Some Reasons for Hope and Good Cheer in the New Year

A friend asked me to write something cheerful for New Year’s. He said my columns have been depressing him lately.

I can’t say I blame him. I tend to take a bleak view of life, possibly because I started in the newspaper business on the Oakland Tribune. We used to put out six or seven editions a day, half of them with big screamer headlines dedicated to the proposition that bad news sells newspapers. It’s hard to escape your early training.

Even so, I made a special effort to sort through what’s coming up this year to see if I could find something diverting, amusing or at least with the potential for a happy outcome.

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Power politics--Many of you might not find the politics of transportation diverting. But it will be followed closely in 1994 by those of us who are amused by ruthless and bloody political combat. The action is expected at the Pentagon of Los Angeles government, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a free-spending, pork-barreling monster fed by a steady flow of revenue from the sales tax and other sources.

The MTA, which runs buses and trains and builds the subway, is led by a board composed of a variety of Los Angeles County elected officials. The real boss is the chairman, the Eastside’s wily Richard Alatorre, a powerful member of the Los Angeles City Council. While others relax, Alatorre plots. Thus he’s been able to install loyalists in key jobs that influence all the major aspects of the huge agency, which awards many millions of dollars in contracts.

But a threat to Alatorre lurks in the West in the form of his rival, the equally powerful City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who represents the Westside and part of the San Fernando Valley. Yaroslavsky is favored to be elected to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors this year, a post that would automatically make him a member of the MTA board. Like Alatorre, he plays the political game with cunning, subtlety and pure power, and their rivalry on the transportation board promises to be of championship class. Most interesting of all is the probable referee, a friend of both Yaroslavsky and Alatorre. That’s Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, also a member of the MTA board. It’s going to take a lot of cunning of his own for Riordan to avoid offending either of the rivals.

Red tape--Here’s good news for anyone who has ever tried to get a construction permit at L.A. City Hall, an experience that is even worse than going to the DMV or the post office. Riordan has started an attack on the red tape and bureaucratic foul-ups that result in delays of weeks, even months, in the permit process. Recently, he called a meeting of city planners and berated them for taking too long in preparing environmental impact reports for construction projects.

The meeting was an opening shot in what will be one of the hottest and most interesting battles in City Hall this year. In addition to trying to cut red tape, Riordan intends to pare down the large number of city-sponsored social welfare and economic development programs, which are run under contract by hundreds of nonprofit agencies, many of them backed by influential City Council members. The aim is to reduce a budget deficit estimated at $200 million. As Bill McCarley, Riordan’s chief of staff, said last year, “Not withstanding a budgetary commitment of nearly $550 million, 718 authorized positions and . . . more than 300 contracts,” the city’s economic development program is inadequate. McCarley wrote that report before he joined the Riordan team, when he was legislative analyst. Now he’s in a position to act on it.

But the mayor had better act carefully. Many of the nonprofit agencies provide badly needed services. Among them are home rehabilitation, after-school care, and anti-drug, anti-gang and recreation programs for teen-agers in poor areas.

New faces--On the theory that most any change may be good, look at the Los Angeles County Hall of Administration and L.A. City Hall. Four new City Council members and a new mayor have been in office for half a year, and it’s time for them to produce. The same is true at the Hall of Administration, where Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, elected last year, is the recently chosen chairwoman of the board. And the new county administrative officer, Sally Reed, has been on the job long enough to start delivering her promised efficiencies. The county will be short of money again in 1994. Let’s hope the supes don’t do anything as stupid as last year, when they tried to have the Legislature wipe out L.A.’s anti-smoking ordinance in exchange for a bigger share of the tobacco tax.

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There are other hopeful prospects. Phase 1 of Riordan’s plan to put more cops on the street sailed through the Los Angeles City Council, indicating that chances may be good for the remainder of the program. The Southland and the rest of California are high on President Clinton’s agenda. He needs to carry the state for reelection in 1996.

Most important, at year’s end, L.A. County’s congressional delegation and politicians from several cities and the county government put aside narrow differences and began working together on regional job-creating schemes. If the economy revives, their efforts may speed the recovery and help end the recession that is at the heart of most of our troubles.

That would be the best news of all.