A Promising Start for 2 Council Newcomers : Chick Makes Early Splash at City Hall

The Los Angeles city election last spring brought two new faces from the San Fernando Valley to City Hall. They are Richard Alarcon, the Valley’s first Latino lawmaker, and Laura Chick, who ousted her former boss, Joy Picus, to take a seat on the City Council. It has been nearly six months since the pair took office and they are generally being credited with adding to the vitality and stature of the Valley’s delegation. What follows is a look at their first half-year in office.

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After less than six months in office, Los Angeles City Councilwoman Laura Chick has made a surprisingly strong mark on City Hall. “She’s a real dynamo,” said one City Hall lobbyist.

“A very fast start,” said William McCarley, chief of staff to Mayor Richard Riordan, reviewing the 3rd District councilwoman’s early record.

In her short tenure, Chick has emerged as a champion of public safety issues and a prickly critic of City Hall perks and conventions, bringing a fresh voice to the San Fernando Valley tradition of government-baiting. The 49-year-old former social worker also has grabbed more than a junior lawmaker’s share of headlines and publicity for her causes and for the Valley.

The kudos have at times been head-spinning. “If she keeps it up, I think there’s potential for Laura to be a mayoral candidate in eight years,” predicted political consultant Rick Taylor, who is not alone in holding such a view.

Assessing her own accomplishments, Chick says they are broadly twofold. “I think I’m keeping the council focused on public safety, which is what the public wants,” she said. “I think I’ve also brought a louder and more visible voice to Valley issues.”

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The fast pace has come with a price for the woman who ousted her own former boss, Joy Picus, from office last June.

Critics see T. Barnum-like mentality at work in Chick’s activities.

One colleague publicly accused Chick of grandstanding when she promised to forgo her own salary increase. Others mutter privately that they sense a touch of demagoguery and higher ambition at work.

But still there’s no dispute on one point: Laura Newman Chick, the Beverly Hills product who braved the sneers of friends and relatives to move to the Valley in the 1970s to raise a family, has made a splash.

After surveying political insiders for their views, Dick Rosengarten, editor-publisher of a political weekly, dubbed Chick one of the state’s “brightest new political stars.”

Amid such reviews, Chick said she is trying to maintain her balance. “It’s heady,” she said in a recent interview.

“But right now I want to stay focused on being the best council person that I can be for the next 3 1/2 years,” she said.

Chick’s moves have often been quick and sure-footed.

When it was learned that the Department of Water and Power had spent $800,000 to feed its supervising employees with catered meals during the recent DWP strike, Chick brandished an inexpensive box of store-bought baked goods on the City Council floor to dramatize her outrage over the DWP spending.

“We have a beer budget,” she fumed as the cameras rolled, but “DWP clearly has champagne tastes.”

As a serial child molester has stalked Valley elementary schoolchildren, Chick was the first to urge setting up a $25,000 reward fund to catch the predator.

Just before an automatic pay increase for City Council members was about to quietly take effect, Chick introduced a motion urging the council to set a belt-tightening example during the city’s fiscal crisis and forsake the increases. It made good news and sound bites. And it ticked off some of her colleagues.

“There are unspoken rules here and when you bend or break them you can expect to have your knuckles rapped,” Chick said of the criticism from her colleagues over the pay-raise issue. “I didn’t run for office to accept the status quo . . . but to get change in the fullest sense of the word.

“I’m not looking for a reputation as a maverick. I know the rules as well as anyone,” she continued. “But if I’m going to play by the rules, I want to play by my rules.”

Chick also scored big by quickly taking steps to keep faith with the demand for greater public safety loudly voiced by voters during last spring’s municipal elections.

With her plan to hire former Los Angeles Police Department officers and to offer full-time employment to reservists, Chick jumped into the limelight with an eye-catching plan before Riordan’s own, more deliberate studies for beefing up the force were completed.

To understand why Chick has gotten out the gate so fast, it helps to look at her background and that of her staff members.

Chick is no City Hall neophyte. From 1988 to 1991 she was a Picus field deputy, a job that introduced her to many of the key personalities and issues in the 3rd District--an area that includes much of the West Valley from Roscoe Boulevard to the Ventura Freeway and from the San Diego Freeway to West Hills. Being married to Robert Chick, a former city Airport Commission president, also put Laura Chick on speaking terms with political activists and insiders, including Chick’s longtime friend, consultant Joe Cerrell.

And then there is Chick’s seasoned staff members.

It starts with chief deputy Karen Constine, a former lobbyist who was former Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores’ press secretary. Next is Chick’s legislative aide, Diane Breuggeman, who held a similar post in former Councilman Michael Woo’s office. And finally there’s Eric Rose, a former lobbyist for a billboard company (who colorfully proposed to his future wife in front of a billboard proclaiming his love) and a former press secretary to former state Sen. Ed Davis.

So despite Chick’s campaign pledge that she would not waste tax dollars by hiring a press secretary if elected, she in effect has two top aides in Constine and Rose who are veterans in the care and feeding of the media.

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With such media veterans on board, it was fitting that one of Chick’s first council actions dealt with image--Los Angeles’ image. Learning that a national TV show was about to air an unflattering portrait of Los Angeles, Chick urged the media to go easy on the city and to reflect as well on the city’s ample assets. It was simply a call for balanced reporting, she said, and it made headlines.

In addition to her media successes, Chick has managed to put a fresh and personable face on one of the area’s most venerable political roles, that of the grumpy champion of the Valley. This political persona contends City Hall bureaucracy is wasteful and often takes more in taxes than it gives back in services to a disenfranchised Valley.

In his heyday, former Councilman Ernani Bernardi played this role to the hilt. Chick has demonstrated that she also knows the lines but can handle them without appearing as parochial or shrill.

One of her first official acts--borrowed straight from the playbooks of Bernardi and former Councilman Howard Finn, another quintessential Valley penny-pincher--was to take nearly $70,000 from her own council office budget and earmark it for more police patrols.

Later, Chick surprised some of her Democratic friends when she joined a council minority that voted against a new program to provide health benefits to the companions of unmarried straight and gay city employees. Chick agreed such benefits were deserved, but she contended the timing was wrong to spend $750,000 annually in such a way. Such perks were inappropriate when voters, especially in the Valley, were demanding that city resources be focused on hiring more police, Chick said.

Her roots also showed when Chick criticized DWP water rates, complaining that they imposed an unfair burden on Valley residents, and urged the Riordan Administration to grant some relief. The rates have imposed an “incredible hardship” on Valley homeowners, Chick politely but forcefully told a panel investigating the matter.

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Chick also sang a popular and familiar Valley refrain when she joined Northridge Councilman Hal Bernson in urging the state Assembly in September to support the breakup of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

“I think she’s philosophically in-line with Mayor Riordan’s own desire to reinvent government,” McCarley said, speaking of the common strains in Chick and Riordan’s agendas. At a recent Valley Industry and Commerce Assn. conference, Chick endorsed Riordan’s aggressive search for ways to privatize government services.

Still, while paying homage to her Valley roots, Chick has been careful.

“We know we have to get along with the rest of the city,” Constine, her chief deputy, said. “Laura pledged during the campaign to take issues of importance to the Valley and give them a new and stronger voice on the City Council floor. That’s definitely happened. But I do not think we are doing this at the expense of the rest of the city. We’re looking for a balanced approach.”

Thus, for instance, when Bernson asked that a city panel looking at the Valley water-rate situation be disbanded because, he contended, it was biased against the Valley, Chick did not join him in making the gesture. “We want to let the process work,” Constine said.

Although a quick student of City Hall, Chick has made some missteps.

Some observers, for instance, say she has been less than forthright about her role in approving the wage pact reached in September with 10,000 striking DWP workers.

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That pact now haunts the city and its treasury, standing as a yardstick by which other municipal unions have come to measure their own wage demands.

Three weeks ago, Riordan told Valley community leaders he had made a mistake when he backed the settlement because the contract was precedent-setting. Clearly, Riordan said, the financially strapped city cannot afford similar settlements with its other unions.

Despite her vote favoring the pact, Chick has criticized the agreement. At a town hall meeting in November, Chick won the applause of a roomful of constituents when she told them the DWP workers “shouldn’t have gotten a raise.” Unlike Riordan, however, she did not disclose her vote on the matter.

Chick has offered two explanations for her vote: First, as a council newcomer, she was overwhelmed by the debate, and secondly, that she only voted for the final settlement because it would have been wrong for the council to reject a deal reached by its own negotiators.

Privately, however, some of her colleagues have accused Chick of trying to duck responsibility for her DWP pay-hike vote.

Chick has also been occasionally vexed by land-use disputes. Although the high-profile development controversies that swirled for years around Warner Ridge and Warner Center and dominated Picus’ final years in office have subsided, Chick has found herself fighting her own land-use skirmishes.

They have led to sometimes strident squabbling with local homeowner leaders in Van Nuys over proposals for a new supermarket and a day-care center.

Chick also caused a stir when it was reported that her office was exploring the possibility of establishing a city-sanctioned day-laborer site in Canoga Park to get the workers--the vast majority of them Latinos--off the streets. Similar programs have proved effective elsewhere in the city, Chick told a Reseda High School crowd. Such reports, however, caused a flap and a quick retrenchment by Chick. Within days, the councilwoman dropped her exploration of the program.

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In an effort to reduce such frictions in the future and develop an early warning system, Chick recently appointed three community councils to advise her on emerging development disputes and projects. Still, the land-use playing field may be hard to master. Don Schultz, president of the Van Nuys Homeowners Assn., has written of his fear that Chick will use the councils to undermine the more traditional homeowner groups.

Others are more sanguine. Robert Gross, president of the Woodland Hills Homeowners Organizations, has praised the planning council program.

And Chick herself says the reaction of her appointees to the councils also has provided a heart-warming demonstration that there are lots of people of good will and talent who are ready to become engaged in civic affairs--if they are asked. “When we had our first meeting, you know, we had almost 100% attendance at a meeting at 9 a.m. on a Saturday,” she said. Such displays of civic commitment are part of “what’s fine and wonderful about this job,” she said.

And like those people, Chick too feels good about her own public service.

“This is kind of my life right now,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for the right arena in which to play out my energies and talents, and I’ve found it. And it feels good.”