Riordan Disproves Myth of a Weak Mayoral System

A destructive myth of Los Angeles government is that we have a weak mayor system.

It goes like this: The mayor can’t fire department heads, a power held by chief executives of some other big cities. The mayor must win City Council approval for important actions. Therefore, the mayor’s got no power.

This argument has been used by apologists for previous Mayors Sam Yorty and Tom Bradley to excuse their inaction. Don’t blame the mayor, they said. The council has all the power.

I’ve never understood this reasoning. When City Hall was especially paralyzed, I’d ask Bradley team members why the mayor didn’t kick tail and get something done. Limited power, they’d reply. The only tool he has is persuasion and he has to use it quietly, behind the scenes. Without making waves. That’s how City Hall works.

Actually, it was why City Hall didn’t work, as we saw when nobody was in charge during L.A.’s greatest crisis, the riots.

*

In presenting his budget last week, Mayor Richard Riordan tried a radically different approach.

He isn’t like Bill Clinton, immersed in every tiny detail of a bill, or Bradley, who used to count potholes on his way to work.

In fact, when Times editors and reporters asked Riordan about a feature of the budget last week, he turned to the deputy mayors seated on either side of him, Robin Kramer and Mike Keeley. “Robin and Mike have the details,” he said, as if his reliance on his aides were a virtue. “I’m proud of the people we’ve brought in and they’re making it happen,” he said.

Instead of micromanagement, Riordan has been concentrating on the big picture. He saw that the mayor has two great powers--writing the budget and appointing the part-time commissioners who set policies for the various departments. Using those powers, he moved to impose his will on three of the richest and most independent departments in city government--Harbor, Airports and Water and Power.

Each of these departments generates a tremendous amount of revenue from such items as docking and landing fees and water and power bills.

Traditionally, each department has kept almost all of its own revenues for operations and future projects, refusing to share it with the rest of city government. The police may have been outgunned and outmanned by crooks. The library may have been short of books. But the Water and Power, Harbor and Airport treasuries were sacrosanct.

City commissioners under Bradley and Yorty quickly bonded with the bureaucrats they were supposed to supervise, joining them in a solid front to protect department budgets. “It was a sociological thing,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, chairman of the City Council’s Budget Committee. “It was like the Symbionese Liberation Army and Patty Hearst.”

The mayors and the most of the council went along. Harbor and Airports found an especially sympathetic audience, perhaps because the two departments hosted mayors and council members on international “trade missions”--junkets to glamorous world capitals financed by the fat department treasuries.

*

Riordan is determined to change the process. He presented a budget last week that would take substantial amounts of money from the three departments. The funds, he said, were needed to put more police officers on the street and eliminate a deficit. Instead of siding with the bureaucrats, his commissioners stood solidly with the mayor.

On Thursday, I talked to a veteran bureaucrat familiar with the process, and he told me this represents a real revolution at City Hall.

“The difference this time is that the mayor and the commissioners realized that they had a lot of influence over the departments,” he said.

“Their highest priority was public safety. The commissioners all pulled together. They frequently had meetings where all of them got together and they were asked ‘How are you helping the city?’ ”

As Yaroslavsky put it: “The mayor made it very clear from the beginning that he had a clear vision and objective. . . . He told them, ‘You go out and do it.’ ”

Other Riordan commissioners went along with additional budget provisions consolidating departments. There wasn’t a whimper from the Community Redevelopment Agency commissioners, for example, when Riordan proposed folding the powerful department into a new Citywide Development Agency. It will include several other city departments.

There is a risk in the mayor’s strategy. By keeping his visibility low during the budget deliberations, Bradley avoided exposing himself to the risk of failure. Riordan is campaigning throughout the city for his budget, and sending Deputy Mayors Keeley and Kramer to Yaroslavsky’s budget hearings this week. If his main budget proposals are rejected, he’ll look like a loser.

But if Riordan wins, he’ll have shown that the Los Angeles mayor has real power.