Jack-of-All-Trades Mayor Learns City From Bottom Up

Mayor Richard Riordan has been moonlighting.

For the last several months, the mayor has been skipping out of his City Hall office to collect trash in El Sereno, check out library books in Baldwin Hills, inspect earthquake-damaged buildings in Van Nuys and pave a road in Echo Park.

Conducted behind the scenes with little fanfare, Riordan’s days out of the office are designed to teach him about the city’s massive bureaucracy--without any reporters around to distract him. He says he wants to observe the work environment as it is without a mayor around.

Early one morning last month, the millionaire attorney and venture capitalist went out with a sanitation crew and learned about mechanized garbage collection. With driver Stanley Hannah and loader Louis Sepulveda as his guides, Riordan pushed dumpsters to the back of the truck and learned to scoop up the trash and crush it.

“He just showed up here one morning,” said Lou Baez, superintendent of the sanitation yard. “No one knew. We made him sign for his gloves and safety glasses and away he went.”

Riordan has also made a street sign, fixed the time clock in a parking meter and read a story to children in an after-school program. In Echo Park, he paved the curb lane of Glendale Boulevard from the Union 76 gas station north through the Montana Street intersection. (The roadway appears fine but Riordan tracked asphalt on the carpet of the mayor’s suite.)

Riordan says he has handled all the tasks that have been thrown at him, although with differing degrees of success.

He had some trouble figuring out the various levers on the garbage truck during his two-hour trash collecting stint and doubts that his crew would want him around full time. As for shelving library books at the Baldwin Hills branch, Riordan acknowledges that he might have made a mistake or two.