PROFILE / ROBIN KRAMER : Assignment: Calming the Waters at City Hall : Politics: As deputy mayor, she will focus her attention on the temperamental council. Another task is to help the mayor with his communication skills.

City Hall is a sensitive world, where personalities and policies often collide and etiquette is as important as the fine print.

Robin Kramer, one of five top deputies reporting to Mayor Richard Riordan, knows that. Her job is to teach the mayor and his high-powered staff about this nebulous side of governance--the art of getting along.

She has her hands full.

The policies the office is pushing are controversial ones. Competing factions are developing among the mayoral staff. And then there is the mayor himself, an impatient and sometimes ill-spoken man who is not yet at ease in the spotlight.

As deputy mayor for communications and community affairs, Kramer will focus much of her attention on the Los Angeles City Council, a temperamental body that has to be treated with care. So far, it hasn’t.

Early on, Riordan visited some council members’ districts without inviting them along, causing the legislators to feel snubbed. And without properly briefing council members, aides to the mayor have pushed controversial initiatives and expected the council to approve them. Both the leasing of the Central Library to Philip Morris and the nomination of Latino activist Xavier Hermosillo to a city commission were voted down by a council disturbed that it had not been consulted.

After numerous minor gaffes, Kramer has arrived to mend fences with the 15 council members and buffer them from the mayor’s aggressive policy experts working to reinvent city government--as Riordan promised during his campaign.

“The mayor has never been mayor before,” Kramer said. “He has his policy people in line. I’m here to help with the human dynamic and preach the gospel of respect and understanding.”

Her main task these days is to build support for the mayor’s plan to dramatically increase the number of police officers on the streets. The first phase sailed through the council last week but the plan is expected to grow more controversial as the mayor proposes new funding sources in the months ahead.

Kramer, 40, knows most of the council members from her days as chief of staff to Councilman Richard Alatorre. In the community, she can tap the many corporate, governmental and community leaders she has worked with as a public relations executive.

Ironically, it was by criticizing the new Administration that Kramer became a part of it.

After some early Riordan blunders, she called top mayoral aides to suggest that he needed a communications expert on board. Later, she got a call from the mayor offering her the job.

From her office just down the hall from Riordan’s, Kramer has already begun the hazy task of improving the mayor’s image inside and outside government, becoming in one observer’s eyes, the Miss Manners of City Hall’s Room 305.

“She’s very nurturing,” said one of her colleagues. “She likes to use the Socratic method. She’s always asking, ‘What are we here for? What are we doing? Who else should we include?’ ”

Besides the council, Kramer has to focus her energies on her new colleagues.

Staffers in the mayor’s office complain privately of declining morale, a general sense of distrust among the employees and confusion over who is responsible for what.

“Reinventing government is a mantra with no religion and no high priest,” said one frustrated staffer.

Since arriving, Kramer has scheduled meetings with dozens of government insiders--from her own staff to the council members themselves. She hired a new director of communications, David H. Novak, to oversee the press and speech-writing operations. And she has begun pushing her view that etiquette is a critical part of government.

“She’s not just touchy-feely,” said one council aide who met with her recently. “She’s not just talking about holding hands and walking off into the sunset. She’s strategic. She returns telephone calls and gets things done. The mayor’s office needed someone like that.”

Kramer spent five years as executive director of the Coro Foundation, a local leadership training organization that teaches some of the concepts she is spreading to the mayor’s staff.

So with Kramer as his guide, Riordan and his top aides are learning not to tromp into council members’ districts without first telling them, not to allow council members to learn of mayoral initiatives in the media, not to treat the council as an impediment to success.

“Before she arrived, there was a fairly high degree of inexperience in that office in dealing with this kind of environment,” said Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, who has clashed with the new Administration. “People who are duly elected expect to be consulted, rather than directed or taken for granted.”

Initially, the plan was for Chief of Staff Bill McCarley and Deputy Mayor Jadine Nielson to handle the elected officials. But McCarley has become bogged down in the nitty-gritty of implementing Riordan’s policies and a frustrated Nielson left the Administration in October.

Riordan said he realizes the importance of the council, although he acknowledges that that view has not always shown through.

“They are such an important part of putting forth programs,” Riordan said in an interview. “They have to trust me and my office and know that we’re not putting them out to dry on anything.”

Kramer has already taken small steps toward healing the critical relationship with the council. Some of what she is doing could not be more obvious.

She handed out her home telephone number to some key council aides, for instance. Before she arrived, some staffers complained that they would leave messages on the mayor’s office voice mail and never have them returned.

Kramer revived former Mayor Tom Bradley’s practice of issuing proclamations honoring local residents. Council members love the mayoral proclamations and had been frustrated when they learned that the elaborate scrolls had come to an end.

Inside her office, Kramer held the first-ever mayoral staff meeting, in which some aides said they met some of their co-workers for the first time. In smaller sessions, she heard grievances from the mayor’s clerical staff about the lack of direction in the office and planned strategy with the senior staff in a retreat at Riordan’s Brentwood mansion.

The office has not become the paragon of grace overnight.

Riordan is still awkward at the podium and occasionally puts his foot in his mouth.

There was concern within the office when Riordan, in response to a question at a community meeting, said that it had been a mistake to grant DWP workers a 9% pay increase over three years to end their nine-day strike. Some of his aides deemed the comments unwise because the city was in the midst of negotiations with other labor unions.

And with Kramer aboard, the mayor stumbled during the recent fires when he heaped praise on city firefighters for keeping the Calabasas/Malibu fire outside city lines, without recognizing the damage inflicted on other communities or acknowledging the dozens of other fire agencies that helped out.

She said the mayor’s press office has operated in a campaign mode, hustling the mayor from one event to another. But besides calling for more news conferences, she appeared unclear on exactly what the office would become.

Kramer acknowledges that there is only so much she can do to control the inherently messy political process. To remind her of the challenge, she keeps a quotation from Coro founder W. Donald Fletcher in her office:

“Government-politics is . . . an area covered with fogs of confusion. . . . To an observer there is little that makes sense.”

Profile:

Robin M. Kramer, a former public relations executive and City Council aide, is the latest to join Mayor Richard Riordan’s staff. As deputy mayor for communications and community affairs, she will attempt to focus Riordan’s message and improve his relations with the council.

* Born: May 25, 1953

* Residence: Hancock Park

* Education: Bachelor’s degrees in political science and journalism from Pitzer College, master’s degree in urban studies from Occidental College.

* Career highlights: Senior vice president at Marathon Communications; chief of staff to Councilman Richard Alatorre, 1986-1990; executive director of the Coro Foundation, 1981-1986; chief deputy to former Councilman Bob Ronka, 1978-1981; executive director of Southern California Democratic Party, 1976-1978.

* Family: Married, with three sons.

* Quote: “I’m here to help with the human dynamic and preach the gospel of respect and understanding.”