpayer benefits, for whatever reason, to illegal immigrants is a position worth fighting for.

“You can always find an excuse not to do something,” he added. “It is clear Tony was finding an excuse. If this was redundant, there would be no reason for him not to support it, reaffirming a policy that you believe in.”

Beilenson responded: “My votes and my decisions on all these things are purely my own.” He said that Rohrabacher’s effort “was obviously an outrageous act. . . . It’s froth.”

This column was written by Times staff writer John Schwada in Los Angeles, Cynthia H. Craft in Sacramento and Alan C. Miller in Washington, D.C.